This new study, which appeared in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, followed 259 lower-income families in New York, most of whom spoke Spanish as their primary language at home. Other studies examining higher-income families have also come to the same conclusion: TV watching not only isn't educational, but it seems to stunt babies' development.
But TV is so often a parent's good friend, keeping kids happily occupied so the grownups can cook dinner, answer the phone, or take a shower. It is seductive in the short run. Be careful.
 |
An Up-and-Coming Absolute Worst Food ... Don't Try This at Home  Here's how they're made: • Twinkies are chilled, rolled in flour, dipped in tempura batter and fried for a minute or two. • The frying process melts the cream center, which becomes infused throughout the cake, giving it a pudding-like texture. • For the finale, they're sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with chocolate or berry sauce. If you're not into Twinkies, don't despair. The Mullen brothers also sell deep-fried candy bars--Snickers, 3 Musketeers and Milky Way--to suit even the most discerning tastes. |
 |
 |
She is not afraid to challenge popular institutions and ideas.Cross posted at The Best Nest
She lobbied to get a Diet Pepsi commercial off the air that featured Cindy Crawford leaving her toddler and baby in her closed SUV on a warm day while she cooled off with a drink. After Fennell complained, Pepsi donated $20,000 to Kids and Cars.
She also helped get a Corvette commercial pulled. Directed by Guy Ritchie, it showed a 10-year-old boy driving the car. She got death threats from Corvette lovers for that one.
When an Arkansas brother and sister died in the trunk of a 2000 GM car last summer, Fennell called for GM to retrofit all its 2000 and 2001 cars with trunk releases.
"(Babies in the womb) can tell the difference between dim and very dim. That's what they'd see if mom removed outer clothing on a sunny day," said William Fifer, Ph.D., head of the fetal/infant development lab at Columbia University's division of developmental psychology.Scientists have watched fetuses on ultrasound turn their heads away from bright lights held up to their mother's stomach, Fifer said. And they've seen the brain waves of premature infants spike in response to a flash of light, or a change in visual stimulus—switching a card from vertical stripes to horizontal, for instance. Sight isn't much of a sense at this point, but it's enough.
"You need sensory stimulation of some sort, or the nerve connections never form," Fifer said. "Kittens blindfolded after birth never develop sight."Sensory stimulation is important in other ways as well, helping fetuses learn. For instance, duck embryos peep to themselves while still inside their eggs. As they do that, they begin to recognize what a duck voice sounds like.
"A researcher named Gilbert Gottlieb found that, if he de-vocalized a duck embryo, then after birth it wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the maternal calls of a duck or a chicken," said Jeffery Alberts, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Indiana University. "They have to hear themselves in the egg and stimulate their own auditory systems. That's how they get it to be tuned enough to complete development."Monkey hear, monkey do
Turns out, babies suck harder on the pacifiers when they hear sounds that are familiar to them from before birth. Newborns prefer their mother's voice over anyone else's (even dad's). They prefer hearing phrases from books they were read while in the womb, compared to new stories. They're even already favoring one language over another."Babies prefer the sound of their mother's native language to others," Moon said. "Interestingly, they can distinguish between languages in the same rythmic class, like Spanish versus English. But they can't tell the difference between similar sounding languages, like English and Dutch."Mothers' speech seem to matter in other ways as well. Moms who don't mumble or slur their words together have children that can better recognize consonants at 6-to-8 months, and have bigger vocabularies at 10-to-12 months, compared to their peers. This, and other research, has led Moon to theorize that language acquisition is a process that begins before we're even born.
"One of the things the fetus experiences from alcohol exposure is reduced swallowing movements. So it doesn't have that stimulation of the gastro-intestinal system to help that system develop normally," Jeffrey Alberts said.Studying fetal senses has also helped doctors develop better ways of caring for premature infants. These babies end up lacking a lot of the sensory experiences they need for normal development—the movement of being inside their mother, the smells and tastes of the womb, their mother's voice—while simultaneously experiencing bright lights and loud noises that they wouldn't normally. Imagine falling asleep in a hammock on a tropical night, and waking to find yourself being grilled under the light by a noir police detective. That shock makes a difference in babies' development, and helps put them at risk for a variety of cognitive and motor disorders, William Fifer said.
"It's only in the last few years that we've been checking that as a matter of course," he said. "Now many nurseries measure brain activity because we know that if you see problems early on you can make a bigger difference."Main image courtesy Flickr user lunar_caustic, via CC.
