A Third of American Children Are Growing Up in Homes Without Their Biological Fathers

Dads DO matter, a lot. There is ever increasing piles of evidence showing that children who grow up without their biological father (or any good father figure) do worse in school, have more social and behavioral problems, and are at increased risk of mental illness. Those are the facts.

But we also know that children who grow in homes with "family problems" are also more prone to many of the same issues.

This is a no-win situation for the kids. The only solution is for fathers to have more access to their children in the event of divorce or having fathered a child out of wedlock (the family court system is still blatantly anti-fathers in many areas of the country). Of course, that requires the fathers to WANT to be involved, which is more often the case now than ever before.

This article comes from The Atlantic.

Why Dads Matter

A third of American children are growing up in homes without their biological fathers.

Lois M. Collins & Marjorie Cortez Feb 23 2014



MIDVALE, Utah — Jordan Ott was the third of his mother’s six children, born over the course of four marriages.

By age 8, he’d had two step-dads; his brothers and sisters had more or fewer based on birth order. Each child also had different numbers of siblings, depending on whether their own dads fathered other children. Ott has one full sister, four half-siblings and at one point had three step-siblings “that I know of,” he said. His own father has mostly lived far away.

His story is not uncommon today. More than half of babies of mothers under 30 are born to unmarried parents. The divorce rate among those who do marry exceeds 40 percent, according to the 2012 State of Our Unions report.

These statistics play out most often in the form of absent fathers—or the arrival and departure of serial father figures involved in romantic relationships with a child’s mother. (Moms still usually retain custody in a breakup or divorce.) Twenty-four million American children—one in three—are growing up in homes without their biological fathers, the 2011 Census says. Children in father-absent homes, it notes, are almost four times more likely to be poor.



Like Ott, now 25, children may grow up with lots of father figures, but no real dad. Or they can be like Arvie Burgos, 17 and in foster care in Utah, who grew up in a virtually man-free zone.

Ott said he learned not to pay attention to stepfathers, even one he had for years. “If I did something wrong and needed discipline, he was all over it. Otherwise, we didn’t have too much to do with each other.”

Meanwhile, Burgos’ sole significant male role model was a young man he saw a few hours each month courtesy of a Big Brothers program. His father had never been part of his life and his mother was a drug addict. He could count on his grandmother, but she died when he was 15, about the time his mentor moved away.

“I think there’s consensus that cultural and family factors are causing children’s family lives to be more unstable than in the past,” said Andrew J. Cherlin, author of The Marriage-Go-Round and director of the Hopkins Population Center at Johns Hopkins University. Experts debate whether recent cultural shifts or economic changes most undermine family stability, but, said Cherlin, “most who I respect believe both are at play.” “None of this implies men are better as dads than women are as moms.”

Most children weather family turmoil and wind up OK, said Cherlin, who coined the term “family churn” to describe what happens to families as couples split, often moving dad out of the home and a new man in. A study in the Journal of Marriage and Family said children in such homes experience an average of more than 5.25 partnership transitions. That’s tough for kids who are used to having their own fathers within reach.

“Dad also helps with impulse control and memory and enhances a child’s ability to respond effectively to new or ambiguous situations, for boys and girls,” said Warren Farrell, author of Father and Child Reunion. Children who are close to their fathers tend to achieve more academically, while kids with absent fathers are more likely to drop out. Fathers are the biggest factor in preventing drug use, Farrell said.

The time a dad spends with his children is a particularly strong predictor of how empathetic a child will become, according to commission of experts who wrote a proposal asking President Obama to create a White House Council on Boys and Men. The group, which Farrell helped assemble, compiled research showing infants with dads living at home were months ahead in personal and social development. Children who lack contact with fathers are more likely to be treated for emotional or behavioral problems. Girls with absent or indifferent fathers are more prone to hyperactivity. If dad is around, girls are less likely to become pregnant as teens.

As early as 1993, studies showed that dads also influenced whether their sons became teenage fathers. A Temple University study found no boys born to teen mothers became teen fathers if they had close relationships with their biological fathers, compared to 15 percent of those who didn’t have that closeness.

“None of this implies men are better as dads than women are as moms,” Farrell and the commission emphasized. Children need both.

