Faculty Bibliography

Some of the most exciting new research, according to D. Kimbrough Oller, a professor of audiology and speech-language pathology at the University of Memphis, analyzes the sounds that babies make in the first half-year of life, when they are 'squealing and growling and producing gooing sounds.' Michael H. Goldstein, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell, has done experiments showing that babies learn better from parental stimulation -- acquiring new sounds and new sound patterns, for example -- if parents provide that stimulation specifically in response to the baby's babble

'We should be careful not to set kids up who are anxious,' she said. 'Make sure they can take their favorite fuzzy bear with them.' The important distinction is in the response. 'If you have a child that's very anxious, you're going to use a lot of anxiety management techniques,' said Christopher A. Kearney, a professor and director of clinical training in the department of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. With the reward-seeking group, he continued, 'increase incentives for going to school and supervision outside of school.' 'It's not a diagnosis, school refusal,' Dr. [Helen Egger] said. 'It's not a disorder. It's a symptom.' It is a symptom with consequences that can be harsh. It should send parents -- and pediatricians, educators and psychologists -- looking for ways to help.

[...] he was avoiding things in school that made him uncomfortable -- interactions on the bus, jostling on the playground. [...] missing school intensifies both the academic pressures and the social pressures that are waiting when a child returns, setting up a dangerous cycle in which the more you're absent, the more you want to stay out

'Nurse,' he said, 'it's an appendix!'' 'One of the things we're struggling with in pediatrics is we've become too dependent on the CT scan,' he said. 'It's become very helpful in terms of identifying appendicitis, but it translates to radiation.' 'I always find it sort of amazing that we've known about appendicitis for so long, and in 2010 there's still so much that's controversial,' said Dr. Catherine Chen, a pediatric surgeon and an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School

Diagnosis was largely by medical history and physical exam; half a century after Madeline's experience, and a full century after appendicitis was first described and named (in 1886, by Reginald Heber Fitz, a Harvard pathologist), there was still no way to know for sure whether a child's abdominal pain was caused by an inflamed appendix. The risk in missing acute appendicitis is that the child will 'perf' -- the inflamed appendix develops a perforation, and bowel contents leak into the abdominal cavity, making the surgery much more complex and dangerous

[...] I have no trouble remembering the name of the bully in my sixth-grade class. Many antibullying programs work by activating those bystanders so that all the children in a classroom or all the children in a school learn to recognize bullying, to call it by its name and to invoke adult help when necessary.

[...] a child who asks a parent this question may be worrying over how and when to bring it up

Dr. Johnston told me that a condition called post-traumatic arousal -- a component of post-traumatic stress disorder that leaves children on edge, jittery and likely to overreact -- was predictive of a repeat injury, not only in a child but also in siblings. Dr. Flaura Koplin Winston, scientific director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, has studied post-traumatic stress in families who have been in car accidents

This study examined 3 questions: (1) What are sources from which low socioeconomic status (SES) mothers of newborns receive parenting information? (2) To what extent are sociodemographic characteristics associated with sources? (3) To what extent are sources associated with intentions regarding activities with infants? In this cross-sectional analysis, mothers were interviewed during the postpartum period about potential sources of information about parenting and asked if and when they planned to initiate shared reading and television exposure during infancy. Maternal high school graduation, US birth, non-Latina ethnicity, language English, higher SES, and firstborn child were each associated with one or more categories representing important sources of parenting information. In adjusted analyses, print, physicians and other health care professionals, and family/friends as important sources of information were each significantly associated with increased frequency of intention to begin shared reading in infancy; television as an important source was associated with intention to begin television in infancy

Premature infants, or those sick enough to need time in the newborn intensive-care unit, are also at risk for hearing loss, sometimes from oxygen deprivation, sometimes from severe infections and sometimes from medications. In otoacoustic emissions, a tiny microphone is inserted into the ear of the sleeping newborn to measure echoes from the cochlea when it is stimulated by sound