Indian British kids less crazy than White British kids

Some researchers have looked at the mental health of Indian-British kids compared with White British kids and those of other ethnoses and found that Indians have fewer mental health problems.

In this study, researchers used data from the 1999 and 2004 British Child and Adolescent Mental Health Surveys, which took a nationwide sample of 5-16 year olds living in England. The proportion of Indian children with any mental health disorder was 3.7%, the lowest of any major ethnic group and substantially lower than the 10.0% proportion in White children. This Indian mental health advantage was driven by Indian children having fewer behavioural problems (e.g. aggressive or antisocial behaviour) and fewer hyperactivity problems. This pattern was reported by parents, teachers and children alike, suggesting that it reflects a real difference and is not the result of chance or biased reporting.

Part of the Indian mental health advantage was explained by the fact that Indian children were more likely to live in two parent familes and had higher academic abilities. Most of the advantage, however, was not explained by the major known risk factors. In addition, Indian children did not show the strong socio-economic gradient in behavioural and hyperactivity problems which was observed in Whites.

So why is this? The authors looked at the usual suspects and threw up their hands. There are other conceivable suspects. Maybe people from that region are genetically different in the parts of the brain that cause mental disorders. I doubt it. We don't know if Indians in India are the same, and I think we would have noticed if a couple of billion people had 1/3 as much mental illness as Europeans. Maybe not.

Another modestly plausible suspect is epigenetics. Maybe getting curry through mother's milk affects early myelination, or maybe the way Indian moms handle their infants affects their seratonin/dopamine balance. 

I'd put my first (also exceedingly modest) bet on culture, possibly acting through epigenetics. If I had to guess (and it's part of the Blogger's Oath that I will guess with a strength of opinion inverse to my actual knowledge of the subject), I'd guess that something in White British culture that makes kids crazy is ameliorated by the way Indian moms treat their little kids. And it probably has something to do with brain development. Is that general enough? 

Many British kids having a hard time learning to talk, so they say

I don't understand this at all, and I don't think I believe it. A survey in Britain found that 1 in 6 kids, and nearly 1/4 of boys, have difficulty learning to talk and understand speech. 4% of kids had not said their first word by age 3.

It was an internet survey by a marketing firm, with parents reporting on their own kids' linguistic development. The parents all said they talked to their kids and read to them, told them stories, sang nursery rhymes, all the things parents need to do to teach their kids to speak, and still 1/4 of boys have a hard time with it, and 4% don't say a word until age 3.

I have a hard time believing the underlying claim of kids not learning to speak, because people are so hard-wired to learn to speak whatever their parents speak, and the parents all claim they are doing what we know they need to do. How could we survive as a species if 1/4 of the males have a hard time learning what distinguishes us from apes? If 1/4 of British males do, Britain is in serious trouble.

But suppose the survey results are correctly reported. What could be causing it?

Teaching 3-year-old boys to write in Britain

The elementary schoolization of preschool is happening in Britain, too. There are several articles in British newspapers about how poorly British boys read poorly compared with girls, and the government is about to order "nurseries and childminders" to spend more time teaching 3- and 4-year-old boys to write. These two cover it best.

Some orphanages as good for kids as foster care

Our images of orphanages come from Dickens, Annie, and horrendous tales from Romania, where care for kids is less important than running a business. But recent research discussed in Scientific American says these are not the usual type in third-world countries.

Researchers looked at 3000 6 to 12 year olds kids in either foster care or orphanages in Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, India, and Cambodia and found that "Health, emotional and cognitive functioning, and physical growth were no worse for institution-living than community-living OAC (orphan kids), and generally better than for community-living OAC cared for by persons other than a biological parent."

That is, kids in orphanages did as well as foster kids in cognitive measures and mostly better than foster kids in things like general  health and specific indicators of health, such as likelihood of having had a cough or diarrhea in the last 2 weeks, or likelihood of being sick on the day of the interview. Height, weight, and BMI were the same for each.

The difference between these orphanages and the ones in Romania seems to be that the adults in these care about the kids. Many of them live in the orphanage, many without a salary. And they are mostly small, averaging 25 to 30 kids each.

On reflection, it should not be a surprise either that groups of 25 Kenyan orphans living with people who care about them should do better than Romanian kids in industrial nurseries, or that orphanages in third-world countries would be staffed by such people. Good for them. They're doing God's work.

