Children

That’s the finding of a new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, by researchers in the Child Language and Speech Studies (CLASS) Lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Priscilla Fung (supplied image)

Priscilla Fung, a fifth-year PhD student, was in the midst of studying the vocabulary development of pre-schoolers when Ontario implemented a COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. But rather than abandon the research, Fung and the CLASS team – Thomas St. Pierre, Momina Raja and Fung’s supervisor, psychology professor Elizabeth Johnson – pivoted to a new question: How would the lockdown affect the children’s language skills?

“Since we already had the pre-pandemic information, we thought it would be interesting to compare,” says Fung, who followed the test group of 365 pre-schoolers (ages 11-34 months) and their parents with Zoom meetings and standardized vocabulary assessments.

“Ontario had one of the longest lockdowns in the world, which meant young children were at home more, but their parents faced unprecedented difficulties and had to juggle work and household duties, with no daycare or grandparents available to look after the kids,” says Fung, who holds both master’s and bachelor’s degrees in psychology from �鶹��Ƶ. “Stress went up, but reading time went down as parents had to leave children in front of the TV for hours and hours while they worked.”

Fung said the researchers hypothesized the children’s vocabulary would take a hit as screen time was already known to be a factor that negatively affects language development.

“It does make a difference, though, whether the screen time was passive, like TV, or interactive like a Zoom call where people were speaking with them,” says Fung, whose research interests also include early childhood bilingualism.

While the data showed that the fallout was fairly mild for most kids, it found that children 19- to 29-months-old from lower socioeconomic status (SES) families experienced delays in vocabulary development – the same group that reported the highest amount of passive screen time.

Fung says the study suggests those with higher income – study participants reported anywhere from $45,000 to $140,000 per household – were able to access resources to provide enrichment activities that helped mitigate language delays.

“We are very interested in following up [with lower socioeconomic status families] and hope to keep monitoring this group to see how they progress after this,” she says, adding that early language development is known to be critical to later cognitive and literacy success, with delays linked to psychosocial and behavioural problems.

The research should spur policymakers to pay more attention to children from lower socioeconomic families during times of crisis and stress.

“We hope society, especially government, will be aware of these findings [and] continue to monitor children’s language development, especially in lower SES families,” says Fung, who adds that the study underscores the benefits of encouraging all parents to interact and read with their children.

The study was funded by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and �鶹��Ƶ Mississauga’s Research and Scholarly Activity Fund.

Children are learning even if they don't pay attention: Study

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 18:57:25 +0000

Children are learning even if they don't pay attention: Study

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 06/21/2023 - 14:57

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(photo by Marko Geber/Getty Images)

Faculty of Arts & Science

Psychology

Research & Innovation

Subheadline

'Children's brains can hold information in a way that adults' brains do not'

A team of researchers has shown that children’s apparent inability to pay attention allows them to outperform adults when it comes to retaining information they were instructed to disregard.

The researchers’ study shows that, as expected, adults do a great job of focusing their attention on an assigned task and do not pay attention to information they are told to ignore.

Children, on the other hand, take in the secondary information they are instructed to ignore when given the same task. The information is then encoded in their brains.

“What we found is that children's brains can hold information in a way that adults' brains do not,” says Yaelan Jung, who worked on the study as a graduate student at the University of Toronto and in her current position as a postdoctoral researcher at Emory University.

Researchers used a series of four simple icons to test how well adults and children paid attention (image courtesy of Jung, Finn, et al.)

“Although it’s not a foreign idea that children have poorer attention abilities than adults, we did not know how this poor attention would impact the way their brains receive and hold other information,” she says. “Our study fills this knowledge gap and shows that children's poor attention leads them to hold more information from the world than adults.”

The team described their study in a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

In addition to Jung, the authors include: Tess Forest, who also contributed to the study as a graduate student at �鶹��Ƶ and in her current position as a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University; and Dirk Bernhardt-Walther and Amy Finn – both associate professors in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of psychology.

“It’s not simply that children’s ability to pay attention is bad and they’re unable to disregard distractors,” says Finn. “Our study suggests that their brains are built to be sensitive to all information, regardless of whether it's relevant or not – that kids are more sensitive to more information.

“Depending on your definition of childhood, humans are children for eight or nine years,” she says. “Compared to other species, that’s a long time and one explanation for such a lengthy childhood is that we humans have so much learning to do. Another is that it’s important for our IQ to take in as much information as we do. Still another is that we need to take in all this information as children in order to wire our brains properly, to develop the circuits and pathways for processing information.”

The study involved 24 adults with a mean age of 23 years and 26 children with a mean age of eight years. The team asked the participants to observe a series of four static illustrations: a bumble bee, a car, a chair and a tree. Each image was accompanied by a background of grey dots moving in one of four directions: up, down, left and right.

