Use the off switch often

EARLIER THIS year, the mighty Walt Disney Company was forced to offer refunds to parents who bought the best-selling Baby Einstein DVDs.

The decision was a triumph for an organisation in the US called the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC) which filed a complaint for false and deceptive advertising in 2006.

It maintained that, far from being the educational tool Disney claimed them to be, the Baby Einstein DVDs and their spin-offs were actually a hindrance to children’s development. The DVDs are popular in Ireland too.

The CCFC campaign was endorsed by researchers in 2007 at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute. They found that, for every hour a day that infants spent watching DVDs, they understood six to eight fewer words than infants who do not watch them.

The American Association of Paediatrics reiterated its view that children under the age of two should not, in any circumstances, watch television.

The Walt Disney Company was forced to drop the words “educational” from the DVDs along with egregious claims that they are a “rich and interactive learning experience that . . . fosters the development of your toddler’s speech and language skills”.

The campaign by the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC) chimes with the views of one of a world authority on early childhood development.

Prof Stuart Shanker of York University in Canada, who was in Dublin earlier this month to launch a new childcare initiative in Ballymun, said there was no substitute for interaction between parent and child.

His central message was that parents do not need to do anything out of the ordinary, or buy any kind of “educational” DVD to further their child’s development.

Shanker launched youngballymun’s Ready, Steady, Grow service which is dedicated to children aged zero to three and their families. Ready, Steady, Grow is a universal service for every child born in Ballymun.

Youngballymun was established two years ago as a prevention and early intervention programme. It is jointly funded by the Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs and the Atlantic Philanthropies, US billionaire Chuck Feeney’s charity.

Its aim is to foster the development of children in an area that was once synonymous with deprivation and crime. Youngballymun is being rolled out in two five-year phases until 2016.

Shanker’s views will reassure parents who are bombarded with DVDs, CDs such as Baby Mozart and electronic toys all holding out a promise that they will improve their infant’s development.

“Neuroscience proves that playing, touching, paying attention or talking at a level that comforts the baby, for example, are the building blocks for healthy infant brain development,” he explains.

“These brain-to-brain experiences are vital for sensory and motor development as well as helping the child to self-regulate later on so that he can control and understand temper, emotions, stress or attention span.”

Every child is different and every child rewards patient attention, he believes.

“We want to get them more aroused so they get interested and sometimes we want to get them to calm down a little bit, and be less aroused.

There is no such thing as a lazy child or a stupid child or a bad child. There are kids that provide different types of challenges.

“It is better that we understand them.”

His presentation emphasised the importance of interaction between primary caregiver, either a parent or a guardian, and the child especially in the first year.

The baby learns through the caregiver’s expressions, tone of voice, gestures and facial expressions. Babies look to their caregivers to understand new situations. These vital brain stimulations cannot be obtained from watching television or a DVD.

“If a kid is spending too much time alone watching these videos, what is not happening are these interactions back and forth. It is the interactions that lead to language development or intelligence. It is everything that the kids are doing with their mums and dads,” he explains.

Shanker says there is growing evidence that children are being exposed to too much stimuli, particularly television.

This was being attributed to growing noise pollution, especially the effects of television, and demographic changes which meant that infants were not spending enough time either with a parent or a childminder.

Along with the interaction of parents, children need a quiet environment to develop themselves.

He defined self-regulation as meaning the steps a child takes to soothe itself, a vital step in maturing as a human being. “If they get angry or if they get frustrated or they get afraid, they can calm themselves down, control their impulses, deal with their frustration. These are all things that the child learns from their primary caregivers.”

Shanker says he fears that infants who do not have an ability to self-regulate might turn out to be adults with a lack of empathy and will be more vulnerable to addictive or risky behaviours in later life.

He says President Barack Obama had referred to the “crisis of empathy” in a celebrated speech three years ago, before he was elected.

The then Senator Obama said the definition of growing up was that “the world doesn’t just revolve around you” and to empathise was “to see the world through those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room”.

Shanker admits he is very impressed by the work of youngballymun. “They thought it through very carefully before they hit the ground, they had a well worked out model before they started. They have brought in the right people.

“A programme like this might be the best thing on paper but if you don’t have the right people, it won’t fly.”

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/health/2009/1229/1224261338305.html

Exposure to tobacco smoke in childhood home associated with early emphysema in adulthood

Children regularly exposed to tobacco smoke at home were more likely to develop early emphysema in adulthood. This finding by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health suggests that the lungs may not recover completely from the effects of early-life exposures to tobacco smoke (ETS). The study is published in the December 2009 American Journal of Epidemiology.

This population-based research is the first to examine the association of childhood ETS with early emphysema by CT scan in nonsmokers. Approximately half of the participants in this large multiethnic cohort had at least one regular cigarette smoker in their childhood home. Participants with more childhood ETS exposure had more emphysema-like lung pixels; an average of 20% of scan pixels were emphysema-like for those who lived with two or more smokers as a child, compared with 18% for those who lived with one regular smoker, or 17% for those who said that they did not live with a regular inside smoker as a child.

The researchers studied CT scans of 1,781 non-smokers without clinical cardiovascular disease recruited from six communities in the United States, including northern Manhattan and the Bronx, New York. Those reporting childhood ETS exposure were somewhat younger, with an average age of 61; were more likely to be non- Hispanic white; and less likely to have been born outside the United States. These differences were statistically controlled in the analyses.

“We were able to detect a difference on CT scans between the lungs of participants who lived with a smoker as a child and those who did not,” observed Gina Lovasi, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. “Some known harmful effects of tobacco smoke are short term, and this new research suggests that effects of tobacco smoke on the lungs may also persist for decades.”

Previous studies have found evidence that childhood ETS exposure affects perinatal and childhood health outcomes, and that adult exposure may affect adult respiratory health outcomes, including lung function and respiratory symptoms.

Although childhood ETS was not associated with adult lung function in this healthy population, this does not contradict the results for early emphysema, since airflow obstruction and anatomic damage are theoretically and clinically distinguishable. “However, emphysema may be a more sensitive measure of damage compared with lung function in this relatively healthy cohort,”

Dr. Lovasi notes. Combined emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are projected to become the third leading cause of death worldwide by 2020.

The exposure information in this study does not provide information on the timing of ETS exposure during childhood, making it difficult to distinguish as exposure in utero. “The association between childhood ETS and early emphysema among participants whose mothers did not smoke, suggests that the effect we are detecting is for smoke exposure in the home during childhood rather than in utero exposure alone,” observed Dr. Lovasi.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program and the National Institutes of Health.

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/exposure-tobacco-smoke-childhood-home-associated-early-emphysema-adulthood-28785.html

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Snooze or Lose

Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years.

