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NEUROSCIENCE FOR HEALTHY KIDs

Healthy children demand jump rope Physical Fitness, a Healthy Diet, Brain Based Learning and Brain Development Resources.

Epidemic of childhood obesity in our nation. No single solution will address childhood obesity and that a sophisticated strategy with many interventions is necessary for success. "The American Academy of Pediatrics is pleased that the report's recommendations mirror many of the Academy's long-standing guidelines, including the restrictions on screen time and the calculation of body mass index (BMI). In addition, the report incorporates several specific recommendations that the AAP made to the Task Force, such as the need for insurers to cover obesity prevention, identification and treatment services appropriately. The report also provides an important service by proposing benchmarks for measuring progress on various recommendations.
To lose a kilogram of fat you need to burn 8,000 calories (1 pound of fat = 3,500 calories). Walking briskly is a good way to start increasing your physical activity if you are obese. Combining increased physical activity with a good diet will significantly increase your chances of losing weight successfully and permanently! Try to find activities which you can fit into your daily routine. Anything that becomes part of your daily life, weaved into your existing lifestyle, is more likely to become a long-term habit. If you use an elevator, try getting off one or two floors before your destination and walking the rest. You could try the same when driving your car or taking any form of public transport - get off earlier and walk that bit more.

 

 

CHILDREN: EARLY BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

"HIGHER ORDER" THOUGHT PROCESSES:
processes such as classifying, inferring, hypothesizing, generalizing, valuing, relating, and synthesizing.

Early Development Benchmarks

 

 

Nurishment

 

Pre School and Kindergarten

 

 

 

CHILDREN, TEENAGERS & BRAIN DEVELOPMENT - TECHNOLOGY

How Young is too Young to start Using Computers in School?
No computer screen time at all for babies under 2 years old.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television for children under 24 months. Parents using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, according to a new study. For every hour a day that babies six to 16 months old were shown such popular series as "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found. Parents buy hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of the videos every year. Unfortunately it's all money down the tubes, according to Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle. Christakis and his colleagues surveyed 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota and determined their babies' vocabularies using a set of 90 common baby words, including mommy, nose and choo-choo. The researchers found that 32 percent of the babies were shown the videos, and 17 percent of those were shown them for more than an hour a day, according to the study in the Journal of Pediatrics. The videos, which are designed to engage a baby's attention, hop from scene to scene with minimal dialogue and include mesmerizing images, like a lava lamp. "I would rather babies watch 'American Idol' than these videos," Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them -- which does have developmental benefits. Interview: Dr. Dimitri Christakis discusses attention disorders and TV.

What's the smartest thing a young child can do with a computer or TV?

Play with the box it came in! Computers tend to insist on being just computers, programmed by adults. But an empty box becomes a cave, a canoe, a cabin, a candy shop—whatever and whenever the child's magic wand of imagination decrees.

Technology can harm kids.
"Some physical therapists and pediatricians are already citing cases of RSI [repetitive stress injuries] in children as young as 8 years old" and 60% of students aged 10 to 17 complained of neck and back discomfort while using the PC. It's not unusual for young people reported spending about 6-1/2 hours per day occupied with various media" from the Net to TV.

Screensucking 
WASTING TIMEengaging with any screen for instance, computer, video game, television, BlackBerry used like this: I was supposed to write that article, but instead I spent the whole afternoon screensucking. ~ Dr. Edward M. Hallowel 2006l

TEENAGER BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

 

 

Teenagers do, physically, need around nine and half hours sleep a night, during which new brain cells are wired, thus increasing intelligence, self-awareness and performance. They get on average about seven hours, whereupon they often become cranky, slower-witted and resentful. Russell Foster, chair of circadian neuroscience at Brasenose College, Oxford, has shown that teenagers' brains work better during the afternoon. They're not lazy, they're biologically programmed. There are simple reasons why they never clean up. First, they haven't the time. Second, nobody clears up as much as someone else might want them to. Third, they aren't usually as good at it as adults. They haven't had the practice.

 

HOW MUCH SLEEP DO WE REALLY NEED.
You Snooze or loose!

