Minority preschoolers from low-income families who participated in a comprehensive school-based intervention appear to fare better educationally, criminally and economically into young adulthood, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

If you know any toddlers, you’ve probably wondered what is going on in their heads as they put their (full) bowls on their head at mealtime or run around in circles, shrieking for no apparent reason.

Researchers have long known that at about 18 months children experience a vocabulary explosion, suddenly learning words at a much faster rate. They have theorized that complex mechanisms are behind the phenomenon. But new research by a University of Iowa professor suggests far simpler mechanisms may be at play: word repetition, variations in the difficulty of words and the fact that children are learning multiple words at once.

Children who were taught a curriculum that focused on self-control and awareness of their own and others’ emotions were found to exhibit greater social competence and fewer behavioral and emotional problems.

Children who have at least one parent who smokes have 5.5 times higher levels of cotinine, a byproduct of nicotine, in their urine, according to a study by researchers from Warwick Medical School at the the University of Warwick, and the University of Leicester, published online ahead of print in Archives of Disease in Childhood.

A research abstract that will be presented Wednesday at SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) finds that a snoring child's poor sleep hygiene habits can have a negative influence on his or her daytime behavior.

The last study of the book "Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents" (Oxford University Press, 2007, written by ISU Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson, Assistant Professor of Psychology Douglas Gentile, and doctoral student Katherine Buckley, assessed 430 third-, fourth- and fifth-graders, their peers, and their teachers twice during a five-month period in the school year.