Morgan is a 10-year-old fifth-grader in Roxbury, New Jersey. She’s fair-skinned, petite, with freckles across her nose and wavy, light-brown hair. Her father is a police sergeant on duty until 3 a.m. Her mother, Heather, works part time, devoting herself to shuffling Morgan and her brother to their many activities. Morgan plays soccer, but her first love is competitive swimming, with year-round workouts that have broadened her shoulders. She’s also a violinist in the school orchestra, with practices and lessons each week. Every night, Morgan sits down to homework before watching Flip This House or another show with her mother. Morgan has always appeared to be an enthusiastic, well-balanced child.

But once Morgan spent a year in the classroom of a demanding teacher, she could no longer unwind at night. Despite a reasonable bedtime of 9:30 p.m., she would lay awake in frustration until 11:30, sometimes midnight, clutching her leopard-fur pillow. On her fairy-dust purple bedroom walls were taped index cards, each with a vocabulary word Morgan was having trouble with. Unable to sleep, she turned back to her studies, determined not to let her grades suffer. Instead, she saw herself fall apart emotionally. During the day, she was noticeably crabby and prone to crying easily. Occasionally, Morgan nearly fell asleep in class.

Concerned about her daughter’s well-being, Heather asked the family’s pediatrician about Morgan’s sleep. “He kind of blew me off and didn’t seem interested in it,” she recalls. “He said, ‘So she gets tired once in a while. She’ll outgrow it.’”

The pediatrician’s opinion is typical. According to surveys by the National Sleep Foundation, 90 percent of American parents think their child is getting enough sleep. The kids themselves say otherwise. In those same surveys, 60 percent of high schoolers report extreme daytime sleepiness. In another study, a quarter admit their grades have dropped because of it. Over 25 percent fall asleep in class at least once a week.

The raw numbers more than back them up. Half of all adolescents get less than seven hours of sleep on weeknights. By the time they are seniors in high school, according to studies by the University of Kentucky, they average only slightly more than 6.5 hours of sleep a night. Only 5 percent of high-school seniors average eight hours. Sure, we remember being tired when we went to school. But not like today’s kids.

It has been documented in a handful of major studies that children, from elementary school through high school, get about an hour less sleep each night than they did 30 years ago. While parents obsess over babies’ sleep, this concern falls off the priority list after preschool. Even kindergartners get 30 minutes less a night than they used to.

There are many causes for this lost hour of sleep. Overscheduling of activities, burdensome homework, lax bedtimes, televisions and cell phones in the bedroom all contribute. So does guilt; home from work after dark, parents want time with their children and are reluctant to play the hard-ass who orders them to bed. All these reasons converge on one simple twist of convenient ignorance: Until now, we could overlook the lost hour because we never really knew its true cost to children.

Using newly developed technological and statistical tools, sleep scientists have recently been able to isolate and measure the impact of this single lost hour. Because children’s brains are a work-in-progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.

The surprise is how much sleep affects academic performance and emotional stability, as well as phenomena that we assumed to be entirely unrelated, such as the international obesity epidemic and the rise of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. A few scientists theorize that sleep problems during formative years can cause permanent changes in a child’s brain structure: damage that one can’t sleep off like a hangover. It’s even possible that many of the hallmark characteristics of being a tweener and teen—moodiness, depression, and even binge eating—are actually symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation.

Dr. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University is one of the authorities in the field. A couple of years ago, Sadeh sent 77 fourth-graders and sixth-graders home with randomly drawn instructions to either go to bed earlier or stay up later for three nights. Each child was given an actigraph (a wristwatchlike device that’s equivalent to a seismograph for sleep activity), which enabled Sadeh’s team to learn that the first group managed to get 30 minutes more sleep per night. The latter got 31 minutes less sleep.

After the third night’s sleep, a researcher went to the school in the morning to test the children’s neurobiological functioning. The test they used is highly predictive of both achievement-test scores and how teachers will rate a child’s ability to maintain attention in class.

Sadeh knew that his experiment was a big risk. “The last situation I wanted to be in was reporting to my grantors, ‘Well, I deprived the subjects of only an hour, and there was no measurable effect at all, sorry—but can I have some more money for my other experiments?’” he says.

Sadeh needn’t have worried. The effect was indeed measurable—and sizable. The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explains.

Sadeh’s findings are consistent with other researchers’ work, all of which points to the large academic consequences of small sleep differences. Dr. Monique LeBourgeois of Brown University studies how sleep affects pre-kindergartners. Virtually all young children are allowed to stay up late on Fridays and Saturdays. Yet she’s discovered that the sleep-shift factor alone is correlated with performance on a standardized school-readiness test. Every hour of weekend shift costs students seven points on the test. Dr. Paul Suratt of the University of Virginia studied the impact of sleep problems on vocabulary-test scores of elementary-school students. He also found a seven-point reduction in scores. Seven points, Suratt notes, is significant: “Sleep disorders can impair children’s I.Q.’s as much as lead exposure.”

Every study done shows a similar connection between sleep and school grades—from a study of second- and third-graders in Chappaqua to a study of eighth-graders in Chicago. The correlations really spike in high school, because that’s when there’s a steep drop-off in kids’ sleep. Dr. Kyla Wahlstrom of the University of Minnesota surveyed more than 7,000 high schoolers in Minnesota about their sleep habits and grades. Teens who received A’s averaged about fifteen more minutes sleep than the B students, who in turn averaged eleven more minutes than the C’s, and the C’s had ten more minutes than the D’s. Wahlstrom’s data was an almost perfect replication of results from an earlier study of more than 3,000 Rhode Island high schoolers by Brown’s Mary Carskadon. Certainly, these are averages, but the consistency of the two studies stands out. Every fifteen minutes counts.

With the benefit of functional MRI scans, researchers are now starting to understand exactly how sleep loss impairs a child’s brain. Tired children can’t remember what they just learned, for instance, because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory.

A different mechanism causes children to be inattentive in class. Sleep loss debilitates our body’s ability to extract glucose from the bloodstream. Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than the rest: the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for what’s called “executive function.” Among these executive functions are the orchestration of thoughts to fulfill a goal, the prediction of outcomes, and perceiving consequences of actions. So tired people have difficulty with impulse control, and their abstract goals like studying take a back seat to more entertaining diversions. A tired brain perseverates—it gets stuck on a wrong answer and can’t come up with a more creative solution, repeatedly returning to the same answer it already knows is erroneous.

Convinced by the mountain of studies, a handful of school districts around the nation are starting school later in the morning. The best known of these is in Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis, where the high school start time was changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30. The results were startling. In the year preceding the time change, math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable. “Truly flabbergasting,” said Brian O’Reilly, the College Board’s executive director for SAT Program Relations, on hearing the results.

Another trailblazing school district is Lexington, Kentucky’s, which also moved its start time an hour later. After the time change, teenage car accidents in Lexington were down 16 percent. The rest of the state showed a 9 percent rise.