But dad’s place is not always secure. The commission report said, “The U.S. has done a better job of integrating women into the workplace than in integrating men into the family—especially into the lives of children in the non-intact family. We have valued men as wallets more than as dads.” The result is “moms feeling deprived of resources and dads feeling deprived of purpose and children feeling deprived of the full range of parenting input.”

Few have studied the relationship between children and sequential parent figures, said Paula Fomby, associate research scientist at University of Michigan. She said research suggests someone not biologically related is less likely to invest in a child for various hypothetical reasons, including unclear parental roles. Sometimes, father figures compete or are stretched thin by obligations to children fathered with other women.

The more transitions a child endures, the worse off he or she typically is, Cherlin said.

In Ott’s case, not all the siblings growing up with him experienced the family’s transitions the same way. Some of his younger half-siblings were actually living with both biological parents while he was dealing with a step-father. It was unequal and complicated as step-fathers treated him and his siblings each differently. He saw friends in intact families enjoy greater consistency, something he wants for his own future children.

“There is a great deal of evidence that children from single-parent homes have worse outcomes on both academic and economic measures than children from two-parent families,” wrote scholar Elaine C. Kamarck and Third Way president Jonathan Cowan in the introduction to Wayward Sons, a report produced for Washington think tank Third Way. “There is a vast inequality of both financial resources and parental time and attention between one- and two-parent families.”

The report also said absent fathers particularly impact the psychosocial and academic development of boys.

University of California-Berkeley’s Philip A. Cowan and his wife, Carolyn Pape Cowan, study parent couples. Their research shows a couple’s relationship is vital to their children, even if they are no longer intimate partners—whether they’re divorced, separated or never married.

“The relationship between two biological parents determines a lot about how fathers are going to be involved, and that determines a lot how kids are going to be,” he said. Simply improving the job market for young adults, especially men, would do wonders to stabilize families.

If parents get along, their children tend to be more psychologically and emotionally healthy. Moms who feel their child’s father backs them up are better mothers through all stages of the child’s development, reports the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—“more responsive, affectionate, and confident with their infants; more self-controlled in dealing with defiant toddlers; and better confidants for teenagers seeking advice and emotional support.”

Ott’s father lived too far away to be available physically or emotionally. Burgos “knew” his father through a single letter and a phone call. Neither of them gained the benefits the studies attribute to an involved, interactive dad.

The federal government is beginning to recognize how important fathers are to children after years of focusing almost exclusively on mothers. Government-funded programs to promote marriage for at-risk families now include money for paternal involvement, too, Cowan said. Social welfare programs have been told to include fathers in case management. The Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations all funded healthy-marriage initiatives. Cowan called attempts to include fathers “islands of hope,” but concedes they’re “fighting decades of prejudice.”

The odds are still stacked against fathers in many government and nonprofit agencies designed to assist families, he said. Often, men’s names are not included on case files, even when parents are married.

Simply improving the job market for young adults, especially men, would do wonders to stabilize families—particularly those just starting out, Cherlin said. Experts have been surprised by the real drop in divorce among the college-educated, who still can get good jobs. He said young people need more job training opportunities and apprenticeships, especially if they’re not college-bound. Making sure tax policy doesn’t discourage marriage and providing a modest earned income tax credit for disadvantaged childless young adults would also encourage formation of stable relationships, he added.

Stable relationships are something both Ott and Burgos long for, and each can picture one in his mind. But both admit to feeling somewhat unsure about how to make it happen in real life.

Burgos said he had some good teachers and a foster dad he liked a lot, but no confidants after his “big brother” Jacob moved away. “I don’t really have deep emotional conversations with anybody,” he admits.

Ott recently married and hopes to have children and a stable family life. Burned more than once by the choices adults made when he was young, he keeps one eye on the past. It’s a path he doesn’t intend to travel.

“I’ve never had a family,” Ott said. “I know what I’m not going to do.”

This story is part of The Father Factor, a series, produced in collaboration with the Deseret News, on the role of dads in American society today.

Lois M. Collins and Marjorie Cortez

Lois M. Collins covers family issues for the Deseret News and is a recent National Health Journalism fellow. Marjorie Cortez is a reporter for the Deseret News, where she covers local government and human services issues including poverty, substance abuse, mental illness, homelessness, and refugee resettlement.