LEARN THAT TEENS DON'T GET ENOUGH SLEEP

The large academic consequences of small sleep differences. A slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. http://nymag.com/news/features/38951/
Dr. Monique LeBourgeois of Brown University studies how sleep affects pre-kindergartners. Virtually all young children are allowed to stay up late on Fridays and Saturdays. Yet she’s discovered that the sleep-shift factor alone is correlated with performance on a standardized school-readiness test. Every hour of weekend shift costs students seven points on the test. Dr. Paul Suratt of the University of Virginia studied the impact of sleep problems on vocabulary-test scores of elementary-school students. He also found a seven-point reduction in scores. Seven points, Suratt notes, is significant: “Sleep disorders can impair children’s I.Q.’s as much as lead exposure.”

America is raising a nation of sleep-deprived kids, with only 20 percent getting the recommended nine hours of shut-eye on school nights and more than one in four reporting dozing off in class. Many are arriving late to school because of oversleeping and others are driving drowsy, according to a new poll by the National Sleep Foundation. "In the competition between the natural tendency to stay up late and early school start times, a teen's sleep is what loses out," said Jodi Mindell.
Nearly all the youngsters -- 97 percent -- had at least one electronic device in their bedroom. These include televisions, computers, phones or music devices. Adolescents with four or more such devices in their bedrooms are much more likely than their peers to get insufficient sleep, the foundation reported.

Patch of brain put to sleep Local snoozing makes for better learning By Tanguy Chouard 6/04
A good night's rest is hard work for parts of your brain, say US neuroscientists. Regions related to learning show increased activity in sleepers who spent their evening mastering a new skill, they say. The discovery shows that sleep is valuable for consolidating new information and is not a simple 'standby' mode. Local brain processing during the night led to new skills being more firmly cemented, the research indicates.

Sleep-Deprived Teens Report Stress, Mood Disorders by Lynne Lamberg
Call them Generation Zzzzz: The nation's teenagers get too little sleep, a recent poll finds.
Six in 10 American students in grades 9 to 12 average less than eight hours of sleep on school nights, according to the National Sleep Foundation 2006 Sleep in America poll, released in March. Research shows most adolescents need at least nine hours of sleep to feel and function at their best.
"Poll data confirm and extend what we've learned about adolescent sleep patterns and problems over the past few decades," said Mary Carskadon, Ph.D., poll task force chair. She directs the E.P. Bradley Hospital sleep and chronobiology research laboratory at Brown University.
Polltakers surveyed by telephone a randomly selected sample of the U.S. population: 1,602 adult caregivers of teenagers, and, separately, their children aged 11 to 17 in grades 6 to 12. The combined adult/child interviews took about 25 minutes and were conducted between September 19, 2005, and November 29, 2005. The poll has a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.
Carskadon's summer sleep camp studies in the 1970s show pubertal changes prompt an increased need for sleep. She later found a delay in the timing of the body's biological clock also kicks in at puberty, shifting adolescents' physiological readiness for sleep to 11 p.m. or later.
As students get older, homework, extracurricular activities, jobs, and socializing push bedtimes even later. "Many teenagers' bedrooms are a technological playground, with access to a radio, television, telephone, computer, and the Internet," Carskadon said. The poll found 97 percent of adolescents have at least one electronic item in their bedroom. Sixth graders usually have two; 12th graders have four. Those with four or more items reported about 30 minutes less sleep than those with fewer devices.
"Talking with friends and instant messaging keep adolescents from feeling tired in the evening," Carskadon noted. "But they must get up around 6:30 a.m. to get ready for school." Most high schools in the U.S. open slightly before 8 a.m., and most middle schools open slightly after 8 a.m., too early for most teens, Carskadon maintained.
At least once a week, 1 in 4 students in grades 9 to 12 dozes in class, and 1 in 7 oversleeps and arrives at school late or misses school. Among those who drive, 51 percent admit driving while drowsy in the past year, and 15 percent report fighting sleepiness while driving at least once a week.
Sixth graders average 8.4 hours of sleep on school nights, and students in grade 12, only 6.9 hours. Taking naps and sleeping longer on weekends disrupts body clocks and does not adequately replace lost sleep, Carskadon said. [source]