In one phase of the study, subjects were instructed to ignore the moving dots and press a button when an object – say, the bumblebee – appeared more than once. In another phase, they were asked to ignore the objects and press a button when the direction of motion of the dots was repeated.

Subjects carried out their task while in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine at the Toronto Neuroimaging Facility at the University of Toronto. As they performed the task, the MRI measured the subjects’ brain activity which revealed how attention shapes what is represented in subjects’ brains.

“What we found in this study provides a novel way to think about what brain development means,” says Jung. “Often, we assume that as the brain develops it will do more and do things better. Thus, we often think that adults are better and smarter than kids. However, our work shows this is not always the case. Rather, children's brains may just do things differently than adults – and consequently, they can sometimes do more than adults.”

Added Finn: “The study suggests that this approach of being more sensitive to the broader environment, at the cost of paying attention to specific things, is better for understanding complex systems. It may help form a higher level of understanding of our full environment.

“So, I look at kids as these little information-processing creatures better able to represent more of the world, with brains that more accurately reflect the world than ours.”

Kids with vegetarian diets record similar growth, nutrition measures as those who eat meat: Study

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 05 May 2022 13:14:46 +0000

Kids with vegetarian diets record similar growth, nutrition measures as those who eat meat: Study

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 05/05/2022 - 09:14

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(Photo by Ekaterina Goncharova via Getty Images)

Jennifer Stranges

Topic

Breaking Research

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Unity Health

Children

Nutrition

Research & Innovation

St. Michael's Hospital

A study of nearly 9,000 children has found those who eat a vegetarian diet had similar measures of growth and nutrition compared to children who eat meat.

The study, led by researchers at the University of Toronto and St. Michael’s Hospital of Unity Health Toronto, also found that children with a vegetarian diet had higher odds of underweight status – emphasizing the need for special care when planning the diets of vegetarian kids.

The findings, published in the journal Pediatrics, come as a shift to consuming plant-based diets grows in Canada. In 2019, updates to Canada’s Food Guide urged Canadians to embrace plant-based proteins, such as beans and tofu, instead of meat.

Professor Jonathon Maguire (photo courtesy of St. Michael's Hospital, Unity Health Toronto)

“Over the last 20 years we have seen growing popularity of plant-based diets and a changing food environment with more access to plant-based alternatives, however we have not seen research into the nutritional outcomes of children following vegetarian diets in Canada,” said Jonathon Maguire, principal investigator on the study who is a professor in �鶹��Ƶ’s department of pediatrics in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and a pediatrician at St. Michael’s Hospital.

“This study demonstrates that Canadian children following vegetarian diets had similar growth and biochemical measures of nutrition compared to children consuming non-vegetarian diets,” said Maguire, who is also a scientist at �鶹��Ƶ’s Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition. “Vegetarian diet was associated with higher odds of underweight weight status, underscoring the need for careful dietary planning for children with underweight when considering vegetarian diets.”

The researchers evaluated 8,907 children aged six months to eight years. The children were all participants of the TARGet Kids! cohort study and data was collected between 2008 and 2019. Participants were categorized by vegetarian status – defined as a dietary pattern that excludes meat – or non-vegetarian status.

The team found children who had a vegetarian diet had similar mean body mass index (BMI), height, iron, vitamin D and cholesterol levels compared to those who consumed meat. The findings showed evidence that children with a vegetarian diet had almost two-fold higher odds of having underweight, which is defined as below the third percentile for BMI. There was no evidence of an association with overweight or obesity.

Underweight is an indicator of undernutrition, and may be a sign that the quality of the child’s diet is not meeting the child’s nutritional needs to support normal growth. For children who eat a vegetarian diet, the researchers emphasized access to health-care providers who can provide growth monitoring, education and guidance to support their growth and nutrition.

International guidelines about vegetarian diet in infancy and childhood have differing recommendations, and past studies that have evaluated the relationship between vegetarian diet and childhood growth and nutritional status have had conflicting findings.

“Plant-based dietary patterns are recognized as a healthy eating pattern due to increased intake of fruits, vegetables, fiber, whole grains and reduced saturated fat; however, few studies have evaluated the impact of vegetarian diets on childhood growth and nutritional status. Vegetarian diets appear to be appropriate for most children,” said Maguire, who is also a scientist at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital.

A limitation of the study is that researchers did not assess the quality of the vegetarian diets. The researchers note that vegetarian diets come in many forms and the quality of the individual diet may be quite important to growth and nutritional outcomes. The authors say further research is needed to examine the quality of vegetarian diets in childhood, as well as growth and nutrition outcomes among children following a vegan diet, which excludes meat and animal derived products such as dairy, eggs and honey.

The study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), St. Michael’s Hospital Foundation and SickKids Foundation.

A version of this story was first published on the website of St. Michael's Hospital, Unity Health Toronto.

Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds: Researcher Mavra Ahmed studies school food programs in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 16:19:37 +0000

Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds: Researcher Mavra Ahmed studies school food programs in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 04/29/2022 - 12:19

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Mavra Ahmed is helping lead a �鶹��Ƶ study reviewing all breakfast, lunch and snack programs in Canadian schools, along with their impact on children’s academic achievement and health (photo courtesy of Temerty Faculty of Medicine)

Jim Oldfield

Topic

Our Community

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition

�鶹��Ƶ

Anthropology

Children

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty of Arts & Science

Hospital for Sick Children

Schools

When Mavra Ahmed first heard about a new post-doctoral leadership position with Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds – a University of Toronto study of school food programs in Canada – she thought the role sounded like a great fit for her expertise, which ranges from basic science to clinical nutrition to population health.

A year and a half later, Ahmed says her first impression could not have been more accurate.

“This study offers several opportunities I was looking for – from leadership and mentorship to work with national and international researchers, and with local schools and community groups,” says Ahmed, who completed doctoral studies at �鶹��Ƶ with a focus on nutritional intakes during deployment or training among Canadian Armed Forces personnel.

“And of course, it’s a great opportunity to help ensure more children eat well at school and are ready to learn.”

Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds is led by �鶹��Ƶ’s Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition, and includes a review of all breakfast, lunch and snack programs in Canadian schools, along with their impact on children’s academic achievement and health.

The work began last summer under Ahmed’s guidance, with the hire of two nutritional sciences undergraduate students. The students reviewed existing monitoring and assessment tools for school food programs and environments, as well as news and other reports on the impact of COVID-19 on program delivery.

The team worked closely with Lawson Centre scientists Daniel Sellen, who also has cross appointments in the department of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts & Science and at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Zulfiqar Bhutta, who is also co-director and director of research at the Hospital for Sick Children's Centre for Global Child Health, and public health researcher Vasanti Malik and others. They will begin to share their results this year. Their findings will be critical to the design and delivery of Canadian school food programs, and will include equity indicators such as race and income.

School food programs in Canada vary greatly in terms of who delivers them, which children they reach and what’s on the menu. Many advocates including the Coalition for Healthy School Food have said for years that heterogeneity hinders effective and broad program delivery.

Canada is the only G7 nation without a national school food program, although the federal government committed to develop a policy on the issue in its 2022 budget.

Other countries have put in place or are developing national programs with various areas of focus, and Ahmed says their experiences should prove useful for Canada. She recently joined INFORMAS, an international network for food and obesity researchers, and the global School Meals Coalition, in part to tap learnings from across Canada and abroad, and to leverage existing findings.

One early insight from interaction with those groups was that researchers have developed new equity indicators to track how programs work for under-privileged students, especially in Brazil and other Latin American countries, Ahmed says.

“Capturing established and emerging program assessment tools is a complex undertaking,” Ahmed says. “We didn’t realize how vast it would become, which is challenging, but it has also afforded some great opportunities for two-way learning and collaboration.”

Longer-term, Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds will enable the researchers to design and test school-level interventions to improve meal program delivery. The project will run over four years.

“Given that Canada is so culturally diverse and geographically vast, we’ll likely need to take the best elements of programs in Canada and adapt approaches from around the world if we want an effective strategy for feeding children well in our schools,” Ahmed says. “I’m excited about how that could look.”

Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds is funded by a $2-million investment from President’s Choice Children’s Charity, and by the Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition at the University of Toronto.

Researchers examine impact of immigration status and racism on child welfare system

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 15:55:16 +0000

Researchers examine impact of immigration status and racism on child welfare system

geoff.vendeville Wed, 03/02/2022 - 10:55

Cutline

Rupaleem Bhuyan is co-leading a collaborative research project looking at the impact of immigration status and systemic racism on child welfare policies and practices (photo by Harry Choi)

Topic

Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Immigration

As someone who works with women and children who have experienced domestic violence, Shaoli Choudhury sees how difficult it can be for them when the child welfare system becomes involved in their lives. If those families are also newcomers to Canada, more problems often arise.

“They worry about having their children taken away, but also about increasing their risk of deportation,” says Choudhury, who oversees three transition houses for YWCA Metro Vancouver. “There’s a lot of uncertainty for immigrant families – and for those of us working in the field.”

To help reduce that uncertainty, she’s partnering with Bordering Practices: Systemic Racism, Child Welfare and Immigration, a collaborative research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and led by Rupaleem Bhuyan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, and Mandeep Kaur Mucina, an assistant professor at the University of Victoria’s School of Child and Youth Care.

Shaoli Chaudhury

The initiative involves community partners in both Toronto and Vancouver who are working together to better understand the roles that immigration status and systemic racism play in child welfare policies and practices – especially if one or more family members has precarious status.

“My colleagues and I recognize that there’s a knowledge gap in terms of how the child welfare system interacts with immigrant families,” says Choudhury. “By offering our perspective and learning from the researchers and other service providers, we’re hoping to help bridge that gap and better support families.”

