"Studies on Pupils Call Bad Behavior Not Dooming" by BENEDICT CAREY
Educators and psychologists have long feared that children entering school with behavior problems were doomed to fall behind in the upper grades. But two new studies suggest that those fears are exaggerated.
One concluded that kindergartners who are identified as troubled do as well academically as their peers in elementary school. The other found that children with attention deficit disorders suffer primarily from a delay in brain development, not from a deficit or flaw.
Experts say the findings of the two studies, being published today in separate journals, could change the way scientists, teachers and parents understand and manage children who are disruptive or emotionally withdrawn in the early years of school. The studies might even prompt a reassessment of the possible causes of disruptive behavior in some children.
Sharon Landesman Ramey, director of the Georgetown University Center on Health and Education, who was not connected with either study:
“I think these may become landmark findings, forcing us to ask whether these acting-out kinds of problems are secondary to the inappropriate maturity expectations that some educators place on young children as soon as they enter classrooms.”
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 behaviors in kindergarten did not correlate with academic results at the end of elementary school.
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.
That's because little "troublemakers" are independent thinkers who don't cow-tow to the passive dogma the schools shit into the kids' heads!
In the other study, 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 developed normally but more slowly in some areas than the brains of children without the disorder.
The disorder, also known as A.D.H.D., is by far the most common psychiatric diagnosis given to disruptive young children; 3 percent to 5 percent of school-age children are thought to be affected.
Doctors said that the report, being published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps to explain why so many children grow out of the diagnosis in middle school or later, often after taking stimulant medications to improve concentration in earlier grades.
Right, the poisonous meds are what helped 'em.
There was little correlation between behavior problems in kindergarten and later academic success. The pattern was about the same in girls as in boys, and for children from affluent families as well as those from lower-income groups.
Because KIDS are KIDS!
Why don't you just let them be kids, before you thrust this shithole society on 'em?
They'll learn soon enough!
The findings should also put to rest concerns that boys and girls who are restless, disruptive or withdrawn in kindergarten are bound to suffer academically.
Maybe they will quit drugging them, too!
Greg J. Duncan, a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University and lead author of the study:
“For kindergarten, it appears teachers are able to work around these behavior problems in a way that enables kids to learn just as much as other kids with equal levels of ability. [The findings have been] very controversial among developmental psychologists who have seen the paper.”
One who is concerned, Ross Thompson, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, said it would be a mistake to conclude from the results that programs to guide preschoolers’ emotional development were not helpful:
“That would be a double whammy for really difficult kids, to have no help managing their behavior and then — wham! — to get labeled as problem kids as soon as they enter school.”
So let's drug 'em, right Ross?
In the second study, government psychiatric researchers compared brain scans from two groups of children: one with attention deficit disorder, the other without. The scientists had tracked the children — 223 in each group — from ages 6 to 16, taking multiple scans on each child.
In a normally developing brain, the cerebral cortex — the outer wrapping, where circuits involved in conscious thought are concentrated — thickens during early childhood. It then reverses course and thins out, losing neurons as the brain matures through adolescence. The study found that, on average, the brains of children with A.D.H.D. began this “pruning” process at age 10 ½, about three years later than their peers.
About 80 percent of those with attention problems were taking or had taken stimulant drugs, and the researchers did not know the effect of the medications on brain development. Doctors consider stimulant drugs a reliable way to improve attention in the short term; the new study is not likely to change that attitude.
They don't even know what the stuff is doing to the kids, yet they keep shoveling the shit down their throats!
Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!
Doctors cannot diagnose attention deficit or any other psychiatric disorder with imaging technology, in part because brains vary so much that a single series of images can seldom reveal who has a disorder. The new findings suggest that searching for a clear abnormality or flaw is the wrong approach, at least for attention problems.
So their expensive technology is a piece of shit when analyzing the kid's heads?
Pffffttttttttttt!
About three in four children do grow out of the problem by early adulthood."
Then WTF are we shoveling pills into them for?
Maybe this will help then, huh?
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