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A link between childhood stress and early molars:
"I've long been concerned that if kids grow up too fast, their brains will mature too fast and will lose plasticity at an earlier age. Then they'll go into school and have trouble learning at the same rate as their peers," says Mackey, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Penn. "Of course, not every kid who experiences stress or [is] low income will show this pattern of accelerated development."
What would help, she thought, was a scalable, objective way -- a physical manifestation, of sorts -- to indicate how children embodied and responded to stresses in their world. Eruption timing of the first permanent molars proved to be just that.
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mackey, with doctoral student Cassidy McDermott and colleagues from Penn's School of Dental Medicine and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, shows that children from lower-income backgrounds and those who go through greater adverse childhood experiences get their first permanent molars earlier. The findings, generated initially from a small study and replicated using a nationally representative dataset, align with a broader pattern of accelerated development often seen under conditions of early-life stress.
Journal Reference:
Cassidy L. McDermott, Katherine Hilton, Anne T. Park, et al. Early life stress is associated with earlier emergence of permanent molars [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2105304118)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10 2021, @03:53PM (1 child)
It's easier. You just have to work at it instead of avoiding it. It takes years for a baby to learn to understand and talk. As a 10 year old, you can learn another language functionally in 6 months for something not completely foreign (eg. similar alphabet). As an adult, the same.
https://www.mondly.com/blog/2018/04/18/how-many-hours-learn-language/ [mondly.com]
How many hours do you think that 3 year old spends learning new language? Even only in school, that's 6-8h a day full immersion? That's 2000 hours in a year. As an adult, you should be able to learn Chinese in that time!
It's rather amusing you talk to me about language as I'm right now living a foreign nation to me, learning the language. Yeah, I've also learned functional english as a 10 year old in 6 months. People that struggle to acquire a language never practice it and never actually work at it. And then they point to kids, like they don't have to work at it. How do you think I could answer questions on a test? Yeah, used a fucking dictionary for every word. Then after looking up same word for 20th time, I remembered it. And on and on. But to adults, yeah, kids just 'absorb it', it's 'easy'.
Also, like learning basic piano - not easy. Your brain needs to create new pathways. You have to play until the fingers start to work. Hours and hours. But if you watch from outside, yeah, magically absorbed...
Do the work. Get results.
I'm upset that they reduce a complex mechanism, like the brain, to counting fucking teeth. It's not better than Nazi measuring heads to determine if you are 'Aryan enough' with similar results. I know people that have turned their life around by learning to use their brains, maybe first time in their lives, later in life. And others that wasted their gifts by atrophying what they had.
Whenever someone tells me that someone is old so they can't learn something easily. It's like telling a 50 year old person to give up, they surely cannot take up crazy sports like running later in life. Both are BS. When you work at it, you get results. Period (sure, maybe not everyone can be #1, but you sure don't have to be in the 2nd half -- most people are fucking lazy and it's easy to be in the lead even with any disadvantages you may have). But, if you are not willing to do the work, then just blame everyone else for your failure or maybe your early teeth.
(Score: 2) by helel on Thursday June 10 2021, @11:15PM
How many times did you need to look words up in the dictionary when learning your native tongue? I'll bet it was a heck of a lot less than 20!
Joking aside, the research disagrees with you. The ability to memorize vocabulary (the aspect of language acquisition you discuss) remains fairly consistent into adulthood. By contrast the ability to master grammar and correctly vocalize are seen to decrease with age. Take the common multi-generational immigrant family. It's quite common that the children who began the local language before age 10 can speak without any accent at all while adults in the family may understand just as well but retain a strong accent for decades or even the rest of their life. That's neural plasticity at work. It takes longer for the adults to rewire their brains.
Like I said in my first post, whether or not any of this is relevant to children in school is questionable. This study certainly doesn't settle the matter. However, the fact that these researchers are studying the matter doesn't mean all previous research is suddenly null and void.