Potential test to identify autism in toddlers

This is going to scare hell out of too many moms. They showed movies to a bunch of kids age 14 to 42 months. One side of the screen showed children dancing or doing yoga, and the other side showed a computer screen saver (in their terms, "dynamic social images" and "dynamic geometric patterns) and bounced an infrared light beam off the kids' eye to track what they were looking at.

• 2% of typical  kids preferred to look at the screen saver (1 out of 51)
• 9% of developmentally delayed kids preferred the screen saver
• 40% of kids already diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder preferred the screen saver. They also had a different pattern of eye movements, changing the gaze less often.

I wonder if it's dose related, meaning does the percentage get higher with more severe autism?

But using the figures as given, as a test for autism, this method gives 2% false positives and 60% false negatives. I'd say this falls into the category of interesting to know, and if you run across a kid who gets fixated on the center computer screen saver more than other kids, it would be worthwhile screening the kid for ASD.

Kicking like a girl

I knew the expression "to throw like a girl." It means an awkward, stiff-armed, inefficient throw, unless you have seen serious softballers, in which case it means hitting the catchers's glove at home plate from the outfield.
I speculate that those girls who do throw like a girl still throw like a toddler, whereas boys (and girls who play softball regularly) grow out of it and use a more efficient motion of the arm.

But I'd never heard of kicking like a girl. Apparently it's real. Some researchers hooked up a couple of dozen male and female college soccer players with electrodes, reflective markers, and video cameras everywhere, and they found that

They found that male players activate the hip flexors (inside of the hip) in their kicking leg and the hip abductors (outside of the hip) in their supporting leg more than females.

In the kicking leg, men generated almost four times as much hip flexor activation as females (123 percent in males compared to 34 percent in females).

In the supporting leg, males generated more than twice as much gluteus medius activation (124 percent in males compared with 55 percent in females) and vastus medialis activation (139 percent in males compared with 69 percent in females).

By itself, this is just a moderately interesting difference between the sexes, but it's also true that women suffer many more injuries to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) than men do. The authors suggest that the greater use of hip flexors and abductors by men may protect them against injury to the ACL.

It seems to me, not being an athlete myself nor associated with any, that this should be a coachable thing. If girls are using different muscles to kick with than boys, then they are somehow swinging their legs differently, and that should be teachable.

Spanking

This article on  spanking habits puts it differently than I would. It says "spanking children who misbehave has been a source of debate among child development researchers." I think that's like saying there is debate about evolution among biologists. A quick look through scholar.google.com found one study that said only some kids are made more aggressive by spanking, and the other 20 said it is a general thing. As I said the other day, people vary.

This particular article was talking about spanking in North and South Carolina, where it says 80% of 3 to 5s get spanked. Overall, they found a decrease in spanking by hand over 30  years, but an increase over 7 years in spanking with an object.

Why do parents spank preschoolers more than other kids? The study authors say, "Kids between 3 and 5, they lie, they cheat, they steal," he said. "They do things to test their limits because they're figuring out the world," and sometimes parents just lose it.

Most parents who do spank their kids do it in anger, he says, not as a calculated tool of discipline. One group disagrees:

"It can be done in a right way and a wrong way," said Brittany Farrell, assistant policy director at the N.C. Family Policy Council, which supports corporal discipline as a tool parents should have. "I think that's an important distinction to be made because the point of the discipline is to teach."

I was about to make a broad statement about people who beat their kids, maybe with some southern slur, but I've begun to think it is related to my ideas about Jane Jacobs' moral syndromes, where she and I divide people into basically liberals and conservatives based on what kinds of acts they view as honorable or dishonorable. I would predict that people who spank their kids are firmly in the guardian moral syndrome and are more likely to be conservative and Republican than liberal and Democrat.

The problem with this, you see, is that I think spanking is almost always useless or harmful and often both. While some kids would not be harmed by it (see: People vary), you can't tell which ones, so spanking kids is a dumb thing to do. One might say, but it makes you feel better smacking the kid. Well, it doesn't make me feel better, so I feel a little moral superiority to someone it does make feel better.

But all this is in the brains of the grown-ups. Conservatives and spankers and liberals and non-spankers all act as they do because of the synapses that fire in their brains. They spank because their brain makes them.

