Child Development News

April 12, 2025

Top Headlines

Early Education Impacts Teenage Behavior

Apr. 8, 2025 — Researchers explored the long-term effects of preschool expansion in Japan in the 1960s, revealing significant reductions in risky behaviors amongst teenagers. By analyzing regional differences in the rollout of the program, the study identified ...

Exposure to Air Pollution May Harm Brain Health of Older Adults

Apr. 7, 2025 — Long-term exposure to high levels of air pollution may harm the brain health of older adults in England, finds a new ...

Childhood Experiences Shape the Brain's White Matter With Cognitive Effects Seen Years Later

Apr. 7, 2025 — Investigators have linked difficult early life experiences with reduced quality and quantity of the white matter communication highways throughout the adolescent brain. This reduced connectivity is ...

Perceiving One's Own Body: Babies Sense Their Heartbeat and Breathing

Apr. 7, 2025 — Body signals such as heartbeat and breathing accompany us constantly, often unnoticed as background noise of our perception. Even in the earliest years of life, these signals are important as they contribute to the development of self-awareness and ...

Latest Headlines

updated 9:29pm EDT

An Immune Cell May Explain How Maternal Inflammation Causes Neurodevelopmental Disorder

Apr. 1, 2025 — A research group has uncovered a potential mechanism linking maternal inflammation to delayed neurodevelopment in infants. The research suggests the ...

Fear of Rejection Influences How Children Conform to Peers

Apr. 4, 2025 — The fear of rejection -- familiar to many children and adults -- can significantly impact how kids behave in their peer groups, according to new ...

Successful Therapy Confirmed for Newborns With the Fatal Metabolic Disorder MoCD Type A

Apr. 3, 2025 — Early administration of the drug Fosdenopterin/rcPMP improves the chances of survival of infants with MoCD type A and promotes the development of ...

Common Phrases, Not Fancy Words, Make You Sound More Fluent in a Foreign Language

Apr. 3, 2025 — Fluency in a foreign language is often thought to be about speaking quickly and using advanced vocabulary. However, researchers reveal that speakers ...

Using Everyday Products During Pregnancy Can Affect Newborn's Metabolism, Study Finds

Apr. 2, 2025 — A newly published study found that a mother's exposure to phthalates during pregnancy can affect their newborn's metabolism and brain development. ...

Exposure to Air Pollution in Childhood Is Associated With Reduced Brain Connectivity

Apr. 1, 2025 — A new study has found that children exposed to higher levels of air pollution in early and mid childhood have weaker connections between key brain ...

My Robot Therapist: The Ethics of AI Mental Health Chatbots for Kids

Mar. 31, 2025 — AI mental health apps may offer a cheap and accessible way to fill the gaps in the overstretched U.S. mental health care system, but ethics experts warn that we need to be thoughtful about how we use ...

Repetitive Behaviors and Special Interests Are More Indicative of an Autism Diagnosis Than a Lack of Social Skills

Mar. 26, 2025 — People with autism are typically diagnosed by clinical observation and assessment. To deconstruct the clinical decision process, which is often ...

What Does 'That' Mean in 'Did You See That?'

Mar. 25, 2025 — What goes through your mind when someone asks 'Did you see that?' A study shows that children and adults process ambiguous information like 'that' differently. While children focus more on the ...

To the Brain, Esperanto and Klingon Appear the Same as English or Mandarin

Mar. 18, 2025 — New research finds the brain's language-processing network also responds to artificial languages such as Esperanto and languages made for TV, such as Klingon on 'Star Trek' and High Valyrian and ...

Does Teamwork Fulfill the Goal of Project-Based Learning?

Apr. 7, 2025 — A researcher investigated the impact of the group work environment on motivation in English as a second language classes. The study revealed that the group work environment plays an important role in ...

How Family Background Can Help Lead to Athletic Success

Mar. 20, 2025 — Americans have long believed that sports are one area in society that offers kids from all backgrounds the chance to succeed to the best of their abilities. But new research suggests that this belief ...

