Psyche, Science, and Society

Commercialization of play and overconcern for safety bad for children’s development, NPR reports

NPR reports on the negative consequences of the commercialization of children’s play combined with parents’ increased emphasis on safety at the cost of children’s imaginative play. Another reason why the capitalist takeover of all areas of life is bad for us:

Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills

by Alix Spiegel

Morning Edition, February 21, 2008 · On October 3, 1955, the Mickey Mouse Club debuted on television. As we all now know, the show quickly became a cultural icon, one of those phenomena that helped define an era.

What is less remembered but equally, if not more, important, is that another transformative cultural event happened that day: The Mattel toy company began advertising a gun called the “Thunder Burp.”

I know — who’s ever heard of the Thunder Burp?

Well, no one.

The reason the advertisement is significant is because it marked the first time that any toy company had attempted to peddle merchandise on television outside of the Christmas season. Until 1955, ad budgets at toy companies were minuscule, so the only time they could afford to hawk their wares on TV was during Christmas. But then came Mattel and the Thunder Burp, which, according to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, was a kind of historical watershed. Almost overnight, children’s play became focused, as never before, on things — the toys themselves.

“It’s interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys,” says Chudacoff. “Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object.”

Chudacoff’s recently published history of child’s play argues that for most of human history what children did when they played was roam in packs large or small, more or less unsupervised, and engage in freewheeling imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and action heroes. Basically, says Chudacoff, they spent most of their time doing what looked like nothing much at all.

“They improvised play, whether it was in the outdoors… or whether it was on a street corner or somebody’s back yard,” Chudacoff says. “They improvised their own play; they regulated their play; they made up their own rules.”

But during the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff argues, play changed radically. Instead of spending their time in autonomous shifting make-believe, children were supplied with ever more specific toys for play and predetermined scripts. Essentially, instead of playing pirate with a tree branch they played Star Wars with a toy light saber. Chudacoff calls this the commercialization and co-optation of child’s play — a trend which begins to shrink the size of children’s imaginative space.

But commercialization isn’t the only reason imagination comes under siege. In the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff says, parents became increasingly concerned about safety, and were driven to create play environments that were secure and could not be penetrated by threats of the outside world. Karate classes, gymnastics, summer camps — these create safe environments for children, Chudacoff says. And they also do something more: for middle-class parents increasingly worried about achievement, they offer to enrich a child’s mind.

Change in Play, Change in Kids

Clearly the way that children spend their time has changed. Here’s the issue: A growing number of psychologists believe that these changes in what children do has also changed kids’ cognitive and emotional development.

It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.

We know that children’s capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn’t stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at the National Institute for Early Education Research says, the results were very different.

“Today’s 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today’s 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago,” Bodrova explains. “So the results were very sad.”

Sad because self-regulation is incredibly important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child’s IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, “Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain.”

The Importance of Self-Regulation

According to Berk, one reason make-believe is such a powerful tool for building self-discipline is because during make-believe, children engage in what’s called private speech: They talk to themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.

“In fact, if we compare preschoolers’ activities and the amount of private speech that occurs across them, we find that this self-regulating language is highest during make-believe play,” Berk says. “And this type of self-regulating language… has been shown in many studies to be predictive of executive functions.”

And it’s not just children who use private speech to control themselves. If we look at adult use of private speech, Berk says, “we’re often using it to surmount obstacles, to master cognitive and social skills, and to manage our emotions.”

Unfortunately, the more structured the play, the more children’s private speech declines. Essentially, because children’s play is so focused on lessons and leagues, and because kids’ toys increasingly inhibit imaginative play, kids aren’t getting a chance to practice policing themselves. When they have that opportunity, says Berk, the results are clear: Self-regulation improves.

“One index that researchers, including myself, have used… is the extent to which a child, for example, cleans up independently after a free-choice period in preschool,” Berk says. “We find that children who are most effective at complex make-believe play take on that responsibility with… greater willingness, and even will assist others in doing so without teacher prompting.”

Despite the evidence of the benefits of imaginative play, however, even in the context of preschool young children’s play is in decline. According to Yale psychological researcher Dorothy Singer, teachers and school administrators just don’t see the value.

