I'm not sure if there are any threads like this, already, but...
I picked up a bunch of books from the library the other day. I m doing research for articles I am writing for my early learning website. One of the books I came across was Raise a Smarter Child by Kindergarten and claimed 30 IQ points were up for grabs.

I don't know if those IQ points are cumulative like that, but I certainly believe IQ can be improved with the right environment / diet / nurturing.

He maintains that we are all born with genes to learn (I guess some have genes that give them the potential to have very high IQs or low IQs.) The right environment, diet, and stimulation causes those genes to be "turned on" (or keeps "bad" genes from getting turned on, at least.)
He focuses mostly on 0-3 years old when we know the brain is making a lot of connections.

This stuff is not only in his book, but in most of the other books I picked up. I've come across this stuff over and over as I've done my research.

Things that might improve IQ:
*breastfeeding (I know not everyone thinks breast milk boosts IQ, but I do. It makes sense that getting less than optimum nutrition might cause the brain not to develop "optimally". Formula doesn't come close to breast milk yet because we don't even know everything that is in breast milk, plus breast milk is living tissue.)
*Stimulating learning activities (I remember learning how if a baby has cataracts, her brain will sacrifice the brain cells used to see and that can impair vision for the rest of the baby's life, which is why they remove them very early now. So it makes sense to do activities that stimulate and reinforce connections in the brain.)
*Nutrition after breast milk (Same premise as breast milk.)
*Music / Playing an instrument
*Creating a prepared environment so your child has a lot of opportunities to learn.
*Limit TV.
*Keeping toxic chemicals out of your home as much as possible.

I mostly see it as helping your child to fulfill whatever their genetic potential is (both in their ability to think and learn and also overall health), not necessarily give kids a magical 30 extra IQ points out of nowhere.

What do you think?


PS. This isn't a blame the mother / father thread where I'm trying to make people guilty for formula feeding or turning on a TV. I was hoping that wouldn't happen in this forum. I've seen it happen in other places. I'm interested in the scientific basis of these ideas, and not how they make people feel.

From what I can find online, that book fires my snakeoil detectors. I'd be wanting citations to peer-reviewed papers for every claim about everything says makes a difference, and then I'd be looking up the papers myself to see whether they really said that. Unless the claims were things I wanted to be true, of course ;-) For example:
My understanding, though it could be out of date or wrong, is that at this point, despite people having looked, we have practically nothing in the way of convincing connections between specific gene variants and IQ. Therefore I doubt that it can be known that particular environmental factors turn on or off particular relevant genes - we don't even know which genes that is! Without concrete evidence to the contrary, therefore, I'd write this off as pseudo-science: he's saying something that he guesses to be true and it sounds good, but he can't know.

Whether, and if so to what extent, IQ can be improved by environment is a highly controversial topic. The best book I've read on this is Flynn's What is intelligence? but even this does not really answer the question.

In the end, the right answer is probably "who cares?". Many (all?) aspects of achievement *can* be improved by working at them, and the ability to work constructively can also be improved by practice. And for 0-3yos, the appropriate work of both kinds is play....

And yes, we've discussed this before at length (at least once that I remember), but I have a feeling it was in a thread whose title didn't match the contents very well, and am failing to find it.

He has a lot of resources listed in the back, but like I said, this stuff is in many of the books and things I have read. It isn't just him. All of these "experts" seem to be really excited about everything we've been learning about how babies 0-3 learn.


Well, I'm pretty sure motor skills can be improved if the baby has a chance to practice, right? I would think the same applies to the ability to think and problem solve. We also know that if a child is exposed to toxic chemicals (all kids are today) and eats a crap diet, this can lead to health problems.

Childhood cancer is the expression of the "wrong" genes you don't want turned on. I would think it is likely that brain functioning would also be affected by neurotoxins and poor nutrition (well, it is. I know there are many studies showing how toxic chemicals and poor nutrition can affect a growing child.) In the womb, babies develop problems or birth defects if a mother takes toxic substances or doesn't get enough of the right nutrients. Babies who are severely neglected don't develop properly.