See also

• The Rise of the Single Dad
• How Anti-Poverty Programs Marginalize Fathers

According to a Psychology Today "Diagnosis Dictionary" entry, more children suffer from neglect in the U.S. than from physical and sexual abuse combined.

During 2005, 62.8 percent of victims experienced neglect, 16.6 percent were physically abused, 9.3 percent were sexually abused, 7.1 percent were emotionally or psychologically maltreated, and 2.0 percent were medically neglected.

Unlike child sexual abuse, where girls are more likely to be victims (based on reporting - there might be more "equality" here than statistics indicate), neglect is equal opportunity, with only a slight difference (2003) between girls (50.7%) and boys (47.3%) - it's unclear where the other 2% fall. Another study (2001) found boys accounting for 48.6 percent and girls accounting for 51.1 percent.

We have known for quite some time that neglect has serious impacts on brain development. Rene Spitz showed the effects of neglect on infant attachment in his foundling home studies. Spitz (1945) compared 61 infants living in a foundling home to 69 infants living in a nursery. The foundling home contained children given up by un-wed mothers whereas the nursery contained children of delinquent girls.

In the foundling homes there was very little to no interaction with adults, few things with which to play, and most of the infants' time is spent in cribs with extremely limited visual stimulation. In the nursery, however, infants were cared for by mothers or foster mothers, they were given toys, and the cribs allowed for visual stimulation. Spitz found that the Developmental Quotient for foundling home babies was averaged at 72, while for the nursery babies the Developmental Quotient was averaged at 105.

More recent research, with the aid of brain imaging, reveals that - among other issues - the mass of the corpus callosum was reduced by 15%–18% (Teicher, et al, 2004) in neglected children. I am particularly interested, however, in how neglect (or the corresponding inflammation from the stress response) impacts myelination.


This article is from Wired Science in 2012, but it remains relevant and informative. The original article is here:

Full Citation:  
Makinodan, M, Rosen, KM, Ito, S, and Corfas, G. (2012, Sep 14). A Critical Period for Social Experience–Dependent Oligodendrocyte Maturation and Myelination. Science, Vol. 337 No. 6090.

How Childhood Neglect Stunts the Brain

By Brandon Keim
09.13.12 | Wired Science


Photo: D. Sharon Pruitt/Flickr

Science is painting a dramatic picture of how childhood neglect damages developing brains, so stunting them that neglect might be likened to physically violent abuse.

The latest addition to this research narrative comes from a study of mice placed in isolation early in their lives, an experiment that, on its surface, might seem redundant: After all, we already know that neglect is bad for humans, much less mice.

But they key to the study is in the details. The researchers found striking abnormalities in tissues that transmit electrical messages across the brain, suggesting a specific mechanism for some of the dysfunctions seen in neglected human children.

“This is very strong evidence that changes in myelin cause some of the behavioral problems caused by isolation,” said neurologist Gabriel Corfas of Harvard Medical School, a co-author of the new study, released Sept. 13 in Science.

Corfas and his team, led by fellow Harvard Med neuroscientist Manabu Makinodan, put 21-day-old mice in isolation for two weeks, then returned them to their colonies. When the mice reached adolescence, the researchers compared their brains and behavior to mice who hadn’t been isolated.

The isolated mice were antisocial, with striking deficits in memory. Their myelin, a cell layer that forms around neuronal networks like insulation around wires, was unusually thin, especially in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region central to cognition and personality.

'The first years of life are crucially important for brain architecture.'Similar patterns of behavior have been seen, again and again, in children raised in orphanages or neglected by parents, as have changes to a variety of brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex. The myelin deficiencies identified by Corfas and Makinodan may underlie these defects.

“This is incredibly important data, because it gives us the neural mechanisms associated with the deleterious changes in the brain” that arise from neglect, said Nathan Fox, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Maryland.

Fox was not involved in the new study, but is part of a research group working on a long-term study of childhood neglect that is scientifically striking and poignantly tragic. Led by Harvard Medical School pediatricians Charles Nelson and Margaret Sheridan, the project has tracked for the last 12 years children who started their lives in an orphanage in Bucharest, Romania, a country infamous for the spartan, impersonal conditions of its orphanages.