So we non-spankers can't hold it against them when they smack their kids. We can try to stop it, because it seems wrong to us. We can try public awareness campaigns, as we did with putting infants to sleep on their backs. We can try moral suasion, as we did with drunk driving. We can pass laws against it, as we have done with smoking in certain places. But we're not going to stop spanking until we cure conservatism.

The study found that 80% of households in North and South Carolina spanked their preschoolers. I wonder what the percentage is in San Francisco?

Early puberty

There's something funny about the reasoning here. It's an article on a study of data from the NICHHD study on early child development. They found that 15-month-old girls "who avoided their mother following the separation or could not be comforted by her return" started puberty earlier than "(b)abies who smiled, vocalized, reached, or otherwise demonstrated appreciation that their mother was back."

From this and the observed fact that girls seem to be starting puberty earlier than they used to, the authors conclude (or should I say hypothesize?) that lack of attachment caused the early puberty in the NICHHD girls. They further hypothesize that the species wide early puberty is caused by stress in the environment, which apparently causes animals to breed earlier.

"An evolutionary biology perspective says, 'look, the thing that nature most cares about -- with respect to all living things, humans included -- is dispersing genes in future generations,'" says Belsky. "Thus, under those conditions in which the future appears precarious, where I might not even survive long enough to breed tomorrow, then I should mature earlier so I can mate earlier before that precarious future might get me." This is the evolutionary logic, according to Belsky, which led to the prediction -- and now evidence -- that early insecurity should be related to earlier pubertal development.

This sure seems fuzzy to me. Maybe it's the metaphorical language ("I should mature earlier") when I'm sure the actual researchers are probably thinking about epigenetic factors, some hormone released in the brains of insecure babies causes some genes to turn on early.

But the actual reasoning chain seems fuzzy to me, too. Something about being insecure at 15 months causes girls to start puberty earlier than other girls. Therefore this recent drop in age of puberty is caused by a species-wide insecurity in baby girls. The reason one group of girls starts puberty earlier than another group is the same reason average girls now go through puberty earlier than average girls used to. It just doesn't follow. It's interesting, and I'm glad they did it, and we can probably learn something useful from it, but I don't see how the big step follows.

Do kids of gays do well in school?

In a recent parsing of census data to look at kids held back a year in school, the answer is yes, if you control for parental education. Having straight parents didn't help compared to gay parents, but what did help was

• having parents, foster or real, not a group home, 
• there being two parents, and 
• the parents being married to each other. 

The number that struck me in this article was that Those who were awaiting adoption or placement in a foster home were held back about 34 percent of the time, compared with 7% of kids of straight married couples. That's 5 times higher. Some of it maybe cortisol secreted during the stress that brought them to foster care, but for whatever reasons, we're really failing our foster kids.

And it's another argument for gay marriage. As though I needed another one.

ADHD misdiagnoses

I'd never thought of this, but it sure sounds plausible. This study says one reason some kindergarteners are diagnosed as ADHD is that they are fidgetier than the other kids in class. One reason some kids are fidgetier than other kids in kindergarten is that they are a year younger than the oldest kids in class.

Kids born on December 1, who are the youngest kids in their kindergarten class California, are a year smaller and have a year less cognitive and social development than kids born on December 2 of the year before. This is why athletes and school leaders are disproportionately born in the early part of a school year, because that makes them a year bigger, smarter, and more coordinated than the kids born late in the cycle.

And the study linked to above says there may be a million kids misdiagnosed as ADHD. A million kids getting stimulants every day for years. I guess that's no worse than giving them bisphenyl A or organophosphates, which we do as a matter of government policy of acquiescing to corporate convenience. At least Ritalin doesn't screw up their sex hormones.

For the record, I was 4 years 6 months and 8 days on entering kindergarten; 4 years 6 months was the cutoff in California back in the Pleistocene. My mom had to go to work, and kindergarten was child care. She always regretted it. I was always glad. I wasn't the biggest, most coordinated, or most mature, but I was still the smartest. Although I guess it would be convenient to blame my character faults on it.

Effects of mom working during the first year

Child Development recently put out a monograph (sorry, no link; I'm reading an actual hard copy) on the effects on kids of mom working during the first year of their lives. The subjects were non-Hispanic Whites or African American, in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care.