So the flip side of this might be that if you provide good food, a safe healthy environment, and a stimulating one for a baby's brain, then she can develop optimally.

I do remember reading quite a few studies linking a higher IQ with breastfeeding and other things, but someone always tries to contest these findings, so I have no clue if they are definitive findings.

I know with breastfeeding, all the literature makes it sound like breastfeeding is a bonus and gives your child better health and a higher IQ or whatever. In reality, feeding your child anything but breast milk may result in a lower IQ, health problems, etc. No one wants to put it that way. (Except her: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2812877/)

So, I see these "bonus" IQ points (if real) as being a result of your child having access to healthy food and such, which is the ideal circumstance (of course, people don't even agree on what a healthy diet looks like.) The book should really say thing like "Feed your kid chicken nuggets all day and that might impact his health and brain functioning. Feed him more vegetables and fruits and he will be more likely to function optimally."
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Also, the way I think of IQ:
To me, an IQ test mainly tests how well you can detect patterns and problem solve. These are thinking skills. I don't know if you can practice IQ test type problems and actually improve your score as an adult, but perhaps it is possible to influence IQ when you are talking about a baby whose brain is just starting to get organized.

I think of IQ as g or as the general amount of intellectual amplitude you have.

You can do things to make sure you don't reach your potential, but I don't think you can increase the potential.

I do a lot of the things you mentioned, too, and it would be extremely hard to do most of it if I had to work full-time and/or was a single mother like some of my friends. I have a friend who desperately wanted to breastfeed her children and couldn't get it to work for her. I don't want to make anyone feel bad in this thread... A lot of this stuff you need support to achieve (and time off from work, too), breastfeeding included.

I am thinking that studies would try to control for the giftedness of parents, but intelligent parents may also be more likely to breastfeed / use eco-friendly products / read books, etc.?

That is kind of what I am thinking. Since I am writing articles along these lines, I am thinking that parents would appreciate knowing what kinds of things they can do to help their child develop optimally. Of course, you risk making them feel like crap if they can't do these things so that is a problem. I personally think that is why these books say things like "Increase your child's IQ" instead of "DON'T do THESE THINGS or you may LOWER your child's IQ."
People want to feel good, not bad.

My sense from most of the research I have read is that there are threshold effects involved, where levels of nutrition (including things like DHA), environmental stimulation, and personal interactions below a certain level, and toxins and stressors above a certain level negatively impact development, but these effects are not at all linear, and you can't create a genius by overstimulating and overfeeding your baby.

I agree. It isn't enough to provide a book list in a bibliography. He needs to provide references to specific papers with evidence for what he's claiming. I would go one step beyond reading the papers that are referenced. I'd also do a general literature search (peer-reviewed, not popular) on the subject. Sometimes people cherry-pick the literature to suit their agendas (the anti-vaccine movement is a case in point).


True, but skills and aptitude are different things. You can get better at running if you work at it every day, but most people will just never run 400 meters in under 50 seconds, no matter how much they practice.


I think that damaging something is typically a lot easier than improving it. Think about how much damage you can do to your body with one five-second vertical fall onto concrete and how long it would take to recover from it. Or think about how quickly a tornado can wreck your house compared to how long it takes to redo the floors in only one room.

I agree about promoting optimal development. That said, I don't believe claims of huge IQ jumps. I think about it this way: if it was really possible to create long-lasting IQ gains on the order of two standard deviations (e.g. from the 50th to the 98th percentile), nearly everyone would be doing this and we'd have a crazy-smart society. It's more likely that, if anything, optimal circumstances can provide a very small boost (but I don't actually know this for a fact). The boost they provide to physical and emotional health is probably much greater and probably also has more profound effects.


Well...cancer is an extremely complicated disease. I don't pretend to be an expert on the subject, but there's definitely a lot more to it than simply turning on the wrong genes (I'm not sure that the term "wrong genes" really applies). Cancer is an interplay of genetic and environmental factors. Some genes are too active and some aren't active enough. Some have mutations. Etc. etc. Cancer is a mess.

