Child of our Time

A growing body of research is pointing to how important and valuable reading is in giving children the best possible start in life, not just for academic success but more broadly including for a child’s mental health and happiness.

In this special episode of the Child of our Time Podcast, Professor Yvonne Kelly is joined by Jonathan Douglas, CEO of the National Literacy Trust and researcher Christina Clark, also from the  Trust. They discuss important new evidence about the benefits of reading for individual children and in addressing social inequalities.

Useful links

* Reading For Pleasure: A research overview

* Do mental health problems have their roots in the primary school years? 

* A bedtime story

Being a scout or a guide when we are young might be a good experience for us in all sorts of ways, but can those positive effects be long lasting though our lives and if so, how? Research using the 1958 Birth Cohort shows a strong link between being a scout or a guide when young and better mental health later in life. Professor Richard Mitchell from the University of Glasgow talks to the Child of our Time Podcast about the research, what he and colleagues from Edinburgh found and what he thinks it tells us.

Photo credit: One-and-Other Girl Guides UK

Making sure that mums-to-be are in the best possible health is key to ensuring their baby gets the best possible start in life. But what sorts of things can help them achieve that? In this episode of the Child of our Time Podcast, Professor Hazel Inskip from the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit at the University of Southampton, talks about an ongoing trial making use of healthy conversations and Vitamin D supplements to try to improve the diet of just pregnant women.

Photo credit: Pregnant, Frank de Kleine

Research by Child of our Time Editor Yvonne Kelly on 11 year-old drinking has caught the eye of Mentor, a charity working to build resilience among young people to prevent alcohol and drug misuse. The charity’s CEO, Michael O’Toole is now looking to collaborate with Yvonne in future research that will take a look a first look at data from the Millennium Cohort Study in the Autumn. In this episode of the Child of our Time podcast, Michael explains what Mentor is doing, why research based evidence is so important to the charity and how he hopes it will help prevent alcohol abuse among young children in the future.

Photo credit: Joseph Choi

 

It’s been said and shown over the last few decades that mixed race and mixed ethnicity children tend not to do as well socially and emotionally as their non mixed peers. But new research casts a rather different light on the matter, showing that children both in the UK and US who are from mixed backgrounds are actually doing rather better.  James Nazroo from the University of Manchester has been looking at the issue with colleagues at the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies, UCL and discusses his surprising findings in our latest podcast episode.

Socioemotional wellbeing among mixed race/ethnicity children in the UK and US: Patterns and underlying mechanisms is published in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour. It is part of a wider programme of ESRC funded research led by Child of Our Time editor, Yvonne Kelly at ICLS.

Photo credit: Philippe Put

Born in Bradford is a fascinating child health development project following the lives of thousands of children in the city. It hopes to find out more about the causes of childhood illness by studying children from all cultures and backgrounds as their lives unfold.

In this Child of our Time Podcast episode, one of the project’s lead researchers, Professor Kate Pickett from the University of York, explains more about the study, what’s in it that researchers can use, what  it’s found so far and what we can expect to come out of it in the future.

Photo credit: Tim Green

It’s time to stop hitting our children and give them the same human rights protection afforded to adults says an important new report published by the NSPCC today. The report, which reviews all the available evidence on the impacts of physical punishment on children has been compiled by a team of academics at UCL: Dr Anja Heilmann, Professor Richard Watt and Child of our Time co-editor Professor Yvonne Kelly. Consultant paediatrician Dr Lucy Reynolds told us what she makes of the report and the impact she hopes it will have on policy makers, her colleagues in the medical profession, parents and children themselves.

Equally Protected? A review of the evidence on the physical punishment of children was commissioned by NSPCC Scotland, CHILDREN 1st, Barnardo’s Scotland and the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland.

Photo credit: Paediatrician, UW Health

When it comes to dealing with children’s problem behaviour, do parents and teachers report the same things in the same way and is that linked in some way to the child’s race or ethnicity ? That’s the focus of a recent study by a cross Atlantic team of researchers from the University of Michigan and University College London. Professor Pamela Davis-Kean from the  University of Michigan talked to Child of our Time about the research.

Reports of Externalizing Behavior: Comparative Analyses between the UK and US is research by Rebecca Waller, Afshin Zilanawala, Sheryl Olson, Amanda Sacker, Meichu Chen, Sharon Simonton,  James Nazroo, Yvonne Kelly, James S. Jackson, Pamela Davis-Kean.

Photo credit: helpingting

 

Children from lower income families are less likely to be judged ‘above average’ by their teachers, even when they perform as well as other pupils on independent cognitive assessments, according to a new study. Researcher Tammy Campbell from the UCL Institute of Education talks to the Child of our Time Podcast Series about how teachers may be unconsciously stereotyping their pupils.

‘Stereotyped at seven? Biases in teachers’ judgements of pupils’ ability and attainment’ by Tammy Campbell is available on Cambridge Journals Online as an article in the Journal of Social Policy July 2015 issue.

Photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Are children becoming obese at a younger age compared with the generations before them? New evidence from a research team at CLOSER, making use of the UK’s Cohort Studies, indicates they are. One of the team, Professor Rebecca Hardy from UCL, spoke to Child of our Time about the research.

How has the age-related process of overweight or obesity development changed over time? Coordinated analyses of individual participant data from five United Kingdom birth cohorts, is research by William Johnson,  Leah Li,  Rebecca Hardy and Diana Kuh, and is published in PLOS Medicine.

Child of our Time podcasts are produced by Research Podcasts.

Photo credit: Bill Gracey