(…) Parents are pushing their children too hard to excel academically at very early ages, says Professor Yang Xiong, director of the Institute of Youth and Juveniles with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

“Parents, many of whom are white-collar workers with good educational backgrounds, place excessive expectations on their children,” he says.

“Some kids are even deprived of a happy childhood since they are trained and supposed to be ‘geniuses.’ Yet a wise approach is to let children be children.”

He warns that though kids today, overwhelmingly in one-child families, are smarter or more knowledgeable than those in the past, they are also facing new problems such as lack of sleep and free time, anxiety over performance and pleasing their parents and even retrogression in their daily-life abilities and skills.

“It’s sad that some primary-school students still don’t know how to tie their shoes or take a bath on their own,” says Yang. Because of all the attention focused on them, he says, “they are also likely to become selfish and self-centered.”

Education these days is overwhelmingly exam-oriented. “Teaching for examination and learning for examination” has been the motto for years, and it’s difficult to change the mindset. The system is much criticized for turning out good test-takers but relatively few well-rounded students who are curious, inquiring and who take the initiative. Passive, not active learners.

The concept of “quality-oriented education” or quality education has been around since the 1980s and Chinese educators have tried to gradually put it into practice since the 1990s, encouraging students to think for themselves and be creative.

Turning out well-rounded, physically and emotionally healthy people is a slow process. Parents push their children to score high, and teachers still focus on the tests. (…)

Source: Xinhua, China
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-01/14/content_7416264.htm

Preschoolers’ odds of having nightmares may be related to their temperament as infants, which may be noticed as early as 5 months old, new research suggests.

In a study that followed 987 children from infancy to age 6, Canadian researchers found that the majority had an occasional bad dream, while a few had them frequently. The odds of having nightmares — and of having them consistently through the preschool years — were higher among children who were considered to be more anxious or “difficult” as babies.

The findings suggest that young children’s bad dreams “are trait-like in nature and associated with personality characteristics measured as early as 5 months,” the researchers report in the medical journal Sleep.

A previous study with identical and non-identical twins suggested that people may inherit a certain vulnerability to having nightmares, Dr. Tore Nielsen, one of the researchers on the new study, told Reuters Health.

In this study, “bad dreams” as early as the age of 2.5 were predicted by signs of anxiety at the ages of 5 months and 17 months, explained Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal. (…)

The results raise the possibility that calming infants’ persistent distress may relieve them of some bad dreams later in childhood, according to the researchers.

In this study, certain parenting routines — like taking 2-year-olds out of bed to comfort them when they were distressed — were related to a lower risk of nightmares later in childhood.

The study did not examine the effectiveness of any tactics for easing infants’ and young children’s anxiety — or their influence on the odds of having nightmares later, Nielsen said. However, he added that based on other research, a good starting point would be to improve children’s early bonding, or “secure attachment,” with their parents. (…)

Source: Reuters India, India
http://tinyurl.com/28d78t

Children who get less than nine hours of sleep a night are more likely to be overweight or obese, new research shows.

Sleep-deprived kids also have more than a 3 percent increase in body fat on average compared to youngsters who sleep for more than nine hours nightly. (…)

Researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand studied the sleep patterns of 591 seven-year-old children using actigraphy — a movement-based, noninvasive method used to study sleep-wake patterns and circadian rhythms. The children were assessed at birth, at one year of age, at three-and-a-half years and at seven years.

The team found that the children slept 10.1 hours on average. They slept fewer hours on weekend days than on weekdays, in the summer and when bedtime was set as after 9 p.m. They also slept fewer hours if they had no younger siblings. (…)

“Sleep is important for health and well-being throughout life,” said lead author Ed Mitchell in a prepared statement. “Few studies have objectively measured sleep duration. In this large study of sleep in seven-year-olds, there was considerable variation in duration of sleep. Sleep duration was 40 minutes longer in winter than summer and was 31 minutes longer on weekdays than on the weekend. Short sleep duration was associated with a threefold increased risk of the child being overweight or obese. This effect was independent of physical activity or television watching. Attention to sleep in childhood may be an important strategy to reduce the obesity epidemic.”

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that children in preschool sleep between 11 and 13 hours a night and school-aged children between 10 and 11 hours of sleep a night. (…)

Source: Washington Post, United States
http://tinyurl.com/2roauw

Experts have plenty of advice for new parents. If only they could agree.

I am raising my baby all wrong. You’re probably raising your baby wrong, too. I have it on good authority. The authority comes from an assortment of books, mostly large-format paperbacks, strewn around my living room. I can tell they are addressed to me because most of them have “Your Baby” in the title or subtitle.

