How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

/pdf/from-neurons-to-neighborhoods-the-science-of-early-childhood-3bfl5g72ow.pdf

From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

Background It is not clear to what extent maternal metabolism during pregnancy affects the cognitive and behavioral function of the offspring by altering brain development in utero. To investigate this question, we correlated measures of metabolism in pregnant diabetic and nondiabetic women with the intellectual development of their offspring. Methods The study included 223 pregnant women and their singleton offspring: 89 women had diabetes before pregnancy (pregestational diabetes mellitus), 99 had the onset of diabetes during pregnancy (gestational diabetes mellitus), and 35 had normal carbohydrate metabolism during their pregnancy. We correlated measures of maternal glucose and lipid metabolism (fasting plasma glucose levels, hemoglobin A1c levels, episodes of hypoglycemia, episodes of acetonuria, and plasma β-hydroxybutyrate and free fatty acid levels) with two measures of intellectual development in the offspring — the mental-development index of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, give...

https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199109263251303

Correlations between antepartum maternal metabolism and intelligence of offspring.

With increased numbers of women employed in their children’s first year of life and with increased attention being paid by parents and policy makers to the importance of early experiences for children, establishing the links that might exist between early maternal employment and child cognitive outcomes is more important than ever. Negative associations between maternal employment during the first year of life and children’s cognitive outcomes at age 3 (and later ages) have been reported using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth–Child Supplement. However, it was not known whether these findings would be replicated in another study, nor whether these results were due to features of child care (e.g., quality, type), home environment (e.g., provision of learning), and/or parenting (e.g., sensitivity). This study explored these issues using data on 900 European American children from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care, which provides information on child cognitive scores at 15, 24, and 36 months, as well as data about the home environment (as assessed by the Home Observation of the Measurement of the Environment Scale), parental sensitivity, and child-care quality and type over the first 3 years of life. Maternal employment by the ninth month was found to be linked to lower Bracken School Readiness scores at 36 months, with the effects more pronounced when mothers were working 30 hr or more per week and with effects more pronounced for certain subgroups (i.e., children whose mothers were not sensitive, boys, and children with married parents). Although quality of child care, home environment, and maternal sensitivity also mattered, the negative effects of working 30 hr or more per week in the first 9 months were still found, even when controlling for child-care quality, the quality of the home environment, and maternal sensitivity. Implications for policy are also discussed.

Maternal Employment and Child Cognitive Outcomes in the First Three Years of Life: The NICHD Study of Early Child Care.

Adverse neonatal outcomes have been associated with intrauterine exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). In a follow-up study of exposed and nonexposed infants, 123 infants tested at birth were administered Fagan's test of visual recognition memory at 7 months. 2 measures of prenatal PCB exposure, cord serum PCB level and maternal report of contaminated fish consumption, both predicted less preference for a novel stimulus. Preference for novelty decreased in a dose-dependent fashion with increasing levels of prenatal PCB exposure. Postnatal exposure from nursing was not related to visual recognition memory. The relation between prenatal exposure and visual recognition was not mediated by the neonatal deficits, suggesting that intrauterine PCB exposure may have a delayed effect on central nervous system (CNS) functioning.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1130097.pdf

The effect of intrauterine PCB exposure on visual recognition memory.

A meta-analytic review of the literature on infant habituation and recognition memory performance as predictors of later IQ suggests several conclusions: (1) Habituation and recognition memory assessments made on a variety of risk and nonrisk samples in the first year of life predict later IQ assessed between 1 and 8 years of age with a weighted (for N) average of normalized correlations of .36 or a raw median correlation of .45. (2) The size of the predictive correlation is essentially the same for habituation and for recognition memory paradigms. (3) This prediction phenomenon is not obviously associated solely with one laboratory, one particular infant response measure, or a few extremely disordered infants. (4) The level of prediction to childhood IQ is substantial given the reliability of the infant measures. (5) Predictions are somewhat higher for risk than for nonrisk samples. (6) Predictions are consistently higher than for standardized infant tests of general development for nonrisk but not for risk samples, and they are not consistently higher than predicting from parental education and socioeconomic status or a few other infant behaviours for nonrisk samples. (8) Coefficients may be higher when the predicting assessments are made between 2 and 8 months of age than earlier or later, but prediction coefficients are remarkably consistent across the observed outcome age period of 2-8 years.

A Meta-Analysis of Infant Habituation and Recognition Memory Performance as Predictors of Later IQ

Transitions in Infant Sensorimotor Development and the Prediction of Childhood IQ.

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Transitions in Infant Sensorimotor Development and the Prediction of Childhood IQ.