Showing posts with label Child Development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Child Development. Show all posts

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Income of workforce is linked to their height

HRK News Bureau | New Delhi | Thursday, 16 August 2018

According to a World Bank report, two‐thirds of India’s current workforce was stunted in childhood and that's affecting their income.

171 million children under the age of five were stunted in the year 2014. According to the World Bank, this phenomenon, wherein children are excessively short for their age, is affecting their income levels.

Stunting in childhood is worrisome because it is associated with adverse outcomes throughout the life cycle. The undernourishment and disease that cause stunting impair brain development, leading to lower cognitive and socio-emotional skills, lower levels of educational attainment, and hence, lower incomes.

According to a World Bank report, two‐thirds of India’s current workforce was stunted in childhood.

Data reveals that on an average, an additional centimeter in height translates into 1.7 per cent higher wages in the labour market.

The rationale is that, had the stunted members of the current workforce not been stunted in childhood and attained regular height, they would not have suffered impaired cognitive development in their early years, nor would they have received less education.
Their income today would have been higher by a percentage that reflects the education penalty associated with childhood stunting, the returns to education, the adult height penalty to childhood stunting, the returns to height, the cognitive skills penalty to childhood stunting, and the returns to cognitive skills.

The average reduction of wages due to stunting for South Asia was 10 per cent, while that for North America was two per cent. The Middle East and North Africa do better, with a reduction of four per cent, compared to Europe and Central Asia with a reduction of five per cent.
© 2016 HR Katha

Source:India's most read website on Human Resources, Jobs & Career(16/08/2018).

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Feeding your baby solids early may help them sleep, study suggests

Advice on when to introduce babies to solid food has been hotly disputed for years, but the latest research seems to indicate that earlier is better

Introducing solid food to babies before they reach six months might offer a small improvement to their sleep, new research suggests.
Researchers from the UK and US looked at data collected as part of a clinical trial exploring whether early introduction of certain foods could reduce the chance of an infant developing an allergy to them. As part of the study the team also looked the impact on other measures, including growth and sleep.
“An added benefit (of early introduction of solids) is that it seems to confer better sleep for the children,” said Gideon Lack, professor of paediatric allergy at King’s College London, and a co-author of the research.
Writing in the journal Jama Pediatrics, Lack and a team of researchers behind the study say while there is a common belief that eating solid food helps a baby to sleep better – with one NHS survey suggesting most mothers give their child food before five months – many sources of advice for new parents, including the NHS and the National Childbirth Trust, recommend that parents should wait until six months before introducing solids.
“We believe the most likely explanation for our findings of improved sleep is that that these babies are less hungry” said Lack, adding that solid foods might mean less regurgitation or greater feelings of being full.
 
More than 1300 healthy breastfed three-month-olds were split randomly into two groups in one the babies were exclusively breastfed until they were six months old – as current guidelines recommend – while children in the other group were breastfed and given solid foods, including peanuts, eggs and wheat, from the age of three months, in addition to breastfeeding. After six months babies in both groups were eating a range of solids.
The children’s health and behaviour was followed for three years, with their sleep and consumption of solid food tracked by families through questionnaires.
While not all babies were kept to their allotted regime, on average, babies who were in the breastfeeding only group were first introduced to solids at around 23 weeks, while those in the other group encountered the foods at around 16 weeks
The results, based on data from 1,162 infants and taking into account factors such birth weight and whether children had eczema, reveal babies introduced to solids from three months slept, on average, two hours more a week at the age of six months, than the babies who were only breastfed. They also woke around two fewer times at night per week at six months and had just over 9% fewer incidents of waking up during the night over the course of the study.
The team found that the more closely parents stuck to the early introduction programme, the stronger the effect.
Lack said a crucial finding is that parents who were asked to exclusively breastfeed had almost twice the odds of reporting a serious problem with their child’s sleep than those who were asked to introduce their babies to solid food early.
The team did note that the study did not use sensors to monitor infants’ sleep and that parents might have misreported sleeping behaviour because they had previously encountered the idea that babies fed solid foods earlier sleep better.
However Professor Amy Brown of Swansea University, whose research includes weaning of babies, said the benefits revealed by the study were “minimal” in real-world terms, and that other research showed no rewards for early introduction of solids.
“There is no clear physiological reason why introducing solids foods early would help a baby sleep, especially not for the very small amounts parents were instructed to give in this trial,” she said.
Brown urged caution, noting that no difference in waking was seen until after five months, despite one group being introduced to solids from three months, and that self-report of infant sleep by tired parents was unlikely to be precise.
Prof Mary Fewtrell, nutrition lead for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health welcomed the study, noting the RCPCH currently recommends solid foods are not introduced before four months, but that the evidence base for current advise is more than 10 years old and is currently under review in the UK and EU. “We expect to see updated recommendations on infant feeding in the not too distant future,” she said.
Erin Leichman, a senior research psychologist at St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, and executive director of the Pediatric Sleep Council said while the impact of early introduction of solid foods likely varied across babies, the findings are important. “Results of this study certainly warrant further research on the topic, particularly addressing how long babies continue to breastfeed despite introduction of solids and how parents interact with their babies at bedtime and during the night after a night waking, which can be related to sleep and night wakings,” she said. “At this point, results of this study do not indicate that solids should be introduced early for all babies.” Making the decision about when to introduce solid foods should be one that is family-based, and made with a trusted health-care provider.”

