New studies throw more light on brain development in children

NEW YORK: Two new studies on child development could change the way scientists, teachers and parents understand and manage disruptive or emotionally withdrawn children in early years of schooling.
    
The studies were reported by the New York Times ahead of their publication.
    
One study concluded that kindergartners who are identified as troubled do as well academically as their peers in elementary school, the Times said.
    
The other study found that children with attention deficit disorders suffer primarily from a delay in brain development, not from a deficit or flaw.
    
In one study, an international team of researchers analyzed measures of social and intellectual development from over 16,000 children and found that disruptive or antisocial behaviours in kindergarten did not correlate with academic results at the end of elementary school, the Times reported.
    
Kindergartners who interrupted the teacher, defied instructions and even picked fights were performing as well in reading and math as well-behaved children of the same abilities when they both reached fifth grade, the study found.
    
Other researchers, said the paper, cautioned that the findings, being reported in the journal Developmental Psychology, did not imply that emotional problems were trivial or could not derail academic success in the years before or after elementary school.
    
In the other study, the paper said researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health and McGill University, using imaging techniques, found that the brains of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), developed normally but more slowly in some areas than the brains of children without the disorder.