[Source: Medical X-Press]

From 1999 to 2015 there was a small reduction in the rate of sudden unexpected infant death (SUID), according to a study published online Feb. 12 in Pediatrics.Alexa B. Erck Lambert, M.P.H., from the DB Consulting Group Inc. in Silver Spring, Md., and colleagues used data from U.S. mortality files to examine national and state-specific SUID rates (deaths per 100,000 live births) for 1990 to 2015. Infants with an underlying cause of death, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), unknown cause, or accidental suffocation and strangulation (ASSB) were included as SUID.

New research with prairie voles by child development experts at the University of California, Davis, suggests that prenatal stress promotes developmental plasticity in babies, making them especially likely to benefit from good parenting as well as suffer from negligent care.

"It looks like prenatal stress can be good for us if we are lucky enough to have a supportive environment postnatally," said Sarah Hartman, a recent Ph.D. graduate in human ecology at UC Davis who conducted the research under the supervision of human development professor Jay Belsky and Karen Bales, professor of psychology.

[Source: Education Week]

When the U.S. Supreme Court created a stronger standard for special education in a unanimous decision last year, observers could be forgiven for believing that was the end of the story.

[Source: Science Daily]

MIT cognitive scientists have now found that conversation between an adult and a child appears to change the child's brain, and that this back-and-forth conversation is actually more critical to language development than the word gap. In a study of children between the ages of 4 and 6, they found that differences in the number of "conversational turns" accounted for a large portion of the differences in brain physiology and language skills that they found among the children. This finding applied to children regardless of parental income or education.