ADHD: Medication plus parent training may help kids with aggression

Combining two medications with parent training appears to improve anger, irritability and violent tendencies in children whose attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is coupled with severe aggression, a new study suggests.

"Augmented" therapy that consists of stimulant and antipsychotic drugs, along with parent training in behavioural management techniques, was rated more effective by parents than "basic" therapy pairing only the stimulant and parent training, researchers found.

"An important finding of this study was that at the end of nine weeks, approximately half of all children receiving basic therapy were still rated by their parents as being impaired... with symptoms interfering with school or social functioning," said study author Kenneth Gadow, a professor of psychiatry at Stony Brook University in New York.

"In the augmented group receiving three interventions for aggression, about one-quarter still, at the end of nine weeks, were rated by their parents as being impaired, and that suggests, even with highly effective therapies, that many of these children still have unmet treatment needs" " he added.

The drugs used in the study, published in the September issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, included the widely prescribed ADHD stimulant Concerta (methylphenidate) and the antipsychotic Risperdal (risperidone).

Approximately 11 percent of American children aged 4 to 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD, which includes symptoms such as impulsivity, hyperactivity, and difficulty focusing and controlling behavior, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As many as half of children with ADHD also display significant, disruptive aggression, according to an editorial accompanying the new research.

"This is very common among kids with ADHD, but unfortunately it complicates the picture for treatment," said Erin Schoenfelder, a clinical psychologist at Seattle Children's Hospital and assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural health at University of Washington.

"It really is staggeringly high."

In the new research, Gadow and his colleagues divided a group of nearly 170 children aged 6 to 12 with ADHD and aggression problems into two treatment groups, basic and augmented.

The basic group received Concerta and their parents underwent behavioral management training.

The augmented group received Concerta and parental training as well, but also took the antipsychotic Risperdal. Both groups were followed for nine weeks.

While both groups of children displayed marked reduction in symptoms, improvement ratings varied depending on whether parents or teachers were making the assessment.

Parents reported that children on augmented therapy were less likely to be impaired socially or academically by their anger and irritability than children on basic therapy.

On the other hand, teachers found few differences in these measures.

Instead, teachers of those on augmented therapy reported significant drops in ADHD symptoms, especially impulsiveness, compared with teachers of children on basic therapy.

Gadow and Schoenfelder agreed that the conflicting parent-teacher ratings demonstrate a familiar concept: that children's behaviours vary in different settings, whether or not they have ADHD.

"Just like adults, they adapt their behaviours to be more appropriate for the setting they're in," Gadow said.

"People do differ, however, in their ability to modify their behaviour from one setting to the next, and some children are much more variable [in this regard]."

Schoenfelder said long-term evidence is needed indicating that combining Concerta and Risperdal is safe in children, but "it appears from this study that the combination was well-tolerated and something practitioners could [adjust the dosage of] effectively."

"Folks trying this type of treatment should have close monitoring," she added. "This is a starting point. It's a combination doctors may try when they see this blend of aggressive and hyperactive behaviours. It certainly will require adjustment . . . but it's exciting to find something helpful for a significant proportion of the kids studied."

The study authors pointed out that their findings only apply to children with ADHD who exhibit severe irritability and peer aggression.

They noted that the study's findings are not an indication of the ADHD population as a whole.

More Information: "Risperidone Added to Parent Training and Stimulant Medication: Effects on Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder, and Peer Aggression" http://www.jaacap.com/article/S0890-8567(14)00369-4/abstract

Dyslexia: Action video games help people with Dyslexia learn to read

In addition to their trouble with reading, people with dyslexia also have greater difficulty than typical readers do when it comes to managing competing sensory cues, according to a study reported February 13 in Current Biology.

The findings suggest that action video games might improve literacy skills in those with dyslexia, which represent five to ten percent of the population.

"Imagine you are having a conversation with someone when suddenly you hear your name uttered behind you," says Vanessa Harrar of the University of Oxford.

"Your attention shifts from the person you are talking to—the visual—to the sound behind you. This is an example of a cross-sensory shift of attention."

"We found that shifting attention from visual to auditory stimuli is particularly difficult for people who have dyslexia compared to good readers."

In fact, researchers already knew that people with dyslexia had some challenges with auditory processing in addition to their visual impairments.

New evidence had also begun to link multisensory integration and dyslexia to the same parts of the brain.

That evidence, together with Harrar's own personal challenges with reading and writing, prompted her and her colleagues to conduct one of the first investigations of how people with dyslexia process multisensory stimuli.

Participants in the study were asked to push a button as quickly as possible when they heard a sound, saw a dim flash, or experienced both together.

The speed with which they pressed the buttons was recorded and analyzed.

While everyone was fastest when the same type of stimuli repeated itself, the data showed that people with dyslexia were particularly slow at pressing the button when a sound-only trial followed a visual-only trial.

In other words, they showed "sluggish attention shifting," particularly when asked to shift their attention from a flash of light to a sound.

While the researchers say further study is needed, they suggest based on the findings that dyslexia training programs should take this asymmetry into account.

"We think that people with dyslexia might learn associations between letters and their sounds faster if they first hear the sound and then see the corresponding letter or word," Harrar says.

Of course, traditional approaches to reading, in which letters are first seen and then heard, do just the opposite.

Harrar's team goes on to propose a unique, nonverbal approach to improve reading and writing with action video games.

"We propose that training people with dyslexia to shift attention quickly from visual to auditory stimuli and back—such as with a video game, where attention is constantly shifting focus—might also improve literacy.

Action video games have been shown to improve multitasking skills and might also be beneficial in improving the speed with which people with dyslexia shift attention from one task, or sense, to another."