Bhuyan says there are very few guidelines on how to manage immigration status in child welfare. “As a result, the level of awareness about immigration issues varies widely among frontline workers and decision-makers,” she says. “In Ontario and British Columbia, most child welfare policies don’t even use the word ‘immigrant.’”

When it comes to immigrants with precarious status – which can include anyone who is not a Canadian citizen, documented or not – there are even fewer resources.

Travonne Edwards

The absence of language in provincial legislation recognizing the issues that impact immigrant families is comparable to the lack of specific language acknowledging the existence of anti-Black racism for Black families, says Travonne Edwards, a PhD student in social work and a member of the project’s advisory board. He works closely with the Black Community Action Network of Peel as part of his research with the Youth Wellness Lab, which is examining the over-representation of Black families in Ontario’s child welfare system.

“This silence directly influences child welfare practice,” he says. “It allows for ambiguity in interpreting policies and prevents a more critical and nuanced understanding of the issues impacting Black and racialized families that are dealing with precarious status.” Research by Edwards and colleagues has led child welfare agencies to pay closer attention to racial disparities experienced by Black children. He says this project aims to produce a similar evidence base to spark action and reform.

A growing number of people living in Canada are racialized immigrants with precarious status as temporary workers, international students, refugee claimants or non-status residents. “It’s impossible to know the true number, but rough estimates run up to 1.6 million including undocumented immigrants,” Bhuyan says. “These individuals and families confront multiple barriers to accessing social services and experience economic hardship and racism – all factors that affect their interactions with the child welfare system.”

In the project’s title, “bordering” refers to the political and social processes that differentiate groups by race, gender and immigration status. “Lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ determines who belongs and who has rights in everyday life” says Bhuyan, “so [bordering] shows up all the time in the everyday life of immigrants.”

Working in partnership with community-based researchers and advocates in Toronto and Vancouver, the Bordering Practices research team – with co-investigators Bryn King, an assistant professor in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, and Rhonda Hackett, of the University of Victoria, are taking a multifaceted approach to establish a baseline understanding of how federal and provincial policies shape risk assessment for child abuse and neglect among racialized immigrants.

In addition to policy analysis, the project is committed to advocacy. Last October, the research team and the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario submitted a formal response to proposed changes to Ontario’s Child, Youth and Family Services Act. “We urged the government to provide better guidance for social workers on cases involving children and families with precarious immigration status and recommended an ‘Access Without Fear’ policy, which safeguards people with precarious status against detention or deportation when they’re accessing essential services,” says Bhuyan.

Keisha Facey

The project is rooted in community participation across the fields of child welfare, immigrant services, anti-Black racism and gender-based violence. The aim, says Edwards, is to break down the silos between these sectors and forge connections that will lead to meaningful change for immigrant families in the child welfare system. “There are people in all of these areas doing amazing work, but it’s disjointed. We’re creating opportunities to bring our work into harmony.”

These opportunities include ongoing focus groups with people at various vantage points within the system – from policy-makers and child welfare managers to frontline workers and child welfare advocates – and community forums, where stakeholders can gather to discuss common concerns and goals. The first community event, Silos and Silences: A Forum Shedding Light on Child Welfare and Immigration Status, will take place this Friday.

“Our primary goal is to raise awareness and share knowledge,” says Keishia Facey, a project partner from the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies (OACAS) who will moderate the forum’s panel discussion. She is the manager of the OACAS’s One Vision One Voice program, which addresses anti-Black racism experienced by African-Canadian families in the child welfare system. “There’s no single, accepted way of protecting the rights of children and families with precarious status, and being part of this project allows us to use our platform to say this needs to change.”

Chizara Anucha

Facey’s colleague, Chizara Anucha, a �鶹��Ƶ master of social work graduate and community engagement specialist at One Vision One Voice, will lead a workshop following the panel discussion on child welfare risk assessments for Black immigrant families. In another workshops, Choudhury will consider how social workers can manage the immigration status of women experiencing domestic violence when there’s a likelihood of child welfare involvement.

“This research is only meaningful if it includes people who are directly impacted by it,” says Bhuyan, adding that another phase of the project will collect stories from families with precarious immigration status who have been involved in the child welfare system. “We’re creating spaces for conversation so we can continue to build this knowledge together.”

�鶹��Ƶ management expert Sonia Kang offers six tips for negotiating with your kids

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 19:46:46 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ management expert Sonia Kang offers six tips for negotiating with your kids

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 09/08/2021 - 15:46

Cutline

(Photo by Gary Burchell via Getty Images)

Rebecca Cheung

Topic

Our Community

Children

Rotman School of Management

�鶹��Ƶ Mississauga

If every interaction with your kids feels like a negotiation lately, you are not alone.

When emotions run high at home, it’s difficult for parents to come up with peaceful resolutions. Even the most experienced business negotiators might find themselves at a loss.