“Because of the testing, and the emphasis now that you have to really pass these tests, teachers are starting earlier and earlier to drill the kids in their basic fundamentals. Play is viewed as unnecessary, a waste of time,” Singer says. “I have so many articles that have documented the shortening of free play for children, where the teachers in these schools are using the time for cognitive skills.”

It seems that in the rush to give children every advantage — to protect them, to stimulate them, to enrich them — our culture has unwittingly compromised one of the activities that helped children most. All that wasted time was not such a waste after all.

Add comment February 22nd, 2008

Are teen sex and delinquenct linked?

The Washington Post has an article partially on a study claiming to debunk the finding that early teen consensual sex leads to later delinquency. By comparing pairs of twins, they suggest that the effect might even be in the opposite direction. While hardly definitive, it looks like a nice attempt to use sophisticated data analysis along with careful conceptual analysis to clarify important social issues.

The article also discusses other issues,including a claim that the relationship between IQ and breastfeeding, about which I blogged last week, may be artifactual:

A recent study by Scottish researchers asked whether the higher IQs seen in breast-fed children are the result of the breast milk they got or some other factor. By comparing the IQs of sibling pairs in which one was breast-fed and the other not, it found that breast milk is irrelevant to IQ and that the mother’s IQ explains both the decision to breast-feed and her children’s IQ.

I suspect neither of these studies is the last word on the breastfeeding-IQ link.

Another issue involves the benefits and risks of early parenting by poor black girls. For decades, Arline Geronimus has made the case that poor young girls are often better off having children young, in direct contradiction of our society’s obsession with preventing teen pregnancy. I was in a seminar with Arlene during our postdocs in 1986-87 and remember her making a quite plausible case. She apparently has continued to amass evidence over the 20 years since.

While none of these studies are definitive, they all emphasize the importance of careful research work before developing social interventions to address what, in some instances, are nonexistent problems.

Here’s the entire article:

Study Debunks Theory On Teen Sex, Delinquency
New Analyses Challenging Many Old Assumptions

By Rick Weiss

Researchers at Ohio State University garnered little attention in February when they found that youngsters who lose their virginity earlier than their peers are more likely to become juvenile delinquents. So obvious and well established was the contribution of early sex to later delinquency that the idea was already part of the required curriculum for federal “abstinence only” programs.

There was just one problem: It is probably not true. Other things being equal, a more probing study has found, youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are, if anything, less likely to engage in delinquent behavior later on.

That new analysis, a reworking of the same data the Ohio team used, is one of several recent instances in which a more precise parsing of data has begun to turn long-standing societal presumptions on their head. By bringing evidence to bear on complex social issues, these studies are forcing individuals and policymakers to rethink such hot-button topics as the benefits of breast-feeding, the risks of teen child-bearing and, in the latest example, the harms long presumed to result from teen sex.

Like many of the newer studies, the latest one — led by Paige Harden, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville — used the powerful techniques of behavioral genetics. The field specializes in studies on twins, research that can help tell whether behavioral traits are the result of genes or the social environment, and that has periodically stirred controversy when it has focused on the genetic underpinnings of criminality and intelligence.

But the specialty’s analytic methods can also help tell whether one behavior, such as early sex, is merely correlated with or actually causes a second behavior that is often found with it, such as delinquency. If two behaviors often exist in the same people but are found not to be connected by cause and effect, then a third factor is likely to be causing both.

That kind of finding can help identify better targets for prevention efforts, experts say.

“Behavioral geneticists have long sought to establish causal links between genes and complex behaviors. So it’s fascinating to see them use the tools of their trade to dispute widely held beliefs” about the social roots of some of those behaviors, said Erik Parens, a senior research scholar who has tracked the field intensively at the Hastings Center, a Garrison, N.Y., science and ethics think tank.

The latest example started when Dana Haynie, a sociologist at Ohio State, and her then-graduate student, Stacy Armour, published a study in February in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. They analyzed data collected from more than 7,000 children as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a federally funded survey that in 1994 began gathering information about the health-related behavior of U.S. schoolchildren who were then in grades seven through 12.

