[Source:  Medical X Press]
 

One of the study leaders and Head of UQ's School of Music Professor Margaret Barrett said parents were asked to report on shared music activities when their child was two to three years old and a range of social, emotional and cognitive outcomes were measured two years later, when the child was four or five.

[Source:  Medical X Press]

However, the authors and other experts stressed that the study offers no evidence that breast-feeding ultimately affects a child's odds of developing autism, or that it lessens the severity of autism symptoms.
 

Long-term studies are "absolutely required" to answer those questions, said lead researcher Kathleen Krol, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in Leipzig, Germany.

[Source:  Medical News Today]
 

For adults, memories tend to fade with time. But a new study has shown that there are circumstances under which the opposite is true for small children: they can remember a piece of information better days later than they can on the day they first learned it.
 

While playing a video game that asked them to remember associations between objects, 4- and 5-year-olds who re-played the game after a two-day delay scored more than 20 percent higher than kids who re-played it later the same day.
 

"An implication is that kids can be smarter than we necessarily thought they could be," said Kevin 

[Source:  Your Therapy Source]
 

Did you know some research indicates that brain activation when identifying letters is influenced by previous handwriting of letters?   Researchers at Indiana University have published several research articles on visual perceptual skills in children.  One article that was published in Trends in Neuroscience and Educationexamined 15 preliterate, right handed children (ages 4.2-5 years old).  During functional MRI scanning, each child was shown a letter or shape on an index card and asked to draw, trace or type the item without it being named by the experimenter.

Editor's Note:  Perhaps our country could learn something outside our nations borders about mental health care in schools!
 

[Source:  Medical News Today]
 

A national school-based  mental health program that is now reaching almost one quarter of all elementary school students in Chile appears to have produced significant improvements in both behavioral and academic outcomes, such as attention problems and school attendance, among participating students. The results of a study by a team of Chilean and U.S. investigators appear in the October issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
 

J. Michael Murphy, EdD, of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Department of Psychiatry, senior author of the JAACAP paper, notes that this is the first study to document the positive impact of a large-scale pediatric mental health intervention using validated mental health measures and real-world benchmarks like end-of-the-year promotion and school attendance. "These findings suggest that school-based mental health programs could play an important role in achieving better educational outcomes for whole countries as well as individual children. Our findings also provide evidence that non-pharmacological interventions can be effective. "