Children
Monday, March 24, 2008
Stressed Parents Equals Sick Kids
Stressed parents aren’t just damaging their own health - they may also be making their children more vulnerable to illness.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
How to help kids keep test anxiety in check
You can’t dismiss the fear of test-taking, says Dr. Robert Rees, director of education and humanities for HeartMath, a nonprofit institute that has developed a program to help people manage test and other anxiety. “Test anxiety is an almost universal experience,” Rees says. Even students who are well-prepared, he says, sometimes “have so much anxiety that they can’t function cognitively.”
Children • Education • HeartMath • Productivity/Performance • Teenagers • (0) Comments • Permalink
Friday, February 22, 2008
Family context influences stress hormone
Continuous production of the stress hormone cortisol is affected by growing up in difficult situations, a study in Canada found. The study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found 40 percent of differences in cortisol production were genetically determined, but growing up in difficult family circumstances overrode this genetic effect.
Children • Hormones • Parenting • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Study shows stress affects brain growth
Children who suffer deprivation in early life show altered patterns of brain growth by the time they are teenagers, according to research that documents for the first time measurable physical effects of poor parenting and unstimulating home lives.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Happy in care: it’s in the hormones
Children from loving homes are stressed when placed in poor quality child-care centres, new scientific evidence reveals. But children from disadvantaged families are better off in child care even if the quality is substandard. The Australian study measured the levels of cortisol - a hormone produced in response to stress - in 156 children attending 16 centres.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Mothers’ stress may increase children’s asthma
Children whose mothers are chronically stressed during their early years have a higher asthma rate than their peers, regardless of their income, gender or other known asthma risk factors.
Children • Reproduction • Stress • Women • (0) Comments • Permalink
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Study links preschool teachers’ stress to student expulsions
Preschool teachers who are highly stressed because of classroom conditions, depression or other factors are far more likely than their colleagues to recommend expulsion for children with behavioral problems, according to a study released Thursday.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
For women, marital distress means less relief from stress
That’s the suggestion from a new UCLA study that tracked levels of cortisol, a key stress hormone, among 30 Los Angeles married couples involved in one of our age’s trickiest juggling acts — raising kids when both parents work full time.
Children • Hormones • Parenting • Psychology • Relationships • Women • (0) Comments • Permalink
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Institute of HeartMath Introduces New HeartSmarts Program
The Institute of HeartMath®, a leading research and education organization in Boulder Creek, Calif., recently released a new supplemental learning program called HeartSmarts™ to help students get their hearts and brains focused on learning. HeartSmarts is a social and emotional intelligence program for grades 3-5 that is based on HeartMath’s many years of research into the physiology of learning. The HeartSmarts program, designed for classroom use, helps students transform stress, improve learning and strengthen relationships. Students learn about their emotional physiology, how to identify their emotions and how different emotions affect them, their schoolwork and others.
Children • Education • HeartMath • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Is Chronic Stress Affecting Your Fertility?
Nonstop pressure and chronic stress may have a significant affect on fertility and may prevent some women from getting pregnant, according to experts.
Children • Reproduction • Women • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
New Study Raises Concerns about Current Test-Taking Requirements
There’s no doubt that today students are under intense pressure to perform academically, but at what cost? The Institute of HeartMath and Claremont Graduate University released a new study that depicts the high levels of anxiety students are shouldering due to the pressure to excel intellectually. Nearly two-thirds of the high school students who participated in the study reported being affected by test anxiety. The study underscores the detrimental impact of test anxiety on academic performance. Based on their findings, researchers say that students’ high levels of anxiety may jeopardize NCLB assessment validity and could be compromising testing results.
Anxiety • Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Children • Cognition • Education • Heart Rate Variability • HeartMath • Memory • Productivity/Performance • Psychology • Stress • Teenagers • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
St. Jude psychologist says most children with cancer are well-adjusted
Children under treatment for cancer are generally emotionally well-adjusted and no more depressed or anxious than other children their age, according to researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. In studies of depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress and quality of life, children with cancer do as well as, and often better than their healthy peers.
Cancer • Children • Depression • Mood • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Monday, September 10, 2007
Suicide in Youth and Young Adults Spiked in 2003–2004: CDC Report
A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows a decline in suicide among youth and young adults between 10 and 24 years of age of almost 29% between 1990 and 2003, followed by a sharp 8% increase between 2003 and 2004, the largest single-year increase in 15 years. Significant increase in suicide rates was limited to girls between 10 and 14 years, followed by those between 15 and 19, rising by 75.9% and 32.3% respectively, and among males aged 15 to 19, a 9% increase. Prior to 2003, rates in all 3 groups had generally trended downward.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
This Is Your Brain On 9/11
If you witnessed the attacks on 9/11 up close and then continually had bad dreams, felt jumpy, kept thinking about what you saw, and avoided the site even several years later, chances are that parts of your brain were altered in subtle ways. According to scientists, such lingering symptoms and physical changes reflect an undiagnosed and long-term toll on mental health resulting from the attacks.
9/11 • Amygdala • Brain • Children • Depression • Hormones • PTSD • (0) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Children who survive urban warfare suffer from PTSD, too
Countless children in San Francisco’s toughest neighborhoods experience murder, violence and trauma - an often unavoidable consequence of living in an urban war zone. The violence, layers of it overlapping year after year, can eventually take up residence in the children’s minds. Like combat veterans, they develop post-traumatic stress disorder - the soldier’s sickness. As many as one-third of children living in our country’s violent urban neighborhoods have PTSD, according to recent research and the country’s top child trauma experts - nearly twice the rate reported for troops returning from war zones in Iraq.