Canada Goose Parka Can home environment predict brain development
canada goose store How much influence do you have over your child’s brain development? Most of us acknowledge that parents can screw things up canadian goose jacket in a big way through the extremes of neglect or abuse. People are canada https://www.canadagooseoutletmall.com goose factory sale understandably more skeptical when it comes to claims about parenting styles or family reading night.
Canada Goose Outlet But a new study suggests the parents of young children may play an important role in a crucial Canada Goose sale phase of brain development canada goose clearance sale the synaptic pruning that happens during adolescence.
Your child’s home environment at age 4 may predict the thickness of portions of his cerebral cortex fourteen uk canada goose years later. Even after you control uk canada goose outlet for your own level of intelligence.
canada goose deals The research hasn’t been published yet, so I don’t know the details. canada goose coats on sale But the story recounted in this piece for Science Now very canada goose gilet interesting.
More than fourteen years ago, Canada Goose online neuroscientist Martha Farah and her colleagues began tracking a group of 64 kids from low income families.
canada goose coats on sale Twice, the researchers visited the children in their homes once when the kids were canada goose store four years old, and again when the kids were 8. During these visits, the researchers noted how many books and educational games were available in the canada goose black friday sale home. They also recorded how warm and supportive the parents seemed canada goose to be.
buy canada goose jacket Then, when the young people were around 18 years old, the researchers scanned their brains with magnetic resonance imaging. Farah’s team looked for differences in the thickness of certain key areas of the cerebral cortex canada goose uk shop and they found them.
buy canada goose jacket cheap The more stimulation and Canada Goose Coats On Sale support kids had at home when they were 4, the thinner their cortices were in two brain regions. According the article in Science Now, one of these regions the lateral inferior temporal gyrus may play a role in visual skills such as word recognition. home environment at age 8 was also a predictor of cortex thickness in young adulthood, but to a much smaller degree. And the mother’s intelligence reportedly had no effect.
Canada Goose online That latter point is cheap canada goose uk important because we might assume that intelligence Canada Goose Parka runs in the family, and that smarter mothers are more likely to create stimulating environments. If so, an enriched home environment might be the effect of thinner cortices, not the cause.
Canada Goose Jackets But wait a minute. Why are we excited about thinner cerebral cortices? If a supportive, stimulating home environment is good for your brain, shouldn’t it make your cortex thicker?
When it comes to brains, we often think that more is better. And babies, as we know, are busy creating billions of synapses, or connections between brain cells. That’s what learning looks like at the level of brain cells: New connections being forged between neurons.
Canada Goose sale But bigger isn’t always better. Some synapses are really helpful and important. They get used over Canada Goose Outlet and over again. Others don’t turn out to have much relevance they don’t represent lessons worth remembering and they get in the way.
As kids get older, it’s important to remove the unimportant synapses, in the same way you prune a garden. Without the pruning, you can get overrun with weeds. A lot of synaptic pruning happens before adulthood. It can result in a thinner cortex, but it makes the brain more efficient.
canada goose So the researchers believe that buy canada goose jacket cheap thinner cortices, in this case, may be signs of faster or more efficient processing.
canadian goose jacket What does it all mean? Some people will interpret these results as more evidence that early childhood is a sensitive period Canada Goose Online for stimulating the brain that it a window of opportunity for fostering long term developmental changes.
canada goose clearance sale That may be, but as Farah notes, this research is still in its infancy. We need to know if the observed brain differences were linked with any behavioral differences. Are these kids better readers? Better students?
canada goose coats Still, other studies have found that young children who grow up with more books at home and supportive, warm parents do better in school. And what really cheap Canada Goose interests me about this new study is it controlled for family income (by restricting its scope to low income kids) and for mother intelligence.
canada goose black friday sale That suggests that canada goose coats the intellectual advantages of living in a bookish, pro educational, warm, supportive family might be independent of your wealth or your buy canada goose jacket genetic contributions to IQ a very hopeful thought indeed.
canada goose clearance For more information about ways to boost your child intellectual performance, check out these pages on Parenting Science. When I visit houses that don have books they seem like an canada goose clearance empty place. I not saying they are the be all and end all I sure that before the advent of printing many children were still brought up well by parents canada goose uk outlet who gave them a great deal of input. Perhaps we talking about the passing on of knowledge here. The books and the games are a symptom of the interested and intelligent parent. It so hard to peel apart nature versus canada goose uk black friday nurture, so the more studies like this, the better.
I wondered about father intelligence immediately. The research suggests unsurprisingly that paternal IQ contributed almost exactly the same amount as maternal IQ, but those studies are generally restricted to children where the father is still around (to be tested), and so contributing to both nature and nurture.
Don be too quick to dismiss Lori, the correlation of IQ between parent and child is heavily influenced by parental involvement with the child. It is really hard to separate nature and nuture here as almost invariably not having one or other parent present is associated with other disrupted events in a child Canada Goose Jackets life which might adversely affect outcomes.
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