I was thinking uh oh, we did all the stuff on the high IQ list.... and look what happened. Perhaps turning on the TV and giving the child some processed food might have made knocked off a few IQ points and made life easier.

I attended a lecture that did extensive studies on string instruments lessons. They used a control group in LA area and found that one year of string or piano increase IQ by 8-7 points. You could replicate this by a second year but that was teh extent of what was studied. It had to be string or piano, not voice, not drums, not brass. I had copied the lecture notes here several years ago.

Also, they have done extensive studies about what happens in the teen years and development and it could explain why some known entrepeneurs don't show any thing extraordinary and then suddenly become great risk and problem solvers. Teen years have a great deal of development in the frontal lobe or working memory. Something the piano or string lessons seem to develop. You can have good develop in the intellectual area early but working memory has to be developed and that is the ability to deal with a lot of facts and deal with an "emergency" situation. So you can have a real smart kid but if the working memory isn't developed, then they cannot problem solve well, on the spot kind of thing.

All this is cumulative.

I tried to do all the early stuff, I figured it better to have an advantage and not, really not knowing how much it all helped. And in the end, we are who we are as parents. I am finding DD more like me as each day passes. I am hoping to improve on the inital prototype.

Ren

Lol, exactly. We live in a 100yo place with a certain amount of flaking paint, but blood lead level testing etc. is unknown here in the UK, and I have no idea what DS's levels have ever been. I sometimes feel uneasy about this, and yet, maybe it's for the best!

On top of the very valid points everyone else has made I also have to question whether, even if we believe that breastfeeding might give you x points, and good nutrition x points, etc whether those points come from correlation not causation and are in fact roughly speaking the SAME few points. No-one has researched all those things together or in their various combinations, each has been (possibly rather dubiously) looked at in isolation. You can't then go well "study" #1 + "study"#2 + "study" #3 = 15 points!

I would think that for the most part the extended breastfeeders are also more likely to be careful with other nutritional needs, also more likely to provide a rich environment, etc. You could include someone who does all three into three different studies for just one of those behaviours and pick up their "extra" 5 points in all three studies(which may well be genetic). You can't then say that their child would have been 15 points worse off if they had not done any one of those three things.

they did do the study, and found there was a gene involved with the susceptibility to harm from formula. That gene had better not be related to susceptibility to IGT or PCOS, is all I can say.

http://www.physorg.com/news113505546.html

Very interesting, I'd missed that. Here's the
full paper.

However, the Wikipedia article on FADS2 (the gene concerned) says that several later studies failed to replicated this finding. One issue that may be relevant is how "breastfed" is defined - e.g., does it mean ever given breastmilk, or exclusively breastfed to 6 months, or what? The original study doesn't seem, on a quick read, to say. Maybe there's a conventional definition that the reader is supposed to know they used, but if not, and if the original and the replicating studies used different definitions, that could be important.

I haven't stated myself very clearly it seems. I was trying to say that it seems to me that in books like the one the OP mentioned, the author will look at 5 different studies of things that might raise IQ and then claim that if you do all 5 then you will get cumulative increases in IQ.

I question the validity of some of those studies, but I also very much doubt that you can say you can get x points for breastfeeding, another x points for a prepared environment and a further x points for a chemical free house. Even assuming the studies are sound, chances are that the same subjects who are extended breastfeeders might also be the low chemical householders and the prepared environment people and their kids higher IQ may be genetic. You could participate in all three studies and show that your child had an extra 5 points in each study - but your child is not 15 points higher for having done the three studies. Until someone comes up with a sound study of combined factors, if that is even possible, then I am very dubious of lists of things you can do for combined positive outcomes (even if I believe the individual studies, which in many cases I am not sure that I do).

I probably didn't explain that any better the second time.

