Parents and teachers know sleep matters and now research suggests preschoolers who have regular and early bedtimes score better on math, literacy and language tests.

The study found regular bedtime “was the most consis­tent predictor of positive developmental outcomes at age four.”

Scores for receptive and expressive language, phonological awareness, literacy and early math abilities were higher in children whose parents reported having rules about what time their child goes to bed. – “Study Links Regular Bedtimes to Better Language, Reading and Math Skills in Preschool Children,” 6/7/10.

The problem is researchers also found many kids do not get enough sleep, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which released a summary of the study this week. Preschoolers should sleep at least 11 hours a night, the group recommends.

“Getting parents to set bedtime routines can be an important way to make a significant impact on children's emergent literacy and language skills,” Erika Gaylor, PhD, lead author of the study and an early childhood policy researcher at the non-profit SRI International, said in a statement. “Pediatricians can easily promote regular bedtimes with parents and children, behaviors which in turn lead to healthy sleep.”

The group also recommends telling and reading bedtime stories as part of a routine that will help kids fall asleep. Yesterday, The Juggle reported a different study found links between poor sleep and bad behavior among grade schoolers.

(Thanks to Bloomberg BusinessWeek for highlighting this research.)

Are the Kids All Right? Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd kicks off a series of hearings  today on the “State of the American Child.”

Hearings will examine all aspects of children’s lives: their health from birth to adulthood, their educational experience in and out of the classroom, and their life at home with their families and in their communities; with the focus of the hearings being on the inter-connectedness of all these aspects and how they shape and define the lives of our children. – “Dodd Launches Landmark Series of Hearings: The State of the American Child.”

We will try to check back and see if senators find answers to the hearings’ questions, which include:

• What do our children need to succeed?
• How are we doing in providing those resources?

Researchers have learned a lot about the way the brain acquires language. They know that when children are between 9 and 15 months old their brain is focused on sounds. They know that a real life teacher has a much bigger impact than a DVD. And, they know that elementary school students who have a second language score higher on achievement tests.

Watch Jackie Friedman Mighdoll, founder of Seattle-based Sponge, a school that offers language classes for young children, talk about the research that supports exposing young childrento one or more languages, the best way to help children learn a new language and the options are available for older children.

Watch online. 

Preschoolers are watching a lot more television than we thought.

Preschool-age children in home-based daycare watched, on average, 2.4 hours of TV a day, compared to those in centers who sat in front of a television 0.4 hours, a report released this morning in Pediatrics found.

These findings could reverberate throughout the early learning world. That’s because other research has begun linking too much screen time among preschool students to language delays, attention issues, obesity and even aggression, the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, head of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Hospital, says. The study is the first in more than two decades to explore TV watching in child care, a span of time when both television and child care changed dramatically.

“At the same time, studies show that high quality preschool can be beneficial to children’s development. Unfortunately, for many children, the potential benefits of preschool may be being displaced by passive TV viewing,” Christakis said in a statement.

While it may be surprising to learn preschool-age children in home-based care average more than two hours of TV time, when you dig a little deeper you find that when these programs have college-educated teachers, television-watching levels are nearer to those at centers.

This could be yet another argument for quality child care, since the telephone-based study of 168 child care programs suggests when teachers have higher training kids are less likely to watch television.

The report is only the latest in the still emerging field of research into television’s impact on children. Earlier this year Christakis released a study that found babies hear far fewer words and conversations when a television is on.

In recent years, we also learned that 40 percent of babies watch TV and that baby DVDs could impact acquisition of vocabulary.

The twist in today’s report, though, is that much of the attention has focused on kids watching TV at home. It looks like we need to pay attention to those television sets in classrooms as well as living rooms.

“We are increasingly technologizing childhood, which may prove harmful to the next generation of adults. Parents and health care providers should know how many total hours of screen time and what programs constitute children’s media diet, just as they should know how many calories and what foods they’re ingesting per day,” Christakis added.

Luckily, today’s report offers tips for parents and early learning educators:

• Talk to your daycare teachers and director about TV use and your concerns.
• Staff should “remember that screen time is not proven to provide any benefits to children and may in fact cause harm.”
• “Set ‘media-free’ days.”
• “Avoid using TV as a reward.”
• “Watch TV actively with children.”

You can read all of the tips near the bottom of the press release.

Check out the full article here.

We knew babies learned a lot in the crib, but a new report suggests they start developing a building block of language in the womb, reflecting their parents’ speech pattern as soon as they start crying.

In a study of 60 French and German babies, European researchers found newborn cries reflected the different tones of their parents – a rising melodic tone for French babies and a falling tone among German infants, Lisa Belkin reports this week in The New York Times parenting blog, Motherlode.

The research is interesting on several levels, including the idea that newborns are picking up their native language even before they are born, Science Daily says. And it is further support for quality prenatal care, a focus of work at Thrive by Five Washington and other early learning groups.

I guess early learning begins before birth.

Of course, many parents think it’s important to talk and sing to their babies in the womb, but this new finding suggests those sounds have a specific impact. (It will also spur another round of potentially silly devices, Belkin points out.)