Insomniac Fruit Fly Mutants Show Enhanced Memory Despite Severe Sleep Loss

Mar. 20, 2025 — Fruit fly mutants that have severe sleep deficits perform better at olfactory learning and memory tasks, according to a new study. The paradox of enhanced memory despite sleep loss could be explained ...

Why Don't We Remember Being a Baby? New Study Provides Clues

Mar. 20, 2025 — Though we learn so much during our first years of life, we can't, as adults, remember specific events from that time. Researchers have long believed we don't hold onto these experiences ...

Parts of the Brain That Are Needed to Remember Words Identified

Mar. 19, 2025 — The parts of the brain that are needed to remember words, and how these are affected by a common form of epilepsy, have been identified by a team of neurologists and neurosurgeons at ...

Why Are Night Owls at Greater Risk of Depression?

Mar. 19, 2025 — Mindfulness, total sleep quality, and alcohol consumption may help explain why people who stay up late have a greater risk of depression, according to a new ...

When Did Human Language Emerge?

Mar. 18, 2025 — Humans' unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago, according to a survey of genomic evidence. As such, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ...

Bridging Nature and Nurture: Study Reveals Brain's Flexible Foundation from Birth

Mar. 17, 2025 — By studying never-before-seen details of brain connectivity in human infants, researchers have identified how a balance of innate structure and flexible learning produces our remarkably organized ...

New AI Model Analyzes Full Night of Sleep With High Accuracy in Largest Study of Its Kind

Mar. 17, 2025 — Researchers have developed a powerful AI tool, built on the same transformer architecture used by large language models like ChatGPT, to process an entire night's sleep. To date, it is one of ...

Oxytocin System of Breastfeeding Affected in Mothers With Postnatal Depression

Mar. 14, 2025 — The oxytocin system -- which helps release breast milk and strengthens the bond between mother and baby -- may be affected during breastfeeding in mothers experiencing postnatal ...

Do You See What I See?

Mar. 12, 2025 — As a child, did it ever occur to you that your perception of color differed from that of others? It's quite common to have this thought, but it turns out that the human color experience may be ...

Children Who Lack Fish in Their Diets Are Less Sociable and Kind, Study Finds

Mar. 11, 2025 — Children who consumed the least amounts of seafood at 7-years-old were likely to be less 'prosocial' at ages 7 and 9 years than those who regularly consumed seafood, according to a new ...

Good Parenting Helps, but Has Limits Under Major Deprivation

Mar. 11, 2025 — Parenting skills can make a big difference in fostering a newborn's language acquisition and cognition, but there may be a limit to how far parenting can go to make up the challenges to ...

Study Pinpoints the Impact of Prenatal Stress Across 27 Weeks of Pregnancy

Mar. 10, 2025 — Researchers found new insights on the timing of prenatal stress and its effect on infant stress reactivity and temperament -- including differences between ...

What's in a Label? It's Different for Boys Vs. Girls, New Study of Parents Finds

Mar. 10, 2025 — Research has shown that adults instinctively think of men when asked to think of a person -- they describe the most 'typical' person they can imagine as male and assume storybook characters ...

Limiting Screen Time Protects Children's Mental Health

Mar. 10, 2025 — A recent study suggests that limiting screen time and promoting physical activity from childhood may help safeguard mental health in adolescence. The findings are particularly significant given that ...

Improving School Readiness for Children With Low Birth Weight

Mar. 7, 2025 — School readiness not only impacts kids' academic success, but also their long-term economic and health outcomes. Unfortunately, research reveals a concerning gap in school readiness for children ...

Genomics to Revolutionize Treatment of Childhood Rare Diseases

Mar. 6, 2025 — A simple genomics blood test could improve treatment and care for childhood epilepsy, but more investment is needed to make access fair and securely join up the data, finds a new ...

Does Getting ADHD Drugs Via Telehealth Increase Addiction Risk?

Mar. 5, 2025 — A study of people who started ADHD stimulant treatment via telehealth vs in-person visits shows no difference in risk of new substance use disorders except for young adults age ...

For Some, Childhood Adversity Can Promote Resilience to Anxiety Disorders

Mar. 5, 2025 — Research has shown that young people who face adversity such as traumatic or stressful events during brain development are 40% more likely to develop anxiety disorders by adulthood. But most people ...