Kelly Peña is so talented at pinpointing the interests, wants and needs of boys, she’s earned the nickname “the kid whisperer.” Her specialty is finding the “emotional hooks” that allow adults to connect with children. She leads a team of 18, all with backgrounds in anthropology and psychology. She regularly rifles through her research subjects’ bedrooms, drawers and closets for insights into how to interest and engage them. Her main purpose is to help the people she works for create “cultural resonance” with boys. She is not an academic researcher or educator.
She works for Disney.
A sobering report from the National Institutes of Health and Yale University links media consumption with a laundry list of childhood problems, including obesity; drug, alcohol and tobacco use; early sexuality and low academic achievement.
The review of nearly 200 research efforts spanning 30 years examined how television, music, movies and other media affect the lives of children and adolescents. It found ”strong connections” between media exposure and problems of childhood obesity, tobacco use and early sexual behavior. About 80 percent of the studies showed a link between a negative health outcome and media hours or content, the Washington Post reports.
The average modern child spends nearly 45 hours a week with television, movies, magazines, music, the Internet, cellphones and video games, the study reported. By comparison, children spend 17 hours a week with their parents on average and 30 hours a week in school, the study said.
“Our kids are sponges, and we really need to remember they learn from their environment,” Cary P. Gross, a Yale professor tells the Post, noting that researchers found it notable how much content mattered; it was not only the sheer number of hours of screen time. Children “pick up character traits and behaviors” from those they watch or hear, he said.
A show of hands, please. Anyone surprised? Yeah, me neither.
Another potential data point in the argument for a broad, content-rich education: A Harvard-based study has found that children who study a musical instrument for at least three years outperform children with no instrumental training in several key ways, Science Daily reports. Not just on tests of auditory discrimination and finger dexterity, but also on tests measuring verbal ability and visual pattern completion–skills not normally associated with music.
Three out of four teenagers report they were bullied online at least once in the last year, according to a new study by UCLA psychologists. Not yours? Only one in 10 reported cyberbullying to parents or other adults.
At Ars Technica, blogger John Timmer has a smart take on this. Parents and teachers are concerned that the anonymity of online bullying exacerbates the problem. But the study suggests it’s less of a new phenomenon than the playground gone digital.
The authors feel strongly that the fact that real-world bullying strongly predicts cyberbullying and the parallels in behavior both suggest that cyberbullying may not actually be a distinct phenomenon. “These findings further underscore the continuity between adolescents’ social worlds in school and online,” they conclude.
A 20-year, $3.2 billion study to be launched in January will track the health of 100,000 American children from before birth to age 21. The National Children’s Study will seek to identify factors behind a host of conditions including autism, learning disabilities, ADHD and obesity.
National Institutes of Health officials say they hope the study, to be conducted at 105 locations throughout the United States, can help pinpoint early-life influences that affect later development, with the goal of learning new ways to treat or prevent illness, Reuters reports.
Researchers will collect genetic and biological samples from people in the study as well as samples from the homes of the women and their babies including air, water, dust and materials used to construct their residences, the NIH said.
The first data from the study could be available in 2012 or 2013.
Texas has spent nearly $300 million since 2003 on expensive anti-psychotic medications for poor children, according to a new federal study. The drugs cost more, have worse side effects in kids and are no more effective than older generics.
“The drugs, known as atypical anti-psychotics, are designed to treat schizophrenia but are also used for everything from autism to attention deficit disorder. Pharmaceutical firms have aggressively marketed the drugs to child psychiatrists and state health officials,” says the Dallas Morning News, which notes prescriptions for kids have increased fivefold in the last 15 years.
“States have spent a tremendous amount of money unnecessarily for drugs that are no safer than the older drugs that are a fraction of the cost,” said Allen Jones, a Pennsylvania whistleblower who investigates drug company influence tells the paper. “It appears, based on what the science is telling us, that an enormous amount of money was spent for no real benefit.”
Want to see improvements in education? Start insisting that your children fully apply themselves in school, counsels Daniel Akst in the Wall Street Journal, in an essay that will surely be clipped, copied and passed out on curriculum nights and at parent teacher conferences. “Let’s face it,” he writes, “more than budgets or bureaucrats, more than textbooks or teachers, parents are the reason that kids perform as they do in school.”
Citing a summary of research by the Michigan Department of Education, Akst notes “the most consistent predictors of children’s academic achievement and social adjustment are parent expectations of the child’s academic attainment and satisfaction with their child’s education at school. Parents of high-achieving students set higher standards for their children’s educational activities.”
He also shoots down the stereotype of the overachieving, upper-middle-class parent “bombarding their precious little ones in utero with Mozart and then hectoring teachers and hiring tutors right up until the Harvard application essay.”
Researchers at Brigham Young and the University of Michigan found that parents preferred teachers who make their children happy over those who emphasize academic achievement. My experience in a nonobsessive school district is consistent with this. Our family’s intense focus on learning is regarded warily by some parents, whose dissatisfactions with school are mostly about testing and creativity but never about a lack of foreign-language instruction or overall academic rigor. Indeed, teachers have reported watering down the public middle-school curriculum in response to parental complaints that it was too difficult.
The lack of demand for serious schooling is the least of it, writes Akst. Too many kids are growing up in homes with little emphasis on reading, learning or culture. “Kids form lots of habits over the years, some good and some bad,” he concludes. “What a nice surprise that doing well in school can be one of them.”
I suspect a lot of teachers will hurt their necks vigorously nodding in agreement with Akst’s essay. There may not always be a cause-and-effect relationship between engaged parents and student performance. But like the race going to the swift and the fight to the strong, it is the way to bet.
The secret’s out. Eduwonkette, the masked heroine who rights wrongs armed only with data and panache, has revealed her true identlty. And she’s not who you think she is, not matter who you thought she was. She’s Jennifer Jennings, Columbia doctoral student in sociology. Tonight, she’s outing herself and ending one of the edusphere’s most entertaining guessing games. Ms. Jennings says she began the blog last year because she was “bad at crocheting and tired of watching the Yankees lose.” She clearly had no idea it would attract so much attention.
Why am I dropping the mask now? Over the past few months, two things happened. First, people started to wrongly finger other educational researchers as eduwonkette. Given the New York City Department of Education’s affection for my data analysis, some researchers rightfully worried that a case of mistaken identity could have negative implications for their relationships with the DOE. Second, others have started to figure out my true identity. It was a matter of time until someone else made my identity known, and I ultimately decided to introduce myself on my own terms.
Eduwonkette’s coming out party includes a nice little feature in New York Magazine. So now those that have taken issue with the Eduwonkette because of perceived bias, will have to deal wth all those stubborn facts she throws around. I’ll miss the mask, but I’ll continue reading Jennifer’s brilliant blog.
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