Haynie and Armour divided the children into three groups based on when they first had sex: when they were younger, about the same age or older than the age at which most of their local peers lost their virginity. (It varies by region, but on average, U.S. children lose their virginity at age 16.) They also compiled information on graffiti-painting, shoplifting, drug-selling and other “problem behaviors” by those young people in later years.

Their conclusion: One year after losing their virginity, children in the early category were 20 percent more likely than those who started having sex at the average age to engage in delinquent behavior, even when several other relevant factors such as wealth, race, parental involvement and physical development were taken into account.

Those findings supported the widely held notion that loss of virginity at a relatively young age appears to, as Haynie and Armour wrote, “open the doorway to problem behaviors.”

Harden, at the University of Virginia, didn’t believe it.

Looked at from a similarly high altitude, she said, people might conclude that red meat is a health food, since people live longer in countries where more is eaten. Only when the issue is studied within one country does red meat’s link to chronic diseases appear.

Suspecting such an error in the Haynie study, Harden and three colleagues, including her adviser, Eric Turkheimer, an expert in behavioral genetics, studied more than 500 pairs of twins in the same national survey analyzed by the Ohio team. Because twin pairs share similar or identical genetic inheritances (depending on whether they are fraternal or identical) and the same home environment, twin studies are useful for seeing through false cause-and-effect relationships.

The team looked at identical twin pairs in which one twin initiated sex younger than the other, then team members tallied subsequent problem behaviors. If sex really adds to the chances of delinquency, then early-sex teens should end up delinquent more often than their later-sex twins.

“It turns out that there was no positive relationship between age of first sex and delinquency,” Harden said.

The way to reconcile that with the previous evidence of a link is to conclude that some other factors are promoting both early sex and delinquency, she said. In an e-mail, Haynie agreed. And the Virginia study, to appear in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, offers some clues.

It found that identical twins, who have the same DNA, were more similar to one another in the ages at which they lost their virginity than were fraternal twins, whose DNA patterns are 50 percent the same — an indication that genes influence the age at which a person will first have sex. Other twin studies have found the same pattern for delinquency.

Together, those findings suggest that some genes — perhaps, for example, those that increase impulsivity and risk-taking — may underlie both behaviors.

“You need to have some appetite for risk-taking to be a delinquent. And the same if you’re 13 and going to have sex for the first time,” Harden said.

Efforts to prevent delinquency can hardly take aim at people’s genes. But the Virginia study also indicates that social factors, as yet unidentified but perhaps involving relationships with family and friends, have an even bigger impact than genes on whether a child will become delinquent. Those are the things that should be identified and targeted by delinquency-prevention programs, said Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, co-director of Columbia University’s National Center for Children and Families.

“I wouldn’t be focusing on early sexuality . . . to alter rates of delinquency,” she said.

Perhaps most surprising, the Virginia study found that adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to end up delinquent than those who lost their virginity later. Many factors play into a person’s readiness for sex, but in at least some cases sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble, the researchers say.

Even then, there are emotional and physical risks. Young adolescents, in particular, are less likely to use condoms and so are vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

But those are risks that other nations have mitigated with education, Harden and Turkheimer said, while U.S. educators wanting a piece of the nation’s $200 million “abstinence only” budget must adhere to a curriculum that links sex to delinquency and explicitly precludes discussion of contraception.

The new study “really calls into question the usefulness of abstinence education for preventing behavior problems,” Harden said, “and questions the bigger underlying assumption that all adolescent sex is always bad.”

Similar re-analyses have begun to undermine other conventional notions about health.

A recent study by Scottish researchers asked whether the higher IQs seen in breast-fed children are the result of the breast milk they got or some other factor. By comparing the IQs of sibling pairs in which one was breast-fed and the other not, it found that breast milk is irrelevant to IQ and that the mother’s IQ explains both the decision to breast-feed and her children’s IQ.

In another example, Arline Geronimus, a University of Michigan professor of health behavior who is now a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study, knew that babies born to teenagers are more likely to die in their first year of life than those born to older women.

