Parenting Trends 2017

What will be the “in” things for moms and dads in 2017? We looked at online data and made some educated guesses to come up with our list of the parenting trends that will change the way we raise kids this year.

 1. Nurseries go into the wood Pinterest called it: Fairies, forests, antlers and other woodland motifs will be popping up in nurseries and kid rooms in 2017. Its annual Hot 100 list, which compiles pins with the strongest upward trend, says this nature-inspired décor theme is starting to go big. We love that it’s not too babyish to grow with your child, and it’s gender neutral to boot. Click here for ideas on how to create an enchanted woodland nursery.

 2. Instant Pots will save family dinner Are you still cooking chicken breasts for the full 40 minutes like a chump? You obviously haven’t caught Instant Pot fever. The Canadian-designed Instant Pot (available via amazon.ca at different sizes and price points) may very well be the kitchen gadget to render all others obsolete. Not only is it a multitasking wonder—slow cooker, pressure cooker, rice cooker, steamer, yogurt maker, sauté/browning pan and food warmer all in one—but it promises to speed up cooking by two to six times, which makes getting dinner on the table that much more doable. Instant Pot’s breathlessly enthusiastic fans unite on social media: Instagram has racked up 42,114 #instantpot posts and on Facebook, a worldwide Instant Pot Community some 289,539 members strong is constantly chatting—trading recipes, trouble shooting and gushing over pics of their miraculous meals.

 3. We’ll get wise to sugar We all know that too much added sugar is harmful, but we’re now starting to learn to what degree. Some researchers say this generation might be the first to have a shorter life span than their parents, due to diet and inactivity. In the powerful new book The Case Against Sugar, author Gary Taubes argues that sugar is a contributing factor to not just obesity and diabetes, but to almost every long-term, degenerative disease out there, and it gets its hooks in us during childhood. Cutting out sugar can be especially tough when it’s hidden in so many products (sauces, dressings, deli meat?!), but as more and more health organizations ring alarm bells, many parents are getting hip to reading labels and reducing sugar to break the cycle. Find out how one mom cut it out completely—and how her kids fared with no sweets.

 4. Old-fashioned play will make a comeback The rise of screen time is necessitating a return to ‘70s-era basics to counteract all that passive consumption. In fact, experts say play is a child’s most important job, teaching them everything from social confidence to self-regulation to problem solving, and it’s increasingly being threatened by, yes, screens but also overscheduling and an overemphasis on academics in school. Pinterest has noted an uptick on content about how play and open-ended toys help babies and toddler develop critical skills, and play-based content like our card games how-to and list of fun indoor activities was some of our most popular in 2016. Read more about the value of play and how to help your kid get in the habit of doing it every day.

 5. We’ll love the letter L In 2017, parents will opt for names that roll right off the tongue, often using the letter “L” and smooth, soft vowel sounds, as in Liam, Luna and Lucas, says Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard. “The overall trend is gearing toward lightness,” she says, “meaning there will be lots of smooth names with no hardened sounds.” Monikers along the Ella continuum will also proliferate, predicts Duana Taha, author of The Name Therapist and baby namer extraordinaire at LaineyGossip.com. Variations

How Music Can Change Your Brain

How Music Changes Your Brain - by  Melissa Locker

There's little doubt that learning to play a musical instrument is great for developing brains.

Science has shown that when children learn to play music, their brains begin to hear and process sounds that they couldn't otherwise hear. This helps them develop "neurophysiological distinction" between certain sounds that can aid in literacy, which can translate into improved academic results for kids.

Many parents probably read the above sentence and started mentally Google-ing child music classes in their local area. But if your kid doesn't like learning an instrument or doesn't actively engage in the class--opting to stare at the wall or doodle in a notebook instead of participating--he or she may not be getting all the benefits of those classes anyway.

A new study from Northwestern University revealed that in order to fully reap the cognitive benefits of a music class, kids can't just sit there and let the sound of music wash over them. They have to be actively engaged in the music and participate in the class. "Even in a group of highly motivated students, small variations in music engagement — attendance and class participation — predicted the strength of neural processing after music training," said Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, in an email to TIME. She co-authored the study with Jane Hornickel, Dana L. Strait, Jessica Slater and Elaine Thompson of Northwestern University.

Additionally, the study showed that students who played instruments in class had more improved neural processing than the children who attended the music appreciation group. "We like to say that 'making music matters,'" said Kraus. "Because it is only through the active generation and manipulation of sound that music can rewire the brain."

Kraus, whose research appeared today in Frontiers in Psychology, continued: "Our results support the importance of active experience and meaningful engagement with sound to stimulate changes in the brain." Active participation and meaningful engagement translate into children being highly involved in their musical training--these are the kids who had good attendance, who paid close attention in class, "and were the most on-task during their lesson," said Kraus.

To find these results, Kraus's team went straight to the source, hooking up strategically placed electrode wires on the students' heads to capture the brain's responses.

Kraus's team at Northwestern has teamed up with The Harmony Project, a community music program serving low-income children in Los Angeles, after Harmony's founder approached Kraus to provide scientific evidence behind the program's success with students.

According to The Harmony Project's website, since 2008, 93 percent of Harmony Project seniors have gone on to college, despite a dropout rate of 50 percent or more in their neighborhoods. It's a pretty impressive achievement and the Northwestern team designed a study to explore those striking numbers. That research, published in September in the Journal of Neuroscience, showed direct evidence that music training has a biological effect on children's developing nervous systems.

As a follow up, the team decided to test whether the level of engagement in that music training actually matters. Turns out, it really does. Researchers found that after two years, children who not only regularly attended music classes, but also actively participated in the class, showed larger improvements in how the brain processes speech and reading scores than their less-involved peers.

