2010 News Round-up

1. ” Babies Can Tell Right From Wrong”, Paul Bloom, New York Times Magazine, 5/9/10. Teams of researchers around the world are exploring the moral life of babies. Do they enter the world equipped with moral notions? Growing evidence suggests they do. Experiments have seen glimmers of moral thought, judgment and feeling in the first year of life. Socialization is critically important for this to appear, their sense of right and wrong diverging in important ways from what adults want it to be. For many years scientists did not know how to study the mental life of babies. Increased use of eyes and “looking time” became reliable proxies for babies’ attention, what they liked and what surprised them. Babies have expectations about how objects should behave, and when they don’t, such as in a magic trick, they look at them longer. They like to look at faces. They loose interest when a moving object becomes still, but when a person’s face is still, the baby becomes upset. By age 2, toddlers have a mental model not only of the world but of the world as understood by someone else. However, the existence of a universal moral code is very controversial. It has been shown that much of morality is a consequence of the culture in which the baby is raised, not their innate capacities.  But people everywhere have some sense of right and wrong, fairness, loyalty, kindness and the ability to categorize people as nasty or nice. They are aware of other peoples’ pain.
   
   
2. Newborns Who Can’t Hear, Perri Klass, M.D., The New York Times, 5/11/10.
   Today, 97% of newborns in America have their hearing screened in the nursery46% who failed the screening in 2007 did not have repeated testing or treatment.  Follow-up is the name of the game. A new study showed that hearing loss in only one ear may look like children don’t pay attention, and often have poorer language skills than other children.  Hearing loss affects 2-4 of every 1,000 babies and can result from prenatal infection, oxygen deprivation, severe infections, some medications, or genetic factors. Every baby should be tested by one month of age, be evaluated at 3 months if they failed the first test, and get into treatment by 6 months.  Hearing loss can develop anytime during childhood.
   
   
3. “Good Parents Can Have Bad Children”, Richard A. Friedman, M.D.,The New York Times, 7/13/10.
   In spite of good parents doing everything they can to raise and nurture their children, sometimes those efforts have limited influence. Children can be rude, abusive and defiant at home, and unkind and unsympathetic to people. Sometimes the child may not be sick, just not a nice person-an uncommon thought in our society. They don’t become criminals or psychopaths, but remain toxic.  There is little, if anything, written about the paradox of good parents with toxic children.
   
   
4. Exercise and intelligence appear to go together (“The Fittest Brains”, Gretchen Reynolds, The New York Times Magazine, 9/19/10). Two groups of 9-10 year old children, the most fit and least fit, ran on a treadmill, their brains scanned with an MRI. Fit children had larger parts of their brains devoted to attention, thought control, the ability to coordinate actions, and memory.  These data are important because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered that about ¼ of school children participate in zero physical activity outside of school. There is a direct correlation between physical fitness and a higher I.Q.
   
   
5. Preschoolers can be depressed (“Can Preschoolers Be Depressed?”, Pamela Paul, The New York Times, 8/29/10) Signs of chronic unhappiness, not having fun, perfectionism, frustration and listlessness can appear well before age 5 and may be “early-onset depression”. Young children may find little joy in toys, whine, cry, and orchestrate scenarios around violence or death. The most obvious symptom is sadness. Unlike other disorders, this is not readily apparent. Depression and anxiety seem to be intertwined, and often coexist with other disorders. A number of health care professionals say it can surface as early as 2 or 3, though this is a matter of debate. Young children lack the skill to deal with strong feelings that can have an intense and long lasting effect. Children who met the criteria for depression in one study were seven times as likely to experience depression four years later. One worry is increased use of off-label medication. One established treatment method is called Parent-Child-Interactive Therapy, a short program with on-going follow-up at home, though not all parents are equipped to handle the responsibility.