The effect of modernization on kids' cognitive abilities

Interesting study in Child Development showing that living a modern life changes the kinds of things the brain gets good at.

Using previously collected data from the late 1970s, the researchers looked at almost 200 children ages 3 to 9 in Belize, Kenya, Nepal, and American Samoa. When the data were collected, these four communities differed in the availability of resources that are typically associated with modernity, such as having writing tablets and books, electricity, a home-based water supply, a radio and TV set, and a car.

Children in communities with more modern resources performed better in some areas of cognitive functioning, such as certain types of memory and pattern recognition, and they took part in more complex sequences of play. The researchers note that these differences don't mean that children from more modern communities are more advanced intellectually; rather, the findings reflect the cognitive skills that are valued and promoted in the communities where the children live.

The researchers discuss this in terms of the Flynn effect, whereby IQ rises each generation and believe that it is due to increasing environmental complexity, which would also explain the current results.

Reading and writing as a second language

A study on reading annd writing Arabic has implications for teaching reading to some American kids.

Modern Arabs speak various dialects of modern Arabic that can be unintelligible to each other, and their spoken language works in Arab brains just as spoken English works in English-speaking brains.

Written Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic), is the same in every Arab country and is what is taught in every Arabic school (except the madrassas that teach classical Arabic, to read the Koran in). It is different from any of the dialects of spoken Arabic.

Arabic speakers have a  harder time learning to read than speakers of other languages. It turns out that written Arabic is handled in their brains as a second language, whereas standard English speakers handle written and spoken English as different representations of the same language. It's like growing up speaking Spanish or African American English and learning to read using books written in standard English or French at the same time you're learning standard English or French. You're better off learning to read in your own language and then transferring that skill to the new language.

Preschool teachers reinforce gender stereotypes

According to research from the University of Gothenburg, a preschooler's gender determines how he or she is treated and responded to in play and learning activities, and when the children's possibilities become expanded, it is usually a result of the children's and not the teachers' initiative.

And this was in Sweden, where gender equality is a fetish. It reminds me of an old TV documentary, maybe a Nova. It showed a mom and dad with their son and daughter, one at a time. The parents said they treated their kids identically, but when they were given a task to help one of the kids with a task that was too hard for the kids to do by themself but easy enough if explained (something to do with sorting shapes and colors), when it was the boy's turn they said things like, "Now, this one is orange and a triangle. This one is orange but a square." When it was they girl's turn they said (I think this is an exact quote), "Aren't we having fun?"

But as with racial civil rights and gay acceptance, it is the kids who are moving us forward.

"But the study finds that it is the children that reformulate and expand their possibilities. There is not a single example in the material where teachers consciously challenge children to engage in border crossing."

Paying working moms to stay home in Germany

Germany is considering paying moms $225 a month if they'll stay home with their kids under 3. The reasoning is just that moms should be home with their kids, and the kids should simply not be in day care. Germans seem to agree with this, since only 18% of kids under 3 are cared for by a third party. (Only? I wonder what the percent is in the US.)

The problem is that when you subtract the cost of child care (in looking around the web while writing this, I found people talking about paying $60 or so a day for preschool in Munich, and $1250 a month someplace else) from the wages a poor immigrant makes, they might make a profit by staying home, so the kids who need the child development part of child care most are most likely to lose it through this program. Child care functions as State Preschool there, where poor immigrant kids from Turkey learn to speak and act German. (And I don't want to hear about the kids keeping  their culture; I'm more concerned about them getting a good job when they're of age.)

Japan to introduce child care allowance

Next June,  Japan will begin giving citizens a child care allowance. The legislation is for $289 a month, but for the first year it will be half payments.

Cooked vs Packaged meals in India's state preschool program

One of the burning child development policy issues in India (which has some fascinating issues I expect to touch on from time to time in this blog) is whether to serve hot, cooked meals or packaged foods to kids in their Integrated Child Development Scheme.

They have created over 40,000 centers nationwide since 1975, providing education, health, and nutrition services to pregnant or nursing mothers and 23 million kids under 6. Half of those kids are in ECE. It's sort of a combination of WIC, SCHIP, and Head Start (or, for Californians, Healthy Families and State Preschool).

In general, India has made a huge effort to save large percentages of preschool slots for the lowest classes, even in private schools. (They use a euphemism for the lowest class that I can't remember. If it comes to me, I'll update this post.)