For kids of moms working full time (but not part time), white kids (but not black kids) had significantly lower scores on some (but not all) cognitive measures at 3, 4.5, and in first grade.

But there were some advantages, too: more money, less stress over money (therefore less cortisol flowing in everyone), and putting the kid in a better preschool when she's 3.

The conclusion to the abstract says, "These results confirm that maternal employment in the 1st year of life may confer both advantages and disadvantages and that for the average non-Hispanic white child those effects balance each other." It's a gratifying conclusion, but I wish they had a comma coach.

Another bad thing you can do to a fetus

Children who were exposed to organophosphate pesticides while still in their mother's womb were more likely to develop attention disorders years later. ... Organophosphate pesticides act by disrupting neurotransmitters, particularly acetylcholine, which plays an important role in sustaining attention and short-term memory. ... Many of these same UC Berkeley researchers are also finding that children with certain genetic traits may be at greater risk. ...

In the study on attention problems, researchers tested for six metabolites of organophosphate pesticides in mothers twice during pregnancy and in the children several times after birth. Together, the metabolites represent the breakdown products of about 80 percent of all the organophosphate pesticides used in the Salinas Valley.

The researchers then evaluated the children at age 3.5 and 5 years for symptoms of attention disorders and ADHD using maternal reports of child behavior, performance on standardized computer tests, and behavior ratings from examiners. They controlled for potentially confounding factors such as birthweight, lead exposure and breastfeeding.

Each tenfold increase in prenatal pesticide metabolites was linked to having five times the odds of scoring high on the computerized tests at age 5, suggesting a greater likelihood of a child having clinical ADHD. The effect appeared to be stronger for boys than for girls.

I'm not good at always washing fruit before putting it in the bowl nor veggies when I'm cooking, but this suggests that pregnant women, and people who cook for them, should fetishize washing fruits and veggies, make it as strong a stricture as not drinking.

My first thought is to ask why we are putting poisons like that on our food, and my second thought is the answer: We can't grow as much of the types of food people want to eat, as many people as want to eat it, at a price they are willing to pay, without industrial farming, which requires vast amounts of pesticides to sustain itself.

It's one of  those cases where the interests of the individual do not match the interests of the group. I would never use a pesticide on my home-grown tomatoes. I have some Safer Soap that I  haven't used in years, and I infused some olive oil with red peppers to spray on them, to try to deter the skunks, so I lose some tomatoes to bugs, but on the other hand, I don't eat any organophosphates with my tomatoes. (Terrible crop this year. Sparse crop of mostly mealy tomatoes. The one that has had any decent tomatoes is a Celebrity, but even it has had just a few tomatoes. Usually in August we're harvesting big basketfuls, but we're getting only a few per week, and them not very good. I blame the weather.)


But if the interest of the group is having enough food for everyone, we need pesticides, and a system for washing them off before we eat them. Maybe there's a way to clean them before packing at the grower. Keep the pesticide on the farm. 

Measuring teachers

Sunday's LA Times had another big article on Sunday, telling which 5th grade teachers in the LA Unified School District are good and bad, with names and pictures of a couple of the best and worst.

The Times got LAUSD to give them 7 years of math and English test scores and gave them to a moonlighting researcher from the Rand Corporation, who applied a statistical approach called value-added analysis.

They looked at test scores as percentiles, to control for home-life issues. If a kid scored int he 30th percentile because his mom is single, poor, and uneducated, so he got to kindergarten knowing half as many words as the other kids, he's probably going to score in the 30th percentile next year, too, unless he has a particularly good or particularly bad teacher.

The Times found that in some teachers' classrooms in the same school (which controls for neighborhood and local events), kids consistently raised their percentiles, and in others, kids consistently lowered them. Kids got better or worse compared with the other kids. The difference is attributed to teacher quality.

This has good and bad aspects to it. I think the methodology is nicely done. It's similar to an idea I had, but much simpler and cheaper. I've written before why and  how I thought we should measure teachers. And we already knew from a twin study and other research that some teachers are better than others at teaching reading.