More information: Current Biology, Harrar et al.: "Multisensory integration and attention in developmental dyslexia." dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.01.029

More Reading, more talking, and longer sentences help babies' brains

The sooner parents start explaining the world to their baby, the better.

That does not mean flash cards for tots, or merely pointing out objects: "Here's an orange. That's a bowl."

New research shows that both how much and how well parents talk with babies and toddlers helps tune the youngsters' brains in ways that build crucial language and vocabulary skills—a key to fighting the infamous word gap that puts poor children at a disadvantage at an even younger age than once thought.

The idea is to connect words and meaning, so the brain becomes primed to learn through context: "Let's put the orange in this bowl with the banana and the apple and the grapes."

Anne Fernald

"You're building intelligence through language," is how Stanford University psychology professor Anne Fernald explains it.

And forget dumbed-down baby talk: Longer, more complex sentences are better.

Erika Hoff

"The advice I give mothers is to have conversations with your babies," said Erika Hoff, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University.

"Children can hear lots of talk that goes over their head in terms of the meaning, and they still benefit from it."

The research, presented Thursday and Friday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, comes amid a growing push for universal preschool, to help disadvantaged youngsters catch up.

But it also begs the question of whether children from low-income, less educated families need earlier intervention, such as preschool that starts at age 3 instead of 4, or higher quality day care or even some sort of "let's talk" campaign aimed at new parents to stress talking, singing and reading with tots even before they can respond.

That can be difficult for parents working multiple jobs, or who may not read well or who simply don't know why it's important.

Scientists have long known that before they start kindergarten, children from middle-class or affluent families have heard millions more words than youngsters from low-income families, leaving the poorer children with smaller vocabularies and less ready to succeed academically.

Fernald said by some measures, 5-year-olds from low-income families can lag two years behind their peers in tests of language development, an achievement gap that's difficult to overcome.

Kimberly Noble

Brain scans support the link, said Dr. Kimberly Noble of Columbia University Medical Center.

Early experiences shape the connections that children's brains form, and kids from higher socioeconomic backgrounds devote more "neural real estate" to brain regions involved in language development, she found.

How early does the word gap appear? 
Around age 18 months, Stanford's Fernald discovered when she compared how children mentally process the language they hear.

Lower-income kids in her study achieved at age 2 the level of proficiency that more affluent kids had reached six months earlier.

To understand why language processing is so important, consider this sentence: "The kitty's on the bench." If the youngster knows the word "kitty," and his brain recognizes it quickly enough, then he has can figure out what "bench" means by the context but if he's slow to recognize "kitty," then "bench" flies by before he has a chance to learn it.

Next, Fernald tucked recorders into T-shirts of low-income toddlers in Spanish-speaking households to determine what they heard all day—and found remarkable differences in what's called child-directed speech.

That's when children are spoken to directly, in contrast to television or conversations they overhear.

One child heard more than 12,000 words of child-directed speech in a day, while another heard a mere 670 words, she found.

The youngsters who received more child-directed speech processed language more efficiently and learned words more quickly, she reported.

But it's not just quantity of speech that matters—it's quality, Hoff cautioned. She studied bilingual families and found that whatever the language, children fare better when they learn it from a native speaker.

In other words, if mom and dad speak Spanish but aren't fluent in English, it's better for the child to have a solid grounding in Spanish at home and then learn English later in school.

Next, scientists are testing whether programs that teach parents better ways to talk to tots really do any good.

Fernald said preliminary results from one of the first, a program called Habla Conmigo that enrolls low-income, Spanish-speaking mothers in San Jose, California, are promising. She analysed the first 32 families of the 120 the program will enroll.

Mothers who underwent the eight-week training are talking more with their toddlers, using higher-quality language, than a control group of parents—and by their second birthday, the children have bigger vocabularies and process language faster, she said Thursday.

TOSCA Study: Concerta® and Risperdal®, help adolescents with ADHD, aggression

Prescribing both a stimulant and an antipsychotic drug to children with physical aggression and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), along with teaching parents to use behaviour management techniques, reduces aggressive and serious behavioural problems in the children.

This is the result of a study conducted by researchers at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

The study was conducted in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh, Stony Brook University in New York and Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

The findings published online this week ahead of publication in the January issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

"Combination pharmacotherapy is becoming common in child and adolescent psychiatry, but there has been little research evaluating it," said first author Michael Aman, director of clinical trials at Ohio State's Nisonger Center and emeritus professor of psychology.

"Our findings may be considered somewhat controversial because they appear to support the use of two drugs over one for treating children with aggression and disruptive behaviour when things do not seem to be going well.

Many practitioners have been taught to 'Keep things simple and safe' in their medical training. In general, this is good advice."

For the "Treatment of Severe Childhood Aggression (TOSCA) Study," 168 children ages 6 to 12 who had been diagnosed with ADHD and displayed significant physical aggression were divided into two groups.

All study participants received a psychostimulant drug called OROS methylphenidate (Concerta®) and their parents received behavioural parent training for nine weeks.

The researchers called this treatment combination "basic" because both are evidence-based and have been shown to be helpful for improving both ADHD and aggression.

Researchers wanted to see if they could expand or augment this treatment by adding a second medication. If there was room for improvement at the end of the third week, a placebo was added for the "basic group," while the antipsychotic drug Risperidone (RISPERDAL®) was added for participants in the "augmented group."

Compared to the "basic group," the "augmented group" who received the stimulant drug and parent training plus risperidone showed significant improvement (on average with moderately better behaviour) on the Nisonger Child Behavior Rating Form (NCBRF) Disruptive-Total Scale, the NCBRF Social Competence subscale and the Reactive Aggression part of the Antisocial Behaviour Scale.