Although the evidence is telling, few districts have followed this lead. Conversely, 85 percent of America’s public high schools start before 8:15 a.m. Thirty-five percent start at or before 7:30 a.m. In New York City, each school principal sets his own school schedule, and a randomized sample of 50 of the city’s 500 public high schools revealed that 30 percent begin by or before 7:30. At Midwood, class starts at seven on the dot; Van Buren lets you slide in at 7:05.

Obstacles to later start times are numerous. Having high schools start earlier often allows buses to first deliver the older students, then do a second run with the younger children. This could mean doubling the size of the bus fleet. Teachers prefer driving to school before other commuters clog the roads. Coaches worry their student athletes will miss games because they’re still in class at kickoff time.

Dr. Mark Mahowald, a University of Minnesota professor who runs a sleep clinic, has been at the center of many school start-time debates, and he dismisses those claims. “Of all the arguments I’ve heard over school start-times, not one person has argued that children learn more at 7:15 a.m. than at 8:30.”

Parents and educators might remain skeptical about the importance of the lost hour, but the sleep-research community considers the evidence irrefutable. Their convictions hardened as scientists began to understand sleep’s vital role in synthesizing and storing memories.

Dr. Matthew Walker of UC Berkeley explains that during sleep, the brain shifts what it learned that day to more efficient storage regions of the brain. Each stage of sleep plays a unique role in capturing memories. For example, studying a foreign language requires learning vocabulary, auditory memory of new sounds, and motor skills to correctly enunciate new words. The vocabulary is synthesized by the hippocampus early in the night during “slow-wave sleep,” a deep slumber without dreams. The motor skills of enunciation are processed during Stage 2 non-rem sleep, and the auditory memories are encoded across all stages. Memories that are emotionally laden get processed during R.E.M. sleep. The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night.

To consolidate these memories, certain genes appear to up-regulate during sleep; they literally turn on, or get activated. One of these genes is essential for synaptic plasticity, the strengthening of neural connections. The brain does synthesize some memories during the day, but they’re enhanced and concretized during the night: New inferences and associations are drawn, leading to insights the next day.

Perhaps most fascinating, the emotional context of a memory affects where it gets processed. Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.

In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81 percent of the words with a negative connotation, like cancer. But they could remember only 41 percent of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like sunshine or basket.

“We have an incendiary situation today,” Walker remarks, “where the intensity of learning that kids are going through is so much greater, yet the amount of sleep they get to process that learning is so much less. If these linear trends continue, the rubber band will soon snap.”

While the neurocognitive sleep discoveries are impressive, there’s equally groundbreaking research on how sleep affects metabolism.

Five years ago, already aware of an association between sleep apnea and diabetes, Dr. Eve Van Cauter at the University of Chicago discovered a “neuroendocrine cascade” that links sleep to obesity.

Sleep loss increases the hormone ghrelin, which signals hunger, and decreases its metabolic opposite, leptin, which suppresses appetite. Sleep loss also elevates the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is lipogenic, meaning it stimulates your body to make fat. Human growth hormone is also disrupted. Normally secreted as a big pulse at the beginning of sleep, growth hormone is essential for the breakdown of fat.

It’s drilled into us that we need to be more active to lose weight. So it spins the mind to hear that a key to staying thin is to spend more time doing the most sedentary inactivity humanly possible. Yet this is exactly what some scientists seem to be finding. In light of Van Cauter’s discoveries, sleep scientists have performed a flurry of analyses on children. All the studies point in the same direction: On average, children who sleep less are fatter than children who sleep more. This isn’t just in the U.S.; scholars around the world are considering it, as they watch sleep data fall and obesity rates rise in their own countries.

Three foreign studies showed strikingly similar results. One analyzed Japanese elementary students, one Canadian kindergarten boys, and one young boys in Australia. They all showed that kids who get less than eight hours of sleep have about a 300 percent higher rate of obesity than those who get a full ten hours of sleep. Within that two-hour window, it was a “dose-response” relationship, according to the Japanese scholars.

In Houston public schools, according to a University of Texas at Houston study, adolescents’ odds of obesity went up 80 percent for each hour of lost sleep.

Sleep’s role in obesity is a comparatively new theory, and one difficult to prove in a controlled experiment. But the traditional approach to solving childhood obesity is an abject failure. The federal government spends over a billion dollars a year on nutrition-education programs in our schools. A recent analysis by McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, found that of 57 such programs, 53 had no effect whatsoever, and the four remaining programs’ results were meager at best.

For a long time, there’s been one culprit to blame for these failed efforts: television. Rather than running around the neighborhood like when we were young, today’s kids sit in front of the boob tube an average of 3.3 hours a day. The connection to obesity seemed so obvious that few people thought it needed to be supported scientifically.

Last year, Dr. Elizabeth Vandewater at the University of Texas at Austin got fed up with hearing scholars blame it all on television. “It’s treated as gospel without any evidence,” she says. “It’s just bad science.” Vandewater analyzed the best large data set available, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has extensively surveyed 8,000 families since 1968. She found that obese kids watch no more television than kids who aren’t obese. All the thin kids watch massive amounts of television, too. There was no statistical correlation between obesity and media use, period. “It’s just not the smoking gun we assumed it to be.”

Vandewater examined the children’s time diaries, and she realized why the earlier research had got it wrong. “Children trade functionally equivalent things. If the television’s off, they don’t go play soccer,” she says. “They do some other sedentary behavior.”

In fact, while obesity has spiked exponentially since the seventies, kids watch only seven minutes more TV a day. Although they do average a half-hour of video games and Internet surfing on top of television viewing, the leap in obesity began in 1980, well before home video games and the invention of the Web browser. This doesn’t mean it’s healthy to watch television. But it does mean that something other than television is making kids heavier.

“We’ve just done diet and exercise studies for a hundred years and they don’t work well, and it’s time to look for different causes,” says Dr. Richard Atkinson, co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Obesity.

Despite how persuasive all this science is, somehow it still seems like a huge leap of faith to consider giving back an hour of our children’s lives to slumber. Statistical correlations are fine evidence for scientists, but as parents, we want more—we want control.

Dr. Judith Owens runs a sleep clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, affiliated with Brown. Recently, a father came in with his 15-year-old daughter, who was complaining of severe headaches. Interviewing the patient, Owens quickly learned that her daily routine was a brutal grind; after violin lessons, bassoon lessons, dance classes, and the homework from honors classes, she was able to get only five hours of sleep a night before waking every morning at 4:30 to hustle off to the gym. The father wanted to know if a lack of sleep could be causing her headaches. Owens told him that was probably the case. She recommended his daughter cut back on her schedule.

The word probably made this father hesitant. He would let her cut back, but only if Owens could prove, in advance, that sacrificing an activity would stop the headaches. Sure, he knew that sleep was important, but was it more important than honors French? Was it more important than getting into a great college?