Among children who spent their first two years in the orphanage, the researchers observed high levels developmental problems, cognitive deficits, mental illness, and significant reductions in brain size. When the researchers measured the sheer amount of electrical activity generated by the brains of children who’d been isolated as toddlers, “it was like you’d had a rheostat, a dimmer, and dimmed down the amount of energy in these institutionalized children,” said Fox.

These problems persisted even when toddlers were later adopted, suggesting a crucial importance for those early years in setting a life’s neurological trajectory. “There’s a sensitive period for which, if a child is taken out of an institution, the effects appear to be remediated, and after which remediation is very, very difficult,” Fox said. The same pattern was observed in Corfas and Makinodan’s mice.

One phenomenon not studied in the mice, but regularly found in people neglected as children, are problems with stress: mood disorders, anxiety, and general dysfunction in a body’s stress responses.

Controlled for gender and age, average white matter volumes in the brains of children who grew up in a Romanian orphanage (left), started in an orphange but were placed in foster care (center), or never lived in an orphanage at all (right). Image: Sheridan et al./PNAS

Those mechanisms have been studied in another animal, the rhesus monkey. While deprivation studies on non-human primates — and in particular chimpanzees — are controversial, the results from the monkey studies have been instructive.

Early-life isolation sets off a flood of hormones that permanently warp their responses to stress, leaving them anxious and prone to violent swings in mood.

Isolation is so damaging because humans, especially as infants, literally depend on social stimulation to shape their minds, said psychologist John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago.

“Human social processes were once thought to have been incidental to learning and cognition,” Cacioppo wrote in an e-mail. “However, we now think that the complexities and demands of social species have contributed to the evolution of the brain and nervous system and to various aspects of cognition.”

Corfas and Makinodan’s team linked specific genetic changes to the abnormalities in their mice, and hope they might someday inform the development of drugs that can help reverse isolation’s effects.

A more immediate implication of the research is social. As evidence of neglect’s severe, long-term consequences accumulates, it could shape the way people think not just of orphanages, but policy matters like maternity and paternity leave, or the work requirements of single parents on welfare.

“What this work certainly says is that the first years of life are crucially important for brain architecture,” Fox said. “Infants and young children have to grow up in an environment of social relationships, and experiencing those is critical for healthy cognitive, social and psychological development. As a society, we should be figuring out how to encourage all that to happen.”

Researcher Claims Progress on Predicting Whether "Bad Boys" Will Grow Out of It or Not

 

This press release comes from the University of Michigan, where psychologist Luke Hyde is specializing in antisocial behavior in young men. His 2011 paper, written with Ryan Bogdan and Ahmad R. Hariri, is "Understanding risk for psychopathology through imaging gene–environment interactions," and it is available for free online.

I'm not sure about this kind of stuff - although I am sure parents will line up for the exam. So if a kid has the specific genetic traits and the parents give the "correct" answers, is the kid labeled for life as an antisocial personality? Is he written off or put on meds he may not need? This is a seriously slippery slope.

Bad Boys: Research Predicts Whether Boys Will Grow out of It or Not

Nov. 5, 2013 — Using the high-tech tools of a new field called neurogenetics and a few simple questions for parents, a University of Michigan researcher is beginning to understand which boys are simply being boys and which may be headed for trouble.

"When young children lie or cheat or steal, parents naturally wonder if they'll grow out of it," said Luke Hyde, a U-M psychologist who is studying the development and treatment of antisocial behavior.

Hyde, a faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research and assistant professor of psychology, is an expert on how genes, experience and the brain work together to heighten or reduce the risk that normal childhood transgressions will develop into full-blown conduct disorders in adolescence and early adulthood.

"The lifetime prevalence of conduct disorder is around 10 percent, and even higher in males and low-income populations," Hyde said. "The total cost to society is enormous, since these behaviors are often chronic, lasting through adulthood."

With colleagues at U-M, Duke University, the University of Pittsburgh and other institutions, Hyde has been exploring the role of the environment and biology as they interact over time to shape behavior. In particular, he is using the techniques of a new field called neurogenetics, which combines genetics, neuroscience and psychology, to learn how genes and neural processes interact with harsh environments, including dangerous neighborhoods and harsh parents, and with a child's own levels of empathy and personality traits, to increase the risk of antisocial behavior.