''The capacity to learn language is inborn, and it's shaped by what [infants] hear in the environment," she (Diane Paul, director of clinical issues in speech-language pathology at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association) says. The new study is saying that ''even before birth, the differences between languages are being heard, the babies are hearing the different melodic patterns, and they are born with the pattern that is more closely related to the melodic pattern they have heard in the language around them." – Newborns' Cries Reflect Parents' Language, EMedicinehealth, 11/5/09.

Although it can't hurt to talk or sing to your unborn baby, Paul says parents-to-be should realize that there is no guarantee doing so will mean the baby will talk sooner or better than those not sung or talked to before birth.

Washington State News

• Column: To Be Equal – High Quality Childhood Education A Step Closer for All – 9/30/09, The Seattle Medium
• Stimulus, grants fund early-childhood ed district-wide – 9/30/ The Tacoma Weekly

National News

• Op-Ed: Early education vital to health of armed forces – 10/1/09, Morning Sentinel (ME)
• Can Better Child Care Shrink Some Achievement Gaps? – 9/30/09, Education Week Blog: Politics K-12
• Race to the Top Grants: Not Just a K-12 Thing? – 9/29/09, Education Week Blog: Politics K-12
• Parents puzzled why developmental screening for pre-K now being enforced – 9/29/09, New York Daily News
• From Birth, Engage Your Child With Talk – 9/28/09, The New York Times
• Parent to Parent: Finding a play-based pre-K – 9/28/09, The Buffalo News (NY)
• Op-Ed: Ready to learn? – 9/27/09, The State (SC)
• Op-Ed: Kindergarten gives children the best possible start – 9/27/09, The Eagle-Tribune (MA)
• Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self Control? – 9/25/09, New York Times Magazine
• Learning language early – 9/18/09, The Standard Times (MA)
   

Policy

• Texas Children Lose Out on High-Quality Child Care Because of Limited Funding – 10/1/09, National Women's Law Center 
• The New Pre-Schoolers: Tested, and Ready for Business? – 9/30/09, Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media Blog: Early Stories
• From the Big Easy, where pre-k is anything but – 9/25/09, Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media Blog: Early Stories

When the television is on babies hear far fewer words and conversations, which could hurt their speech and possibly cognitive development, a new study released this week found.

Researchers found that for each hour a TV was turned on and audible, between 500 and 1,000 fewer words were spoken, which is important because other research suggests the number of words a baby hears plays an important role in development.

“We’ve known that television exposure during infancy is associated with language delays and attentional problems, but so far it has remained unclear why,” lead researcher Dr. Dimitri Christakis said in a statement. “Since 30 percent of American households now report having the television always on, even when no one is watching, these findings have grave implications for language acquisition and therefore perhaps even early brain development.”

Christakis added the best tools for early childhood language acquisition are spoken and imitated words of parents, teachers and caregivers. Unfortunately, each additional hour of TV, whether as background or entertainment, was “associated with a decrease of 770 words the child heard from an adult” during research sessions, the press summary stated.

These are the latest findings on the impact of TV on babies and kids from a group of University of Washington researchers, including Christakis, who also found “40 Percent of Babies Watch TV, UW Study Finds”  and “Videos Won't Make Baby Smart”.

You can preview a video of Dr. Christakis talking about his latest findings and offering TV tips here.  

Seattle Children’s Hospital offers the following recommendations:

• “Avoid TV for babies under age two.” (The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV)
• “Keep TV off during meals.”
• “Avoid using TV as a reward.”
• “Watch TV with your child.”
• “Keep TVs out of bedrooms.”

You can see the full list in the press summary

For further reading: “Even Background TV May Delay Infants' Speech” – Live Science, via MSNBC.com.

(Thanks to LiveScience.com for highlighting this news.)

Baby videos are back in the news as the Today Show, Your Healthy Family examines research this morning about whether those DVDs help, or maybe hinder infant vocabulary.

The Today Show’s Dr. Nancy Synderman examined these findings and recommendations on DVDs and babies. While there didn’t appear to be any new breakthrough research, the story brought the issue back into the public arena.

Back in 2007, University of Washington researchers drew national attention when they suggested overuse of videos for babies may lead to a small decrease in vocabulary development. The long term impact of this on a child’s vocabulary development is not known yet.

Disney now owns Baby Einstein and responded to these claims by saying it had millions of satisfied customers and that the study “collected no specific data concerning – and conducted no specific evaluation of – the viewing of ‘Baby Einstein’ videos or their specific impact on children…” The Today Show reported.

Even as data emerges about possible negative impacts of baby DVDs, researchers say we are only beginning to understand the impact media is having on children as it moves deeper into their lives.

But since this story broke two summers ago, the buzz around baby videos appears to have quieted, though that is based on anecdotal evidence and not a scientific study. And those DVDs are still selling, according to Dr. Synderman.

According to Danielle Z. Kassow, Ph.D. of Thrive by Five Washington, “The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television for children under the age of two years of age.”

You can read more about the work of UW researchers on TV and kids at http://www.maketvwork.com/.