Your point's very interesting, MumOfThree, and I didn't comment on it because I started down a trail of thinking about what you said and didn't get to a good resting point! My first intuition was: "I dare say in practice you're right, because it's so difficult to control for confounding factors, but I *think* that if the studies in question were done properly so as to show causation, not just correlation, your argument would not apply (or not exactly...)."

But then I started to actually do the mathematics and came to some surprising and amusing conclusions... And confused myself utterly, so let's see who else I can confuse :-) :-)

Let's consider a simplified situation. Suppose that we had uncontroversial, cast-iron evidence that
(a) using acrylic nappies raises IQ by 5 points ("acrylic" for short)
(b) giving a daily dose of cocaine raises IQ by 5 points ("cocaine" for short).
For causation to have been shown, which we're assuming, it has to be the case that, if you take groups of families with babies who are equally likely to have any characteristic known or suspected to affect IQ, except that one group uses acrylic and the other doesn't, then the acrylic group has babies with IQs on average 5 points higher. Similarly for cocaine. If the studies haven't shown this - if they haven't controlled for all plausible confounders - then by definition the studies are not sound. We're assuming they are.

Now, which of these connections, acrylic or cocaine, was suspected first? Let's suppose that the news about the possible benefit of acrylic broke first. For this investigation, it will suffice to imagine that, to everyone's surprise, the situation is very simple: every baby's IQ is raised by exactly 5 points compared to where it would otherwise have been expected to be, provided the baby wears an acrylic nappy. This is so convincing that noone questions it any more...

At this stage, nobody gives their baby cocaine; that wonder-factor hadn't yet been suspected. Later, giving your baby cocaine becomes fashionable and people think about studying it. Now, any study of cocaine that doesn't control for acrylic is by definition unsound. IOW, by assumption, we have studies that show that, even when the cocaine-using group and the non-cocaine using group have the same proportion of acrylic-users, the cocaine-using group has higher IQ. Is this consistent with there being no additional benefit of using cocaine if you already use acrylic?

Well, yes: it just has to be the case that there's a larger than 5 point effect on the non-acrylics, to account for the 0 point effect on the acrylics. Suppose for simplicity that 50% of the population uses acrylic at this point (and that the study's groups are representative in this respect). If non-acrylic + cocaine gives a 10 point advantage compared to neither, and acrylic + cocaine gives only the 5 point advantage they already had for acrylic, we're done: average IQ gain of 5 points for cocaine will be what we see when comparing the study groups, and will be what holds over the whole population.

Note the strange situation we've cooked up. Suppose the no-acrylic no-cocaine baseline IQ is 100. We've got acrylic no-cocaine and acrylic + cocaine both at 105, and we've got no-acrylic + cocaine at 110. Just so long as hardly anyone uses cocaine (the situation that pertained when the acrylic research was done) both acrylic and cocaine, separately, are genuinely causing a 5 point IQ increase averaged across the whole population, as stipulated: but the way to give your child the highest possible IQ is to *not* use acrylic but use cocaine.

As more and more people start using cocaine, the average benefit of using acrylic diminishes, until when 50% of people are using cocaine, the average effect of using acrylic is 0, and when 100% of people are using cocaine, we find that using acrylic (quite genuinely!) causes an average of a 5 point drop in your baby's IQ.

Now, as laid out, because the cocaine study is controlling for acrylic, this strange situation will, hopefully, be noticed and remarked on. (But maybe not - if all they do is to make sure the cocaine and no-cocaine groups have the same proportion of acrylic users, and they don't study the acrylic and non-acrylic users separately (maybe they haven't the power) they will still have controlled for acrylic, but they won't spot this effect.) But it illustrates the difficulty in investigating multi-factorial effects, and also the difficulty of applying research in a different time or place to where it was done.

If you consider a slightly different scenario, in which the same reality holds, but the research pattern is different, it could happen like this:

- 50% of people use acrylic, but only one group of researchers suspects it might matter. They do a study.

- 0.001% of people use cocaine, and only one group of researchers (not the same ones) think it might matter. They do a study.