SCHOOLS WAKING UP TO TEENS UNIQUE SLEEP NEEDS
Issues surrounding sleep -- who needs how much and when -- are usually given short shrift in efforts to improve student achievement. But modern brain researchers say it is time that more schools faced the biological facts. Sleep deprivation can affect mood, performance, attention, learning, behavior and biological functions. Teenagers have long complained that starting school about 7 a.m. -- the typical start time for many high schools -- is cruel and inhumane. But some adults tend to blame the griping on their behavior -- procrastination that leads many teens to stay up late to do homework, or nightly marathon phone sessions with friends. Now, computer games and instant messaging have made it even more alluring to stay up. "People tell me that changing school start times to later is just mollycoddling the kids," said Kyla Wahlstrom. "I'd say they are people who don't want to accept the fact that there is a different biology for teens." That might be one reason that it's not unusual to find a high school parking lot at 7 a.m. filled with students clutching cups of coffee, writes Valerie Strauss. Scores of school systems -- though no one has an exact number -- have moved back the start of high school from 15 minutes to more than an hour. Teachers report that in schools with later start times, students were more alert. Other research showed a range of benefits to students and teachers -- and contradicted some of the biggest fears about the change: that after-school sports and jobs would suffer.However, there are more than 13,000 school systems in the United States,and the vast majority of high schools still start about 7 a.m.

Snooze your way to high test scores Source: NewScientist
YOU are trying to commit something to memory, take a nap. Even a short daytime snooze could help you learn.A good night's sleep is known to improve people's ability to learn actions such as mirror writing. REM sleep, when most dreaming occurs, is thought to be particularly important. The role of sleep in factual learning has been less clear. Now Matthew Tucker at The City University of New York and his colleagues have shown that even a nap with no REM sleep can help. Volunteers were told to memorise pairs of words (a test of factual learning) and to practise tracing images in a mirror (action learning). When they were tested straight afterwards and 6 hours later, those who had been allowed a nap of up to 1 hour before the re-test scored 15 per cent better in the factual test than the non-nappers, but no better in the action test (Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, vol 86, p 241). "Traditionally, time devoted to daytime napping has been considered counterproductive," the researchers say. It now seems sleep is "an important mechanism for memory formation".

TEEN BRAINS AREN'T DEVELOPED THEY CANNOT PROCESS THE CONSEQUENCE:
The "you can't take it back" issue.

Generation M
MULTI TASKING
IS A MYTH

multi task OUCH!

 

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice:

"There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time." To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one's time; it was a mark of intelligence. "This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind."

Multi Tasking Teenagers and their Brains - It's a myth
They aren't doing it better or faster, in fact they are hurting their brains. Brodmann’s Area 10 is part of the frontal lobes, which "are important for maintaining long-term goals and achieving them," Grafman explains. "The most anterior part allows you to leave something when it’s incomplete and return to the same place and continue from there." This gives us a "form of multitasking," he says, though it’s actually sequential processing. Because the prefrontal cortex is one of the last regions of the brain to mature and one of the first to decline with aging, young children do not multitask well, and neither do most adults over 60. New fMRI studies at Toronto’s Rotman Research Institute suggest that as we get older, we have more trouble "turning down background thoughts when turning to a new task," says Rotman senior scientist and assistant director Cheryl Grady. "Younger adults are better at tuning out stuff when they want to," says Grady. "I’m in my 50s, and I know that I can’t work and listen to music with lyrics; it was easier when I was younger." But the ability to multiprocess has its limits, even among young adults. When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer--often double the time or more--to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially, says David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan: "The toll in terms of slowdown is extremely large--amazingly so." Meyer frequently tests Gen M students in his lab, and he sees no exception for them, despite their "mystique" as master multitaskers. "The bottom line is that you can’t simultaneously be thinking about your tax return and reading an essay, just as you can’t talk to yourself about two things at once," he says. "If a teenager is trying to have a conversation on an e-mail chat line while doing algebra, she’ll suffer a decrease in efficiency, compared to if she just thought about algebra until she was done. People may think otherwise, but it’s a myth. PDF

