As a parent, I hate how you have to sign kids up for camps way before summer even starts. What 12-year-old can really answer whether he’d rather go indoor skydiving or learn SCUBA when he’s still trying to build a cardboard suit of armor for Social Studies? (A suit that would prove equally useless for skydiving, SCUBA, or understanding the role of economic subjugation in feudal societies.) However, if we don’t act in time, the only spots left will be in that engineering camp he attended last year, the one where they built the same catapult over and over again. At least if he ends up there, he’ll have just the right armor.
Fuse
I'm going to storm the Cardboard Castle, just as soon as I figure out how to breathe in this outfit!
Joint attention
It’s hard to explain to a kid that just because something is legal doesn’t meant it’s good for you. After all, no one has outlawed large sugary sodas, tequila, or Miley Cyrus. So, with two states now allowing recreational use of marijuana, I find it just the teeniest bit alarming that a new study confirms that marijuana use can lead to permanent brain damage in young adults. On the up side, once your brain has been impaired by smoking pot, you could care less.
Dr. Hans Breiter and his colleagues obtained high-resolution (“High.” Heh!) MRI scans of the brains of recreational marijuana users between the ages of 18 and 25 years, then analyzed the volume and composition of their brains, compared with matched controls, with particular attention to brain regions responsible for regulating emotion and motivation. (For those of you who are still motivated, those are the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala. For the rest of you...“high-resolution.” Heh!)
Dr. Breiter explained, "What we're seeing is changes in people who are 18-25 in core brain regions that you never, ever want to fool around with. Our hypothesis from this early work is that these changes may be an early sign of what later becomes amotivation, where people aren't focused on their goals." Of course, marijuana advocates may have a different take on things. Some people “suffer amotivational symptoms.” Some just “abide.”
Mother’s little helper
Doesn’t it seem unfair that toddlers can’t use the same coping skills as adults do? Being little presents all sorts of stresses, but small children can’t go for a run, they can’t drink alcohol, heck, they can’t even yell at their subordinates. But there is one thing they can do, and new research shows that the crankier children are, the more they indulge: watching mindless television. I’d explain more, but my show is on.
Okay, commercial break. Dr. Jenny Radesky and her colleagues evaluated data from 7,450 children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort, attempting to correlate measures of emotional self-regulation with hours spent in front of a screen. As it turns out, kids who were especially fussy at ages 9 months and 24 months spent more time watching videos than did their calmer peers. The authors fail to document whether their parents drank more.
The study also did not address cause and effect: Do children with poor emotional regulation get stuck in front of screens to calm them down, or does increased screen time prevent kids from building more advanced coping mechanisms? I became so perplexed reading this study that I had to watch an episode of The Golden Girls. It relaxes me: Every time someone says “Blanche,” I take a shot.
Tipping the scales
The vaccine-autism myth is like the pediatric version of the Sewer Gator: It started with a study that has been flushed down the toilet, yet no amount of evidence will convince some people that it’s not real, and it grows more dangerous every day. The only difference is that the Sewer Gator never actually killed a child. In the midst of outbreaks of measles, mumps, and whooping cough, I was not reassured to read a new Harris Poll reporting that 1 in 3 parents still believe that vaccines can cause autism. At least the existence of the Sewer Gator has not been definitively disproven by 23 studies.
Before we waste any more energy fighting this misconception, however, we have to acknowledge what we’re up against. According to the National Science Foundation’s annual survey, fewer than 40% of Americans believe in the Big Bang, fewer than 50% believe in evolution, and 26% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. And we’re hoping that 95% of Americans will understand the epidemiology of infectious diseases and the fetal origins of autism spectrum disorders. Right. If you need me, I’ll be watching The Golden Girls, wearing cardboard armor.