Since the researchers are working independently and in ignorance of one another's work, neither controls for the other's factor. (Both control for all other known confounders, but that need not concern us: let us suppose that neither acrylic use nor cocaine use is correlated with any other confounder, nor with one another.) In our hypothesised reality, both studies will, quite rightly, find that their factor causes an average 5 point increase in IQ. And then maybe people like us who read both studies will come along and wonder whether or not you get a 10 point increase by doing both...

ETA: and to bring us back to reality, I wonder whether the study someone mentioned on playing string instruments controlled for breastfeeding, separate from the confounders of maternal IQ and eduction? It would be amusing, would it not, if playing a string instrument raises your IQ substantially but only if you weren't breastfed, so that actually, the optimal strategy for raising your baby's IQ is to formula feed and send them to Suzuki classes?

Science has advanced:

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/10/news/la-heb-genetic-study-intelligence-20110809
Intelligence is in the genes, researchers report
August 10, 2011
By Eryn Brown
Los Angeles Times

Intelligence is in the genes, researchers reported Tuesday in the journal Molecular Psychology.

The international team, led by Ian Deary of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Peter Visscher of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, compared the DNA of more than 3,500 people, middle aged and older, who also had taken intelligence tests. They calculated that more than 40% of the differences in intelligence among test subjects was associated with genetic variation.

The genome-wide association study, as such broad-sweep genetic studies are known, suggested that humans inherit much of their smarts, and a large number of genes are involved.

Booster Shots asked Deary to answer a few questions about the research. The following is an edited version of our questions and his emailed responses.

What exactly were you looking for when you looked at test subjects' genetic information?

We studied over 3,500 people. We looked at over 500,000 individual locations on the chromosomal DNA where people are known to differ. We looked at the association between those DNA differences and two types of intelligence. One type of intelligence was on-the-spot thinking (fluid intelligence) and the other was vocabulary (crystallized intelligence).

You wrote in your paper that 40% of the variation in crystallized intelligence and 51% of the variation in fluid intelligence is associated with genetic differences. How did you calculate those figures? And where does the rest of intelligence come from? Other genes, or environmental factors?

To estimate the proportion of variance associated with common genetic differences (in what are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) we used a new genetic statistics procedure invented by Professor Visscher and his colleagues in Brisbane, called GCTA. The rest of people's differences in those types of intelligence could come from genetic differences we were not able to capture, or from the environment.

Certainly, twin and adoption studies tell us that the environment makes an important contribution to intelligence differences throughout life, and especially in early childhood.

Is this the first time such a study has been attempted? How have scientists studied the relationship between genes and intelligence in the past?

There have been some studies looking at individual genes and sets of genes. And some smaller studies have been conducted with coarser genetic sweeps. This is the first study to use thousands of people, half a million genetic variants and to apply this new GCTA procedure to
estimate the genetic contribution directly from the genes.

Why would it be surprising that intelligence is an inherited trait? Many people might say this seems obvious.

It is not surprising to find that intelligence differences have some genetic foundation. Twin and adoption studies have been suggesting that for decades. But those studies make assumptions -- for example that the environment is just as similar for non-identical twins as for identical twins -- and people have questioned those assumptions.

Here, we bypass all that and test the DNA. What is not at all obvious is what the genetic contribution is. From our results, we can suggest that a substantial amount of the genetic contribution to intelligence differences comes from many, many small effects from genetic variants that are in linked with common variants (SNPs).

