3 Specific things to focus on when your child goes to school that will optimize their future reasoning skills…
Wednesday, August 23, 2023. This is for J & R, and little E…
When it comes to navigating the world these days, if you lack critical thinking skills…. you’re kinda screwed.
In the off chance that more than a few of my gentle readers might have little kiddos, I offer this intriguing, newly minted research.
Breaking research from Finland suggests that soulful parents (a term I coined to describe humans who parent deeply across time & space), have a crucial role in helping the children developing keen faculties and critical thinking abilities.
This is nothing less than a Swiss army knife for life. These are the essentials for every child..everywhere.
3 areas of focus are fundamental. I even wrote about one of them, because the research is already in on reading for pleasure.
Parents can promote enhanced reasoning skills among their children over the first two years of schooling when they:
Improved overall diet quality, reduce the consumption of red meat and high-fat milk products.
Encourage more time reading for pleasure. Remember that 12 hours a week is the sweet spot for teens.
Make organized sport an area of curiosity and focus. As kids spend more time in organized sports it fosters recognizing rules, the value of cooperation, and perhaps most importantly, organized sports help kids to assess and analyze situations in real time. But please caste a wide net in defining “sport.”
I am a proud alumni (and ex-captain) of the Boston Technical High School Chess Club of 1968-69.
I learned a great deal about how the world works as I walked past the in-ground swimming pool and tennis courts of Newton North, (and yes, if you’re wondering, they always kicked our ass).
Mind your child’s nutrition….the critical dimension of nutrition is often overlooked…
What is the MIND diet?
The Mediterranean-DASH Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay focuses heavily on fresh fruit, vegetables, and legumes including beans, lentils, and peas — It is similar to both the DASH and Mediterranean diets, but is of particular importance in brain development.
Because the MIND is slightly different…it also recommends specific foods, such as leafy greens and berries, which are known to promote brain health. While the MIND diet has shown positive effects among adults, very few studies haves studied the impact of MIND on children...until now.
How the research was conducted
The research team examined two distinct diets: The Healthy Eating Index – 2015 (HEI-2015), based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and the MIND diet, which combines a traditional Mediterranean diet with the heart-healthy Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet.
“We assessed how adherence to these diets was associated with children’s attentional inhibition — the ability to resist distracting stimuli — and found that only the MIND diet was positively linked with children’s performance on a task assessing attentional inhibition,” says Shelby Keye, PhD, who performed the work as a doctoral student in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and will be an assistant professor there this fall, in a media release. “This suggests that the MIND diet could have the potential to improve children’s cognitive development, which is important for success in school.”
The first justice is food justice, IMHO. Here’s what the Doctoral Researcher Sehrish Naveed in their press release:
“Children with healthier eating habits showed greater cognitive development than other children. Specifically, better overall diet quality, lower red meat consumption, and higher low-fat dairy product intake were linked to better reasoning skills,”
Let’s get Concrete AF…
Kids who enjoy reading and organized sports displayed significantly stronger reasoning skills than their classmates who weren’t readers or team mates.
Here is the fu*king important part… unchecked computer use, as well as unsupervised leisure-time, were both linked to lower overall reasoning scores. Interestingly, many factors (screen time, active school transportation, physical activity during recess, and the intensity of the physical activity) were not correlated with the development of critical thinking
Over half of the kids participated in a two-year family-based and individualized diet and physical activity intervention.
The researchers explained it this way: “In the lives of growing children, diet and physical activity intervention is just one factor influencing lifestyle and reasoning skills.”
“Based on our study, investing in a healthy diet, and encouraging children to read, are beneficial for the development of reasoning skills among children. Additionally, engaging in organized sports appears to support reasoning skills,” Dr. Eero Haapala explained.
These findings and conclusions are based on data provided by the Physical Activity and Nutrition in Children (PANIC) study. This latest work examined the impact of a two-year diet and physical activity intervention on the cognition of nearly 400 Finnish kids in elementary school.
I like the care these researchers took in analyzing any apparent correlations between diet, physical activity, vs. sedentary behavior with cognition quality over a two-year period.
The researchers even allowed for disparities in parental education and income, as well as children’s body fat ratio, and maturity level, during the study. This is a brand, new, very high quality study. Parents take heed…
Gentle readers with offspring, consider this information, parent with your soul…be well, and Godspeed.
RESEARCH:
Sehrish Naveed, Taisa Sallinen, Aino‐Maija Eloranta, Hannamari Skog, Henna Jalkanen, Soren Brage, Ulf Ekelund, Heikki Pentikäinen, Kai Savonen, Timo A. Lakka, Eero A. Haapala. Effects of 2‐year dietary and physical activity intervention on cognition in children—a nonrandomized controlled trial. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 2023; DOI: 10.1111/sms.14464