While there is always some risk with the addition of a second drug to the treatment package, the two drugs seemed to neutralize some of each other's potential side effects.

For instance, children in the augmented group did not seem to have as much trouble falling asleep, once the risperidone was added, Aman said.

"We conducted this study because we viewed the combination of ADHD and significant physical aggression – especially the aggression – as a serious situation," Aman said.

"It is not uncommon to use more than one medicine for other serious situations, such as when treating cancer or epilepsy for instance."

"Although doctors have often used stimulants and antipsychotics together in recent years, we did not have good evidence until now that they would work more effectively when carefully staged and given together."

More information: "Treatment of Severe Childhood Aggression (TOSCA) Study,"

Can Toys help develop Science and Technology (STEM) skills in children?

One of the hot topics on social media this holiday season is finding gifts that can help children, especially girls, develop science- and engineering-related skills.

Beth Holloway, director of the Women in Engineering Program at Purdue University, says toys that help children figure out how to turn their ideas into reality - toys that let them design and build something, for instance - are a great first step in inspiring them to consider a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) career.

"Toys like that will help children realize that they can make an impact on the world through their ideas," she says.

As for girls in particular, Holloway says they should have a range of toys and experiences.

"Parents need to provide girls with toys that indulge their feminine side but also those that allow them to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes from designing and building something," she says.

"Those accomplishments will encourage them to continue to stretch their imaginations."

Holloway says research shows that girls tend to become interested in what they are confident that they are good at doing.

STEM-inspired toys can help foster that confidence in designing and building while reinforcing their existing interests.

For ideas on STEM-related toys, Holloway suggests the websites www.amightygirl.com/ and www.modernparentsmessykids.com

Clinician observations of preschoolers' behavior help to predict ADHD at school age

Don't rely on one source of information about your preschoolers' inattention or hyperactivity. Rather, consider how your child behaves at home as well as information from his or her teacher and a clinician.

This advice comes from Sarah O'Neill, of The City College of New York, based on research she conducted at Queens College (CUNY), in an article published in Springer's Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology.

The study examines how well parent, teacher, and clinician ratings of preschoolers' behavior are able to predict severity and diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at age six.

Characterized by developmentally inappropriate levels of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, ADHD is one of the most frequently diagnosed childhood psychiatric disorders.

Although many studies focusing on school-aged children have shown that parents and teachers—rather than clinician observations alone—are more likely to assess ADHD accurately, scant evidence exists to support similar conclusions with preschoolers.

To fill this gap in the research, O'Neill and colleagues followed a group of 104 hyperactive and/or inattentive three- and four-year-olds for a period of two years. Both parents and teachers rated the preschoolers' behaviour.

In addition, clinicians, who were blind to parent and teacher reports, completed ratings of preschoolers' behavior during a psychological testing session.

By the time the children reached age six, more than half (53.8 percent) had been diagnosed with ADHD.

The likelihood of such a diagnosis increased when all three informants had rated the child as high on symptoms at age three or four.

Furthermore, after analyzing the reports separately, the research team found that parents' reports were critical, particularly when combined with either teacher or clinician reports.

Teacher reports alone were not as useful, and the research team ascribed the relative inability of educators' reports to predict a child's ADHD status over time to possible situational variables.

Preschoolers may initially have difficulty adjusting to the structured classroom setting, but this disruptive behavior is time-limited to the transition to school.

Teachers' perceptions of "difficult" behaviour may also be affected by factors such as classroom setting and size as well as their expectations of children's behaviour.

As a result of the study findings, O'Neill and her team emphasize the importance of using information from multiple informants who have seen the child in different settings.

Parent reports of preschoolers' behaviour appear to be crucial, but these alone are not sufficient. Augmenting the parent report with that of the teacher and/or clinician is necessary.

Also important are clinician observations of preschoolers during psychological testing, which are predictive of an ADHD diagnosis and its severity over time.

Being able to identify children at risk for poorer outcomes may help educators and clinicians to plan appropriate interventions.

"Consider a preschool child's behaviour in different contexts," O'Neill emphasized. "Although parents' reports of preschoolers' inattention, hyperactivity, or impulsivity are very important, ideally we would not rely solely on them. At least for young children, the clinician's behavioural observations appear to hold prognostic utility."

More information: O'Neill, S. et al. (2013). Reliable Ratings or Reading Tea Leaves: Can Parent, Teacher, and Clinician Behavioral Ratings of Preschoolers Predict ADHD at Age Six? Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. DOI: 10.1007/s10802-013-9802-4

Teenagers with Autism: Watching their success helps master important life skills

Watching a video of themselves on an iPad successfully solving a problem can help students with autism master critical life skills.

Like all special education instructors, Cami Burton aims to help her students with autism and developmental disabilities master real-life skills that will allow them to become more independent.

But traditional teaching methods often fail to give these students the practice and reinforcement they need to embed the important skills that can enhance their long-term life outcomes.

Now, a promising study Burton conducted at Brigham Young University using iPads combined with a proven video instruction technique has helped children with autism develop and retain important math skills.

The research was conducted by Burton, a graduate student in the David O. McKay School of Education, and faculty members Darlene Anderson, Mary Anne Prater and Tina Dyches.

Darlene Anderson

While many studies have shown the benefits of video self-modeling (VSM) —filming students as they successfully solve a problem or complete an assignment—in regular educational settings, few studies have investigated the use of VSM in teaching core skills such as math and science to students with autism and intellectual disabilities.

Mary Anne Prater

In the BYU study, several junior high school-age students with autism used an iPad that showed a video of themselves accurately and independently solving a practical math problem: Estimating the amount of money they needed to pay for an item as well as how much they should get back in change.

