Faculty Bibliography

"It was going to bring down our society," said Megan Moreno, a specialist in adolescent medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "Men would be calling women and making lascivious comments, and women would be so vulnerable, and we'd never have civilized conversations again." Researchers also are looking to online media for opportunities to identify problems, to hear cries for help, and to provide information and support. Dr. [Michael Rich], who sees many teenagers who are struggling with Internet-related issues, said it was important to step away from blanket judgments about the dangers of going online. "We should not view social media as either positive or negative, but as essentially neutral," he said. "It's what we do with the tools that decides how they affect us and those around us." "Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all harm model, one of the questions parents need to ask is, 'How is this going to interact with my child's personality?"' said Clay Shirky, who teaches about social media at New York University. "Digital media is an amplifier. It tends to make extroverts more extroverted and introverts more introverted."

In a study of the ways college students describe sadness in status updates on their Facebook profiles, she showed that some such expressions were associated with depression in students who completed clinical screening tests. Since freshman year is a high-risk time for depression, many college resident advisers already try to use Facebook to monitor students, Dr. Moreno said.

It's a primal impulse to worry about an infant's growth. But experts on child nutrition, mostly enlisted nowadays in the battle against childhood obesity, point out that some of our standard infant feeding practices and attitudes may need revising, including some of those encouraged by pediatricians like me. My grandmother's attitude -- stuff food into the baby, be proud of a 'good eater' -- may not make sense in an environment of abundant food and rising obesity. [Ian M. Paul] recalled two educated parents whose child he had cared for. 'They're both small people, but when their daughter weighed between the 5th and the 10th percentile, they felt they were doing something wrong,' he said. 'Percentiles on a growth chart are very different from percentiles in academic achievement, but almost all parents want their children to be above the 50th percentile on the growth chart.' 'Half the population should be below the 50th percentile, 10 percent of the population should be below the 10th percentile,' Paul said. 'In most cases that's healthy growth, and I think we do a disservice to the family by not explaining this clearly.'

[...] experts on child nutrition, mostly enlisted nowadays in the battle against childhood obesity, point out that some of our standard infant feeding practices and attitudes may need revising, including some of those encouraged by pediatricians like me. Dr. Elsie M. Taveras, a pediatrician on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and a leading expert on obesity risk factors in children, says that the evidence indicates that when parents too severely restrict a child's food intake, that child is at higher risk for obesity.

According to data compiled by Dr. Alvin C. Bronstein, the director of surveillance for the American Association of Poison Control Centers, and Dr. Daniel A. Spyker of Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., three types of exposures have increased most significantly among children ages 10 to 19 during the last decade: ingestions of atypical antipsychotic drugs, up by 543 cases per year on average; ingestions of benzodiazepines (anti-anxiety drugs), which have risen by 328 cases per year; and ingestions of certain antiseizure medications, which have grown by 300 cases a year

Yet while many parents recognise the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. [...] while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there are not many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child.

The researchers suggested that this represents a process of 'neural commitment,' in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds. In contrast, the bilingual infants followed a different developmental trajectory. At 6 to 9 months of age, they did not detect differences in phonetic sounds in either language, but when they were older -- 10 to 12 months -- they were able to discriminate sounds in both. 'What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies' experience keeps them open,' said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, professor of speech and hearing sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study. 'They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It's another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain.' Dr. Kuhl describes bilingual babies as 'more cognitively flexible' than monolingual infants. Her research group is examining infant brains with an even newer imaging device, magnetoencephalography, or MEG, which combines an MRI scan with the recording of electrical impulses done in an EEG. She hopes that it will help explore the question of why babies learn language from people, but not from screens

Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior -- where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention -- to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them

Dr. Monique LeBourgeois, a sleep scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her colleagues have just conducted the first study on how napping affects the cortisol awakening response, a burst of hormone secretion known to take place shortly after morning awakening. They showed that children produce this response after short naps in the morning and afternoon, though not in the evening, and it may be adaptive in helping children respond to the stresses of the day. By experimentally restricting sleep in young children, and then analyzing their behavior putting puzzles together, Dr. LeBourgeois's group also is quantifying how napping -- or the lack of it -- affects the ways that children respond to their worlds. 'Sleepy children are not able to cope with day-to-day challenges in their worlds,' she said. When children skip even a single nap, 'We get less positivity, more negativity and decreased cognitive engagement.' The 'circadian process,' which has been localized to a very particular place in the brain, works a little like a clock, tying our sleep to schedules and to cycles of light and dark, regardless of how much we have or haven't slept. This interacts with the 'homeostatic process,' which works differently, pushing us harder toward sleep the longer we stay awake and building up sleep pressure, which can be measured via EEG recordings.

[...] researchers are learning that it is not so simple: napping in children actually is a complex behavior, a mix of individual biology, including neurologic and hormonal development, cultural expectations and family dynamics. Napping happens 'because children have a much faster sleep homeostasis -- they build up sleep pressure more quickly, they are not so tolerant toward longer waking periods,' said Dr. Oskar Jenni, a pediatrician who is director of the child development project at the University Children's Hospital Zurich