<end of excerpt>

Here is the paper abstract:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21826061
Mol Psychiatry. 2011 Aug 9. doi: 10.1038/mp.2011.85. [Epub ahead of print]
Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic.
Davies G, Tenesa A, Payton A, Yang J, Harris SE, Liewald D, Ke X, Le Hellard S, Christoforou A, Luciano M, McGhee K, Lopez L, Gow AJ, Corley J, Redmond P, Fox HC, Haggarty P, Whalley LJ, McNeill G, Goddard ME, Espeseth T, Lundervold AJ, Reinvang I, Pickles A, Steen VM, Ollier W, Porteous DJ, Horan M, Starr JM, Pendleton N, Visscher PM, Deary IJ.
Source
Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Abstract
General intelligence is an important human quantitative trait that accounts for much of the variation in diverse cognitive abilities. Individual differences in intelligence are strongly associated with many important life outcomes, including educational and occupational attainments, income, health and lifespan. Data from twin and family studies are consistent with a high heritability of intelligence, but this inference has been controversial. We conducted a genome-wide analysis of 3511 unrelated adults with data on 549&#8201;692 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and detailed phenotypes on cognitive traits. We estimate that 40% of the variation in crystallized-type intelligence and 51% of the variation in fluid-type intelligence between individuals is accounted for by linkage disequilibrium between genotyped common SNP markers and unknown causal variants. These estimates provide lower bounds for the narrow-sense heritability of the traits. We partitioned genetic variation on individual chromosomes and found that, on average, longer chromosomes explain more variation. Finally, using just SNP data we predicted &#8764;1% of the variance of crystallized and fluid cognitive phenotypes in an independent sample (P=0.009 and 0.028, respectively). Our results unequivocally confirm that a substantial proportion of individual differences in human intelligence is due to genetic variation, and are consistent with many genes of small effects underlying the additive genetic influences on intelligence.

Ah, interesting, thanks for posting that Bostonian. Recent enough, though, that not only will I not beat myself up for not having known about it, but also, I will continue to regard the book under discussion as snakeoil, because at the time the book was written, we didn't know with any confidence what genes were important. (And now, it looks as though there are so many genes involved, each with low individual importance, that you'd have to be showing that some environmental factor turned on many of them for that factor to have a measurable effect by doing so, probably.)

They say hindsight is 20/20.

Thanks for the laugh, PTP! You're a hoot!

I also think this is the more accurate way to phrase it.

Around here often the idea is to know what sorts of thing notto do in order to avoid the child developing 'optimally.' ((Humor Alert))
Raising IQ must be a concern somewhere on the Internet, but I come here to find out how to get the rest of the child (EQ, fine motor, gross motor, work ethic, organizational skills) to stay sort of caught up to the high IQ.

Actually I feel guilty enough about my genetic contribution, which I couldn't help, but I have to admit that I do think I provided an enriched environment by making seeing patterns a ton of fun. And singing for joy. Human brains are usually built to be pleasure seeking, so adults who enjoy 'brainy' things are going to share that fun with their kids if conditions are decent. Here's another thought - learning is easier than teaching. I listend to an audio program about Primate learning, and one has to get quite close to humans before much thoughtful teaching goes on.

In teaching there is a difference between demonstrating a skill, and demonstrating a skill, observing the student perform the skill and giving a 'just right' bit of babystep instruction. I'm currently listening to a book that says humans have many more 'mirror neurons'than other primates that allow us to form a virtual model of an other person based on observation.

So I think that people with high skill in the teaching process are going to help their kids enjoy learning more and that lots of high IQ parents will fit into that catagory.

Yeah, so I did lots of attachment parenting things, but fed him lunch meat and 'crap' (if one really doesn't want to ruffle feathers, than it's worth taking an extra minute to edit and replacing words like crap with conventional - BTW)

and let him play with anything - mouthing and all, plus daycare from age 7 weeks, 'cause I was back to work. To be honest, I think that every decision has good and bad outcomes. Being more careful than cultural norms isn't risk free.

I'll tell you what I'm still curious about - we didn't let him sleep on his stomach for fear of SIDS. I think all those extra startles were bad for him in the long run. I wonder about the science and politics behind that whole 'back to sleep' movement.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

My son was breastfed, has taken piano lessons since age 5, musical theater which includes dance, acting and singing since 4, and I let him play challenging computer games that were both fun and educational since he was about 2. I read to him and talked to him a lot since he was a baby, and I answered his many questions to the best of my ability while driving many miles to doctors appointments and museums until he got an iPhone and could look up answers himself, which only game him more ammunition to debate with me which I find even more challenging, but I didn't make him practice coloring which he hated and other fine motor activities like jigsaw puzzles or legos because his fingers seemed weak and his hands got tired so quickly. I think having a disability that affects fine motor skills can cause differences in IQ scores. Even though my son's disability doesn't affect the way he thinks, and it didn't hurt his verbal IQ score, it affects what he is able to do because some (but not all) of his muscles are a little weaker and he does not have the endurance that most other kids have, although he is working on that and improving. He often has to work through pain which can be distracting and adds to his fatigue.