In one recent study, for example, Hyde and colleagues studied subjects with over-reactive amygdala responses. The amygdala is an almond-shaped part of the brain's primitive limbic system involved in processing fear and other visceral emotions. It has been associated with impulsive, aggressive behavior, as well as anxiety disorders and depression.

"Previous research suggests that the amygdala becomes over-reactive probably as a result of both genetics and experience," Hyde said. "And once the amygdala is over-reactive, people tend to behave in an anxious, over-reactive way to things they see as a potential threat.

"Our study found that this tendency is moderated by a person's environment, including the social support they get. If they're not getting support from family, friends, neighbors or professionals, then the link between the amygdala and anxious behavior is much stronger."

In another study, Hyde and colleagues showed that kids who are impulsive are only at higher risk of engaging in antisocial behavior if they live in dangerous neighborhoods.

Hyde also identified specific items within childhood behavior checklists that can be used as early as the age 3 to identify kids who will likely have worse trajectories for antisocial behavior compared to other children who have similar behavior problems, such as throwing tantrums.

These items assess observable behaviors that include whether the child is cruel to animals, doesn't seem to feel guilty after misbehaving, is sneaky, lies, is selfish or won't share, and won't change his or her behavior as a result of punishment.

"The results of this test aren't really meaningful until age 3," Hyde said. "Before that, many of these behaviors are fairly common and don't predict anything. But after age 3, if children are still behaving in these ways, their behavior is more likely to escalate in the following years rather than improve."

There is good news, though. Kids who scored high on this test benefitted just as much as other kids from interventions, according to Hyde. These interventions, often called parent management training, focus on giving parents better skills to manage child behavior problems, including training parents to spend more positive time with their kids, use time-outs instead of physical punishments, and reward good behavior by giving out stickers.

"Parents need to know that intervention works, especially if it's done early," Hyde said. "They need to go for help if they see signs of trouble. Clinical psychologists, among other professionals, have empirically supported treatments that are quite effective for children, especially in this age period."

David Brooks - The Heart Grows Smarter

Over the past several years, as conservative New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks has read more and more in sociology, social psychology, and neuroscience, he has become more and more liberal on social issues. Granted, he still writes some bone-headed columns from time to time, likely to appease his conservative base, but he tends more toward progressive, compassionate views on social issues, as in the column below.

George Vaillant, a psychiatrist and Professor at Harvard Medical School, spent the last 30 years as Director of the Study of Adult Development (The Grant Study, which is what Brooks is referencing below) at the Harvard University Health Service. The study has prospectively charted the lives of 824 men and women for over 60 years. His book summarizing some of  the data from the study is Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development (2003) - you can read more about the study in this 2009 article from the Atlantic Monthly.

The Heart Grows Smarter

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: November 5, 2012 

If you go back and read a bunch of biographies of people born 100 to 150 years ago, you notice a few things that were more common then than now.

First, many more families suffered the loss of a child, which had a devastating and historically underappreciated impact on their overall worldviews.

Second, and maybe related, many more children grew up in cold and emotionally distant homes, where fathers, in particular, barely knew their children and found it impossible to express their love for them.

It wasn’t only parents who were emotionally diffident; it was the people who studied them. In 1938, a group of researchers began an intensive study of 268 students at Harvard University. The plan was to track them through their entire lives, measuring, testing and interviewing them every few years to see how lives develop.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the researchers didn’t pay much attention to the men’s relationships. Instead, following the intellectual fashions of the day, they paid a lot of attention to the men’s physiognomy. Did they have a “masculine” body type? Did they show signs of vigorous genetic endowments?

But as this study — the Grant Study — progressed, the power of relationships became clear. The men who grew up in homes with warm parents were much more likely to become first lieutenants and majors in World War II. The men who grew up in cold, barren homes were much more likely to finish the war as privates.

Body type was useless as a predictor of how the men would fare in life. So was birth order or political affiliation. Even social class had a limited effect. But having a warm childhood was powerful. As George Vaillant, the study director, sums it up in “Triumphs of Experience,” his most recent summary of the research, “It was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.”

Of the 31 men in the study incapable of establishing intimate bonds, only four are still alive. Of those who were better at forming relationships, more than a third are living.

