The National Center for Health Statistics shows childbearing for single moms reached a record high in 2006.

And Diane Debrovner, Senior Editor of Parents magazine, says stars having kids out of wedlock makes it seem glamorous.

“I think,” Debrovner told Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen Thursday, “because of our media obsession with celebrities and their every move … they set the bar at what is sort of socially acceptable and fashionable in many ways.”

She says she’s sure that makes it more likely the average woman will look at the single celebrities and say, “If they can do it, why can’t I?”

“The rate of births out of wedlock is higher than ever,” Debrovner observed. “I don’t know if celebrities are the main reason fueling that trend. But I think that the media make us feel that, if celebrities can do something, that that’s something we should aspire to.

“And, absolutely, their life is very different than the average woman. And I hope that people remember that when they see these stories in the news.

“They have resources that most women don’t have. They probably have a team of nannies waiting in the wings and a personal trainer at home.

“There are millions of wonderful single parents in this country and their children can thrive. But the reality is that, logistically and emotionally and financially, it’s much more difficult to be a single parent than a parent with a partner.” (…)

Source: CBS News, NY
http://tinyurl.com/2kamqt

A new poll shows that some U.S. parents are reconsidering their use of over-the-counter cough and cold medicines for children.

In the poll, most parents indicated that they’re aware of recent news about the safety and effectiveness of those cold medicines.

In October, an FDA advisory panel recommended that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines not be used in children who are 2 to 5 years old. The FDA hasn’t decided yet whether to approve that recommendation.

Earlier this year, the FDA warned parents not to give kids younger than 2 over-the-counter cough or cold medicines unless given specific directions to do so by a health care provider. (…)

Over 30% of parents with children under 6 say they plan to stop giving their children those cold medicines. But 50% say they’ll keep giving their children those drugs. The remaining parents aren’t sure, aren’t aware of the issue, or said they never gave those drugs to their children, anyway. (…)

About 70% of all the parents of children under 6 say they are at least “somewhat” confident that over-the-counter children’s drugs are safe. But 35% say their views about children’s over-the-counter cough and cold medicines have become “more negative” in the past several years — and roughly the same number say they’re confused about the safety and effectiveness of children’s over-the-counter cough and cold medicines.

Parents said their doctor is their most trusted source of accurate information about the safety and effectiveness of over-the-counter medicines for children. Pharmacists ranked second. (…)

Source: WebMD
http://tinyurl.com/37r8jd

Last month Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty launched one of the most significant improvements in education in decades. Publicly-funded, full-day kindergarten for all will equalize opportunities for Ontario parents and their children by fostering a love of learning that will allow children to thrive in school, and beyond.

There has been some debate since Mr. McGuinty’s announcement about the benefits of full-day kindergarten. But as a scientist with decades of research experience into early childhood learning challenges, let me be clear: There is no debate over the benefits of quality early learning and care programs. Extensive research has consistently shown that quality preschool, taught by teachers trained in early childhood development, improves not only school readiness, but also the social and emotional skills that help children for a lifetime. (…)

We are only just beginning to understand the many reasons why preschool not only greatly facilitates the transition into school, but helps lay the foundation for the social, emotional, cognitive, communicative, and even physical capacities that underpin healthy mental functioning.

Beginning around the age of four, children make a quantum leap in their ability to understand what others are thinking and feeling. The social interactions that a child experiences at this age are critical for the development of this ability to “mindread,” and will become a core part of the child’s understanding of other people’s behaviour — and her own — for the rest of her life.

Hand in hand with the child’s developing ability to understand what is going on in other people’s minds is her ability to regulate and express her emotions. The child’s interactions with her parents lay the foundation, but interactions between peers in a preschool setting are vital for further development: especially between the ages of four and six when the part of the brain that supports emotion regulation is undergoing a critical stage of wiring.

No less significant is the impact that such a program can have on the child’s developing language, literacy and math skills. A recently published report in The Heinz School Review (March 2007) described how vocabulary scores in children who attended public kindergarten were 31 per cent higher than children without the program; math skills improved by 44 per cent; and print awareness by 85 per cent. The study also found that, in order to obtain these favourable results, the child has to spend a minimum of three hours in the preschool, five days a week. Children who attended for three years did better than those who attended two years, and the two-year cohort had higher scores than those who attended one year.