Owens tried her standard argument. “Would you let your daughter ride in a car without a seat belt? You have to think of sleep the same way.” But in the father’s mind, he saw the transaction the other way around: Cutting back was putting his daughter at risk. What if the headaches didn’t stop and she gave up one of her great passions, like dance, for no reason?

Long before children become overscheduled high schoolers gunning for college, parents start making trade-offs between their kids’ sleep and their other needs. This is especially true in the last hour of a child’s day, a time zone let’s call “the Slush Hour.” The Slush Hour is both a rush to sleep and a slush fund of potential time, sort of a petty-cash drawer from which we withdraw ten-minute increments. During the Slush Hour, children should be in bed, but there are so many competing priorities. As a result, sleep is treated much like the national debt—What’s another half-hour on the bill? We’re surviving; kids can, too.

Sleep is a biological imperative for every species on Earth. But humans alone try to resist its pull. Instead, we see sleep not as a physical need but a statement of character. It’s considered a sign of weakness to admit fatigue, and it’s a sign of strength to refuse to succumb to slumber. Sleep is for wusses.

But perhaps we are blind to the toll it is taking on us. The University of Pennsylvania’s David Dinges did an experiment shortening adults’ sleep to six hours a night. After two weeks, they reported they were doing okay. Yet on a battery of tests, they proved to be just as impaired as someone who has stayed awake for 24 hours straight.

Dinges did the experiment to demonstrate how sleep loss is cumulative, and how easily our judgment can be fooled by sleep deprivation. Nevertheless, it’s easy to read his research and think, “I would suffer, but not that bad. I would be the exception.” We’ve coped on too-little sleep for years and managed to get by. But when it comes to a child’s developing brain, is just getting by enough?

Asking sleep experts for advice on how to put children to bed often feels like an exercise in futility. The standard tips are banal and predictable: avoid caffeine; remove the TV from their bedroom; don’t sleep on a full stomach; put up dark blinds. You have the feeling the experts are holding out on us—there has to be something more. And there is. Here’s the stuff they’d love to tell you, if they weren’t afraid of overwhelming you with science.

• Can a Lack of Sleep Hurt Your Child’s Cognitive Skills?

• Ever wonder why most people sleep better when their bedrooms are cool? It’s because the circadian rhythm system that helps regulate sleep cycles is not just light sensitive, it’s temperature sensitive. Anything above a neutral air temperature both slows the body’s initiation of sleep and changes sleep patterns—a hotter room means an increase in non-REM sleep.

• 77 percent of children use television as part of their pre-bedtime routine. Sitting still and vegging out for half an hour should, theoretically, help a child unwind, as long as they’re not watching a show that excites them too much. However, the brightness of the screen undermines the theory. The light from a television or computer can delay both the necessary drop in core body temperature and melatonin production—and thus delaying sleep onset—by two hours.

• We’re all familiar with the agony of being super exhausted, yet not being able to fall asleep for hours. What gives? It’s because after just a few days of shortened sleep, the brain starts making extra stress hormone cortisol. It takes six times as long for this stress hormone to drop to a low-enough level that sleep is possible.

• In one study of 170 children, those in white-collar families tended to be in bed later and get up earlier than those in working-class families. Yet they actually got more actual sleep. How is that possible? It’s because their bedtimes and wake-times were more consistent; they stuck to their routine. This made their sleep more efficient—they rolled around in bed far less.

• Inconsistent bedtimes are, for all practical purposes, homemade jet lag—the desynchronization of the two systems that regulate sleep, the circadian rhythm and the homeostatic pressure system. Staying up three hours later on weekends is equivalent to flying across three time zones every weekend.

• With children averaging three hours of television per day, it’s hard to make the case children are universally overscheduled. But the most driven children are the most overscheduled—and the most sleep deprived. In some ways, these busy overachievers are those who concern the experts the most. According to University of Minnesota’s Dr. Kyla Wahlstrom, a motivated student can sacrifice sleep to maintain high GPAs, but she may pay for that success with higher levels of depression and stress. Teen boys who have a high number of extracurriculars are significantly more likely to be involved in a fall-asleep car crash. And those with part-time jobs both sleep less and have lower grades.

• For the majority of kids, rather than thinking it’s a choice between sleep and activities, the opposite is true: Students who sleep more are involved in more afterschool activities—with no detriment to their grades. They have the energy to be involved. Schools that have delayed start times have seen their students sleep more and increase their participation in sports and extracurriculars.

• Naps are not quite the salve we imagine. They appease the homeostatic pressure system, but not the circadian. You wake up feeling better—a two-hour nap is equivalent to 150 mg of caffeine—but naps do nothing to repair diminished cognitive functioning. The intellect is just as dulled after the nap as before. Kindergartners who take long naps, for instance, do worse on puzzle-solving.

• 16 percent of kids snore a few times a week. As recently as 2002, the American Academy of Pediatrics opined that children’s snoring was a benign condition not warranting treatment. Just five years later, researchers now caution that kids’ snoring is not like adult snoring at all—even a little snoring is a major cause for concern, because their developing brains can be deprived of oxygen.

• Common sleep disorders such as nightmares, restless leg syndrome, and frequent night waking can have a startlingly negative impact on children’s development—from using drugs at 14 to having clinical-level anxiety as adults. Research by University of Michigan’s Dr. Ronald Chervin indicates as many as 25 percent of kids diagnosed with ADHD have an underlying sleep disorder causing their symptoms. If treated for their sleep disorder, the ADHD would magically disappear. Despite the risks posed by sleep disturbance, the number of children treated for them is “vanishingly small.” Parents should consult a qualified sleep specialist—few pediatricians have expertise with sleep problems. Waiting to see if a child grows out of a sleep problem isn’t the answer.

http://nymag.com/news/features/38951/

Scientists say semaphorin acts as brain circuitry controller

By combining a research technique that dates back 136 years with modern molecular genetics, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist has been able to see how a mammal’s brain shrewdly revisits and reuses the same molecular cues to control the complex design of its circuits.

Details of the observation in lab mice, published Dec. 24 in Nature, reveal that semaphorin, a protein found in the developing nervous system that guides filament-like processes, called axons, from nerve cells to their appropriate targets during embryonic life, apparently assumes an entirely different role later on, once axons reach their targets. In postnatal development and adulthood, semaphorins appear to be regulating the creation of synapses — those connections that chemically link nerve cells.

“With this discovery we’re able to understand how semaphorins regulate the number of synapses and their distribution in the part of the brain involved in conscious thought,” says David Ginty, Ph.D., a professor in the neuroscience department at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “It’s a major step forward, we believe, in our understanding of the assembly of neural circuits that underlie behavior.”

Because the brain’s activity is determined by how and where these connections form, Ginty says that semaphorin’s newly defined role could have an impact on how scientists think about the early origins of autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy and other neurological disorders.

