organization:university of notre dame

Modern parenting may hinder brain development, research shows // News // Notre Dame News // University of Notre Dame
▻http://news.nd.edu/news/36653-modern-parenting-may-hinder-brain-development-research-shows

Social practices and cultural beliefs of modern life are preventing healthy brain and emotional development in children, according to an interdisciplinary body of research presented recently at a symposium at the University of Notre Dame.

“Life outcomes for American youth are worsening, especially in comparison to 50 years ago,” says Darcia Narvaez, Notre Dame professor of psychology who specializes in moral development in children and how early life experiences can influence brain development.

“Ill-advised practices and beliefs have become commonplace in our culture, such as the use of infant formula, the isolation of infants in their own rooms or the belief that responding too quickly to a fussing baby will ‘spoil’ it,” Narvaez says.

This new research links certain early, nurturing parenting practices — the kind common in foraging hunter-gatherer societies — to specific, healthy emotional outcomes in adulthood, and has many experts rethinking some of our modern, cultural child-rearing “norms.”

“Breast-feeding infants, responsiveness to crying, almost constant touch and having multiple adult caregivers are some of the nurturing ancestral parenting practices that are shown to positively impact the developing brain, which not only shapes personality, but also helps physical health and moral development,” says Narvaez.

Stadiums and Other Sacred Cows - Issue 39: Sport
▻http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/stadiums-and-other-sacred-cows

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There’s a strange sort of reverence that surrounds our relationship with sports. Jay Coakley first noticed it as a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana; he was studying sociology, so perhaps it was hard not to analyze the sport-centered culture that surrounded him. He observed the hype around football weekends, the mania of pep rallies, and the fundraising enthusiasm of booster clubs. He noticed that football players always seemed to have the nicest cars—and heard through his wife, who worked at the registrar at the time, that sometimes transcripts were changed to keep players on the field. He was so intrigued that he proposed doing his thesis and dissertation on the topic.“My faculty advisor in the sociology department said, ‘Are you crazy? You have to focus on (...)

Nieman Reports | Frank Deford: Sports Writing in the Internet Age
►http://nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=102524

In the spring of 2010 Frank Deford, a senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated, author, and commentator on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” delivered the Red Smith Lecture in Journalism at the University of Notre Dame. He called his talk “Sportswriter Is One Word” (PDF), an at times humorous, always insightful rendering of “the carnival I hitched a ride onto in 1962.” For close to half a century he has written stories about athletes and the games they play, and now, as he assesses the technological changes in how sportswriters do their job, he provocatively states that “The end of journalism as we know it is only the beginning of better things for sports journalism. With two caveats.” An excerpt follows:

#sportinvestigation