This analysis I think accurately tells which teachers are good at having their kids score well on California's standardized 5th grade tests. To the extent that scoring well on those tests measures the quality of a kid's education, the analysis is valid to measure teachers. The Times' experts said they thought it should account for  a fraction of the measurement. (I forget what fraction they said, and the newspaper is all the way in the living room, and I can't find it in the online version. If I find it, I'll insert it, delete this sentence, and pretend I knew it all along.)

But you know that the cheap, easy, incomplete measure will become the sole standard in practice. And teachers will have even more incentive to teach to the test.

One thing I wonder about. Perry Preschool's educational advantage was all in girls. Boys showed improvement in not receiving social services as an adult, not being arrested, and owning their own home at age 27, but income and educational advantages were pretty much all for girls. So I wonder how the LA Times analysis would look if you separated girls from boys. And if you looked at boys arrest records after 10 years.

And so to work, with images of failing teachers and lost kids in my head.

Curing lebianism?

The LA Times had an article yesterday about a medical treatment that brings up an interesting philosophical question. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia is a rare condition in which a girl may develop "ambiguous genitalia," looking like they have a penis, which could, for some girls, be embarrassing. Something like a quarter of girls with this condition are lesbians.

But there is a treatment. It doesn't cure the underlying adrenal dysfunction, but it makes the girl develop normal looking female genitalia. (I guess I should  say "more typical genitalia.") It also has a side effect of feminizing the girls, making them girly-girls. And reducing the incidence of lesbianism to that of society at large.

The Times says gay and lesbian groups are outraged that any treatment that would reduce the incidence of homosexuality would even be considered.

I think they are wrong to be outraged. If gayness and straightness are morally equal (a proposition I'm not prepared to debate), then the issue is whether having ambiguous genitalia is harmful to girls. People vary, and some girls probably learn to deal with it. For others, it probably ruins their lives. My own guess is it would cause more withdrawal than zits or fat or stuttering ever could, and if we can prevent it, we should.

If a treatment for a fetal heart defect increased the percentage of girls born lesbian to 10%, I would have no problem with that. If an otherwise valid medical treatment happens to reduce the number of lesbians among these girls to societal levels, that's a situation, not a problem. Being a lesbian is not morally superior to being straight. The treatment is not to prevent lesbianism but to keep girls from growing a penis.

And these are not your kids. When your daughter has congenital adrenal hyperplasia, you talk with your doctors and decide what to do about your kids. Let these other mothers do what they think is best for their kids.

Puberty in second grade

I haven't written about the recent study about girls of 7 or 8 growing breasts and pubic hair, because several ideas were swirling in my head. I still haven't sorted them out, so I guess I'll just blurt them out.

There is a syndrome whereby toddlers grow breasts. I've always assumed something like that was some gene getting turned on by accident of DNA or of environment. This doesn't seem to be that.

Reported age of menarche has been dropping for a hundred and fifty years. Much of this seems to have to do with nutrition. Your body needs a certain amount of body fat before it figures it's ready to breed, and girls are getting that body fat younger than they used to.

Or it could be that a certain percentage of young girls have always done this, but medical books, written by men we  hope are not especially interested in 7- and 8-year-old girls, hadn't noticed. Because cadavers for dissection  used to come pretty much exclusively from poor people, there is at least one case where the size of an organ shrunk by a disease of poverty was taken as a standard. Maybe richer girls get enough fat earlier than the poor girls who formed the baseline for 19th century medical texts. (I love speculation about research; it's so much easier than actual, you know, research about it.)

Or it could be that all these organophosphates and other chemicals we're putting into food containers and the food itself are changing the average sexuality of girl humans. And boys.

Or it could be a combination of nutrition and some long-term genetic change. I'd like to know if it's happening in Botswana and Bolivia, too. Or cosmic rays from the hole in the ozone layer. Or the flying spaghetti monster willed it. I need to go get some more coffee.

People Who Are Angry Pay More Attention to Rewards Than Threats

The title, which is the Association for Psychological Science's press release title, pretty much says it all. More specifically, "Angry people spent more time looking at the rewarding pictures."

The implication for child development is that parents (or teachers) who are faced with an angry child (or teenager) are more likely to calm her down if you offer her something than if you threaten to take something away. It sounds like appeasement.