The discovery came as a surprise finding in studies by the Johns Hopkins team to figure out how nerve cells develop axons, which project information from the cells, as well as dendrites, which essentially bring information in. Because earlier work from the Johns Hopkins labs of Ginty and Alex Kolodkin, Ph.D., showed that semaphorins affect axon trajectory and growth, they suspected that perhaps these guidance molecules might have some involvement with dendrites.

Kolodkin, a professor in the neuroscience department at Johns Hopkins and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, discovered and cloned the first semaphorin gene in the grasshopper when he was a postdoctoral fellow. Over the past 15 years, numerous animal models, including strains of genetically engineered mice, have been created to study this family of molecules.

A pyramidal neuron in the mouse cerebral cortex is labeled using the Golgi technique.

Using two lines of mice — one missing semaphorin and another missing neuropilin, its receptor — postdoctoral fellow Tracy Tran used a classic staining method called the Golgi technique to look at the anatomy of nerve cells from mouse brains. (The Golgi technique involves soaking nerve tissue in silver chromate to make cells’ inner structures visible under the light microscope; it allowed neuroanatomists in 1891 to determine that the nervous system is interconnected by discrete cells called neurons.)

Tran saw unusually pronounced “spines” sprouting willy-nilly in peculiar places and in greater numbers on the dendrites in the neurons of semaphorin-lacking and neuropilin-lacking mice compared to the normal wild-type animals. It’s at the tips of these specialized spines that a lot of synapses occur and neuron-to-neuron communication happens, so Tran suspected there might be more synapses and more electrical activity in the neurons of the mutant mice.

The researchers tested this hypothesis by examining even thinner brain slices under an electron microscope.

The spines of both semaphorin-lacking and neuropilin-lacking mice were dramatically enlarged, compared to those of the smaller, spherical-looking spines in the wild-type mice. In wild types, Tran generally noted a single site of connection per spine. In the mutants, the site of connection between two neurons was often split.

Next, the team recorded the electrical output of mutant and wild-type neurons and found that the mutants, with more spines and larger spines, also had about a 2.5-times increase in the frequency of electrical activity, suggesting that this abnormal synaptic transmission is due to an increase in the number of synapses.

What causes synapses to form or not form in appropriate or inappropriate places is an extremely important and poorly understood process in the development of the nervous system, Kolodkin says, explaining that the neurons his team studies can have up to 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons. If connections between neurons are not being formed how and where they’re supposed to, then miscommunication occurs and circuits malfunction; as a result, any number of diseases or disorders might develop.

“Seizures can be interpreted as an uncontrolled rapid-firing of certain neural circuits,” Kolodkin asserts. “Clearly there’s a deficit in these animals that has a human corollary with respect to epilepsy. It’s also thought that schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders have developmental origins of one sort or another. There likely are aspects to the formation of synapses — if they’re not in the correct location and in the correct number — that lead to certain types of defects. The spine deficits in these mice that are lacking semaphorin or its receptor appear very similar to those that are found in Fragile X, for instance.”

Source: Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions

http://www.sciencecodex.com/johns_hopkins_scientists_discover_a_controller_of_brain_circuitry

US – Don’t need to dig very deep for year’s top story

The White House vegetable garden.

I am not sure there has ever been a patch of dirt anywhere that has received as much attention, been so widely imitated and been the source of so much controversy as that 1,100-square-foot garden on the South Lawn of the White House.

It even eclipsed the antics of Bo, the Obama children’s long-promised pet.

Michelle Obama’s modest attempt to get some fresh vegetables in her family’s diet became an international sensation and hijacked the food conversation in this country.

The Queen of England, Maria Shriver and the mayor of Baltimore followed her example – as did municipalities all over the United States. When she went to Russia, no one wanted to talk to her about anything else, and when her husband hosted the G20 summit for world leaders, a jar of honey from the beehive in the White House garden was the gift for each of their spouses.

The first lady was even moved to say, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

It is true that just about anything a newly inaugurated presidential family does holds fascination for Americans – until we get bored with them.

But I am not sure there is anything the Obamas could have done, short of hanging out the White House wash to dry in the sun, that would have had such a profound impact on our thinking about our stewardship of the earth.

The poor economy and the threat of lost jobs helped propel Americans toward a money-saving alternative to the produce aisle at the grocery store, as did renewed concerns about the safety of our food.

But Mrs. Obama, planting the garden in her purple sweat suit and harvesting it in her salmon colored Gap jeans, surrounded by children who were surprised to discover that they liked fresh vegetables, captured the imagination of the country and changed how many Americans think about food and healthy eating.

Even her gown for the first state dinner did not garner the kind of attention that her garden gear did. (And by the way, herbs and greens from the garden were served at that dinner.)

A farmer’s market was installed just outside the gates of the White House, with the first lady as its first customer. The vegetable garden was opened to tours for schoolchildren, and Mrs. Obama used the first harvest in June as a platform to help launch her husband’s health care reform initiative.

Two reality shows, “The Biggest Loser” and “Iron Chef,” used the garden as a prop. Mrs. Obama appeared on “Sesame Street” to plant a vegetable garden. Replicas of the garden were installed in one of Europe’s biggest garden shows and at the Pennsylvania headquarters of Burpee, probably the nation’s top garden seed seller.

A marzipan replica of it graces the holiday gingerbread White House, and assistant chef and head gardener Sam Kass, who starred in a White House video that tells the story of the garden, made People magazine’s list of the 100 most beautiful people.

More than 1,000 pounds of vegetables were harvested from the garden, and it isn’t done yet. Mr. Kass did a YouTube video on how to build row covers to conserve the sun’s heat and grow winter crops.

Not bad for an investment of about $175 in seeds and soil amendments. I’m surprised the photo for the White House Christmas card wasn’t taken in the vegetable garden (although it was taken outdoors on the lawn.)

Not surprisingly, the vegetable garden had its share of political enemies.

First there was the charge, after June’s first harvest, that the garden had been “faked.” Conspiracy theorists claimed that despite a lot of compost and a very rainy spring, the greens the school children harvested with the first lady had actually been purchased, fully grown, and planted in the garden in the dead of night, and that the media was complicit in fooling the American public.

Next were the stubborn reports that a previous administration had used a sludge fertilizer on the South Lawn that contained dangerously high levels of lead and had contaminated the vegetables. Not even a parade of scientists could squelch that rumor.

In this conspiracy theory, the first lady refused to let Malia and Sasha eat anything from the lead-filled garden. Instead, she shipped it off to soup kitchens where poor children would have their brain development and their futures stunted by the lead levels in the food.

All of this, over a simple vegetable garden?

Now that’s a news story that should make anybody’s list.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bal-op.reimer28dec28,0,3615009.column

US – What Works in Early Childhood Education: A View from the Field

While the national debate rages over the benefits of early childhood education, an innovative, district-wide early childhood education initiative is bearing fruit in Bremerton, Washington. Since the initiative’s founding, the percentage of Bremerton children entering Kindergarten knowing their letters has shot from 4% to over 50%. The percentage of Kindergarteners needing specialized education services has plummeted from 12% to 2%. And the share of first graders reading on grade level has risen from 52% to 73%.