Of course, the deciding factor here is the quality of the staffing. The best teachers are nurturers who make intentional use of play and experience-based learning by using a combination of child-initiated and teacher-selected activities.

That’s no simple feat, which is exactly why teachers must have a sound understanding of the stages of a child’s development and be able to detect potential challenges. (…)

The pace of new scientific results in this field is truly astounding. Adele Diamond, Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, just published a ground-breaking study in Science reporting that preschool programs that use dramatic play, visual aids, and peer interaction during reading and math to teach children important cognitive and social-emotional skills, had a powerful effect on the child’s ability to screen out distractions, to resist responding impulsively to a question, and to think creatively and reflectively. (…)

Source: Ottawa Citizen, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/2vy7t7

Albany County School District No. 1 is hoping to empower more students to think mathematically by showing teachers what that thinking looks like.

District math coordinator Dee Swanson demonstrated the training that she is giving to teachers and principals Wednesday night at the school board meeting.

While the math curriculum isn’t changing, Swanson has worked with teams of teachers throughout the district to show strategies for teaching the quantitative understanding of numbers in addition to verbal and symbolic understanding — which are recognizing how to say a number and knowing what a number looks like.

“If math is all about quantity, why do we leave it out? But we have,” she said. The problem that some students have with that concept doesn’t have to do with teachers; it has to do with the system, she said.

The concept Swanson is teaching starts in kindergarten with the number five. Using colored sliding beads that students can move into various quantities, they learn how numbers come together and break apart into groups, such as the number five breaking into a group of two and a group of three.

Once students have mastered the basic skills, they can more easily conceptualize the addition or subtraction of larger numbers. (…)

Source: Laramine Boomerang, WY
http://www.laramieboomerang.com/news/more.asp?StoryID=107447

Last weekend the National Invitational Conference of the Early Childhood Research Collaborative was held at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. The Bank and the U of M Center for Early Education and Development were joint sponsors.

A discussion of class size was led by Jeremy D. Finn at the University at Buffalo - SUNY. He concluded that smaller class sizes at the earliest grades had substantial benefits especially for minority students.

His paper (co-authored by Allison Suriani & Charles M. Achilles) was titled “Small Classes in the Early Grades: One Policy - Multiple Outcomes”. He began by refuting a widely held opinion that lower pupil-teacher ratios showed little benefit. He argued that pupil-teacher ratios ignore the actual setting in which teachers are teaching and students are learning. He said that “it is not surprising that the relationship of PTR (Pupil-Teacher Ratio) with student achievement is weak at best” partly because studies have alternated between class size and pupil-teacher ratio, with no reference to the actual teaching or learning process in the classroom. (…)

Short-term findings were that small classes have academic benefits in every grade and in every subject tested in K-3. Benefits equated to 1/2 to 5-1/2 months of schooling. Starting early and continuing in small classes for multiple years also helped - “in general, the more the better.” (…)

Graduation rates were significantly impacted by small class participation. “For all students combined, the effects of attending small classes for 4 years increased the odds of graduation by about 80%.” The rates for low-income students with 3 or more years of small class participation were as high as those of higher-income students. (…)

In looking at why small classes affect student performance, systematic interview and classroom observations don’t support the hypothesis that smaller classes provide more individualized instruction. Studies do affirm that teachers of small classes spend more time on instruction and less on classroom management or matters of discipline, and have more time to “listen to children, to get to know their personal lives and concerns.” The most visible changes are not in teacher’s behavior, but in students’ behavior…more engaged in learning, and better behaved.

Other findings: In small classes all students feel pressure to participate, and the teacher can’t “easily ignore” any particular student. Students have a “sense of belonging” being more cohesive with splinter groups rare and benefiting from a “psychological sense of community”. (…)

Source: Twin Cities Planet, Minnesota
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/node/8547

Two studies published in the New Zealand Medical Journal show the extent to which Pacific Island children, and children of parents younger than 25, are at risk of physical discipline.