Crap. Time to get ready for work again. Gainful employment can be satisfying, but it cuts into so many other things.

How to pour champagne

It's by-God gratifying to know that in a time of social, political, and economic upheaval, some people can keep their priorities straight. Some French researchers have found that pouring champagne down the side of an angled glass, rather than straight down the middle in a vertical glass, preserves up to twice as much of the carbon dioxide, so it pops on your tongue, not in the glass. That could be their slogan. Keeping the champagne cooler also helps. They like 39 degrees Fahrenheit.

Another bad effect of stereotyping

You remember the study (sorry, no link) where a bunch of black or white college kids were given a series of tests, and in the first one, the subjects were told the researchers were just calibrating, and it wouldn't be scored. The second group was told it would be scored. The third was told it would be scored by race.

Black men scored the same as white men in the first test, worse in the second, and still worse in the third. As I recall, black women were not (as) effected.

A new study looked at something similar. They had two groups of women do a math test  to "determine whether or not they were capable and smart in math" after getting either supportive or stereotypic messages, and then later they tested them on aggression and self control.

"In these follow-up tests, the women who felt discriminated against ate more than their peers in the control group. They showed more hostility than the control group. And they performed more poorly on tests that measured their cognitive skills," says Inzlicht.

This explains so much. Stopping for Haagen-Dazs after a particularly unhappy job interview. Blowing up at the kid. My only caveat would be that I think they tested the people soon after the stereotyping occurred. It doesn't show that it persists, but I believe it does, when such slights continually occur.

This reminds me of Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, in which he says slaves become lazy and shiftless as a rational response to the condition of slavery.

The lesson for child care and development is not to stereotype kids, but we do with regard to sex, and we probably do with other characteristics, too, such as  income and race. State Preschool and Title 5 programs have to be on watch against teachers who stereotype kids based on the fact that mom brings the kid by bus or  looks tough, or tattered, or frazzled, or doesn't speak English, or wears a headscarf.

Poverty and preschool vocabulary

We all know that rich kids enter preschool and kindergarten with bigger vocabularies than poor kids, and this both predicts and influences a number of adult outcomes, but I didn't know the difference was so big. My new favorite blog is Child's Play, and the particular post I'm thinking of is Don't Bite: Does Self Control Determine Class. This is one of a series of posts riffing off the experiment where a kid gets one M&M or marshmallow now or two when the lady comes back into the room, and we watch the kids fidget. The type of people who read this blog would be very interested in the whole series.

One detail struck me:

“(c)hildren from welfare families hear on the order of thousands fewer words per day than children from professional families, leading to what Hart and Risley term a “meaningful difference” over time. While it is difficult to quantify the impact this impoverished input has on learning, many researchers believe the effect to be massive. Just to give you an idea – by the age of three, children from professional families actually have larger recorded vocabularies than the parents of the welfare families.”

Thousands more words a day heard. I'm assuming this means total words, not different words. But even so, how could this be? I see two obvious guesses: Maybe poor kids spend more time with no or fewer adults around than rich kids, or maybe poor parents talk to each other less.

Oh, crap. It's time to get ready for work, and I'm not finished with this. I wanted to talk about implications for preschool curriculum and public policy. Well, you go read the series at Child's Play, and I'll get back to this. Or more likely, I'll move on to something else. Oh, shiny!

Thinking you can do it, or not, affects your brain activity

The extent to which you believe you will succeed or fail at a task affects the resources the brain brings to bear on the problem. If you think you can do it, the brain shows greater activity than if you don't think you can do it.

And when people who thought  themselves either good or bad were faced with different scenarios, people who thought they were good at something had highest brain activity when they had a chance at a big gain, and people who thought they were bad at it had highest brain activity when they stood a chance of a big loss. (Big, in this case, was $5 compared to $1 for college student test subjects.

If it were possible to make oneself believe that one is good at something, one might well become better at it. I guess that's the point of Stuart Smalley's affirmations. If you think you can, you'll try harder, and maybe you'll succeed.

I wonder if affirmations work. That is, I wonder if telling yourself you're good enough at something does change the brain activity when you get to the actual task? People (okay, college students) weren't good at knowing how good they really were, which fits other research. If you really do think you're bad at it, can you lie to yourself and convince yourself that you are good at it? Maybe if you're real gullible, since you know what a liar you are.