Dynamics of the Central Bottleneck: Dual-Task and Task Uncertainty
Mariano Sigman, Stanislas Dehaene
Unit INSERM 562, Cognitive Neuroimaging, Service Hospitalier Frdric Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV, Orsay, France, 2 Collge de France, Paris, France Source: PLoS Biology (Open Access)
Why is the human brain fundamentally limited when attempting to execute two tasks at the same time or in close succession? Two classical paradigms, psychological refractory period (PRP) and task switching, have independently approached this issue, making significant advances in our understanding of the architecture of cognition. Yet, there is an apparent contradiction between the conclusions derived from these two paradigms. The PRP paradigm, on the one hand, suggests that the simultaneous execution of two tasks is limited solely by a passive structural bottleneck in which the tasks are executed on a first-come, first-served basis. The task-switching paradigm, on the other hand, argues that switching back and forth between task configurations must be actively controlled by a central executive system (the system controlling voluntary, planned, and flexible action). Here we have explicitly designed an experiment mixing the essential ingredients of both paradigms: task uncertainty and task simultaneity. In addition to a central bottleneck, we obtain evidence for active processes of task setting (planning of the appropriate sequence of actions) and task disengaging (suppression of the plan set for the first task in order to proceed with the next one). Our results clarify the chronometric relations between these central components of dual-task processing, and in particular whether they operate serially or in parallel. On this basis, we propose a hierarchical model of cognitive architecture that provides a synthesis of task-switching and PRP paradigms.

THE IMPORTANCE
OF PLAY


 

Play Positive Music lyrics might actually make your child more caring and socially responsible.: After years of studies purporting to show the harmful effects of young people listening to songs with violent or misogynistic themes, a psychologist has concluded that music containing a positive message has a beneficial impact on listeners.

Find The Hard Science Research about the importance of Play and Laughter

Free play like backyard tinkering used to lead, if not to a scientific career, at least to continued informal pursuit of science as an adult hobby. For many children, particularly boys, free play used to mean fiddling around with a chemistry set in the basement or lighting things on fire in the backyard. These days, with parents' penchant for overscheduling their children, there is less time for such youthful experimentation.
"Today's youngsters and their parents are more wired and more scheduled than earlier Americans, leaving less unstructured time to spend outdoors," the Christian Science Monitor reports. [1] "For the kids, that can mean missing out on childhood bonds to nature. Alarmed,conservationists and government officials are looking for ways to reverse the trend." The Monitor mentions Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, who cites studies showing that "exposure to nature boosts attention spans, reduces stress, and could be an antidote to the rising problem of childhood obesity." Clearly a balance - between scheduled and unscheduled, indoor and outdoor, and tech-enabled and tech-free time is needed.
Newman, who is a perceptual motor therapist, runs movement classes for children and thinks kids need to exercise and move to develop good pre-writing skills.

SCHOOLS TRY TO DISCOURAGE PLAYING TAG
As school administrators wrestle with the deeply controversial issues of educating America's youth evolution versus creationism, metal detectors on campus, standardized testing one topic has really put them in the public hot seat: the schoolyard game of tag. The issue made national headlines recently when Willett Elementary School in Attleboro, Mass., officially banned the venerable skinner of knees, inspiring considerable derision in editorials and online discussion boards. (Schools in South Carolina, Wyoming and Washington have instituted similar bans.) The topic is so no-win that school officials, admittedly busy with loftier issues, are reluctant to discuss it. But the reality is that schools across the United States have been quietly discouraging tag for years, reports Janet Cromley. Any discussion of it elicits a flinch response because this simple schoolyard game is at the nexus of three competing interests: giving kids freedom to play (what many teachers and kids want), keeping them safe from harm on large, unruly playgrounds (what concerned parents want) and avoiding band-aid-related depositions (what all administrators want). The game can bring out aggression in some kids and lead to confrontation. Today's campuses are often paved with blacktop, not cushioned with grass; and schools have had to cut back on supervisory aides because of funding problems. Some believe the socializing benefits of tag outweigh the dangers of lawsuits. "Tag is about learning how to compete in a fair and laughing joyous way," says Andrew Rakos. "There's an element of being safe, of avoiding trouble, strategy. You learn about how to deal with disagreements and how to find solutions. And of course you learn about your personal space and about speed and control of your body." Tag is a uniquely elemental game that develops naturally — and kids seem to be hard-wired to play it. At age 4 or 5, children are running around chasing each other, and by the first grade, they've created the rules and organized themselves into a game. "It's one of the few games left where the adults have absolutely nothing to do with it," says psychologist Fred Frankel, director of the UCLA Parent Training and Children's Friendship Programs. "Kids transmit it from generation to generation and spontaneously organize it."
http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-he-tag6nov06,1,4374880.story?coll=la-news-learning

2.17.08 Taking Play Seriously
The New York Times Magaizine features Dr. Stuart Brown in a major article highlighting the value to society of developing a scientific understanding of play .