The Pacific Islands Families Study found that nearly one-quarter of mothers admitted hitting their four-year-olds with an object, such as a wooden spoon or belt, at least once a month.

Equivalent figures for fathers were not included, but the study did show that just over 13 per cent of them hit their two-year-old children with an object at least once a month.

The study, which tracked the first four years of babies born to Pacific Island parents in South Auckland during 2000, also said that more than three-quarters of parents smacked their children. More than 1200 mothers and 800 fathers took part in the study. (…)

Nearly 37 per cent of young parents inflicted physical punishment on a child under the age of two, with 3.3 per cent of that categorised as severe. This rose to 84.4 per cent for children aged two to four (11.2 per cent severe), dropping slightly to 77.8 per cent (15.3 per cent) for those aged five. (…)

On average, 1.2 New Zealand children per 100,000 die at the hands of adults each year, the third-worst rate in the developed world - one of the factors that prompted the Government to pass the Crimes Amendment Act to outlaw smacking of children.

Source: The Dominion Post, New Zealand
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/dominionpost/4323064a6000.html

The United States may still consider itself a superpower. But when it comes to science, we increasingly look like a 90-pound weakling.

And which nation did the best? Finland, whose students also ranked first in math skills and second in reading.

That superb performance could be expected in a country where everyone has access to a quality education, where teachers aren’t straightjacketed by standardized testing and where important research isn’t hobbled by religious dogma.

“Where I feel we’ve been really successful is that we have been able to create a creative environment,” says Pekka Voutilainen, minister counselor for economic affairs in the Finnish Embassy in Washington, D.C. “Finns are problem solvers.”

In the past three decades, Finland has remade its education system, eschewing elitism in favor of free education all the way through law or medical school. But except for SAT-like exams in high school, teachers don’t spend much of their time “teaching to the test,” a familiar lament in the United States.

“Schools in Finland have a lot of independence in terms of their programs,” Voutilainen says. “That helps motivate teachers, and with motivated teachers, usually the results are better.”

And Finland gets a lot of bang for its buck. Although it spends $30,000 less than the United States educating a student through high school, its graduation rate is 92 percent compared to the U.S. rate of 72 percent. (…)

Source: St. Petersburg Times, FL
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/12/12/Worldandnation/Finns_set_teachers_fr.shtml

(…) In a study published this February in Nature Neuroscience (”A deficit in the ability to form new human memories without sleep,”) Seung-Schik Yoo, Matthew Walker, and their collaborators at Harvard Medical School looked at memory formation in young subjects with or without a night of sleep deprivation. (…)

Sleep and memory consolidation

Over the last ten years, scientists have come to appreciate the complex relationships between sleep and memory. Not only does sleep prepare the brain for encoding new memories, sleep also provides an opportunity for the brain to consolidate and integrate recently learned information. Thus, sleep can make memories more stable, so that they are more resistant to interference and decay. For example, a night of sleep can make you better able to identify objects in your visual field where you studied them the night before, and it can make you faster and more accurate at typing a sequence of numbers that you practiced the night before… But studies have also shown that sleep also can identify, extract, and store key features of memories, leaving a memory that is more useful the next day. Thus a night of sleep can increase the likelihood that you will discover a hidden shortcut for a mathematical procedure that you laboriously practiced the night before.

This wide range of benefits of post-training sleep suggests that such memory processing is a major function of sleep. But the findings I’ve described so far all concern the benefits of sleep on the formation and recollection of memories already formed. Another question is: How does sleep help you learn better the next day? Or, to put it another way, how does a lack of sleep affect your ability to form new memories?