 Tina Dyches

They were then asked to solve similar problems using the VSM as a guide. Gradually, over time, the students were asked to figure out the math problem without the VSM.

The results: The students were able to independently solve the math problems with an accuracy of between 80 and 100 percent.

And, best of all, they enjoyed it. All student participants indicated that they liked having a video made of them in class and stated that they enjoyed using the iPad and watching a video of themselves.

As one student stated, "It was cool and fun."

Cami Burton

Children with autism have difficulty generalising, Burton explained.

"We want them to be able to generalise what they've learned and apply it to new skills. Anything visual will help heighten their awareness of the task," she said.

"We're not always able to capture their potential," said Anderson. "These new technologies can make that possible."

The BYU researchers also observed that, without exception, all of the students seemed enthusiastic and excited to participate in the study each day.

"We noticed an immediate and abrupt change in student performance each time the video model was introduced," Burton said.

"Students with serious unwanted behaviour issues—such as aggression and fidgeting—seemed to remain on task to a greater extent than when the iPads weren't used."

Said Anderson, "The students were clearly focused and engaged."

The research paper, published in the journal Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, documented the positive functional relationship between viewing the VSM and student performance.

Burton, who completed her master's thesis while working as a full-time teacher, was motivated by her desire to use her research to help the students she works with every day.

"Our research indicated that video self-modeling via an iPad may be an effective way to deliver academic content to adolescent students with autism and intellectual disability," said Burton, who continues to successfully use the iPad/VSM method in her classes.

Future research should be easy to implement, since, thanks to ever-improving iPad applications, the video models are simple to create and are easily demonstrated and measured, Anderson said.

"I believe this model could transfer to anything you're willing to apply it to," said Burton. "And it's very socially appropriate and easy for these students to carry an iPad around with them."

More information:
'Video Self-Modeling on an iPad to Teach Functional Math Skills to Adolescents With Autism and Intellectual Disability'

Medikidz: Comic books to help children understand chronic pain

Comic book superheroes are being used to help children understand more about older relatives suffering from chronic pain, in an innovative project. 

Northumbria University academic Dr Derek Jones has been working on a project led by Teesside University Professor Denis Martin to explore how comic book superheroes can help children understand what an older adult with chronic pain is experiencing.

The research project, also involving colleagues from the universities of Dundee, Aberdeen, and Greenwich, has seen the academics work with Medikidz – an international company which produces award-winning comics featuring Marvel-inspired superheroes to put medical information into plain words which children can understand – to create a comic book about chronic pain.

The comic is one of the products from a collaboration between the university partners in the UK Research Council-funded £1.2 million EOPIC (Engaging with Older People and Their Carers to Develop Interventions for the Self-management of Chronic Pain) Project.

Dr Derek Jones, Senior Lecturer in Occupational Therapy at Northumbria University, said: "Education about pain is really important; it is increasingly recognised that explaining to people the biological processes underlying their experience results in better pain management.

"We will be carrying out research to investigate the value of the Medikidz comic book; from what we have been told so far we think it will prove to be helpful to anyone who comes into contact with someone with chronic pain."

Professor Martin, from Teesside University, said: "The idea for the comic came about as we were talking to older people to find out their ideas on how to improve the lives of older people living with chronic pain."

"We learned that there was a need to help grandchildren to better understand the experiences of a grandparent living with chronic pain."

"It can be difficult for a child to understand because they can't see the pain which is making their grandparent miserable and feeling unable to do day-to-day things. We wanted to use that information to develop a product which would help younger relatives understand what the older person is going through, given the lack of information available to help that communication."

Medikidz already produces material to explain to children about their own medical conditions, but working with the EOPIC team, they focused on material to inform a child about the older relative's condition.

The book, entitled 'What's Up with Moira's Grandad: Medikidz Explains Chronic Pain', portrays a typical scenario, which involves a child not understanding why their grandparent has suddenly cancelled time they'd planned to spend with them.

The child is left upset, thinking the grandparent simply isn't bothered - while the grandparent is frustrated and angry at having felt forced to cancel due to difficulty in coping with chronic pain.

The EOPIC team provided the information and outline of the story to Medikidz, who adapted it to use their superheroes to tell the story.

In the story the child is taken on a journey through the human body, with the Medikidz superheroes explaining about chronic pain and how it impacts on someone's life. The happy conclusion shows the child with a better understanding of their grandparent's situation.

The team now plans to distribute the comics to clinics across the region initially and then to expand nationally and further afield.

Dyslexia: UK Campaign to help dyslexic prisoners

A CHARITY set up by a Benfleet (UK)  family to help cut re-offending rates in prisons is being rolled out across the country.

Jackie Hewitt-Main, of Kents Hill Road, and her two sons, Stuart and Richard, launched the Cascade Foundation in a bid to stop prisoners reverting back to a life of crime and keep them on the straight and narrow once they have served their sentences.

The organisation will work with dyslexic prisoners in UK prisons and use a multi-sensory learning programme and prisoner mentoring scheme to help them develop basic reading and writing skills needed to get by in everyday life.

Jackie, who suffers from dyslexia herself, said: “After years of struggling, it was an epiphany moment for me when I was diagnosed.

“It is easy to believe you are stupid because you have trouble reading and writing, when actually you are not stupid, you just learn differently from how you were made to try and learn in the classroom.

“If we can diagnose dyslexics in prisons properly, help them come to that realisation and give them the basic reading and writing skills they need to interact with society when they are released, it gives them a real opportunity to turn their lives around.”

Jackie, who is a qualified special educational needs teacher, set up a successful pilot project in Chelmsford Prison in 2006 which was largely attributed to a stark drop in reoffending rates among those who took part.

