Child development
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A mother’s touch: a key player in fine tuning the function of our genome
There is debate as to the importance of genetics in determining our behaviour. This debate has become enshrined perhaps due to the early focus of genetics on searching for DNA variation in our genome (termed a polymorphism) that affected protein structure, the hypothesis being that such a protein variant would not be working optimally in our body throughout our life.
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Parents should keep talking to boost infant language development
Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds tend to have poorer language skills when starting school than those from higher SES backgrounds. Now, data shows that increasing the amount of “contingent talk”— whereby a caregiver talks about objects that an infant is directly focusing on — within an infant’s first year of life promotes a wide vocabulary later in infancy.
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Low activity levels affect child mental development
High activity levels (AL) in early childhood are associated with sub-optimal social and behavioural outcomes, but whether low AL have negative outcomes is unclear. Now, a study conducted by researchers at Boston University has demonstrated that AL are curvilinearly related to mental development.
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