Sleep and memory encoding

That diminished attention should account for the poor ability of sleep-deprived individuals to form new memories seems intuitively obvious. Yet animal studies have suggested that there’s more to this poor memory formation than just attention problems. Studies in both humans and animals have found that a part of the brain known as the hippocampus is critical for forming new memories that we and animals can later recall. (…)

Sleep decreases stickyness

The researchers then went back to the fMRI recordings from the original training session and looked at what parts of the brain each group was using while studying the pictures. Although both groups seemed to show study-related activity in the same set of brain regions, the sleep-deprived subjects showed significantly less activity in the hippocampus; this was true even when Yoo looked only at the brain activity seen when individuals were studying pictures that they correctly recognized two days later. And even when the best performing sleep-deprived subjects were compared to the worst control subjects (whose performance matched that of the best sleep-deprived subjects), the sleep-deprived subjects still showed less hippocampal activation. In contrast, both groups activated attentional networks in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain equally. (…)

It may not be surprising that these sleepy subjects needed to crank up their arousal circuits along with their hippocampi. Yet it came as something of a surprise that they seemed to do so at the expense of other circuits that are normally involved in encoding new memories. This may further explain why sleepy subjects performed more poorly. Indeed, when activation patterns seen during successful encoding of pictures later remembered was compared to that seen during unsuccessful encoding, the same medial temporal lobe structures turned up during successful encoding for the well rested subjects but not for the sleepy ones. Despite adequate attention and extra effort at arousal, other crucial memory networks were not up to par.

None of this bodes well. As we become more and more sleep-deprived, replacing needed sleep with caffeine and bleary eyes, we can expect to see a concomitant slipping away of the ability to remember the very things we stayed up late trying to learn. You have to wonder whether it’s worth it. (…)

Source: Scientific American
http://science-community.sciam.com/thread.jspa?threadID=300005529

The idea that more time in school produces better results could get a small boost today with the release of international data from the Brookings Institution. The study finds adding 10 minutes of math instruction to an eighth-grader’s day translates into a jump in math skills.

The findings come as a handful of states and school districts experiment with packing more minutes into the school day and, in a few cases, more days into the year.

The study, which examined eighth-grade math scores in 20 countries, found that five of seven that added instructional minutes from 1995 to 2003 showed improved skills. Of the 13 countries that subtracted time, 10 got worse results. The three exceptions were Latvia, the Netherlands and the USA.

Most U.S. eighth-graders got 45 minutes of daily math instruction in 2003, down from 49 in 1995, but their scores on the Trends in Mathematics and Science Survey improved slightly. Researcher Tom Loveless says that is an anomaly, and more time in class could help boost scores. But even 450 more minutes of math, or two weeks’ worth, would shrink the gap between the USA and top-scorer Singapore by less than 5%, he says.

It’s smarter to make school days a few minutes longer than to extend the academic year as a few states have done, Loveless says. Ten more minutes of daily math instruction are associated with a 19-point gain (on an 800-point scale). Adding 40 days of 45-minute math classes yielded 8.5 more points.

“Small increases to the school day add up to a lot of time over an entire year,” he says. (…)

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-12-10-math-class-time_N.htm

Parents who show little interest in their children’s education should be targeted by schools as part of a drive to boost standards, ministers are to say.

They will get regular emails and phone calls updating them on pupils’ attendance, behaviour and academic record, the Government is expected to announce.

In a statement to Parliament, the Government is also due to unveil plans for a new-style report card - modelled on the ‘red book’ for children’s health - to track each pupil’s progress from the early years to the start of secondary school. (…)

The reforms - part of the wide-ranging Children’s Plan - come amid growing concern that progress in the basics has stalled under Labour as children at primary and secondary school are overtaken by those in other developed nations.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, admitted that the education system was not yet “world class” and insisted schools needed to forge a “new relationship” with parents.

It follows Government research showing the level of family involvement in education is more important to grades than social class, family size or parents’ own academic record. (…)

Further reforms will be focused directly on the classroom.

A wide-ranging review of the curriculum for five to 11-year-olds will be ordered in a desperate attempt to boast standards in the basics.

Traditional subjects such as history and geography and art and music could also be rolled into one as part of the new plan to “de-clutter” the school timetable.

The move will give schools more time to concentrate on English and mathematics, as well as holding compulsory lessons in modern languages.

French, German and Spanish - as well as world languages including Mandarin and Urdu - will be taught in every primary school for the first time. (…)

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/11/nteach111.xml