The national average reoffending rate for prisoners within one year of their release is 50 per cent, but of the prisoners released at the end of Jackie’s scheme, only 6 per cent went on to reoffend.

The charity has been set up in conjunction with Benfleet councillor Andrew Sheldon, who suffers from dyslexia, and Hadleigh-based artist Karen Osman.

Mr Sheldon said: “This programme has the potential to impact upon so many lives, not just the prisoners, but also those who would otherwise become victims of their reoffending.

“The results from the Chelmsford pilot Jackie did a few years ago are so encouraging we felt we had to push to get it rolled out across the country.”

The charity was launched by the Secretary of State for Justice, Chris Grayling, at an event hosted by Castle Point MP Rebecca Harris in the Houses of Parliament earlier this month.

Mr Grayling said: “The fact that what Jackie did was to find people who had been in the criminal system their whole lives and couldn’t even write a letter, is an indication of the challenge we face, that we do need to recognise that within our prisons there are very specific challenges that can be addressed and can be turned round. Dyslexia is very clearly one of them.”

The Cascade Foundation will be launching its next project in Doncaster Prison in August.

Fathers who bond with children help keep Partner's Relationship /Marriage strong

Sharing housework is the key, as is open communication with your spouse and /or partner.

For dads aiming at marital bliss, a new study suggests just two factors are especially important: being engaged with the kids, for sure—but also doing a fair share of the household chores.

In other words, just taking the children outside for a game of catch won't cut it.

"In our study, the wives thought that the father's involvement with the kids and his participation in household work, are all inter-related and worked together to improve marital quality," said Adam Galovan, lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Missouri, in Columbia.

"They think that being a good father involves more than just doing things involved in the care of children."

Adam Galovan

Galovan found that wives and partners, feel more cared for when husbands are involved with their children, yet helping out with the day-to-day responsibilities of running the household also matters.

But Galovan was surprised to find that, how husbands and wives divide the work, doesn't seem to matter much.

Partners, husbands and wives are happier when they share parenting and household responsibilities, but the chores don't have to be divided equally, according to the study.

What matters is that both parents are actively participating in both chores and child-rearing.

Doing household chores and being engaged with the children seem to be important ways for husbands to connect with their partners, and that connection is related to better relationships, Galovan explained.

The research was recently published in the Journal of Family Issues it can also be found on the MU News site.

For the study, the researchers tapped data from a 2005 study that pulled marriage licenses of couples married for less than one year from the Utah Department of Health.

Researchers looked at every third or fourth marriage license over a six-month period.

Couples indicated which spouse was generally responsible for completing 20 common household tasks— or if both or neither of them were responsible.

Fathers rated their involvement in their children's lives and mothers noted how involved they felt their husbands were with the kids. Both spouses rated how happy they were with how they divided household tasks and with their marriage.

Men and women differed in how they reported marital quality. For wives, the father-child relationship and father involvement was most important, followed by satisfaction with how the household work was accomplished.

For husbands, satisfaction with the division of family work came first, followed by their wife's feelings about the father-child relationship, and then the degree of involvement the dad had with his children.

Child Abuse and Neglect: Can primary care doctors help?

A lack of research makes it impossible to recommend how primary care doctors can prevent abuse and neglect of children who show no signs or symptoms of maltreatment, according to a new U.S. Preventive Services Task Force statement on Prevention of Child Maltreatment.

"We know there are children suffering abuse who don't show obvious signs of mistreatment, and the task force wanted to learn more about what primary care practices can do to help them," task force member Dr. David Grossman said in a task force news release.

Child abuse and neglect affects more than half a million American children each year, according to the release.

About 680,000 children in the United States were abused or neglected in 2011 and more than 1,500 of these children died. Children aged 5 and under are at the most risk for abuse and death from abuse.

The task force analyzed studies released since 2004 and concluded that although child abuse and neglect is a serious problem, there is very little evidence to determine how primary care doctors can protect young victims who show no obvious signs or symptoms of maltreatment.

Due to the lack of information, the task force said it cannot make a specific recommendation for or against primary care doctors taking action to help these children. The statement appears online June 11 in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

"We critically need more research on how primary care clinicians can prevent maltreatment and protect their young patients when symptoms of abuse or neglect are not apparent," Grossman said.

The task force said areas where more research is needed include: how health care providers can help support families to prevent abuse and neglect; how to identify children who are being mistreated; ways to prevent abuse of older children; and whether interventions to prevent child abuse could cause unintended harm.

Virginia Moyer

"It will take action from every part of society, including families, schools and health care professionals, to build a future where every child can grow up healthy and safe from abuse and neglect," task force chair Dr. Virginia Moyer said in the news release.

"While we learn more about what primary care professionals can do to help children, all health care professionals must continue to remain vigilant for signs of abuse and neglect, and respond appropriately when they identify problems."

More information: The U.S. Children's Bureau outlines ways to prevent child abuse and neglect.

Knowing the Gender of Unborn Child Helps Fathers Bond with Offspring

Dads who find out the sex of their unborn child and give him or her a name may find it easier to connect emotionally with their baby, a study conducted at the University of Birmingham has found.

The report, entitled "The Moral Habitus of Fatherhood: A Study of How Men Negotiate the Moral Demands of Becoming a Father," funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, looked at men's experiences of, and feelings about, becoming a father and mapped their journeys from the discovery of the pregnancy to the early months of fatherhood.

Jonathan Ives

Dr Jonathan Ives, a senior lecturer in the centre for Medicine, Ethics, Society and History at the University of Birmingham, who carried out the research, said: "Serious consideration needs to be given to how men can be empowered to become the fathers they want to be.