Sonia Kang

“Some of the difficult discussions we have with our kids can become emotional, repetitive and unpredictable,” explains Sonia Kang, an associate professor in the department of management at the University of Mississauga who is cross-appointed to the Rotman School of Management.

“Our kids might be the toughest negotiators we ever face.”

That said, there are things parents can do to get through to their kids during this difficult time, says Kang, who has devoted much of her academic work to studying and understanding negotiations, power and behaviour.

As Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Kang’s research identifies strategies to disrupt systems, processes and structures that block diversity and inclusion within organizations. She also explores how employees can navigate challenges that arise on the job with her popular podcast, For the Love of Work. As well, she coaches students in her negotiations courses on how to execute difficult deals, persuade others or negotiate raises or promotions.

Her experiences during the global pandemic have made her a true expert when it comes to negotiating with kids. In addition to juggling work and other commitments during lockdown, Kang and her partner have been brokering deals with their two energetic – and very clever – young sons.

Here are Kang’s six tips for navigating difficult parenting situations:

Prioritize your relationship with your child

“As a parent, your top priority never changes. Your child should always feel safe and secure with you,” says Kang.

Parents need to maintain a healthy, secure attachment relationship with their kids. This puts children on the path to becoming confident adults who are comfortable taking risks and pursuing healthy relationships later in life.

Know what is negotiable

When kids feel a sense of control, they are less likely to act out and more likely to abide by the few rules that their parents establish.

Kang encourages parents to re-examine their daily parenting decisions and consider whether they are non-negotiable issues, negotiable issues or issues to forget for now.

“I think most parents will see that very few issues are non-negotiable, and that leaves a lot of room to involve kids in decision-making,” she says.

Parents can empower their kids by having them suggest a few meal ideas for the week or ideas on how they want to spend their free time.

Adults should also know when to walk away.

“There are battles that just aren't worth the energy right now,” says Kang. “For example, if your child refuses to sleep in her bed and insists on sleeping on the floor, think about whether it’s worth the fight. If the end goal is to get her to go to sleep and she’s doing that, don’t fixate on details.”

Coach kids on their emotions

“In parenting, all emotions get a ‘yes,’ even if your child is expressing something that you disagree with,” says Kang. She recommends four steps for helping kids process their emotions, derived from the theory and practice of emotion-focused parenting.

Attend to the emotions that your kids are expressing. Resist the urge to refute your child’s claims. “For most parents, it’s hard to hear that your children feel hopeless or bad about themselves, but we need to instill the idea that they can trust their feelings,” says Kang. “It’s important to take a moment and listen.”
Put a label on their emotions. Help your kids define exactly what they are feeling. For instance, for kids who feel unpopular or isolated from their peers, parents can use phrases like “I understand why you’re feeling this way because everyone wants to have friends” or “I understand why you’re sad because it feels bad to be left out.”
Validate their emotions. You might disagree with the assumptions underlying your child’s emotions, but you need to show them that you empathize with them.
Meet the need. Once you’ve put the emotions in context, jump into action. Soothe, offer hugs and reassure. Set boundaries if your child acts out.

Coach kids on their behaviours

Once parents have helped kids understand their emotions, they need to be firm about expected behaviours. Kang offers parents four steps for guiding kids towards productive behaviours.

Describe what you’re seeing. State the facts and don’t be judgmental. For instance, when you see a fight escalating between your kids, describe what you’re seeing with “I see two kids who aren’t getting along.”
Remind. Emphasize the rules and expectations. (For example, “In our home everyone's body is safe” or “In our family, we discuss things calmly when we disagree.”)
Inspire and expect. Remind your kids of times when they did the right thing. (“I've seen how responsible you can be and helpful you’ve been to your sister in the past” or “I remember times when you showed so much kindness and caring towards your brother.”)
Give opportunities. Speak slowly, take deep breaths, and be patient. Give your kids time to process what you’ve told them and the opportunity to do the right thing. If they act out, be firm and provide loving consequences, which will be unique from family to family based on what works and feels right for them.

Know your role and responsibilities

“As parents, your job is to empathize, validate and set boundaries. Your kids are simply responsible for experiencing and expressing their feelings,” says Kang. “If you can manage those things, that’s enough. You’re doing your job well. Aside from that, remember that you’re not a bad parent if you don’t love every moment you spend with your children. You need breaks and space for yourself too.”

With parenting, you’re playing the long game

“We’re doing the hard work now to make sure our kids become teenagers and adults who can trust their own emotions, stick up for themselves and do what they feel is right,” says Kang. “Everything we teach them now about regulating their emotions and behaviours will pay off much later, and it will be worth it.”