It’s not that the men who flourished had perfect childhoods. Rather, as Vaillant puts it, “What goes right is more important than what goes wrong.” The positive effect of one loving relative, mentor or friend can overwhelm the negative effects of the bad things that happen.

In case after case, the magic formula is capacity for intimacy combined with persistence, discipline, order and dependability. The men who could be affectionate about people and organized about things had very enjoyable lives.

But a childhood does not totally determine a life. The beauty of the Grant Study is that, as Vaillant emphasizes, it has followed its subjects for nine decades. The big finding is that you can teach an old dog new tricks. The men kept changing all the way through, even in their 80s and 90s.

One man in the study paid his way through Harvard by working as a psychiatric attendant. He slept from 6 p.m. to midnight. Worked the night shift at a hospital, then biked to class by 8 in the morning. After college, he tried his hand at theater. He did not succeed, and, at age 40, he saw himself as “mediocre and without imagination.” His middle years were professionally and maritally unhappy.

But, as he got older, he became less emotionally inhibited. In old age, he became a successful actor, playing roles like King Lear. He got married at 78. By 86, the only medicine he was taking was Viagra. He lived to 96.

Another subject grew up feeling that he “didn’t know either parent very well.” At 19, he wrote, “I don’t find it easy to make friends.” At 39, he wrote, “I feel lonely, rootless and disoriented.” At 50, he had basically given up trying to socialize and was trapped in an unhappy marriage.

But, as he aged, he changed. He became the president of his nursing home. He had girlfriends after the death of his first wife and then remarried. He didn’t turn into a social butterfly, but life was better.

The men of the Grant Study frequently became more emotionally attuned as they aged, more adept at recognizing and expressing emotion. Part of the explanation is biological. People, especially men, become more aware of their emotions as they get older.

Part of this is probably historical. Over the past half-century or so, American culture has become more attuned to the power of relationships. Masculinity has changed, at least a bit.

The so-called Flynn Effect describes the rise in measured I.Q. scores over the decades. Perhaps we could invent something called the Grant Effect, on the improvement of mass emotional intelligence over the decades. This gradual change might be one of the greatest contributors to progress and well-being that we’ve experienced in our lifetimes.


A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 6, 2012, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: The Heart Grows Smarter.

The Effects of Early Exposure to Sexual Material

The human brain is not designed to deal with issues of sex and sexuality until the body hits puberty, and even then we are far too emotionally immature (at least in our culture) to handle sexuality respectfully and responsibly. But with the incredible quantity and availability of internet porn, children are being exposed to sexuality far earlier than is healthy developmentally.

We know that early sexualization through incest and molestation changes how a child relates to others and how the child understands their value as a person. These kids (not all of them, of course) often define their relational worth in terms of sexuality, leading to all kinds of issues.

Early exposure to porn is not likely to produce such extreme outcomes, but it tends - according to some studies - to generate earlier sexual activity than in those who do not view porn. It also creates very unrealistic expectations for what sex is like and, among boys, for how women relate sexually. Hint: It's not like it is in the porn clips.

I would never advocate banning porn, but I would definitely advocate that parents be more actively involved in teaching their children about sex and sexuality - don't leave it up to the schools, the church, or the older kids on the playground. Take responsibility for teaching your children about this sensitive issue.

This article is from Psychology Today's blog section - by Carolyn C. Ross, M.D., M.P.H. on her Real Healing blog.

Overexposed and Under-Prepared: The Effects of Early Exposure to Sexual Content

Is the Internet impacting sexual development? 

 

 

Published on August 13, 2012 by Carolyn C. Ross, M.D., M.P.H. in Real Healing

“They grow up so fast,” parents often lament. Today, children are being sexualized earlier and earlier, in part because they are exposed to sexual material in movies, television, music and other media earlier than ever. With widespread access to the Internet, curious teens may accidentally or intentionally be exposed to millions of pages of material that is uncensored, sexually explicit, often inaccurate and potentially harmful.

So what? If kids don’t understand it, how can they be affected by it? Even if young children can’t understand sex or its role in relationships, the images they see can leave a lasting impression. It’s a basic premise of marketing that what we watch, read and direct our attention toward influences our behavior. And, as any marketer knows, sex sells. That’s why we see products and services that have nothing to do with sex being marketed in increasingly sexualized ways.