"Healthcare workers who are involved in this process need to engage with men's views on what it is to be a good man, a good partner, and a good father and help them achieve an appropriate balance between their own needs and interests and those of their partner and future children."

The study found that some men's understanding of what it means to be a good man and/or a good partner could act as a barrier to being drawn into, or actively seeking involvement in antenatal or postnatal consultation, but that "this is not necessarily demonstrative of a lack of commitment to fatherhood, but merely a different construction of the fatherhood role in that context".

"Helping men effect an 'active transformation into positive fatherhood' may require helping them to reconcile their moral sense of how they ought to act as a partner and as a man, with how they need to act as a father and a father-to-be," the report states.

"Encouraging fathers to become actively involved, and drawing them in, may require more than making them feel welcome and creating space for them to talk, but also giving them explicit permission to become actively involved."

The research found that scans helped to make their partner's pregnancy more real for men but "it was discovering the gender of their child, and giving him/her a name that tended to enable men to feel emotionally connected, because it allowed them to think of the unborn child as a person whom one can father, and with whom a relationship could be developed and a future imagined".

Dr Ives followed 11 men over a period of 9 months, from the first scan to 8 weeks after the birth of their child. The ages of participants ranged from 22 to 58.

Jason Cole, one of the dads who took part in the research, said: "I really wanted to know the gender of our first child.

My partner wasn't fussed. She was happy either way but I really wanted to know. I don't know why. As soon as we found out she was a girl, from about 20 weeks, we named her Molly and I think it did help me prepare for her and connect with her once she was born."

Mr Cole, who lives in Devon, is happy to discuss his experiences with the press. He and his partner are now expecting their second child – also a girl.

More information: www.birmingham.ac.… oject-1.aspx

Telling Personal Stories Help Children Develop Emotional Skills

A new study finds that mothers tell better, more emotional stories about past experiences which help children develop their emotional skills.

Credit: © Pavel Losevsky / Fotolia

A new study finds that mothers tell better, more emotional stories about past experiences which help children develop their emotional skills.

The act of talking is not an area where ability is usually considered along gender lines.

However, a new study published in Springer's journal Sex Roles has found subtle differences between the sexes in their story-relating ability and specifically the act of reminiscing.

Widaad Zaman

The research by Widaad Zaman from the University of Central Florida and her colleague Robyn Fivush from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, discusses how these gender differences in parents can affect children's emotional development.

Previous research in this area has concluded that the act of parents reminiscing with their children enables children to interpret experiences and weave together the past, present and future.

There is also evidence that parents elaborate less when talking to sons than daughters.

The primary objective of Zaman's study was to compare the reminiscing styles of mothers and fathers with their pre-school daughters and sons.

This included how they elaborated on the story and the extent to which their children engaged with the story while it was being told.

Robyn Fivush

The researchers studied 42 families where the participating children were between four and five years old.

Parents were asked to reminisce about four past emotional experiences of the child (happy, sad, a conflict with a peer and a conflict with a parent) and two past play interactions they experienced together.

The parents took turns talking to the child on separate visits.

The researchers found that mothers elaborated more when reminiscing with their children than fathers.

Contrary to previous research, however, Zaman's study found no differences in the extent to which either parent elaborated on a story depending on the sex of the child.

Mothers tended to include more emotional terms in the story than fathers, which they then discussed and explained to the child.

This increased maternal engagement has the effect of communicating to the child the importance of their own version, perspective and feelings about the experience.

The authors contend that through their increased interaction with the child, mothers are helping their children work through and talk about their experiences more than fathers, regardless of the type of experience.

This may reflect the mother's efforts to try and help her child deal with difficult emotions, especially about negative experiences, all of which is related to better emotional well-being.

The authors conclude that "these results are intriguing, and a necessary first step to better understanding how parents socialise gender roles to girls and boys through narratives about the past, and how girls and boys may then incorporate these roles into their own narratives and their own lives."

Reference
Gender Differences in Elaborative Parent–Child Emotion and Play Narratives. Sex Roles, 2013; DOI: 10.1007/s11199-013-0270-7

Closer Personal Relationships Could Help Teens Overcome Learning Disabilities

In addition to struggling in school, many learning disabled children are known to face social and emotional challenges including depression, anxiety, and isolation.

Often beginning early in childhood, they become more pronounced during adolescence, an emotionally turbulent time.

For these youngsters, more positive relationships with the significant adults in their lives -- including parents and teachers -- can improve learning and "socioemotional" experiences, says Dr. Michal Al-Yagon of Tel Aviv University's Jaime and Joan Constantiner School of Education.

In a recent study published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, she reported that teens with learning disabilities were less likely to have secure attachment relationships to their mothers and teachers compared to peers without learning disabilities.

The absence of such close and supportive relationships had an adverse effect on the teens' social and emotional functioning, contributing to behavioral problems including isolation, depression, and aggression.

"We found that more secure child-adult attachments may act as a protective factor during this developmental period, whereas insecure attachments are a risk factor" for social and emotional issues, Dr. Al-Yagon says.

These results could help researchers design more effective interventions for children and adolescents with learning disabilities. Helping to strengthen their relationships with parents and teachers may decrease their emotional and behavioural problems.

The power of attachment
Attachment theory, which describes long-term relationship dynamics, seeks to explain how parental involvement, availability, and support can shape a child's social and emotional development. Insecure attachments are damaging to a child, hindering future relationships with peers, romantic partners, and family members.

For this study, Dr. Al-Yagon measured the socioemotional state and the security of attachments to parents and teachers for 181 adolescents with learning disabilities and 188 with typical development, all between the ages of 15-17.