1.29.08 Live from the NY Public Library - A Conversation with Dr. Stuart Brown and Krista Tippet before a sold out audience.

8.23.07Spirit, Character and Play - Hear Dr. Stuart Browns interview on public radio program Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett.


PHYSICAL EDUCATION

 

 

Physical Fitness Jump Rope

 

 

PLAY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR HEALTHY CHILDREN

HEALTHY DIET

 

Healthy Diet

National School Lunch and School Breakfast program Wellness Policy
Federal law requiring every school system in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs to write a "wellness policy" by July of 2006.

HEALTHY EARS
PROTECT YOUR HEARING

 

 

 

HEALTHY EARS PROTECT HEARING

Going Deaf? How did the music get so loud? Read ASHA's DeskReference Guidelines. Audiological Assessment of Children Birth to 5 Years of Age and find out how to protect the children from hearing loss due to all the technology they stick inside their ears.

Babies remember music they heard in the womb.

HEALTHY EYES

 

Healthy Eyes

"Sixty percent of kids with learning disabilities have undiagnosed vision problems," according to a conservative estimate from the American Optometric Association (AOA). And while nearly three million students in the U.S. currently receive special education services according to the National Center for Learning Disabilities -- of all U.S. children 12 years old and under, a shocking 86 percent have never had an eye exam, according to the Vision Council of America. Does the individual display signs of poor vision or hearing? Unfortunately, many parents, educators and even school nurses assume that when a child can see the eye chart that vision is fine. In fact, all "20/20" means is one is able to see the size of the letters on the eye chart that one is supposed to see from 20 feet. Yet, children who have passed vision screenings or other eye exams could still be missing many of the over 15 visual skills critical to academic success. "These undetected vision problems can often be readily diagnosed and treated," says Dr. Drusilla Grant, a developmental optometrist and president of the College of Optometrists in Vision Development. "Screenings sometimes help, but only a comprehensive vision exam by a developmental optometrist can rule out a learning-related vision problem," Grant adds. Parents and educators are urged to act now: Before even thinking about the possibility of a learning disability, ask: Could this be a hidden vision problem? "And then insist on a comprehensive eye exam from a developmental optometrist," Grant says. [1]

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

 

Character Development

Character Development
Moral Flexibility, Spin, Damage Control how children learn to determine what the truth is. Recasting the definition of a successful learner from one whose achievement is measured solely by academic tests, to one who is knowledgeable, emotionally and physically healthy, civically engaged, prepared for economic self-sufficiency, and ready for the world beyond formal schooling.

Learning Ethics

Corporal punishment is legal in 23 states. It is legall for school teachers and officials to spank and paddle children, a form of corporal punishment that advocates say leads to violence in adult lives. A growing body of evidence indicates that perhaps the parent or authority figure who uses the rod, spoils, or at least harms, the child, especially a girl child. In fact, a growing number of experts believe that children, in general, and girls, in particular, should not be spanked at home or subjected to corporal punishment at school.

 

HEALTHY ADULTS

 

 

HEALTHY KIDS GROW UP TO BE HEALTHY ADULTS
Free Database Searches on Health provided by the National Library of Medicine

The neuroscience of mindfulness:

Simply put, with no religious overtones. When you understand the underlying physiology of mindfulness, you begin to see that any discussion about human change, learning, education, even politics and social issues, ends up being about mindfulness. That's because mindfulness, in some ways, is simply the opposite of mindlessness. And mindlessness is the cause of a tremendous amount of human suffering.

Multiple Sclerosis can be cured breakthrough procedure, which involves widening the veins. Chronic Cerebrospinal Venous Insufficiency CCSVI - Multiple Sclerosis MS Sufferers Have Abnormal Blood Flow In Necks

 

FREE DATABASES ON HEALTH

Circumcision Decision: Weighing the Risks and Benefits
Male circumcision reduces HIV, cervical cancer, syphilis, and chlamydia.

As a mother of a grown-up boy, I can mentor you through managing teenage boys. It is a 4-step rule:
1. No, you are not crazy - it is their hormones
2. Just take a deep breath and don't give up - what you just said or did
will sink in, but few years later
3. Tell yourself: It all gets better after 5 years of pain
4. Take a deep breath and return to step 1.

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