I think my son's IQ increases when he manages to get plenty of sleep which seems impossible in the brace he has to wear. His memory is much better when he is not sleep deprived or getting a migraine. The psychologist, who tested my son even though we told her that my son hadn't slept well the night before because of anxiety about the test and was also getting a migraine, didn't think that would make much difference in the IQ score. I don't believe it because I know how sleep deprivation and migraines affect me.

I don't know how sleep deprivation affects anyone else, but my son and I definitely don't think as well when we are sleep deprived or have a bad headache which seems to happen more often when we are sleep deprived. My son and I have talked about this a lot since the test and I notice that my executive function and my ability to multitask and do mental math are very impaired when I can't sleep and haven't slept well for weeks. I can't imagine that anyone would do well on an IQ test while in a sleep deprived state. I am afraid to drive when I am sleep deprived. So I think getting enough sleep might also improve IQ.

I think sleep is important enough that we were often late to his musical theater class and they had to work around it. I hated being late but it was an accommodation my son needed. Melatonin only helps a little when my son is wearing the painful brace at night. If he got less than six hours of sleep at night his ability to memorize lines and learn dances was impaired. With six hours and caffeine to get through the day he can memorize and learn well enough to do what he needs to do, but he still learns better if he gets 8 or 9 hours of sleep. It is even harder for him in piano if he gets less than six hours of sleep or has a bad headache.

We often watch television, usually something educational or the news while working out on the elliptical and weight machines. Not sure what effect that would have on IQ if any. We try to exercise a little before getting started on academics. I do that that helps and I think there have been studies that support this.

I will hire a college level first chair strings graduate for any position. In six months they usually perform as if they have five years of experience.

Does that mean it's settled, then? It's half nature, half nurture..

The way I read it was as though genes were responsible for at least 40%-50% of the variation.

"The rest of people's differences in those types of intelligence could come from genetic differences we were not able to capture, or from the environment."

Also, we'll have to wait for additional studies before we put too much faith in the results obtained this time.

Thanks.
Lol @"crap". I do try to stick to "mainstream" and "conventional" when I write, but I do think "crap", especially when I eat it myself.

"So I think that people with high skill in the teaching process are going to help their kids enjoy learning more and that lots of high IQ parents will fit into that category."

So, do you think parents with a higher IQ will end up finding the stuff on my site because they are more likely to want to give their children learning opportunities? (Or, will they not be worried because they already have smart children lol.)

Depends a bit on what's on your site, but honestly the latter sounds more likely. When DS was younger I used to search for things relating to whatever I was thinking about at the time - sleep, for example! - but I certainly didn't ever search for sites that would tell me how to teach him or make him smarter. Maybe start a thread if you'd like to point at your site (just once ;-) and ask about what people might find useful?

I am sure DD#1s unsettled sleep as a baby had a long term impact on her too. Though she was so unsettled that there wasn't much putting down at all, front or back. DD#3 would ONLY be put down on her tummy or not at all from about 2w to 3mths, she still wouldn't go down often but she did go down, we put her on a breathing monitor and went with that, until she suddenly decided to only sleep on her back.... She is SO like #1 in so many ways, or rather she was, but the better handling of her sleep, forcing her to crawl and a few other things seem to be turning her into quite different a toddler. Maybe she was always going to be more different than she seemed as a newborn, but maybe we did manage to reduce rather than exacerbate some of their shared tendencies.

