Featured series 
Tag: child development and behavior
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Science & Tech
For bonobos, it’s one for all
Daycare workers and kindergarten teachers tend to offer young humans a lot of coaching about the idea of sharing. But for our ape cousins the bonobos, sharing just comes naturally.
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Health
Fragile period of childhood brain development could underlie epilepsy
A form of partial epilepsy associated with auditory and other sensory hallucinations has been linked to the disruption of brain development during early childhood, according to a study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Described in today’s advance online edition of Nature Medicine, these new findings provide the first genetic link…
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Health
Maternal, paternal genes’ tug-of-war may last well into childhood
An analysis of rare genetic disorders in which children lack some genes from one parent suggests that maternal and paternal genes engage in a subtle tug-of-war well into childhood, and possibly as late as the onset of puberty. This striking new variety of intra-family conflict, described by Harvard researchers in today’s edition of the Proceedings…
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Health
Infant weight gain linked to childhood obesity
As childhood obesity continues its 30-year advance from occasional curiosity to cultural epidemic, health care providers are struggling to find out why — and the reasons are many. Increasingly sedentary environments for both adults and children, as well as cheap and ubiquitous processed foods no doubt play a role, but researchers are finding more evidence…
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Science & Tech
Center on the Developing Child names Richmond Fellows
To support its goal of creating a new generation of leaders who have a broad perspective on the promotion of healthy child development and who recognize the need to bring strong scientific knowledge to bear on policies and programs that support the well-being of children, the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University today…
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Science & Tech
From neuroscience to childhood policy
The Center on the Developing Child, founded in July 2006 to promote healthy child development as “the foundation of community development, economic prosperity, and a secure nation,” has been putting its message forth in a powerful series of colloquia across the University. Wednesday night (Dec. 5) director Jack P. Shonkoff brought his case to a…
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Campus & Community
Study: Gap in energy among teens
A new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) shows that America’s overweight teens consumed an average of 700 to 1,000 calories more than required each day over a 10-year period. This “energy gap” – or the imbalance between the number of calories children consumed each day and the number they…
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Campus & Community
Not unusual to forget childhood sexual abuse
When questioned closely by psychologists from Harvard University about their feelings, victims of childhood sexual abuse revealed some surprising impressions.
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Science & Tech
Child enrichment program still pays off after 15 years
Researchers have detected the lasting benefits of early childhood education 15 years after the program ended. What may have seemed like three years of fun and games at the time for the low-birth weight, premature infants translated into higher achievement scores in math and reading for the intervention group at age 18. They also tended…
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Campus & Community
Judge Baker Children’s Center welcomes a groundbreaking research project that may shed light on autism
Harvard-affiliated Judge Baker Children’s Center is launching a research project to study autism. Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman, director and research director, respectively, of Harvard’s Infant and Child Study Center, in conjunction with Martha Herbert and Katherine Martien from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), are beginning to study the brain-processing mechanisms in children with autism and…
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Health
An existing diuretic may suppress seizures in newborns
A diuretic drug called bumetanide may serendipitously help treat seizures in newborns, which are difficult to control with existing anticonvulsants, according to a study in the November 2005 Nature Medicine. The study findings could lead to clinical trials of bumetanide in newborns, whose immature, rapidly- developing brains are especially vulnerable to seizures – particularly preterm…
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Campus & Community
They are born to add
How does someone who hasn’t learned to count yet, say a preschooler, deal with numbers? Adults are comfortable with symbols like “10” to signify 10 balloons, beeps, or beliefs. But how do kids handle numbers when they don’t know numbers? Very well, according to experiments done at Harvard University. In these experiments, 5-year-olds, who had…
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Health
Child early intervention programs make for healthier adults
The Brookline Early Education Program (BEEP), a community- based child health and development program, was initiated by the Brookline Public Schools and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and ran from 1972-1979. Enrollment was open to families in Brookline, Mass., and to some urban families in neighboring Boston. The program provided health, educational, and social services…
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Science & Tech
Witnessing gun violence significantly increases the likelihood that a child will also commit violent crimes
“Based on this study’s results, showing the importance of personal contact with violence, the best model for violence may be that of a socially infectious disease,” says Felton Earls, MD, HMS professor of social medicine and principal investigator of the study. The study, a project that included interviews of children and teenagers from Chicago neighborhoods,…
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Health
Weight status of children ages 8 to 15 predicts obesity and high blood pressure in adulthood
“We have known that kids who are overweight or obese have a higher risk for being overweight or obese as adults. But in this paper, we show that even children in the high normal weight range have an elevated risk of becoming overweight or obese as adults,” said lead author Alison Field, assistant professor of…
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Health
Which comes first, language or thought?
“Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects,” says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. “These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later.” Because languages differ in how they approach objects, many scientists suspected that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their language. That’s wrong,…
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Science & Tech
Monsters, tooth fairies and germs!
Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Paul Harris argues that children as young as preschool age can discern whether or not they’re hearing the truth, even in a domain for which they have no previous knowledge, by accurately judging the reliability of the person who’s telling them. “Particularly among 4-year-olds, but also among 3-year-olds, they’re…
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Science & Tech
More TV means fewer veggies
Harvard researchers tracked 548 sixth and seventh graders from public schools for 19 months. The children were asked to fill out surveys to determine the time they spent per day watching television, movies or videos; time spent per day on physical activities and how many fruits and vegetables they consumed daily. The average amount of…
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Science & Tech
Puberty gene identified
A gene discovered by Harvard researchers and their colleagues in England makes a protein necessary to trigger a hormonal cascade that flows from the brain to the gonads. Without it, the researchers have shown, humans and mice do not become sexually mature. Stephanie Seminara, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, called the…
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Health
Pregnant women carrying boys eat more than those carrying girls
Researchers looked at the diets of 244 pregnant American women via a food frequency questionnaire during the second trimester. They found that women expecting a boy had an eight percent higher intake of protein, a nine percent higher intake of carbohydrates, an 11 percent higher intake of animal fats, and a 15 percent higher intake…
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Campus & Community
Childhood abuse hurts the brain
A thick cable of nerve cells connecting the right and left sides of the brain (corpus callosum) is smaller than normal in abused children, says Martin Teicher, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He and his colleagues at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility affiliated with Harvard, compared brain scans from 51 patients and…
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Health
Bottle-feeding before bed time may increase risk of childhood asthma
Nearly one in 13 children in America has asthma. The National Institutes of Health reports that the prevalence of asthma around the world has doubled in the last 15 years, increasing 160 percent among pre-school age children. Asthma is the third leading cause of hospitalization among children under age 15 and accounts for more than…
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Science & Tech
Reserved children more likely to be violent than their outgoing peers
Kurt Fischer from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Brandeis’ Malcolm Watson tracked 440 children and adolescents over seven years to determine what causes children to become aggressive and violent. They found that two characteristics strongly predict the development of aggression. Violence in the home, including physical parental punishment, was the strongest predictor of…
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Health
Imagination important for children’s cognitive development
Paul Harris, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, says there are two very different ways to define imagination. “You can either see it as disappearing or waning during childhood, or you can see it the way I do, as persisting throughout life,” Harris says. The message in his book, “The Work of the…
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Health
Study reveals how child abuse can lead to substance abuse
It’s a common-sense notion that those who have been abused as children may became drug abusers later in life. But why is this so? Carl Anderson, a Harvard instructor in psychiatry and a research associate in McLean Hospital’s Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Laboratory and Brain Imaging Center, and his colleagues investigated. They found that repeated sexual…