Like most parents - probably more than most parents, considering everything - I am looking for guidance in handling My Baby. Parenting seemed to be a straightforward proposition when I was on the receiving end of it: I had parents, and they fed me and clothed me and discouraged me from biting and petty larceny. Only when I became a father myself did I start to consider the sheer volume of details, let alone the philosophy behind those details, let alone the possibility of there being a raging culture war over different philosophies. Suddenly I needed assurance.

The books are nothing if not assured. The uncertain project of bringing up an infant is, like losing weight or cultivating inner peace, an outlet for the American faith in the perfectibility of human endeavor. What we lack in cultural continuity, we make up for in consumer spirit. There are right answers to choose, and wrong ones. (…)

Consider the pacifier. “Most babies don’t need them and are better off without,” Penelope Leach declares. “Pacifiers,” the American Academy of Pediatrics counters, “do not cause any medical or psychological problems.”

Or the perilous issue of whether a baby should sleep with its parents. “Family beds do have snags and it’s sensible to foresee them if you can so that you can weigh the pros and cons,” Leach writes, on tiptoe. The American Academy of Pediatrics chooses its side by omitting “family bed” and “co-sleeping” from its index altogether; the Searses, partisans of love and attachment, present a bullying hard sell for cuddling through the night: “If there were fewer cribs, would there be fewer crib deaths?”

(…) The more we read, the more the experts began to sound like the nattering advice we were already getting. Feed the baby cereal with a spoon. Feed the baby cereal with your finger. The American Academy of Pediatrics, in a recurring footnote, explains that its Section on Breastfeeding and its Committee on Nutrition could not agree on whether to start solid foods at four months or at six. Perhaps, the Searses say, you only want to start solids because you’re trying to force your baby to conform to an arbitrary timetable. (…)

Source: Boston Globe, United States
http://tinyurl.com/2f8jvz

(…) 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

While the connection between a child’s weight and the amount of sleep that child gets may not be immediately apparent, new research has found a strong correlation between the two.

Sixth-graders who averaged less than 8.5 hours of sleep a night had a 23 percent rate of obesity, while their well-rested peers who averaged more than 9.25 hours of sleep had an obesity rate of just 12 percent, according to a new study.

“We found that children who got less sleep were more likely to be obese,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Julie Lumeng, an assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan Center for Human Growth and Development…

Lumeng said there are three likely reasons why sleep might affect weight. First, if children don’t get enough sleep at night, they’ll be less likely to run around and get exercise during the day. Second, when kids are tired, they’re more irritable and may reach for junk food to help regulate their mood. And, finally, what Lumeng called a “hot area for future research” is the possible connection between sleep and fat metabolism. She said there have been studies done with adults that have shown that a lack of sleep may disrupt the secretion of hormones involved in appetite and metabolism, such as leptin and insulin…

Both Lumeng and Sheldon recommended trying to keep a consistent sleep schedule. Bedtimes and wake times are both important - for children and adults. Sheldon said it’s usually OK to vary your sleep times a little bit on the weekend, about an hour or so, but, he cautioned, “Letting you child sleep till noon or mid-afternoon is inviting trouble.”

Lumeng also recommended that children not have a TV in their bedroom, because it can make it more difficult to fall asleep.

Source: CBC News, Canada
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/HealthScout/071114/6111417AU.html

Americans have long turned to sports and career coaches to shape up their bodies and work life. Now, some are hiring a new breed of coach — one that helps bring order to families and home-life. Dr. Jennifer Trachtenberg, pediatrician and author of Good Kids, Bad Habits: The RealAge Guide to Raising Healthy Children sheds some light on the new breed of coaches and offers simple, smart parenting advice. Here’s a Q&A:

Why do families need coaches?

Modern times really invite unhealthy habits. There is so much over-scheduling, kids have so many activities and people don’t know where to turn.

Are parents letting kids get away with too much?

Our expectations have changed but also, modern times have changed. Advances in technology mean that kids are ahead of their parents in so many ways — they’re growing up faster, experimenting more. What we really need to do is get back to basics. We need to reinforce good habits of sleeping, exercise, and time management…

The best way to get your family in order is by doing an assessment of your child’s health habits: what they are doing now and what they need to start doing to have health and happiness as they grow older. The key ingredients are sleep, safety habits, and emotional health. Address these first.

Of course, not everyone needs a coach to accomplish this. And it doesn’t have to be a big, expensive production. The expense is a real downside to this and remember, these are self -prescribed experts. They are not licensed or credentialed so you have to be careful. Coaches are a good way to motivate some people, but I think it all comes down to good time management, organization and trying to fit in the basics.

Why do we let our home-life get so disrupted?

You may feel like there are higher expectations of you at your job. There are other people that you need to listen to and you put your best face out there. At home you let things slip and slide because no one is watching you. But our children imitate us so behaviors at home, so it’s very important. Parents are really huge influences on their children — kids imitate what they see.

What is the number one thing families can do for immediate benefit?