And I do also feel that parents being better teachers impact on the outcome, particularly if they are introducing and making fun subject areas that other parents don't ever touch on. I personally feel that much children are getting "smarter" each time and it could all be genetics but I can clearly see things that I have done differently that will have helped shape their learning and thinking. On the other hand they have not had the access to zoos, museums, etc that #1 had as I simply haven't had the same amount of time... swings and roundabouts.

But now back to Colin's Mum's awesome post. I am so not a mathematician, statistician or scientist. I should have prefaced my own post with that! Your post was fascinating. I am not sure I understood it 100% to be honest but I do think I get the general idea well enough (Lori speaking of sleep deprivation I am much more so than usual and I can feel the impact on my sluggish brain).

I get what you are saying but I am thinking (and I confess that I have not read the various studies) that the studies in question would be controlling for things like maternal IQ, family income, perhaps other social factors (and possibly lead poisoning?). But I am guessing they were not controlling for the things that the various other studies were studying.

I guess I feel that there are things you can do that impact negatively, or without which ones full genetic potential might not be reached. But I think the book sounds like snakeoil (to use somebody else's words)

I was a high IQ child raised in an adopted household. But I'm fairly certain that my parents had higher IQs than average, and I had a relatively "enriched" environment. The first piece of furniture my father made for me for my room, way back when I was 2, was a 3' tall, 6' long three-shelf bookcase...so maybe the books really are to blame!

Yes, I have wondered about this too. I don't think it negatively affected IQ, but I really wonder about what that constant startle did for sensory development and anxiety.

A question for those of you with kids who also had trouble with startling when asleep on their backs as newborns - do you know if they have a retained MORO reflex? My worst sleeper did, and working to integrate it has helped her appreciably.

I work with newborns and even at around 10 days old it is rare for me to see a newborn with a moro reflex as strong as my own kids had even months later. Many of the babies I see have little to no moro reflex at all, and they are much more settled babies.

Umm, well, I have an awful story about that. DD had horrible colic around a few weeks old. DH was walking her around in seated position facing outward because that was all she could stand. She wouldn't stop screaming and fussing, so at one point, he just went around in a circle a few times. I guess in desperation, I dunno. When he stopped, her arms were straight out, stuck there. She was dizzy. It was funny and didn't seem to do any damage, but I felt bad, anyway. She did stop crying for a bit. I don't know if that was out of the ordinary, though.

Also, DD never slept on her back. Oops. She always ended up on her side, cuddled up next to me. I'd be on my side, too. She used to nurse and fall asleep like that. I liked that I could hear her breathing and know the second she stirred. She sleeps on her back now sometimes, although I think she might end up on her front, too, but shes 9 months almost.

Yes, very interesting. What do you do to work on that?

It was something her OT picked up, though I am not clear what part of her OT treatment was for that. I also suspect the cranio sacral physio work she had done helped with the primitive reflex integration.

Exactly what I meant to say - Thanks

My son has a retained Moro. His OT worked on reintegrating it (and his other retained infantile reflexes), and it is reduced now, but still present. At least now we've gotten to the point where the sound of plastic packaging being opened doesn't send whatever he has in his hands flying.

I think there is a definite association between retained reflexes, anxiety, and sensory integration issues, but I would be reluctant to say that some were causes and others effects. I think it is just as likely that they all simply reflections or manifestations of the same difference in the underlying neurology.

ETA: To my knowledge, the first time he ever fell asleep on his own without being physically held still was when he was 8 YEARS old.

Oh Aculady, I really feel for you. My DD's moro was not that strongly retained, and she started "sleeping through" at 6.5yrs. Which is to say that she started being able to choose to stay in bed every time she woke up, but only with her sister in the room with her. Ideally she likes to co-sleep with her sister, but she wakes her up.

Edited to add that I also don't think that the group of issues are cause/effect. I was curious about whether the other parents here of "difficult" sleepers knew whether their child had retained reflexes. I also don't think that the sleep issues (except when sleep deprived) has impacted my DDs IQ necessarily, but I think it's related to her other issues and I certainly think that effects performance.

Yes!