Last week, I spoke with a woman at the center of the program: Linda Sullivan-Dudzic, the district’s Director of Special programs. She described some keys to the program’s success. The district:

•Aligns existing school and community resources
•Raises the quality of existing preschools rather than creating new ones
•Focuses on literacy and numeracy
•Heeds the research, and
•Holds all providers to high standards of quality
[First published on June 26]

Read extensive highlights from our interview with Sullivan-Dudzic:

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: What are the major goals of Early Childhood Care and Education Group, and what do you believe you’ve accomplished in striving towards those goals?

SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: We have two goals. [The first is] to increase the number of children entering kindergarten with early literacy skills–and now we’ve added early math foundation skills. And the second goal is to decrease the number of children, students, with learning disabilities or learning differences associated with reading.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: And do you feel like you’ve made headway in reaching your goals?

SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Yes. In literacy definitely. We’re just starting in math. We have decreasing numbers of kids qualifying as learning disabled, and we have increasing numbers of kids entering kindergarten with early reading foundation skills.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: So you have all kinds of community partners?

SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Sure. I started 29 years ago with Head Start, as a speech language pathologist. And we formed our first relationship there. When I figured out that kids could get services through their public school for free, essentially, rather than through Head Start, then we formed our first partnership between Head Start and the public school system. Then I shifted over to the public school.

So we’ve had deep relationships in our community, working in private and Head Start preschools with kids with disabilities–and working on collaborative efforts, starting with social and emotional skills.

So it was a shock when the kids entered kindergarten in 2000, and we found out only 4 percent entered kindergarten knowing their letters.

So instead of saying we need to go do our own preschool, we got our partners together to look at the data and ask what we could do about this. And we made an effort to say we want to increase the quality and services for children in all preschools in Bremerton, not just in special ed or blended preschools. So instead of reaching a few kids, we now reach 570 kids before they come into kindergarten.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: And you didn’t feel you needed to create an entirely new set of schools from scratch?

SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: We purposely did not do that. We wanted to value what people were already doing. If you have a childcare in Bremerton or a preschool and you feed into our schools, we wanted to support you.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: As you know, a lot of conversations about early childhood address the question of when academic work becomes appropriate and whether we give students too little or too much [academic preparation]. What kinds of things have you learned through your own work?

SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Definitely you need to be grounded on the research. [When we revisited our early childhood work], I was serving on the Washington State Early Learning Benchmark Task Force, to work with a researcher on what every child should know and be able to do before Kindergarten.

So we brought in our preschool partners to examine that. We looked at Head Start standards. We looked at special ed requirements and just laid them all out. And we said, we’re not going to debate what’s developmentally appropriate, we’re going to do research [on] what [to] teach young children. And then we looked at what’s the best of preschool that we could influence our K-3 system, and what’s the best of K-3 that we could influence our preschool.

We have created what now is referred in the literature to a pre-K through third grade initiative.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: Do you focus your attention on a certain demographic, or is this really for all kids in Bremerton?

SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: All kids. The most at-risk kids are low-income. So if you look in your community where these kids might be if they are not at a Head Start, they’re often in a faith-based preschool where churches have reached out to low-income families. But they hardly have any money to support a quality preschool.

We brought a group of parents together and said, if your child didn’t have disabilities or your child wasn’t low-income, what preschool have you heard has really high quality? And so we brought in a mix of parents, including high socio-economic parents, and they told us what next partners we should [consider including].

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: The benefits, then, of this program last well beyond kindergarten?

SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Yes. Now, this year we’re starting to see a little bit of “slippage” in second and third grades. And so we’ve brought the teachers together, and I’ve requested that the Board do a pre-K through third grade summit.

So we haven’t seen any fadeout at the end of first grade, but second grade and third grade we’re starting to see some things.

Now, a good thing is that we know what to do. We brought our second grade teachers and our third grade teachers together, and we’ve mapped out next year.

I’m pushing to use our ARRA Title I monies to do a summer school for Kindergarten and [first grade]. The gatekeeper is the end of first grade. We used to think it was third grade. If you’re not solid at the end of first grade in reading, you only have a 1 out of 8 chance [of becoming proficient later on].

We have a high turnover in preschools because they don’t pay a lot, and so they need a consistent curriculum that is aligned with K-3. And K-3 needs to align with preschool.

We’ve aligned our Head Start resources with our Title I resources, which is what it was meant to do in the very beginning. Under the Johnson era, Head Start was created at the same time Title I was created, and they have very similar mandates: Requirements for staff development, a requirement to lift kids up and close the achievement gap. We’ve been able to take all our resources and just focus them.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: It sounds like you’re taking the existing players in the field, the existing resources for kids, and aligning them much better.

SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Yes. For example, I bring a group together once a month– the ECCE Directors Meeting. And you’re a director if you own your own in-home childcare. We bring everybody together, and we talk about staff development needs, because very few people can afford staff development. Then we plan our monthly staff development, which is taught by our instructional coach. And she brings in other resources too, other resources from the school district, resources from Head Start. And once a month she trains the staff.

If you’re a preschool that can’t release your staff, then she’ll go out to your preschool then and fill you in on what you missed. And every month she’s done a brilliant job of designing it. It’s based on the needs of the kids. Then the next month, the preschool will showcase what they did with that information.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: Some people are saying early childhood doesn’t help at all. Others are saying well, yes, it helps but it’s got to be way more targeted: We have to target it to low-income kids, and universal early childhood education is actually not a good use of resources. Is that something you want to comment on?

SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Is universal preschool a wonderful idea? Absolutely. I think we have lost our advantage as a nation. We used to be the only country that offered free public education, K-12. Where people get worried about universal preschool is when they look at the state of Georgia, which is getting a strong fadeout effect. [we have to] go back and look at how are we using our resources.

The question is, are we ready to look in the mirror and say, “yes, we want to do universal preschool, but it will be quality.” Those people who are trying to do a good job… we honor what they’re doing, but we don’t excuse poor quality. We will look at data of kids coming into kindergarten and we will adjust our own instruction so that we can send even more kids well-prepared.

We [in Bremerton] had the choice of taking our Title I money and building our own preschool. We figured that, with the amount of money we [currently] spend to reach 570, we’d probably reach about 20 kids [with our own preschool]. This way, that same money can take existing preschools and lift them up.

I think that you can’t talk about preschool unless you talk about pre-K through 3. Otherwise you’re just wasting your money. We all could do a better job of aligning of resources. K-3 needs to step up to the plate, and preschool needs to step up to the plate. And kindergarten. We are going to make sure that we don’t fade out. We capitalize on the good work and we continue it.