Participants completed a series of questionnaires regarding their attachment to their mother and father, perceived teacher availability and rejection, loneliness, experience of positive and negative emotions and behavioral problems.

Adolescents with learning disabilities were discovered to have less secure attachments with significant adult figures compared to their non-disabled peers, which had a direct impact on their socioemotional state.

Within the disabled group, those who had more secure attachments to their mother and father, or who considered their teacher caring and available, exhibited fewer negative emotions, feelings of loneliness, and behaviour problems -- all of which can interfere with learning.

Building closer relationships

These findings can help guide clinicians in developing effective treatment strategies, says Dr. Al-Yagon.

Examples include family intervention techniques that focus on creating more secure attachments between parents and children, or school workshops to help teachers understand the needs of their learning disabled students and make more of an effort to include them in classroom activities.

While social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties cannot be entirely avoided, Dr. Al-Yagon believes that a little effort, care, and attention can go a long way toward helping learning disabled children and teens feel happier and more secure.

"Parents and teachers should be aware not just of academic difficulties, but also of socioemotional difficulties -- and work to treat them. They should not avoid or ignore issues such as depression or aggression, which are another dimension of the original problem," she advises.

Dyslexia and Video Games: They can 'help reading in children with dyslexia'

Playing video games may help children with dyslexia improve their reading skills, research suggests.

A study of 10-year-olds who played 12 hours of an "action" video game found it improved their reading speed without any cost to accuracy.

The effects were equivalent to more than a year's worth of reading development, the Italian team reported in Current Biology.

But more research was needed before games could be considered a treatment.

Their work builds on earlier research in which they linked dyslexia with early problems in visual attention rather than language skills.

They selected a fast-moving game requiring a high degree of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills as well as being unpredictable and involving peripheral processing.

Ten children spent nine 80-minute sessions playing the video game, which consisted of a series of mini-games.

And their reading and attention skills were compared before and after with 10 children not exposed to the game.

Speed and accuracy
The researchers found those who had played the video games had better attention skills than before.

And they were able to read faster without losing any accuracy, the team from the University of Padua reported.

Study leader, Dr Andrea Facoetti, said: "Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment.

"Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly."

He explained that attention should be thought of as a "spotlight" that can be moved, and adjusted in its size, in the visual field.

When the spotlight is on a portion of the visual field, the details will be enhanced, the contrast improved and so on, while everything that is outside of this spotlight will be inhibited.

The video games may be working to train the part of the brain responsible for attention and motion perception, he added.

"These results are very important in order to understand the brain mechanisms underlying dyslexia, but they don't put us in a position to recommend playing video games without any control or supervision," he said.

The team are now planning to look at the effects of video games on the prevention of dyslexia in children before they learn to read.

Dr Kate Saunders, chief executive of the British Dyslexia Association, said it was a complex condition but for some individuals part of the problem may include difficulty with aspects of visual perceptual skills, and visuo-motor coordination and attention.

She added that more research was needed to establish whether repeated play on some targeted computer games could help build certain visual and attention related skills.

"There are questions, however, as to the extent that skills transfer from one situation to another and would be retained in the longer term."

Teenage Cancer Trust: The role of a Youth Support Co-ordinator - YouTube

Carrie is a Teenage Cancer Trust Youth Support Co-ordinator. She talks about how her role helps young people with cancer remain active and occupied during long stays in hospital and encourages them to share their experiences with each other.

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ADHD at School: Help Your Children to Learn!

One of the frustrations for teachers and parents of children with ADHD is getting a child to stop, listen, and understand what is being taught or asked of him.

These tips and strategies will enable students to listen and learn in school and at home.

Tools for Teachers

• Get your students' attention! Clap out a rhythm and have your students clap the rhythm back until the class is quiet. This signals that it is time to move to the next activity. During group lessons, keep students involved by asking them questions. Play music or sing a song to keep them focused on the material being taught.
• Repeat it back. When giving instructions, limit the number of steps involved and have the students repeat the steps back to you, one at a time. Use the words first, next, and last to give order and structure.
• Go beyond textbooks. Relate concepts to real-life experiences through visuals, sign language, or gestures. Bring vocabulary words and stories to life by giving students examples from everyday life. If you are starting a story about a supermarket, bring in items that you buy there.
• Make directions concrete. Make sure your commands and directions are precise. "Do careful work" or "Be respectful" are too vague. Be specific in what you expect to see: "Eyes looking at me, bottoms in your chairs, book open to page 21, and desks cleared except for a pencil."
• Take small steps. Read a few pages of an article or story at a time. Teach students how to stop and ask themselves questions about what they have read. Allow them to draw a picture or write a key word on a sticky note and attach it to the page.
• Use attention-getting strategies. Make your voice go up or down, or make it louder or softer while doing a read-aloud or giving directions. Buy a garden glove and write a story element on each finger.

Pointers for Parents

• Keep it predictable. Be consistent with the words you use to give directions, and stick to established schedules in your household. This will increase a child's listening comprehension because he knows what to expect and feels secure and calm.
• Show them what you want them to do. Walk through the steps of a task. Check for understanding of directions. Write down the task you want done (in words or pictures) and give it to your child for reference.
• Check in with a child to make sure he isn't tuning out. Before, during, and after chores, homework, or a task, have your child tell you specifically what he is doing. This continuous reminder of the task at hand keeps your child focused. It may seem redundant, but it works!
• Move to remember. Get your child up and moving to help with listening skills. Use hand gestures, exercises, or dance moves to help him remember what to do.
• Help a child recall. If your child is watching TV, ask her about what she is watching. When your child gets off the phone, ask him what he talked about -- and, above all, don't interrupt.

