Child development
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Shining a light on the injustice of institutionalization and the damage it causes to children – to promote care reform across the globe
Led by 22 of the world’s leading experts on reforming care for children, The Lancet Commission on Institutionalisation and Deinstitutionalisation of Children includes a review and meta-analysis of the effects of institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation on children’s development, and makes 14 policy recommendations addressed to policymakers at all levels. The Commission was chaired by Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke, Professor of Developmental Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London who leads the English and Romanian Adoptee (ERA) Project.
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Female pioneers: Kathy Sylva OBE on educational psychologist and psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs CBE
To celebrate International Women’s Day, three ACAMH luminaries shine the spotlight on the female pioneers of child and adolescent psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, they most admire. “Susan Isaacs made a major contribution to our understanding of child development, yet is very little known, and I want to keep her memory alive.”
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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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Most Cited JCPP Articles #11 of 60
Most cited JCPP papers #11 of 60: Infant intersubjectivity: Research, theory, and clinical applications
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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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