How does sleep affect children’s intelligence and academic performance? Research on sleep duration, napping, and cognitive development — plus evidence-based bedtime strategies.
Emotional Regulation and Children’s Cognition
How does emotional regulation affect children’s cognitive development? Research on self-control, executive function, and practical strategies for helping children manage emotions and learn effectively.
Video Games and Cognitive Development
Do video games help or hurt children’s cognitive development? A balanced review of research on gaming and attention, problem-solving, and academic performance.
Premature Birth and Long-Term Cognition
Approximately 10% of babies worldwide are born prematurely — before 37 weeks of gestation. For parents of preterm infants, particularly those born very early, a pressing question is: how will prematurity affect my child’s cognitive development? Research spanning decades and tens of thousands of preterm-born individuals now provides a clear, …
Does Birth Order Affect Intelligence?
The belief that firstborn children are smarter than their younger siblings is one of the most persistent ideas in folk psychology. Parents joke about it, media repeats it, and surprisingly, the research largely supports it — though the effect is far smaller than most people assume and the reasons behind …
How Pregnancy Diet Affects Baby’s Brain
The nine months of pregnancy are the most consequential window of brain development in human life. Roughly 100 billion neurons are produced before birth, alongside the architecture of synaptic connections that will support cognition for decades. The fetal brain consumes about 60% of the energy delivered by the placenta despite …
Does Breastfeeding Make Kids Smarter?
“Breast is best” includes, in most parenting guidance, a confident claim that breastfeeding makes children smarter. The observational data are real — children who were breastfed score about 3 to 4 IQ points higher on cognitive tests than children who were not. The harder question is whether the milk does …
Screen Time and Children’s Intelligence
Few topics generate more parental anxiety than screen time, and few are reported with less precision. Headlines swing between “screens are rewiring children’s brains” and “no evidence screens harm cognition” — both citing real studies, both correct in narrow ways, neither capturing what the research actually shows. The honest summary: …
Motor Skills and Cognitive Development in Children
For a long time motor development and cognitive development were treated as parallel but mostly independent strands of children’s growth: motor skills tracked through pediatric milestones, cognitive skills tracked through psychometric assessments, and the two domains analyzed by separate researchers using separate frameworks. The past two decades of research have …
Maternal Milk and Neurodevelopment
In neonatal intensive care units across the world, mothers of babies born too early are routinely encouraged to express breast milk to be fed to their infants by tube — sometimes for weeks or months before the infant can suckle directly. The clinical justification is partly nutritional, partly immunological, and …