Leave them kids alone

An article by Neil Swidey in the Boston Globe Magazine begins with a profile of a three year old girl — tutored in the Better Baby Institute method — who does not know the names of the Disney princesses but can correctly “identify flashcards with the following images: the Mona Lisa, Aristotle contemplating a bust of Homer, Marie de Medici, and Erasmus of Rotterdam.” If you are impressed by that, you should not read the article. But if you are, however vaguely, troubled, then this article provides a good starting point for resisting the preschool rat-race mentality.

For instance, in regard to early reading, the author points out,

Researchers who’ve been marinating in reading studies for years say a tiny percentage of children – maybe 3 percent, maybe a little more or less – can be classified as truly early readers. These 3- or 4-year-olds understand phonics and context, and they will likely keep up their accelerated reading pace throughout their school years. . . . But most of the other early readers bringing smiles to their parents’ faces aren’t really reading at all. They’re demonstrating merely that they’ve memorized lots of words by sight. Instead of understanding the discrete sounds and segments that make up the word CAT, and understanding that each letter in the word has both its own name and its own sound or group of sounds, these children – like our early ancestors – see it as just a whole symbol for the furry feline. Change the first letter to E, and they might still think feline, until they memorize the new word. Studies have demonstrated that the early reading advances these kids show typically wash out a few years down the line.

Moreover, the author cites a study that indicates that rather than hoping to raise a precocious child, one might be better off hoping that your child is a late bloomer:

Researchers from the National Institutes of Mental Health performed periodic MRI brain scans on children and teens ranging in age from 5 to 19, tracking the relationship between the thickness of the brain’s outer mantle, or cortex, with the subject’s IQ. They found that the people whose IQ scores put them in the “superior intelligence” category had cortexes that matured much later than those of average intelligence. The cortexes of the smartest kids peaked by around age 11 or 12, whereas the average kids’ peaked by around age 8. Jay Giedd, one of the lead researchers, says he and his colleagues were initially taken aback by the findings, but with more reflection they realized they made all kinds of sense. “By having this peak period of plasticity later,” he says, “the brain is adapting to the 12-year-old world, which is more complicated, more similar to the adult world, than the 8-year-old world.”

The final word goes to David Elkind, who, twenty-six years ago, wrote The Hurried Child, “lamenting the fallout from parents thrusting their children into adulthood prematurely.” He argues that “if parents could give themselves permission to stop worrying about college acceptance letters while their kids were still in booster seats, everyone would be a lot better off.” Retired after twenty-nine years of teaching at Tufts, he says he was worn out “from students who had adopted their parents’ angling, recoiling from criticism and lobbying him to goose their grades, sometimes enlisting their parents to intervene.” Now tending his gardens, he observes, “A gardener can’t hurry the ripening of tomatoes.”

Andrée de Jongh: a laudable life

Obituaries may be biographies for the lazy and the short of attention.  Yet, where else might one encounter such lives as this one?

Andrée de Jongh, whose youth and even younger appearance belied her courage and ingenuity when she became a World War II legend ushering many downed Allied airmen on a treacherous, 1,000-mile path from occupied Belgium to safety, died Saturday in Brussels. She was 90.

She was working as a commercial artist in May 1940 when the Germans absorbed Belgium. Having had first-aid training, she began working as a nurse. She quietly pored over the myriad German rules governing control of movement and conferred with confidants about escape. . . . Eventually Ms. de Jongh settled on the long route to Spain. When she got her first two airmen to the British Consulate in Bilbao, Spain, she asked for support for further missions.

Ms. de Jongh eventually led 24 to 33 expeditions across occupied France, over the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. She herself escorted 118 servicemen to safety. At least 300 more escaped along the Comet line.

When the Germans captured her in 1943, it was her youth that saved her. When she truthfully confessed responsibility for the entire scheme, they refused to believe her. . . . After 20 interrogations, the Germans still refused to believe her confession and she was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. There, among skeletal and shaven forms, she was so unrecognizable that the Gestapo could not identify her for requestioning.

Why my wife has daughters

Analysis of the birth records of the Sami people of Finland by Virpi Lummaa has yielded fascinating information about the detrimental effects that bearing sons have on their mothers. Scientific American reports on Lummaa’s findings:

those who bore sons had shorter life spans than those who gave birth to daughters. This discrepancy has to do with birth weight—male babies are typically larger—as well as testosterone. “Testosterone can compromise your immune system; it can affect your health,” Lummaa says, and the mothers of sons proved especially susceptible to endemic infectious disease, such as tuberculosis. “Boys are a little bit more costly” to raise than girls as well, because they drain more physical resources from their mothers, she adds, as has been seen in other mammals, such as the red deer. Sons also are not as likely as daughters to stick around to help their mothers out later in life.

Unfortunately, the havoc that sons cause is not limited in impact to the mother:

More recently, Lummaa and her colleagues have been studying how sons are not just tough on their mothers but also hard on their siblings. Those born after a son were physically slighter, had smaller families and generally had a greater chance of dying from an infectious disease. The effects held up whether the elder brother died in childhood or not, suggesting that the negative outcome is not a result of some direct sibling interaction, such as competition for food, regular beatings or the practice of primogeniture, in which the eldest brother inherits everything. “Big brothers are bad for you,” Lummaa explains. “If the fifth-born was a male, then the sixth-born is doing worse.”

This phenomenon is particularly evident in twins where one is male and the other is female. Of 754 twins born between 1734 and 1888 in five towns in rural Finland, girls from mixed-gender pairs proved 25 percent less likely to have children, had at least two fewer children, and were about 15 percent less likely to marry than those born with a sister. This brotherly influence remained the same regardless of social class or other cultural factors and even endured if the male twin died within three months of birth, leaving the female twin to be reared as an only child.

The reason that the female half suffers, Lummaa speculates, is because of testosterone exposure in the womb. . . . Whatever the cause, there is no question of the outcome: mothers of opposite-sex twins end up with 19 percent fewer grandchildren than moms of same-sex twins, meaning evolution would seem to favor the latter.

Spice of life

Apparently, the food industry has been experiencing a growth in demand and sales of more intensely flavored foods.  The Boston Globe reports that some researchers attribute the trend to the deteriorating sense of taste of the baby boomers: “As they age, they are losing their ability to taste – and turning to spicier, higher-flavor foods to overcome their dulled senses.  Chiefly because of degenerating olfactory nerves, most aging people experience a diminished sense of taste, whether they realize it or not.”

What’s known is that at a certain age – after about 40 for most people – the number of nerve receptors in the nose and tongue that respond to smell and taste dim and decrease. As that happens, complex flavors become duller. Sweet and sour tastes decline sharply; salty and acidic tastes remain brighter for longer.

The tastes that penetrate the fog most clearly come from another group of flavors called sensory irritants. These hit the body not through taste or smell, but through the chemosensory system, which conveys sensations like touch, temperature, pain, and pressure.

A list of foods in the sensory irritant category reads like a roster of modern flavorings: habanero, jalapeno, black pepper, horseradish, ginger, cinnamon. All of them – generally lumped together as “spicy” or “high-flavor” – help kick up the overall sensory experience of eating.