Child Development News

LAWRENCE — A new, wide-ranging review of available research shows parents and caregivers can improve health outcomes for kids by using mobile-phone apps and text messaging. The research appears in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal JAMA Pediatrics on March 20. Previous to this investigation, the only across-the-board review of mobile health (mHealth) effectiveness centered on childhood obesity alone.

Beginning in 1995 with the seminal study of vocabulary development by Betty Hart and Todd Risley that revealed a 30 million word gap in what children from the least and more advantaged homes heard by age 3, Life Span Institute researchers have investigated the power of parenting.

Researchers estimated that more than 106,000 high-risk early preterm births could be avoided in the U.S. each year if pregnant women took daily supplements of the omega fatty acid.

LAWRENCE — University of Kansas researchers have found that certain specific parenting practices are significantly associated with the development of communication and language skills in children with Fragile X syndrome. These same parent behaviors are also associated with the growth of socialization and daily living skills of these children. Parenting even mitigated declines often reported in children with FXS beginning in middle childhood.

LAWRENCE — A clinical trial of book reading to help kindergarten children with Specific Language Impairment learn words has determined the number of times a child with SLI needs to hear a word to learn it: 36 times or exposures compared with 12 times for typically developing children. This is the first piece of evidence that could lead to the development of an effective treatment for children with SLI, something that Holly Storkel, who directed the trial, says is a critical need.

Professor Yo Jackson and her team are analyzing data from one of the largest longitudinal studies of foster children ever undertaken.

A National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded study led by University of Kansas Medical Center researchers could lead to a reduction in early preterm births -births before 34 weeks of gestation - which are a major burden on the health care system and a concern for mothers worldwide.

A National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded study led by University of Kansas Medical Center researchers could lead to a reduction in early preterm births -births before 34 weeks of gestation - which are a major burden on the health care system and a concern for mothers worldwide.

When Debra Kamps, senior scientist at the University of Kansas Life Span Institute, first began researching how to improve the social and communication skills of children with autism in natural settings like schools in the 1970s, it was hard to find children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who were in classrooms with their typically developing peers.