Emotional overeating fed by temperament, caregivers' reactions to children's emotions

 Managing a fussy infant or a determined toddler can be a daily test of patience and endurance for parents and caregivers. New research on the origins of emotional overeating in 3-year-olds suggests that how caregivers respond to infants' and toddlers' negative emotions such as disappointment, fear and anger influences the children's development of emotional overeating.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign followed more than 350 children from birth to age 3 and found direct associations between infants' temperaments and their development of emotional overeating at age 3. However, caregivers' supportive and non-supportive responses to the children's negative emotions had significant influence as well.

Emotional overeating was defined in the study as consuming food to cope with feelings rather than in response to hunger.

In assessing the children's temperaments, the researchers looked at their orienting responses -- their ability as infants and toddlers to engage with, maintain and disengage their attention from external stimuli.

"Our findings show that if a child has a greater capacity to orient their attention and regulate their emotions during infancy, caregivers may be more likely to implement supportive responses -- therefore the child is less likely to turn to food for self-regulation," said first author Sehyun Ju, a graduate student in human development and family studies. Ju's co-authors were Kelly Bost and Samantha Iwinski, a professor and graduate student, respectively, in the same department.

Supportive responses from caregivers included using problem-solving strategies to alleviate a child's distress, validating and addressing the child's feelings or offering encouragement. Conversely, non-supportive responses included caregivers punishing a child for expressing their emotions and minimizing or dismissing their feelings.

Some prior research found that emotional eating is driven by individuals' ability to regulate their emotions as opposed to the feelings themselves, according to the current study, published in Frontiers in Psychology.

Accordingly, parents should be aware that emotional overeating is a complex behavior that is influenced by caregivers' reactions to the child's emotional expression as well as by the child's temperament and ability to manage their feelings, Ju said.

All of the children and their caregivers were participants in the STRONG Kids 2 birth cohort study at the U. of I., a research project that examines various family environmental factors and biological characteristics that influence children's weight and dietary habits from birth through age 9.

When the children were 3 months, 18 months and 3 years old, their parents or caregivers were surveyed on their children's eating behaviors such as whether they ate more when bored, sad or angry; their personality traits or typical way of behaving, including how frequently they showed cheerfulness or distress; their ability to self-regulate their emotions; and how they responded to external stimuli.

Sourc: ScienceDaily

Great news, parents: You do have power over your tweens' screen use

 Restricting use in bedrooms and at mealtimes have the biggest impact, but modeling good behavior is also important.

For many parents, it can feel like curbing kids' screen use is a losing battle. But new research from UC San Francisco (UCSF) has found the parenting practices that work best to curb screen time and addictive screen behavior: restricting screens in bedrooms and at mealtimes and modeling healthy practices at home.

Researchers asked 12- to 13-year-olds how often they used screens for everything but school, including gaming, texting, social media, video chatting, watching videos and browsing the internet; and whether their screen use was problematic.

Then, they asked parents how they used their own screens in front of their kids, how they monitored and restricted their kids' screen use, and whether they used it to reward or punish behavior. They also asked about the family's use of screens at mealtimes and the child's use of screens in the bedroom.

Using screens in bedrooms and at mealtime were linked to increased time and addictive use. But use went down when parents kept track of and limited their kids' screen time, and when they modeled healthy behavior themselves.

"These results are heartening because they give parents some concrete strategies they can use with their tweens and young teens: set screen time limits, keep track of your kids' screen use, and avoid screens in bedrooms and at mealtimes," said Jason Nagata, MD, a pediatrician at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals and the first author of the study, publishing June 5 in Pediatric Research. "Also, try to practice what you preach."

Refining AAP guidance

The study analyzed the effectiveness on tweens of parenting strategies recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) for children and adolescents aged 5 to 18 years old. It is one of the few studies to examine how parenting practices affect screen use in early adolescence, when children start to become more independent.

"We wanted to look at young adolescents in particular, because they are at a stage when mobile phone and social media use often ramps up and sets the course for future habits," Nagata said.

The researchers collected data from 10,048 U.S. participants, 46% of whom were racial or ethnic minorities, from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study.