Source: The Guardian

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

New study finds preference for children to cradle dolls on left is indicator of social cognitive abilities


New study finds preference for children to cradle dolls on left is indicator of social cognitive abilities

June 27, 2018 by George Wigmore, City University London



Credit: FamVeld/Shutterstock.com
Children who cradle dolls on the left show higher social cognitive abilities than those who do not, according to new research from City, University of London.
The new findings, which also show deeply inbuilt facial recognition skills which enable children to interpret even simple approximations as human faces, suggest the children's cradling preference could help to indicate some social developmental disorders.
The study builds on previous knowledge of a 'left-cradling bias' – the phenomenon that humans will typically cradle a baby on their left side, enabling both parent and child to keep the other in their left visual – which is unrelated to dominance of the use of right or left hand. Information from the left visual field is processed by the right hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with emotion and the perception of facial expression.
Further investigation could enable researchers to make important predictions about the trajectory of children's development based on their cradling responses, in association with social and communication abilities.
The research – led by Dr. Gillian Forrester of Birkbeck, University of London and Dr. Brenda Todd of City, University of London – was conducted with 98 typically developing children (54 girls and 44 boys) in reception or year 1 at a mainstream reception school in South London, who were given a human infant doll to cradle.
They were observed to hold the doll markedly more often in a left-cradling position, and those who showed this bias had a significantly higher social ability score compared with those who held the doll on the right.
The social ability traits tested including likeliness to follow rules, willingness to share with others and wanting to please their teachers.
As part of the study the children were also given a pillow to cradle, with three dots marked on to suggest a face. They were more likely to cradle this object on the left, which researchers say indicates the depth of the evolutionary bias, as even a hint of a face will trigger the response.
By contrast, when given a plain pillow, without a suggestion of a face, the children demonstrated neither a left nor right cradling bias.
Birkbeck's Dr. Forrester said: "Even recognise the simple design of three dots surrounded by a circle as a face. And faces receive special attention from our left visual field (connected to the right hemisphere), which is faster and more accurate at identifying individuals and their emotional expressions than the right visual field for the majority of the population. This left-visual-field bias is a natural ability, thought to have originated from a need to identify predators in the environment. In modern humans we believe that the left visual field bias for recognising faces and expressions supports our sophisticated social and emotional abilities.
"In our study, children held a plain pillow randomly in either arm, but adding a 'three-dot-face' resulted in a preference to hold in the left arm, mirroring the left-side cradling bias shown by mothers holding babies. The phenomenon, known as the 'left cradling bias', is not just present in humans—it is pervasive across the animal kingdom and found in species as different as gorillas and flying foxes. Keeping a baby in the carer's left visual field allows for more efficiently monitoring of the baby's wellbeing.
"Not surprisingly, the left cradling bias was also seen when children held a human baby doll, indicating that this behaviour is present early in development and you do not need to have had experience of holding babies to express this preference. What was interesting was that children who held the baby doll with a preference for the left arm scored higher on social ability tests, compared with children who held with a right-side preference, indicating that using the visual field linked to the dominant hemisphere for processing social stimuli gives the individual a real-life advantage."
The cradling bias was once thought to be associated with the prevalence of the of the right-handed population but is now known to result from a preference for using the left visual field to view faces – it is quicker and more accurate at identifying individuals and their expressions. Cross cultural studies indicate that approximately 80% of mothers naturally cradle on the left.
City's Dr. Brenda Todd said:
"I have previously studied mothers holding their own babies, finding that the left cradling is strongest in the first 12 weeks after the birth, when the babies are most vulnerable. It is very interesting to see that a similar is shown when young hold a doll which depicts a young infant, indicating that this behavioural preference is apparent so early in our development."
The peer-reviewed study is published in Cortex. 

More information: G.S. Forrester et al. The left cradling bias: An evolutionary facilitator of social cognition?, Cortex (2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2018.05.011

Journal reference: Cortex search and more info website
Provided by: City University London


Source: https://medicalxpress.com/ (28/06/2018)search and more info website

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