It’s a wonderful, hopeful time right now. We have the research out there. We have good longitudinal studies. I think we have about a two-year window. We either do this right or we’re not going to have another chance.

http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/what-works-early-childhood-education-view-field-0

US – Politicizing Preschool

Before we invest $10 billion to fund new programs for preschoolers, let’s get an answer to the $100 billion question: Does Head Start provide lasting benefits?

Universal health care may top the wish-lists of many liberals this Christmas — but universal preschool isn’t far behind. President Obama is doing his best to play the role of Santa, bringing subsidized pre-kindergarten to a growing number of American families.

The president has called for $10 billion in new funding for preschool programs, and Congress is working to deliver. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included $5 billion for preschool and childcare programs. In September, the House passed a higher education bill that included an $8 billion “Early Learning Challenge Fund” to provide grants to states to expand subsidized preschool. The Senate is expected to follow suit.

These proposals are based on the belief that “investments” in early childhood education yield significant long-term benefits for children served. As President Obama himself promised, “For every dollar we invest in these programs, we get nearly $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer health care costs, and less crime.”

If the president is right, we should look forward to a safer, healthier, and welfare-free world sometime soon, thanks to our federal “investments” in preschool. In 2009, taxpayers will spend $25 billion on the federal government’s 69 federal preschool and childcare programs.

Unfortunately, little is known about whether these programs work. One might think that Congress and the administration would be focusing on evaluating these programs’ effectiveness before spending another $8 billion on preschool. Actually, there is reason to believe that they are instead ignoring empirical evidence that undermines the case for a new federal preschool program.

Consider the saga of the Head Start program and its national evaluation. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson created Head Start, the first national preschool and childcare program serving low-income children. Nearly 45 years later, the federal government has spent more than $100 billion on it. With annual funding of approximately $7 billion, Head Start currently spends at least $7,300 annually on each of the 900,000 low-income children served.

For more than a decade, Congress has been trying to figure out whether Head Start has provided lasting benefits for participating children. In 1997, the GAO reviewed the available literature on Head Start’s impact and concluded that body of research was inadequate for drawing conclusions about the program’s effectiveness. This finding led Congress in 1998 to mandate a national evaluation of Head Start’s impact on participants.

Seven years later, the Department of Health and Human Services released the preliminary findings of the national impact evaluation — comparing the development of children served by Head Start with their peers who didn’t participate in the program. In the critical area of cognitive development, the evaluation found that Head Start’s participants experienced modestly positive benefits compared to their peers who weren’t served by the program. Head Start children outperformed their peers in four out of the six cognitive constructs: pre-reading, pre-writing, vocabulary, and parent reports of students’ literacy skills.

But the 2005 evaluation looked only at children’s developmental progress after one year in Head Start. It didn’t address the $100 billion question: Does Head Start provide lasting benefits?
This question would be addressed by future evaluations of the performance of former Head Start students and their peers through the end of first grade and third grade. Data collection for the initial study of first graders’ progress was completed in the spring of 2006.

Three years have now passed. According to the HHS Web site, this project was supposed to be completed by March 2009. But the findings of the congressionally-mandated evaluation have never been made public.

One can’t help but wonder: What’s causing the delay? Former HHS officials have told me that they were briefed on the results of the first-grade evaluation in 2008. They report that the evaluation found that, overall, Head Start participants experienced zero lasting benefits compared to their non-Head Start peers by the end of first grade. These officials expressed little surprise that the report’s release had been delayed.

Is the Department of HHS burying a damaging study? Perhaps there’s a good explanation for the delay. But without raising the question, we won’t know the answer. Before taxpayers “invest” another $8 billion in another preschool program, we deserve to know whether programs like Head Start are, indeed, making a lasting difference.

President Obama has said that his administration’s only test for deciding what education programs to fund with our “precious tax dollars” will be whether it “works.” It’s time to find out whether he will keep his word — even if it means bad news for one of liberals’ favorite initiatives.

Dan Lips is Senior Policy Analyst at The Heritage Foundation.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/12/29/dan-lips-heritage-preschool-head-start-politics/

US – Fulfilling our Promise: The Prospects of Early Childhood Education

A teacher reflects on her work in early childhood education, and how Obama’s policies might move it forward.

I found my calling in a pile of vomit and a smile.

The vomit came from one of my pre-kindergarten students, Tyrique, whose anxiety about transitioning to school made him physically sick. He was unsure about whether school would bring him the same joy he experienced playing with his mother and two sisters at home. I soon learned that in addition to needing support in adjusting to new routines, Tyrique was behind in basic literacy and cognitive skills.

The smile also came from Tyrique, every day after the third week of school, when he would express his excitement to be with his friends. One day in particular, late in the spring, Tyrque was reading independently after breakfast. I asked if we could read together because I always wanted to read the book he had chosen. We took turns and for the first time, he managed to sound out a word on his own. He turned to me with a huge smile and said, “Ms. Pappas, I’m a good reader.” Right then, my interest in teaching was solidified.

His trajectory from an anxious newcomer without an understanding of what a letter is to a self-confident early reader required strategic and steadfast efforts to identify and meet his needs. I paid attention to everything, from the toys and stories that piqued his interest to his specific skill deficits, in order to create individualized learning plans that maximized every moment.

Tyrique’s story and the growth of all the students I taught in Newark, New Jersey, highlighted the reality that the achievement gap starts before kindergarten and the ability for high quality early learning experiences to give children from disadvantaged areas the enriching introduction to school they deserve.

Yet despite these successes, I stood in front of my students and their families on graduation day with mixed feelings. I was proud of our accomplishments, but I felt anxious about the quality of early childhood programs across the country and in K-12.

A strong start is necessary, but cannot on its own advance equal opportunity without being part of a broader continuum of high-quality education. While New Jersey and other states have made strides in increasing systemic cohesion, early childhood education across the country remains, to a large extent, both internally fragmented and disjointed from the larger K-12 system in everything from funding streams and governing structures to content standards and pedagogy. Young children entering kindergarten may have attended early childhood programs in a wide range of settings with various standards and approaches.

President Obama’s early childhood policies introduce the possibility for real change by not only creating opportunities for states to receive funding, but by transforming the way that early childhood policy is shaped. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius have joined forces to advance common definitions of quality across early childhood programs. Two of their top advisors, Jacqueline Jones (DOE) and Joan Lombardi (HHS), have engaged both agencies in discussions around key issues, described recently at a research summit at Georgetown University. Their shared leadership model and discussion of diverse perspectives affords the opportunity to mobilize the two agencies around a collective purpose, while also leveraging the unique insights and expertise each one brings to the table.

The promise of early childhood education is really the promise of a leveled playing field. I am confident that the approach and content of new initiatives are a crucial step towards fulfilling that promise.

http://www.good.is/post/Fulfilling-our-Promise-The-Prospects-of-Early-Childhood-Education

US – Study to help children lose weight and maintain weight loss

Obesity researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are recruiting families with overweight children for a study to help those kids, and their parents, lose weight.