Source: ScienceDaily

How much oxygen do very premature babies need after birth?

 Giving very premature babies high concentrations of oxygen soon after birth may reduce the risk of death by 50 percent, compared to lower levels of oxygen says new research led by University of Sydney researchers.

When premature babies are born, they sometimes need help breathing because their lungs haven't finished developing. To help babies during this process, doctors may give them extra oxygen through a breathing mask or breathing tube.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, examined clinical trial data and outcomes of over one thousand premature babies who were given different oxygen concentrations. This included low concentrations of oxygen (~30 percent), intermediate (~50-65 percent) or high (~90 percent).

The study found for babies born prematurely, at less than 32 weeks (less than three quarters of the way through a full pregnancy), starting resuscitation with high concentrations of oxygen (90 percent or greater), could increase chances of survival compared to low levels (21 to 30 percent).

For comparison, the air we breathe, also known as 'room air' only has about 21 percent oxygen.

When a doctor provides oxygen to babies that need help breathing, there is a device that regulates how oxygen is mixed together to reach the desired concentration. The researchers believe higher initial levels of oxygen may jump-start independent breathing, but more research is required to explore the underlying cause for this effect.

The researchers emphasise that additional large studies will be important to confirm this finding, and that even when starting with high oxygen, it needs to be adjusted to lower levels quickly to avoid hyperoxia (oxygen poisoning).

How the oxygen is delivered during the first 10 minutes of the infant's life is critical. Doctors may give the baby high levels of oxygen at the start but then monitor vital signs and continually adjust the oxygen to avoid over or under exposure.

If confirmed in future studies, the findings challenge current international recommendations that suggest giving preterm babies the same amount of oxygen as babies born at term, 21 percent to 30 percent oxygen (room air), rather than extra oxygen.

This study also demonstrates that there may not be a one-size-fits-all approach, and babies born prematurely may have different needs than babies born at term.

Worldwide, over 13 million babies are born prematurely each year, and close to 1 million die shortly after birth.

Source: ScienceDaily

Babies use 'helpless' infant period to learn powerful foundation models, just like ChatGPT

 Babies' brains are not as immature as previously thought, rather they are using the period of postnatal 'helplessness' to learn powerful foundation models similar to those underpinning generative Artificial Intelligence, according to a new study.

The study, led by a Trinity College Dublin neuroscientist and just published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, finds for the first time that the classic explanation for infant helplessness is not supported by modern brain data.

Compared to many animals, humans are helpless for a long time after birth. Many animals, such as horses and chickens, can walk on the day they are born. This protracted period of helplessness puts human infants at risk and places a huge burden on the parents, but surprisingly has survived evolutionary pressure.

"Since the 1960s scientists have thought that the helplessness exhibited by human babies is due to the constraints of birth. The belief was that with big heads human babies have to be born early, resulting in immature brains and a helpless period that extends up to one year of age. We wanted to find out why human babies were helpless for such a long period," explains Professor Rhodri Cusack, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, and lead author of the paper.

The research team comprised Prof. Cusack, who measures development of the infant brain and mind using neuroimaging; Prof. Christine Charvet, Auburn University, USA, who compares brain development across species; and Dr. Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, a senior AI researcher at DeepMind.

"Our study compared brain development across animal species. It drew from a long-standing project, Translating Time, that equates corresponding ages across species to establish that human brains are more mature than many other species at birth," says Prof. Charvet.

The researchers used brain imaging and found that many systems in the human infant's brain are already functioning and processing the rich streams of information from the senses. This contradicts the long-held belief that many infant brain systems are too immature to function.

The team then compared learning in humans with the latest machine learning models, where deep neural networks benefit from a 'helpless' period of pre-training.

In the past, AI models were directly trained on tasks for which they were needed for example a self-driving car was trained to recognise what they see on a road. But now models are initially pre-trained to see patterns within vast quantities of data, without performing any task of importance. The resulting foundation model is subsequently used to learn specific tasks. It has been found this ultimately leads to quicker learning of new tasks and better performance.

Source: ScienceDaily