The people doing the research are "working toward the development of implanted neural prosthetic devices that would serve as an interface between severely paralyzed individuals' brain signals and artificial limbs -- allowing their planned actions to control the limbs' movements," which is the coolest thing I've heard in months.

You are who you are

A recent study says "Personality traits observed in childhood are a strong predictor of adult behavior." 

Yup. You are who you are, and you just get more of it as you age. From a group of 2400 kids studied in the 1960s, they found 144 of them 40 years later and found that:

Youngsters identified as verbally fluent – defined as unrestrained talkativeness – tended, as middle-aged adults, to display interest in intellectual matters, speak fluently, try to control the situation, and exhibit a high degree of intelligence. Children rated low in verbal fluency by their teachers were observed as adults to seek advice, give up when faced with obstacles, and exhibit an awkward interpersonal style.

Children rated as highly adaptable – defined as coping easily and successfully with new situations – tended, as middle-aged adults, to behave cheerfully, speak fluently and show interest in intellectual matters. Those who rated low in adaptability as children were observed as adults to say negative things about themselves, seek advice and exhibit an awkward interpersonal style.

Students rated as impulsive as adults were inclined to speak loudly, display a wide range of interests and be talkative. Those who were rated low on impulsivity were observed, as adults, to be fearful or timid, keep others at a distance and express insecurity.

Children whose teachers rated them as having a tendency to self-minimize – defined as humble, minimizing their own importance or never showing off – as adults were likely to express guilt, seek reassurance, say negative things about themselves and express insecurity. Those who were ranked low as self-minimizing were observed as adults to speak loudly, show interest in intellectual matters and exhibit condescending behavior.

This fits in so well with other studies showing perseverance of personality traits and political orientation.

So you can look around your classroom of 4 year olds and tell which ones you would like to be friends with 40 years later. 

Another prayer study

An associate professor in the religious studies department at Indiana University Bloomington went to Mozambique, to a Pentecostal faith healing group specializing in healing the blind and deaf. They tested the hearing and vision of some people, watched as the faith healer put his hands on them and made their ears hear and their eyes see. Then they published this in a journal as finding that proximity of the prayer is key to having it work.

I think it shows some people are susceptible to being gulled by faith healers. The people they tested were shills, and the people doing the "healing" were frauds who put one over on the "researchers."

$320,000 kindergarten teachers

A reader sent me a link to a New York Times article on the incremental monetary effect of good kindergarten teachers. It reports on some a report at a conference saying that, while the test score improvement provided by high-quality early education fades by middle school, test scores are not well associated with good adult outcomes, such as going to a good college, making more money, being married to a high wage-earner, or having a retirement plan, but the quality of one's kindergarten teacher is related to them.

The dataset was a study from the 1980s where they had randomly assigned 12,000 kids to kindergarten classes. The kids are now about 30, and how much they learned in kindergarten (a proxy for teacher quality) was related to how much they earned at age 27. And kids with some teachers learned more than kids with other teachers.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.

They say that 1 standard deviation in improvement in teacher quality raises students' annual earnings by 2.9%, so the incremental lifetime increase in earnings for a classroom of 20 kids from moving out a 25th percentile teacher and moving in a 75th percentile teacher is $320,000.

They looked at all the other things, like teacher experience and class size, and they had minor effects, but this one stood out.

If this scales with good teachers later on, quality of P-5 education could have an enormous effect on lifetime income. It is the educational version of the miracle of compound interest. You have more to build on for longer.

It's not an argument for paying kindergarten teachers $320,000 a year, but it is an argument for starting them at $50 or $60,000 and the good ones working up to $100,000 (or some numbers; I don't actually know how much we should pay them, just more).

And it is an argument for figuring out which teachers are good and which are not and either teaching them to be good or helping them find another career.

Baby boys sleep lighter than girls

Baby boys die from SIDS more often than girls do, so it was not implausible that boys should be harder to rouse from sleep than girls, but it turns out to be not so. For the first month or so, boys are more easily awakened by a puff of air than girls are, and by 2 or 3 months, there is no difference. On to some other plausible reason.

And yes, I did have a very nice vacation, thank you.