Children as young as 8 and 9 are coming across sexually explicit material on the Internet and in other media. Although research is just beginning to assess the potential damage, there is reason to believe that early exposure to sexual content may have the following undesirable effects:

Early Sex. Research has long established that teens who watch movies or listen to music that glamorizes drinking, drug use or violence tend to engage in those behaviors themselves. A 2012 study shows that movies influence teens’ sexual attitudes and behaviors as well. The study, published in Psychological Science, found that the more teens were exposed to sexual content in movies, the earlier they started having sex and the likelier they were to have casual, unprotected sex.

In another study, boys who were exposed to sexually explicit media were three times more likely to engage in oral sex and intercourse two years after exposure than non-exposed boys. Young girls exposed to sexual content in the media were twice as likely to engage in oral sex and one and a half times more likely to have intercourse. Research also shows that teens who listened to music with degrading sexual references were more likely to have sex than those who had less exposure.

Why are teens more likely to have sex after being exposed to sexual content in the media? Just as we read specific books and show educational movies to our children in hopes that they learn lessons from the characters, the media provides a type of sex education to young people. Media messages normalize early sexual experimentation and portray sex as casual, unprotected and consequence-free, encouraging sexual activity long before children are emotionally, socially or intellectually ready.

High-Risk Sex. The earlier a child is exposed to sexual content and begins having sex, the likelier they are to engage in high-risk sex. Research shows that children who have sex by age 13 are more likely to have multiple sexual partners, engage in frequent intercourse, have unprotected sex and use drugs or alcohol before sex. In a study by researcher Dr. Jennings Bryant, more than 66 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls reported wanting to try some of the sexual behaviors they saw in the media (and by high school, many had done so), which increases the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

Sex, Love and Relationship Addictions. Not every child who is exposed to sexual content will struggle with a mental health disorder, but research shows that early exposure to pornography is a risk factor for sex addictions and other intimacy disorders. In one study of 932 sex addicts, 90 percent of men and 77 percent of women reported that pornography was a factor in their addiction. With the widespread availability of explicit material on the Internet, these problems are becoming more prevalent and are surfacing at younger ages.

Sexual Violence. According to some studies, early exposure (by age 14) to pornography and other explicit material may increase the risk of a child becoming a victim of sexual violence or acting out sexually against another child. For some people, habitual use of pornography may prompt a desire for more violent or deviant material, including depictions of rape, torture or humiliation. If people seek to act out what they see, they may be more likely to commit sexual assault, rape or child molestation.

Preserving Our Children’s Youth

Early exposure to sexual content in the media may have a profound impact on children’s values, attitudes and behaviors toward sex and relationships. Unfortunately, media portrayals do not always reflect the message parents want to send. Here are a few ways that you as a parent can ensure your message is heard:

• Know what your children are watching, playing and listening to and take advantage of teachable moments to discuss any inappropriate content or behaviors with them.
• Set and enforce limits around screen time.
• Make use of Internet filters and parental controls.
• Share your family’s values and expectations regarding sex and relationships.
• Talk to your child about media representations of sex, relationships and gender roles and teach them to question the accuracy and intent of the messages they receive.
• Model healthy, respectful relationships and self-worth.

For most families, banning media from the home isn’t a realistic option. After all, most 8- to 18-year-olds devote an average of seven and a half hours to media in a typical day, according to a 2009 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and more than half of that content contains sexual images or references. The goal isn’t to avoid the issue, but to approach it head-on so that your children learn about sex and relationships from their most trusted source: you.

A single close friendship can ease a boy’s passage through middle school

From Slate, an article on the importance of buddies for young boys as they enter middle school. There are big piles of research (decades worth) demonstrating that kids with close "buddy" friendships "are healthier, do better in school, and don’t get bullied as often." More importantly, friendships help mitigate "the negative impacts of family problems and, according to Dr. William M. Bukowski, make kids less anxious about trying new things."

The Buddy System: A single close friendship can ease a boy’s passage through middle school - But what if your son can’t find a pal?

By Joshua Glenn and Elizabeth Foy Larsen | Posted Thursday, March 15, 2012

Research has shown that kids with close friendships are healthier, do better in school, and get don’t get bullied as often. Photograph by Digital Vision.