"It turns out that playing a musical instrument is important," Kraus said, differentiating her group's findings from the now- debunked myth that just listening to certain types of music improves intelligence, the so-called "Mozart effect." "We don't see these kinds of biological changes in people who are just listening to music, who are not playing an instrument," said Kraus. "I like to give the analogy that you're not going to become physically fit just by watching sports." It's important to engage with the sound in order to reap the benefits and see changes in the central nervous system.

As to how to keep children interested in playing instruments, that's up to the parents. "I think parents should follow their intuitions with respect to keeping their children engaged," said Kraus. "Find the kind of music they love, good teachers, an instrument they'll like. Making music should be something that children enjoy and will want to keep doing for many years!"

With that in mind, it's not too late to trade in those Minecraft Legos, Frozen paraphernalia, XBox games, and GoldieBlox presents that you may have purchased, and swap them out for music lessons for the kids in your life.

Original Article Here

This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain On Music!

Musical training doesn't just improve your ear for music — it helps your ear for speech. That's the takeaway from an unusual new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers found that kids who took music lessons for two years didn't just get better at playing the trombone or violin; they found that playing music also helped kids' brains process language.
Something else unusual about the study: where it took place. It wasn't a laboratory, but in the offices of Harmony Project in Los Angeles. It's a nonprofit after-school program that teaches music to children in low-income communities.
Two nights a week, neuroscience and musical learning meet at Harmony's Hollywood headquarters, where some two-dozen children gather to learn how to play flutes, oboes, trombones and trumpets. The program also includes on-site instruction at many public schools across Los Angeles County.
Harmony Project is the brainchild of Margaret Martin, whose life path includes parenting two kids while homeless before earning a doctorate in public health. A few years ago, she noticed something remarkable about the kids who had gone through her program.

"Since 2008, 93 percent of our high school seniors have graduated in four years and have gone on to colleges like Dartmouth, Tulane, NYU," Martin says, "despite dropout rates of 50 percent or more in the neighborhoods where they live and where we intentionally site our programs."

There are plenty of possible explanations for that success. Some of the kids and parents the program attracts are clearly driven. Then there's access to instruments the kids couldn't otherwise afford, and the lessons, of course. Perhaps more importantly, Harmony Project gives kids a place to go after the bell rings, and access to adults who will challenge and nurture them. Keep in mind, many of these students come from families or neighborhoods that have been ravaged by substance abuse or violence — or both.
Still, Martin suspected there was something else, too — something about actually playing music — that was helping these kids.
Enter neurobiologist Nina Kraus, who runs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. When a mutual acquaintance at the National Institutes of Health introduced her to Martin, Kraus jumped at the chance to explore Martin's hunch and to study the Harmony Project kids and their brains.

Breaking Down Brainwaves
Before we get to what, exactly, Kraus' team did or how they did it, here's a quick primer on how the brain works:

The brain depends on neurons. Whenever we take in new information — through our ears, eyes or skin — those neurons talk to each other by firing off electrical pulses. We call these brainwaves. With scalp electrodes, Kraus and her team can both see and hear these brainwaves.
Using some relatively new, expensive and complicated technology, Kraus can also break these brainwaves down into their component parts — to better understand how kids process not only music but speech, too. That's because the two aren't that different. They have three common denominators — pitch, timing and timbre — and the brain uses the same circuitry to make sense of them all.
In other research, Kraus had noticed something about the brains of kids who come from poverty, like many in the Harmony Project. These children often hear fewer words by age 5 than other kids do.
And that's a problem, Kraus says, because "in the absence of stimulation, the nervous system ... hungry for stimulation ... will make things up. So, in the absence of sound, what we saw is that there was just more random background activity, which you might think of as static."
In addition to that "neural noise," as Kraus calls it, ability to process sound — like telling the difference between someone saying "ba" and "ga" — requires microsecond precision in the brain. And many kids raised in poverty, Kraus says, simply have a harder time doing it; individual sounds can seem "blurry" to the brain. (To hear an analogy of this, using an iconic Mister Rogers monologue — giving you some sense of what the brain of a child raised in poverty might hear — be sure to listen to the audio version of this story.)

Working with Harmony Project, Kraus randomly assigned several dozen kids from the program's waitlist into two groups: those who would be studied after one year of music lessons and those who would be studied after two years.
And what she found was that in the two-year kids, the static didn't go away. But their brains got better — more precise — at processing sound. In short: less blur.

Why The Improvement?
It goes back to pitch, timing and timbre. Kraus argues that learning music improves the brain's ability to process all three, which helps kids pick up language, too. Consonants and vowels become clearer, and the brain can make sense of them more quickly.
That's also likely to make life easier at school, not just in music class but in math class, too — and everywhere else.
To be clear, the study has its limits. It was small — roughly 50 kids, ranging in age from 6 to 9. It wasn't conducted in a lab. And it's hard to know if kids doing some other activity could have experienced similar benefits.
But 10th-grader Monica Miranda doesn't need proof that playing violin has helped her. She's one of the first students in the door at a recent Harmony Project re-enrollment event in the auditorium of a nearby elementary school.
"I feel like music really connects with education," she says. "It helps you concentrate more."
Miranda is in her third year with Harmony Project.
"When I do my homework or I'm studying for something and I feel overwhelmed, I usually go to my violin, to start playing it," Miranda says. "I feel like it relaxes my mind. And coming here to play with an orchestra, it's just amazing. I love it."
And, the science says, her brain loves it, too.

Original Article at NPR