Lighting and noise contribute to kids' sleep deprivation in hospitals: �鶹��Ƶ study

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 11 May 2021 17:56:50 +0000

Lighting and noise contribute to kids' sleep deprivation in hospitals: �鶹��Ƶ study

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 05/11/2021 - 13:56

Cutline

Despite the importance of sleep for recovery, researchers at �鶹��Ƶ and SickKids have found that lighting and sound are significant factors contributing to sleep deprivation among hospitalized children (photo by Gorodenkoff Productions OU/iStockPhoto)

Topic

Hospital for Sick Children

Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing

Research & Innovation

Most hospitalized children experience significant sleep deprivation – and light and sound are two major culprits.

That’s the finding of researchers at the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) who measured, minute by minute, how well children sleep in the hospital – as well as their exposure to light and sound.

The study was recently published in JAMA Network Open.

“This is the first time we can show how much of an impact light and sound have on awakenings in particular,” says lead author Robyn Stremler, an associate professor in the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing.

“It has been assumed that when children are sick, they might be awake or have disrupted sleep due to pain or illness, but with these data, we are able to show that light and sound are the largest contributors to sleep problems and that sleep could and should be improved.”

Using actigraphy, a non-invasive way of measuring rest and activity cycles, Stremler and her team were able to objectively measure sleep by having patients wear a device on their ankle or wrist that contained an accelerometer – similar to how a Fitbit measures sleep. They then assessed waking and sleep periods over the course of multiple nights. Sound and light meters were time-synchronized to the actigraphy device and were placed at the child’s bedside to measure any light and sound that occurred in the room around waking.

After considering additional variables, such as the reason for the child’s admission, how ill they were, whether they were residing in the pediatric intensive care unit, or PICU, and whether a parent or nurse was present in the room, the study found that light above 150 lux, or about the same brightness as an incandescent bulb, and sound over 80 decibels, which is equivalent to a sudden loud noise, had the most significant impact on sleep.

“What we can see is that these disruptions are part of the hospital environment and are modifiable – not easily, but we can look at doing something about it,” says Stremler, who is also an adjunct scientist at SickKids.

Researcher Robyn Stremler with a child who is wearing an actigraph (photo courtesy of Lawrence S. Blomberg Faculty of Nursing)

One of the main reasons patients get woken up at night is so caregivers can monitor their temperature and blood pressure, or administer certain medications. The sicker the patient is, the more likely they are going to need frequent assessments. Stremler says that while there is a clinical imperative to check on these patients, there could be a greater effort to tailor care to each patient’s situation.

“Rather than, across the board, saying, ‘Every four hours, patients need to have their vitals assessed,’ can we look more critically at patients to see if that level of monitoring is necessary? Can we make different choices about when medications are given? We need to think about how we can preserve as much sleep as possible given that we know that more sleep benefits patients’ physical and mental health and recovery.”

That said, Stremler notes it can be challenging to modify such assessments because they involve policy change and care co-ordination across many groups of caregivers in hospital. Stremler’s previous research has shown that while nurses know that preserving sleep is particularly important for pediatric patients, they also emphasize it can be difficult to provide adequate care and ensure there are limited sleep disruptions.

There may be other ways that hospitals can help to reduce light and sound within a patient’s room. Hospitals designing new spaces, for example, can consider how loudly or often doors close, lighting options and the use of materials that can absorb sound.

“We’ve suspected for some time that aspects of the environment were affecting sleep in young patients, but with this granular look at sleep intervals we are able to emphasize the importance of taking measures to reduce light and sound to improve sleep for patients who need it most,” Stremler says.

Ten ways to teach your kids through play during COVID-19: �鶹��Ƶ expert

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 13 May 2020 20:23:28 +0000

Ten ways to teach your kids through play during COVID-19: �鶹��Ƶ expert

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 05/13/2020 - 16:23

Cutline

Research has found that the integration of academic learning in play-based contexts is often more successful than traditional adult-led learning, according to �鶹��Ƶ researcher Angela Pyle (photo by Jeanette Virginia Goh via Shutterstock)

Topic

Our Community

Coronavirus

Children

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

As many parents have come to realize during COVID-19, teaching your children can be quite challenging. Children are used to you acting as a parent – not a teacher, according to child development expert Angela Pyle of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto.

But Pyle, who is an assistant professor in OISE’s department of applied psychology and human development and runs Play Learning Lab at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, says play-based learning can provide a developmentally appropriate context for learning skills in an engaging manner that is less stressful.

While play is traditionally conceived as a child’s activity rather than a serious learning context, research has found that the integration of academic learning in play-based contexts is often more successful than traditional adult-led learning. There are many ways to integrate play and learning, including both adult-led and child-led approaches, Pyle says.

Pyle recently put together a list of 10 ways to encourage children’s learning at home through play:

Language and play

1. Hide letters around your house and go on a letter hunt. Have younger children identify the letters and their sounds. Invite older children to make as many words as they can using the letters they find.

