Science Corner Vol. 9 – Evidence That Sending a Child on a Guilt Trip Has Long-Lasting, Negative Effects
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Science Corner Vol. 9 – Evidence That Sending a Child on a Guilt Trip Has Long-Lasting, Negative Effects

  A recent research article published in The Journal of Family Psychology reported the use of guilt-inducing parenting causes distress and anger that is still measurable the next day. Guilt-inducing parenting is when a parent tries to impact a child’s behavior by trying to make them feel guilty. An example might be when a child…

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Manole Family – A “Discovery” Leads to Success with NACD & Simply Smarter

Years ago, I saw a TV show on Discovery with an organization from England that transformed “typical” children into geniuses using programs close to what NACD is using. I was fascinated but frustrated because I believed that I would never have an opportunity to follow this type of program in Romania. After I registered my…

Science Corner Vol. 8 – Be Smart About Breakfast
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Science Corner Vol. 8 – Be Smart About Breakfast

  Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing reported that children who ate breakfast more often had significantly higher IQ scores on the full scale, verbal, and performance tests. The study included 1,269 six-year-old children. After controlling for seven potential sociodemographic variables, the study found children who ate breakfast on a near-daily basis…

Science Corner Vol. 7 – Sleep Apnea and Its Association to Behavior, Learning Problems and ADHD
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Science Corner Vol. 7 – Sleep Apnea and Its Association to Behavior, Learning Problems and ADHD

  The Tucson Children’s Assessment of Sleep Apnea Study was published this year in the journal SLEEP [1]. In this study of 263 youth, sleep study and neurobehavioral data was collected twice, five years apart. Twenty-one of the children had persistent sleep apnea throughout the entire study. These children were six times more likely to…

Science Corner Vol. 6 – Optimal Outcome for a Diagnosis of Autism
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Science Corner Vol. 6 – Optimal Outcome for a Diagnosis of Autism

Historically, it has not been considered a “realistic” goal in the mainstream world for a child with autism to ever lose their diagnosis, let alone lose all the symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder and move completely into the non-autistic range of normal social interaction and communication. Although much recent research has documented individuals with ASD…

Science Corner Vol. 5 – Anxiety
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Science Corner Vol. 5 – Anxiety

Anxiety disorders are supposedly the 
most common mental health issue 
today for adolescents, with one
 national study of more than 10,000 
adolescents finding that about 31%
 qualified for an anxiety disorder at 
least at one point in their lives 
(Merikangas et al., 2010). 
Prescriptions given to children for 
these anxiety disorders are
antidepressants that include selective
…

Science Corner Vol. 4 – Brain Imaging: What It Can and Can’t Tell Us
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Science Corner Vol. 4 – Brain Imaging: What It Can and Can’t Tell Us

The National Association for Child Development is always looking for the best knowledge to further our understanding of developmental disorders and their remediation. Therefore, we are fascinated by the prospects of neuroscience research, but are fully aware of the current limitations. One major area of neuroscience research that has generated a lot of hyped buzz…

Science Corner Vol. 3 – The Sleep Advantage of Homeschooling: Scientifically Verified
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Science Corner Vol. 3 – The Sleep Advantage of Homeschooling: Scientifically Verified

It might not be that shocking to find homeschoolers get more sleep than their public school peers, but a new study which featured 2,600 adolescents around the nation found homeschoolers get on average 90 minutes more sleep per night! Just to put that into perspective, 90 minutes a night over the course of a 5-day school…

Science Corner Vol. 2: Working Memory Training Physically Changes Brain for the Better, fMRI Neuroimaging Study Finds
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Science Corner Vol. 2: Working Memory Training Physically Changes Brain for the Better, fMRI Neuroimaging Study Finds

Last summer, a group of researchers
 published a study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in which they
used fMRI technology to show
auditory working memory training
 (such as the auditory sequential processing activities in Simply Smarter) resulted in physical changes 
to the brain. In addition to showing
 auditory working memory can be
 trained, this research was able…

Science Corner Vol. 1: Cracking the Code Behind the Cognitive Development Challenges of Down syndrome
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Science Corner Vol. 1: Cracking the Code Behind the Cognitive Development Challenges of Down syndrome

Have you ever wondered what it is exactly about the extra chromosome 21 that makes cognitive development in children with Down syndrome so challenging? Just this March researchers at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute published research that may have cracked the code on this one. The researchers have found that a protein called sorting nexin…