“But that is an apples-to-oranges comparison,” she said. In New York City, for example, far more teen mothers live in Harlem than on the Upper East Side, she said, and “there are a lot of differences between those groups.”

So Geronimus looked more closely and got a different answer.

“If you compare Harlem teen moms to Harlem older moms, you find that the kids of the teen moms are actually less likely to die,” she said. The reasons include the fact that, unlike older women, poor teenagers are generally not juggling jobs and have older relatives to help.

It can make sense for poor women to have children when they are quite young, Geronimus concludes, and any effort to change that ought to treat it as an economic problem, not a health education problem.

In a different re-analysis, Geronimus made another counterintuitive finding. While it is true that, in general, teen mothers are less likely to breast-feed their babies than older moms, it is not true among poor women. Poor teenagers are actually more likely to breast-feed than poor older moms, in large part because the older women have jobs that don’t grant them the time to breast-feed or pump milk.

Because of that misconception, programs promoting breast-feeding have targeted teens instead of older women, Geronimus said. And they have taken aim, in part, at a concern that teenagers were believed to have: the cosmetic effects of breast-feeding on their breasts.

“So you’ve targeted the wrong population,” Geronimus said, “and come up with the wrong kind of intervention.”

Add comment November 11th, 2007

Breastfeeding: Nature determines nurture influence

According to the BBC, a new study reports finding a gene that determines whether breastfeeding will increase a baby’s IQ. The 90% of babies (the article doesn’t say in what population) with the gene will gain an average of 7 IQ points if breastfed, the other 10% will not experience gain. This study is one of a number showing that traditional models of the nature-nurture relationship, in which the two are additive effects, are flawed. Rather, their is an interaction between them. But elucidating the nature of the interaction requires identification of mechanisms, in this case the FADS2 gene. Perhaps gradually the “nature-nurture” dichotomy will die out as we learn more about how these factors interact in development:

Gene ‘links breastfeeding to IQ’
A single gene influences whether breastfeeding improves a child’s intelligence, say London researchers.

Children with one version of the FADS2 gene scored seven points higher in IQ tests if they were breastfed.

But the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study found breastfeeding had no effect on the IQ of children with a different version.

The gene in question helps break down fatty acids from the diet, which have been linked with brain development.

Seven points difference is enough to put the child in the top third of the class, the researchers said.

Some 90% of people carry the version of the gene which was associated with better IQ scores in breastfed children.

Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, used data from two previous studies of breast-fed infants in Britain and New Zealand, which involved more than 3,000 children.

IQ was measured at various points between the ages of five and 13 years in the studies.

Previous studies on intelligence and breastfeeding have come up with conflicting results.

There has been some debate as to whether mothers who had more education or who were from more affluent backgrounds were more likely to breastfeed, skewing the results.

Nature versus nurture

Professor Terrie Moffitt, a co-author on the paper, said the findings gave a fresh perspective on the arguments by showing a physiological mechanism that could account for the difference between breastfed and bottle-fed babies.

“The argument about intelligence has been about nature versus nurture for at least a century,” she said.

“However, we have shown that in fact nature works via nurture to create better health outcomes.”

Since the studies used in the analysis were done, manufacturers have begun to add fatty acids to formula milk but there have been inconsistent results on the benefits.

Belinda Phipps, of the National Childbirth Trust, said: “This shows for the majority of parents they can have a positive effect on their babies IQ by breastfeeding.”

Catherine Collins, a dietician at St Georges Hospital in London and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, said the study highlighted the interaction between nutrition and genetics.

“In this study you have an effect that suggests that nature is more important that nurture.

“If nine out of 10 babies benefit, then that is a very good chance.”

But she added the study did not specify how long babies were breastfed for and it may be that even breastfeeding for a short period may be beneficial for intelligence.

Professor Jean Golding, who founded the ALSPAC study set up in the 1990s to follow the development of thousands of children in the South West of England, said the results were fascinating and they would be doing a further study of the gene.

“In the past people have had different results about whether breastfeeding improves IQ and this would sort out the reason why,” she said.

1 comment November 6th, 2007