2. To help children learn to blend letter sounds, an essential reading skill, play hide-and-seek. Choose a favourite toy and hide it in the house. Invite your child to find the toy with the help of a clue. For example, sound out the letters of the word that describes the hiding place (e.g., “The car is under the t-a-b-l-e.”). Your child can blend the sounds together to solve the clue and find their toy.

3. Invite your child to choose one of their favourite toys to be the character in a play or movie. Younger children can identify the parts of the story – character, setting, problem, solution – orally. Older children can write the outline, while more capable children can write a full script. Then perform a live play or create a movie of their story.

Math and play

4. Use Lego to practice basic math skills. Have younger children roll a die and build a tower with that many blocks. Older children can roll two dice and add the numbers together to determine how many blocks to put in their tower. More advanced learners can roll two dice, using the first to identify the number of towers to build and the second to represent the number of blocks in each tower. Children can then write out and answer the corresponding multiplication sentence, using the blocks as counters if needed.

5. Board games support the development of number skills as children roll dice and count out the appropriate number of spaces to move in games like Snakes and Ladders, and Candyland. For older children, strategy games like Blokus that develop their spatial awareness are a good option.

6. To work on your child’s visual spatial skills, present them with a building challenge. Build a simple structure out of blocks. Show the structure to your child for five seconds and then hide it. Challenge your child to visualize the object and build it from memory. Once complete, show the original structure and allow them to compare the two.

Science and play

7. Building things can promote learning of the scientific process as children experiment with different ways to make structures more stable. For instance, they could build a roller coaster out of Lego and tracks out of cardboard and other household items. You can extend this learning by asking purposeful questions: How can you ensure that the roller coaster arrives at the end of the track without stopping? How can you make the roller coaster travel faster?

8. A common household item like an ice cube can provide the inspiration for both science and art. Experiment with melting ice cubes by using household items like salt or a hair dryer. Measure and compare how quickly each item causes the ice cube to melt, then ask your children for their theories about what they have observed. Add food colouring to the ice cubes using primary colours to experiment with colour mixing. What happens when a red ice cube and a purple ice cube melt and mix together? Use this knowledge to create beautiful art by rubbing the ice cubes on paper as they melt.

Integrating learning and imaginative play

9. In this unusual time, many children wish they could go somewhere beyond their homes. Turn this frustration into an inspiration for play. Learn about a place your child would like to go by reading about it or watching videos online. Make a pretend airplane and invite your child to create passports, boarding passes, travel brochures and signs for your trip. This type of play scenario provides the opportunity to practice both reading and writing while engaging in imaginative play.

10. Invite your child to build a fort that can serve as the inspiration and location for learning. They can draw plans for their fort prior to construction. More capable learners can label these plans and write a list of the materials they will need. Children can give their fort a name and make signs containing the name and any rules that they wish those inside the fort to abide by. The fort can also provide a cozy place to read together. Both inviting your child to read and reading to your child are valuable to their learning. When your child reads they practice using strategies to decode words and read fluently. Reading to your child provides the opportunity for them to hear what fluent reading should sound like, expand their vocabulary and hear stories that they may not yet be able to read on their own.

�鶹��Ƶ child psychiatrists share tips with Globe and Mail on talking to children about COVID-19

rahul.kalvapalle — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 15:56:26 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ child psychiatrists share tips with Globe and Mail on talking to children about COVID-19

rahul.kalvapalle Tue, 03/17/2020 - 11:56

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(photo by Pascal Guyot/AFP via Getty Images)

Topic

It’s no easy task talking to children about the COVID-19 outbreak, but parents who can discuss it in an honest manner, while exhibiting calm amid the crisis, can help foster resilience in their families, according to child psychiatrists at the University of Toronto.

In an op-ed for the Globe and Mail, Rachel Mitchell, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry in �鶹��Ƶ’s Faculty of Medicine and a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Centre for Youth Bipolar Disorder at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and Gili Adler Nevo, assistant professor of psychiatry at �鶹��Ƶ and head of the Child Anxiety Clinic at Michael Garron Hospital, say the first step is for parents to manage their own anxiety.

“If you model calm, children are more likely to be calm,” write Mitchell and Nevo, although they emphasize that this doesn’t mean parents should pretend to not be worried, but rather that they should demonstrate to their children that they can cope with worry.

It’s also useful to tailor explanations to your child’s developmental stage and their specific questions. “It isn’t necessary to provide answers beyond what your child is looking for. Know your facts, be age-appropriate, use familiar language and administer only at a ‘dose’ they can manage,” say the psychiatrists.

Parents can also convey to their children that they have power over the situation by doing such things as washing their hands regularly, which can have a large impact.

While parents themselves won’t always have all the answers, “We can be a comforting, stable, sensible and responsible support for our children,” Mitchell and Nevo write.

