Category: Child Psychology

This parenting strategy leads to children with IQs 6 points higher.

Children raised by nurturing parents develop higher IQs, research finds.

Many of the children in the study, who were raised in Brazil and South Africa, had faced considerable adversity, such as poverty and low birth weight.

But when they experienced responsive caregiving and the opportunity to learn, it was possible for them to reach their full potential.

Responsive caregiving involves being sensitive to the needs of the child and knowing how to respond to them.

Typical nurturing activities include reading to the child, playing games with letters and numbers as well as singing songs together.

Professor Maureen Black, study co-author, said:

“We found that adolescents who were raised in nurturing environments had IQ scores that were on average 6 points higher than those who were not.

This is a striking difference that has profound implications by increasing the intelligence of entire communities.

A nurturing environment also led to better growth and fewer psycho-social difficulties in adolescence, but it did not mitigate the effects of early adversities on growth and psycho-social difficulties.”

The research included over 1,600 children who were tracked from birth to their teenage years.

Both prenatal and early life adversity tends to lower IQ and is linked to problems adjusting psychologically.

However, a nurturing environment created by caregivers counteracts the disadvantages of early adversity.

Professor Black said:

“I think our findings could apply to communities here in the U.S. where children are hungry, living in poverty or lacking in access to medical care.”

Getting involved with children is the key, said Professor Black:

“Get children involved in friendly activities as much as possible rather than parking them in front of a screen.

Children love to learn and in a nurturing environment they can grow into adolescents and adults with the abilities to care for themselves, their families, and their communities.”

The study was published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health (Trude et al., 2020).

This parental behaviour is linked to more intelligent children.

Children whose parents are ‘chatterboxes’ tend to have higher IQs, research finds.

Children hearing more speech from their caregivers had better reasoning and numeracy skills, the observational study found.

Some children in the study heard twice as many words as others.

Perhaps less surprisingly, children who heard higher quality speech from their parents, using a more diverse vocabulary, knew more words themselves.

For the study, tiny audio recorders were fitted to 107 children aged between 2 and 4.

They were recorded for 16 hours a day for three days at home.

Ms Katrina d’Apice, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“Using the audio recorders allowed us to study real-life interactions between young children and their families in an unobtrusive way within the home environment rather than a lab setting.

We found that the quantity of adult spoken words that children hear is positively associated with their cognitive ability.

However, further research is needed to explore the reasons behind this link — it could be that greater exposure to language provides more learning opportunities for children, but it could also be the case that more intelligent children evoke more words from adults in their environment.”

While parental talk was linked to children’s cognitive abilities, their parenting strategy was linked to their behaviour.

Specifically, positive parenting was linked to less aggression, disobedience and restlessness.

Positive parenting involves responding to children in positive ways and encouraging them to explore the world.

Professor Sophie von Stumm, study co-author, said:

“This study is the largest naturalistic observation of early life home environments to date.

We found that the quantity of adult spoken words that children were exposed to varied greatly within families.

Some kids heard twice as many words on one day as they did on the next.

The study highlights the importance of treating early life experiences as dynamic and changeable rather than static entities — approaching research in this way will help us to understand the interplay between environmental experiences and children’s differences in development.”

The study was published in the journal Developmental Psychology (d’Apice et al., 2019).

The right methods can help boost children’s IQ.

Parents can boost their children’s IQ, psychological research finds, as long as they use tried and tested methods.

After examining almost every available intervention, Dr John Protzko and colleagues found that just four had a real chance of working:

1. Omega-3 supplementation,
2. reading to children interactively,
3. enrolling children in early educational interventions,
4. and sending children to a quality preschool.

The results come from a meta-analysis, a type of study that collects together the results of many other studies.

In doing so, the researchers created a “Database of Raising Intelligence”.

Dr John Protzko, the study’s first author, explained:

“Our aim in creating this database is to learn what works and what doesn’t work to raise people’s intelligence.

For too long, findings have been disconnected and scattered throughout a wide variety of journals.

The broad consensus about what works is founded on only two or three very high-profile studies.”

Supplementation with long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, like those in foods rich in omega-3, was linked to an IQ boost of 3.5 points, on average.

Preschools were linked to an increase of 7 IQ points.

They may boost IQ by providing the child with a cognitively stimulating environment.

In addition, it could be the extra exposure to language that provides the boost.

Dr Protzko said:

“Our current findings strengthen earlier conclusions that complex environments build intelligence, but do cast doubt on others, including evidence that earlier interventions are always most effective.

Overall, identifying the link between essential fatty acids and intelligence gives rise to tantalizing new questions for future research and we look forward to exploring this finding.”

Teaching parents how to read interactively with their children was linked to a 6 point IQ increase.

This is likely from the boost to language development.

The study was published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science (Protzko et al., 2013).