It is known that childhood experience influences brain development but the only evidence scientists have had for this has usually come from extreme cases such as children who had been abused or suffered trauma. Martha Farah, director of the centre for neuroscience and society at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the latest study, wanted to find out how a normal range of experiences in childhood might influence the development of the brain.

Farah took data from surveys of home life and brain scans of 64 participants carried out over the course of 20 years. Her results, presented on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, showed that cognitive stimulation from parents at the age of four was the key factor in predicting the development of several parts of the cortex – the layer of grey matter on the outside of the brain – 15 years later.

Doctors and government health officials should set limits, as they do for alcohol, on the amount of time children spend watching screens – and under-threes should be kept away from the television altogether, according to a paper in an influential medical journal published on Tuesday.

Allt du behöver för att resa med barn!

Smarta, praktiska och innovativa produkter för resan, övernattningen eller för en skön dag på stan eller i naturen.

Önskar du dina barn och barnbarn ett långt och friskt liv? Om du är man bör du i så fall skaffa barn sent i livet. Ännu bättre är om din egen far också var till åren kommen när han fick dig, enligt en ny studie.

Children who grow up learning to speak two languages are better at switching between tasks than are children who learn to speak only one language, according to a study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. However, the study also found that bilinguals are slower to acquire vocabulary than are monolinguals, because bilinguals must divide their time between two languages while monolinguals focus on only one.

PlayLand STHLM är leklandet i innerstan där både barn och vuxna skall trivas.

Vi tror att barn mellan 0-8 år har som roligast hos oss, men givetvis är alla lika välkomna!

Fridhemsgatan 49-51.

At an age when "ba-ba" and "da-da" may be their only utterances, infants nevertheless comprehend words for many common objects, according to a new study.

The problem with safety guidelines is that they make most playgrounds so uninteresting as to contribute to reduced physical activity.

Playgrounds don't look like they used to. Steep metal slides and wooden towers have given way to slow, plastic slides and carefully penned-in climbing contraptions.

And forget about seesaws -- they're a thing of the past.

When kids are bored by unimaginative (read: safe) playground equipment, they're less active as a result, and with childhood obesity at epidemic proportions, that's a danger, too.

In contrast, names these days show that people living in what has become an extremely urbanized society miss their links with nature, Makino says. This can be observed in the proliferation of kanji such as 翔 (shō), meaning "flying," 海 (kai), which means "ocean," and 空 (taka), meaning "sky."

So how do parents decide on names for their babies? Well, there's no shortage of methodologies out there to help with their selection, and many people actually combine two or more of them.

After a brief, failed experiment paying me to do chores, my dad tried something really neat. It clearly took a bit of legwork, but maybe there are some transferrable lessons for parents who want to lay an entrepreneurial foundation.

He gave me a vending machine.

He rented the machine, found a location in a local workshop, and installed it. And then he told me two things.

1. That this would be the last time I was given allowance.

2. And that if I wanted to have any pocketmoney next week, I’d better spend this week’s on some inventory.