Read the op-ed in the Globe and Mail

'No walk in the park': �鶹��Ƶ alumna's book teaches kids about the messy business of scientific discovery

geoff.vendeville — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 20:54:31 +0000

'No walk in the park': �鶹��Ƶ alumna's book teaches kids about the messy business of scientific discovery

geoff.vendeville Tue, 03/03/2020 - 15:54

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Cylita Guy, who earned a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from �鶹��Ƶ, is writing a children's book inspired by her research on the city's bats (photo courtesy of Cylita Guy)

Topic

Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Faculty of Arts & Science

Graduate Students

Cylita Guy knows all too well that the pursuit of urban ecology comes with its share of unglamourous obstacles, from smelly river muck to nosey passersby – and now she's hoping to paint a more complete picture of the scientific process for the public.

She recalls, as an example, one cool night in Toronto’s High Park while she was doing research on city bats for her PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto. Her field partner nearly fell off a roof trying to reach a bat colony and the work was constantly interrupted by curious onlookers, including a police officer with an apparent fear of the winged mammals.

Guy draws on that experience, and those of seven urban ecologists at �鶹��Ƶ and other universities, in her first book – a children’s book – about the problems that arise during the process of doing science and about the diverse work of urban ecologists. Adventures of Your Friendly Neighbourhood Urban Ecologists features scientists at different stages of their careers and highlights the work of female ecologists and people of colour.

She says that she wants to introduce young readers to the relatively young field of urban ecology and address what she sees as a gap in children’s literature about science – namely a tendency to gloss over how scientists actually obtain data and make their discoveries.

“I felt like a lot of kids’ science books present ... ‘the cool people who found those cool animal facts,’” she says.

“I think one of the problems is that people think that science is static. We think these are the way things operate, but sometimes we find the complete opposite – and sometimes we generate new questions that we still need to go out and answer.”

Her research in High Park, which was published in the Journal of Urban Ecology, will be the focus of the first chapter of her book, which is due to be published next year by Annick Press (the independent Canadian publisher approached Guy after seeing her work featured in another book, Fieldwork Fail: The Messy Side of Science).

The chapter describes how scientists can change their minds about a research question after gathering new evidence.

Like other ecologists, Guy assumed the park in Toronto’s West end was a good habitat for big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus), but her fieldwork suggested otherwise. The bats they found in the park were runtier than specimens in Hamilton, Ont.; males outnumbered females two-to-one; and beetles, bats’ favourite snack, were in short supply.

Guy, author of an upcoming kids' book on urban ecology, trapped and researched big brown bats like the one above for her PhD studies (photo courtesy of Cylita Guy)

There was also the eventful night in High Park when she and field partner Krista Patriquin encountered the aforementioned complications. The pair were trapping bats from a colony hanging from the eaves of a house when Patriquin slipped and nearly tumbled to the ground. Later, while examining the bats, the pair were interrupted by a group of curious teenagers.

“I was super stressed because I was like ‘Oh my god. What is going to happen?’” Guy recalls. “But they were probably the most engaged group of people we have ever encountered.”

Later the same evening, a police officer showed up and asked the researchers what they were doing in the park after midnight. As Guy explained, she noticed the officer’s eyes widen.

“Ma’am, did you know your shirt is moving?”

“Oh yeah, of course,” Guy answered. “I have 25 bats down there.”

Because of the cold, the bats had entered what Guy describes as a “mini-hibernation state,” also known as torpor. Guy was following a procedure to warm them up before releasing them back into the wild.

In the book, Guy builds on that anecdote with vignettes about urban ecologists across North America, including �鶹��Ƶ PhD candidates Charlotte de Keyzer, who looks at how plants and pollinators respond to climate change, and PhD student Rachel Giles, who studies road run-off and other contaminants in waterways and how they affect invertebrates like crayfish and larvae.

Guy says she chose the �鶹��Ƶ researchers to show the broad range of research questions that urban ecologists seek to answer.

When people think of ecology, “we often think about warm, fuzzy mammals and plants,” she says. “But nobody thinks about the invertebrates that inhabit the river bottoms in the middle of the winter, or that fact there might be tiny little plastics in our water, and maybe this matters for fish and other living things.”

Rachel Giles, a second-year PhD student who studies how mixtures of contaminants impact wildlife in urban streams, is one of the scientists featured in Guy's children’s book (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Giles, a student in �鶹��Ƶ Assistant Professor Chelsea Rochman’s lab in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology, shares her own story of how she once sank into the Humber River in a conservation area north of Brampton while collecting water and sediment samples for her research – in February. The riverbank at their test site that day was flooded with meltwater.

“When I put my foot down on what I thought was the edge of the riverbank it actually ended up falling down and I slowly sank into the nearly freezing water,” she says.

Fortunately, Giles was able to grab a tree branch and climb out of the mud. It was a crash course in the importance of the safety measures taken by researchers – and an example of the lengths they go to for science.

“You put yourself in situations where there’s extreme weather or it’s super stinky or it’s really long days. .. Scientists will go to crazy measures to get their data,” Giles says.

“Ecology is certainly no walk in the park.”