The most important thing for families to do is spend time together, but quality time doesn’t mean being disorganized…

What are some of the challenges for working women in balancing a family with long work hours?

We all face the challenge of working long hours while still trying to be there for our kids – whether it’s helping them with homework, doing activities with them or having a family meal together. At the same time, you also need time for yourself as well.

It all comes down to how you manage your time. What people need to do for starters is ask: What should go and what should stay? What are we trying to do this for?

You need to sit down as a family and decide how you want to prioritize you life. Once you understand your family’s priorities, you need to manage your time so that you are having fun but also instilling good habits in your children.

Healthy habits are important. Kids should eat good food — and not in front of the television. Also, be aware of work habits, like how your kids manage their time. That makes a big difference for how they function in the future. Kids need routines and they really like knowing what to expect…

Source: MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21659493/

Parents who work late often don’t make it home before their kids go to bed. So instead of coming home earlier, some parents are keeping kids up later…

Although babies and toddlers at least have the option to sleep late the next day, schoolkids still have to get up early and make do on less sleep. And childhood is a risky time to miss out on sleep. In September, the medical journal Sleep reported that shorter sleep duration, particularly before the age of 3 1/2, resulted in lower cognitive performance and hyperactivity problems. The “results highlight the importance of giving a child the opportunity to sleep at least 10 hours per night throughout early childhood,’’ the authors stated.

Lisa Spiegel, founder of Soho Parenting, told Time Out that rather than keeping kids up late, busy parents should try to find a few nights a week when they can come home early. And if working late is essential, put the kids to bed on time and start making breakfast the family meal.

Source: New York Times, United States
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/a-city-of-kids-who-never-sleep/

In most of the world, sleeping next to your child is a necessity: families of limited means live in cramped quarters. But in the affluent West, the practice is widely frowned on, not just by grandparents and friends, but by the medical community at large.

Still, it is far more common than many people think. Nearly 13 percent of parents in the United States slept with their infants in 2000, up from 5.5 percent in 1993, according to a report last month in the journal Infant and Child Development. Countless children start the night in their own beds, only to wake up a few hours later and pad into their parents’ bedrooms, crawling into the bed or curling up nearby on the floor.

Ask parents if they sleep with their kids, and most will say no. But there is evidence that the prevalence of bed sharing is far greater than reported. Many parents are “closet co-sleepers,” fearful of disapproval if anyone finds out, notes James J. McKenna, professor of anthropology and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame.

“They’re tired of being censured or criticized,” Dr. McKenna said. “It’s not just that their babies are being judged negatively for not being a good baby compared to the baby who sleeps by himself, but they’re being judged badly for having these babies and being needy.” …

In a series of studies in Britain, scientists interviewed parents about their children’s sleep habits, but also used infrared cameras to monitor the parents’ bedroom. The children often spent part of the night in the adults’ bed, but in about half those cases, the parents did not reveal that unless they were specifically asked. As a result, many experts say most of the data in the United States vastly understates how common the practice really is…

In a paper last month in Infant and Child Development, Dr. Dyer proposed that co-sleeping families fall into three distinct categories. There are intentional co-sleepers — those who sleep with their children because they want to breast-feed for a long stretch and believe bed sharing is good for a child’s well-being and emotional development. Another group is reactive co-sleepers, those parents who don’t really want to sleep with their kids, but do so because they can’t get their children to sleep any other way or because financial hardship requires them to share a room with a child.

And then there is a third group that she tentatively calls circumstantial co-sleepers — parents who sleep with their children occasionally because of circumstances like sharing a bed on a family vacation, during a thunderstorm or because the child is sick…

Source: New York Times, United States
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/health/23well.html?ref=science

Channel 4’s controversial programme Bringing Up Baby are facing more criticism as a group of childcare professionals condemn the show as “an exploitative parenting series” which gives out “dangerous” advice.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, seven experts call on production companies to “stop making programmes that give irresponsible advice and turn the suffering of tiny babies into adult entertainment”.

Last week, the childcare expert Gina Ford described the techniques advocated by Claire Verity on the programme as “child abuse”. The four-part show, which ends tonight, compares techniques that were popular in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.

Verity, 41, is shown recommending that infants be left to sleep in a separate room from their mother. She also recommends that parents feed babies at strict four-hour intervals and ignore the child no matter how much it cries.

Childcare professionals, including Mary MacLeod, the chief executive of the Family and Parenting Institute, say they are alarmed Channel 4 is broadcasting “such an exploitative parenting series as Bringing Up Baby”.

They warn: “Many techniques in these programmes fly in the face of scientific knowledge about brain development in very young babies. That anyone should be billed as an expert and allowed to promote ideas such as not making eye contact with babies and not comforting them in distress is at best irresponsible and at worst dangerous.” …

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/16/nmedia316.xml