The two-year study, called COMPASS (Comprehensive Maintenance Program to Achieve Sustained Success), will involve families with one or more children between the ages of 7 and 11 who are at least 20 percent above their ideal weight.

“In the past 30 years, the obesity rate in children has tripled in the U.S.,” says Denise E. Wilfley, Ph.D., the study’s principal investigator and the director of Washington University’s Weight Management Center. “The earlier we address a problem like obesity, the better an individual will do, so we want to catch these children before they grow into adults with serious problems.”

The study is funded largely through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The ARRA is providing $4.6 million in grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health to support the study. The research will be conducted at Washington University in St. Louis in collaboration with Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

About 20 percent of U.S. children are either overweight or obese, and that puts them at high risk for obesity as adults. Among those who are overweight as kids, 65 percent of white girls and 84 percent of black girls grow up to be obese women. Seventy-one percent of overweight white boys and 82 percent of overweight black boys become obese men.

Overweight and obese adults face mounting medical complications such as diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea and heart disease. Previous studies have shown that because they grow taller, young children can get leaner even if they don’t drop many pounds. By intervening at younger ages, Wilfley believes it may be easier to alter a child’s activity patterns and dietary habits so that young children may develop long-lasting and healthy eating and activity behaviors.

But young children don’t have the power to control their own environment, so parents are involved, too. To qualify for the COMPASS study, the overweight child must have at least one overweight parent who will be encouraged to actively participate in the program as well.

“If you can change the parent’s behavior and help that adult acquire healthier eating habits and physical activity patterns, that’s going to have a positive effect on the child,” says Wilfley, a professor of psychiatry, medicine, pediatrics and psychology. “We are aggressively targeting both overweight and obese children and their parents.”

Family-based interventions to help kids lose weight consistently have been shown to be effective. However, maintaining weight loss remains a challenge for both children and adults. In order to overcome the problem of weight regain after weight-loss treatment, families must learn weight-maintenance behaviors and skills. In a past study, Wilfley and her colleagues found that children who lost weight were able to keep it off more effectively if they participated in a maintenance-targeted treatment program. Research testing adult maintenance interventions also found that this type of treatment can help adults sustain weight loss over time.

In the COMPASS study, children and parents will start with four months of intensive family-based intervention to help them lose weight. They’ll meet with behavioral interventionists, weigh in and receive feedback and support regarding diet and activity every week during that period.

During the next eight months, families will be divided into three groups: intensive weight maintenance therapy called social facilitation maintenance (SFM); a slightly less intense version of SFM therapy; or the current standard of care, which entails providing information and education about how to maintain weight loss and live healthy lives.

The SFM therapy presumes people need a social environment that supports continued weight control. The treatment guides parents to encourage their kids to be friends with physically active peers and to ensure that play dates with existing friends involve physical activity and healthy eating.

Those who receive the intensive SFM intervention will continue to meet with behavioral interventionists and other participating families each week during the maintenance phase of the study. A second group will receive a less intensive version of the SFM program that requires meetings only every two weeks.

But every family in the study will start by receiving four months of an evidence-based intervention to help parents and kids lose weight.

“All of them will get terrific treatment,” Wilfley says. “We want to see if there is a particular strategy that works best in terms of helping them keep the extra weight off. Or perhaps we’ll find that particular maintenance strategies tend to work better in particular types of families.”

In previous research, Wilfley found that the SFM program helped kids maintain their relative weight significantly better than those who did not receive maintenance treatment.

After four months of weight loss and eight months of maintenance, the COMPASS study will continue to follow families for another year to see whether children and adults remain lean. Although they won’t be asked to attend regular sessions, they will be evaluated and assessed at 18 months and again two years after the start of the study.

The investigators plan to recruit 120 families in St. Louis and in Seattle. Study participants will be asked to come to Washington University Medical Center in St. Louis once a week for the first four months. How often families return to the medical center over the next eight months will depend upon which maintenance intervention they receive.

Children or parents who are unable to participate in moderate physical activity at a level equivalent to a brisk walk will not be eligible for the study. Others who take medication that affects their weight or have medical conditions that require severe dietary restrictions also are ineligible, as are those with eating disorders or those who currently are participating in other weight-loss programs.

The program is provided free of charge for those who qualify, and families who complete the study will receive a stipend: $50 at the end of the first 12 months, $75 at the 18-month evaluation and $100 for completing two years of treatment and assessments. The research study is not intended to replace routine medical care for study participants, and there is no guarantee of direct benefit for volunteers.

For more information about the COMPASS study, call Molly at (314) 286-1055 or e-mail compassprogram@psychiatry.wustl.edu.

http://mednews.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/15258.html

Plan for daycare at shopping centres

GOODSTART, the charity taking over Australia’s biggest childcare chain, ABC Learning, hopes to expand into shopping centres to offer educational daycare with one-stop convenience.

GoodStart chairman Robin Crawford — a co-founder of Macquarie Bank — said yesterday that childcare could give shopping centres a competitive edge.

“In my view that’s an operation that makes strategic sense,” he said.

“Shopping centres are places of work and you want to be as convenient as possible. And if you’re a shopping centre operator . . . competing against three or four others, and yours can offer childcare, at least you know that those mothers will be dropping off and collecting their child every day.”

Mr Crawford has known Westfield shopping centre mogul Frank Lowy for 30 years but said he had not discussed the idea with his old mate.

“The obvious problem is that price per square metre is high,” Mr Crawford said.

“But you’ve got to have dreams and visions.”

GoodStart is a consortium of the charities Mission Australia, Brotherhood of St Laurence, Benevolent Society and Social Ventures Australia.

It plans to plough $21 million a year in payroll tax exemptions back into the 678 daycare centres it bought last week, transforming daycare from babysitting into an early education service.

Mr Crawford revealed that the ABC group was “nearly break-even” after 13 months in receivership. He said GoodStart’s charitable status would entitle it to payroll tax relief worth $21m a year.

“The opportunity to put that money back into the early learning agenda is terrific,” Mr Crawford said. “We’re not using it as a competitive advantage.

“To be so deeply committed, and such a large player in the sector, we are the logical partner for (the federal government) to develop a new agenda.”

The Rudd government has lent GoodStart $15m to fund its $100m takeover of the remains of Eddy Groves’ international childcare empire, which collapsed into receivership with debts of $1.6 billion. The sale coincides with a massive shake-up of the childcare sector, after the Council of Australian Governments imposed higher quality controls this month.

Starting next year, centres will be given “quality ratings” and from 2014 they will be forced to hire extra staff.

Mr Crawford said governments traditionally had regarded childcare as a workforce issue, but the government was now “looking at the child” instead.

“Quality childcare can make a huge difference to young children,” he said.

“They are early-learning sponges.”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/plan-for-daycare-at-shopping-centres/story-e6frg6nf-1225813999503