To read the full article with helpful links visit here

Are Reading and other Learning Disabilities Preventable? | Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

Are Reading and Other Learning Disabilities Preventable?

Perhaps you had this experience: You approached your child’s school about your kindergarten age child, expressing concern that he or she may have a learning disability. While sympathetic, your school’s psychologist, reading specialist, or other diagnostic expert responded that learning disabilities cannot be diagnosed until a child has been unable to succeed academically despite conscientious instruction.

Several years later, you attended a meeting with your school’s multi-disciplinary team who explained that your child indeed does have a learning disability. Your emotions felt chaotic – a mixture of relief, worry, sorrow – and perhaps frustration or even anger that years had passed since you recognised that your child’s development was not typical, but rather different from his peers in subtle yet important ways.

It is a fact that learning disabilities cannot be 'positively' diagnosed in early childhood. Unlike severe developmental disabilities, learning disabilities are mild neurocognitive deficits that cannot be easily distinguished from the broad range of typical early childhood development.

However, it is also a fact that it is possible to identify children with 'increased risk' of developing learning disabilities in the future, e.g. as elementary school students.

Children with 'increased risk' of learning disabilities frequently share one or more of these characteristics:

• A mother, father, sister or brother with an Autistic Spectrum Disorders, ADHD, or Learning Disability
• Low birth weight, defined as a weight less than 2500 grams or 5.5 pounds
• Delayed speech—failure to combine two or more words into short phrases by 24 months of age
• A diagnosis of ADHD

These risk factors are associated with increased risk of learning disabilities because many learning disabilities are the result of a developmental trajectory that starts before birth, and continues through adulthood.

As preschoolers, children at 'increased risk' have trouble:

• Rhyming
• “Reading”—really recognising—signs like Coke, McDonalds and other frequently occurring printed words
• Recognising parts of books such as the cover, title
• Recognising letters of his or her own name
• Quickly retrieving words, measured by asking a child to rapidly name a category such as “animals”

If we know this then 'What about prevention?'

Many of the home-based interventions that can reduce the risk of learning disabilities, especially reading disabilities, are parenting habits that apply to all children.

The common element of all home—based interventions is the systematic exposure of children to rich, engaging, and expressive language. The best example of this is shared reading.

'Shared Reading', is when parents read to their children, and through this activity, books take on an added dimension of parental love and affection. Children hear models of reading that are more accurate and more advanced than their own.

They begin to associate letters with sounds and words with meaning. Using books with predictable rhyme patterns and simple rhythms, such as the Dr. Seuss books, teaches the acceptable and common sound system of our language.

Old fashioned entertainment, based on interaction between adults and children rather than video, fulfills a similar purpose. Telling stories about family history, sharing folk tales you learned as a child, playing word games such as 20-questions or I-Spy are ways parents teach their preschool “language apprentices.”

Apprentices need teachers who listen well and listen patiently, and who can demonstrate good conversational skills such as taking turns speaking without interrupting.

Helping children to play creatively, with other children, and with their imaginations is the oldest form of language and social skill training.

Summary

In summary, while diagnosis of learning disabilities is not possible at young ages, parents, schools, healthcare professionals and others can be very attuned to delays in language development that confer increased risk for learning disabilities.

In addition, adults can focus particular attention to Low-Birth-Weight children, and children who were not talking by their second birthday, viewing them as especially vulnerable and needing developmental assessment.

Parents, schools and speech and language therapists can team-up to help reduce the potential risk of learning disabilities.

Speech recognition, mobile apps help build reading skills

Students’ scores on a national reading assessment have remained relatively flat for nearly 40 years, with students ages 9-17 scoring an average of 255 points on a scale of 0 to 500. As educators work hard to bring that average up, many are excited about the potential for new technologies to help.

Some schools, for example, are using tools such as speech recognition technology to give students a personal reading coach inside the classroom. Others are taking advantage of mobile technology to help students build the skills they need for reading fluency in their spare time, wherever they might be, by downloading audio books or applications to their mobile phones or mp3 players.

“Technology changes the whole game,” said Matt Walker, vice president of sales and marketing for Recorded Books, a company that provides audio books and other products for schools.

Meanwhile, there is new research to suggest that this approach can be successful: A PBS study found that mobile applications can help increase students’ vocabulary. That could be welcome news for educators who have seen students’ reading scores remain largely flat in national exams.

Long-term trend results in reading from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are available on the National Center for Educational Statistics web site for 12 assessment years, going back to the first in 1971.

The average reading score for 9-year-olds was 220 points in 2008, increasing 4 points since 2004 and 12 points in comparison to 1971. While the average score for 13-year-olds in 2008 was higher than in both 2004 and 1971, it was not significantly different from the scores in some assessment years in between, at 260 points. The average reading score for 17-year-olds was higher in 2008 (286 points) than in 2004 (283 points) but was not significantly different from the score of 285 points in 1971.

Scientific Learning Corp.’s Reading Assistant software aims to change that. The program is a guided oral reading tool that is used to build fluency. The software uses speech verification technology to monitor for signs of difficulty in reading—which include hesitations, silence, mispronunciations, and other cues—and provides assistance when students stumble or get stuck.

“Reading Assistant was developed with the idea of bringing additional reading tutors to students through computers,” said Maura Deptula, projects manager for Scientific Learning. “The computer can listen to students the way a teacher can and prompt the student when he or she gets stuck.”

The software automatically calculates a student’s fluency rate, and there is a direct correlation between fluency and comprehension, said Liz Kline, product manager for Reading Assistant. The software not only helps teachers identify problem areas but also allows them to make sure each student’s reading has been assessed.

Read the full article here