Recently both of our oldest sons switched schools for junior high. While in many ways each of their transitions were smooth, both of us were surprised that these two terrific, well-adjusted, handsome (natch) boys seemed at first—at least to their parents—to have no friends.

We reacted to this information in manners befitting our personalities. Josh gently encouraged his son to pick up the phone and call his elementary-school pals; his son resisted, saying he wanted to move on. Elizabeth, on the other hand, went full-on helicopter. After a call to her son’s adviser revealed the not-encouraging fact that he’d been eating lunch with that same adviser, she phoned the school counselor, who assured her that her son wasn’t roaming the halls by himself and that this temporary friendlessness was in the range of normal, especially for introverted boys like her son. “He’s still most likely putting all his energy into getting to the right classroom for each class, not to mention finding the bathroom,” she said. Needless to say, soon Elizabeth was asking her son for the names of everyone he ate lunch with, much to her son’s disgust.

We remember from our own treacherous passages through junior high how strong friendships can ease the pain of those change-filled years. Josh and his best friend from childhood, Dooley, lived on the same street and attended the same middle school. Though they both made other friends, the two were joined at the shoulder most days from breakfast, which Josh often ate at Dooley's house (where Carnation Breakfast Drinks were an accepted alternative to oatmeal), through dinner, which Dooley often ate at Josh's father's house (where reading a Tintin book at the table was by no means considered rude).

In fact, decades of research have shown that kids with close friendships are healthier, do better in school, and don’t get bullied as often. Friendships also can minimize the negative impacts of family problems and, according to Dr. William M. Bukowski, a psychologist who researches friendships at Concordia University in Montreal, make kids less anxious about trying new things. In one University of Virginia study, researchers placed students wearing heavy backpacks at the base of a hill and asked them to estimate its steepness. The participants who stood next to a friend gave lower estimates than those who were alone.

Perhaps most important, friendships can validate kids in a way that sticks more than their parents’ You rock! praise. “Kids know that parents are supposed to love their children,” says Bukowski. “But when someone shows you affection who doesn’t have to, it has a stronger effect.”

Given these benefits, it makes sense that we parents of boys should see the middle school years as an opportunity to encourage a life-long appreciation for friendship. Unfortunately, for boys growing up today, maturity is mostly defined as being cool and independent. You’re not supposed to need a relationship with anyone. In fact, the very idea of having a “relationship” with a guy friend, much less talking about it, seems icky to many boys.

 “You have to shift the whole game and say that maturity should be defined as having quality, mutually supportive healthy relationships,” says Niobe Way, an NYU psychology professor. Way’s recent book, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, shreds the assumption many parents make that boys can take or leave their pals. Instead, her research shows that boys actually love their guy friends, and have the instinctive intelligence to be able to talk about those attachments. “We think boys are emotional clods who don’t know how to express their feelings,” says Way. “What I hear from listening to boys for almost 20 years is that they have an incredible astuteness about the emotional world. It’s not just that they can say they love a friend, but they can say things with more nuance, like ‘I can act like I’m mad but I’m really hurt.’ ”

Unfortunately, according to Way and other researchers, intimacy between boys vanishes as they progress through high school, in part because many boys this age are afraid of acting in a way that makes them seem girlish or gay. (Jocks, on the other hand, can openly show affection with their guy friends—especially on the playing field—because their popularity and status as manly men insulates them from being harassed.) It’s a loss that the boys Way interviewed mourn intensely and still grieve as adults. Since publishing her book, Way says she’s been surprised by all the letters she’s received from grown men telling her how much they missed their own boyhood chums.

The loss of close-knit guy friendships in middle school may lead to more than loneliness. “If you live in a culture in which the definition of manhood is independence and autonomy and where we aren’t valuing our social and emotional sides,” asks Way, “is it so surprising that we have this culture of bullying and cyberbullying and people being so brutal to each other?”

We agree. But encouraging authentic relationships at a time of life when kids just want to fit in is no small challenge. Here are a few friendship-encouraging strategies recommended by experts—and that would possibly be recommended by our sons, if they were ever willing to talk about this.

Don’t confuse popularity with friendship. If your son has one friend in whom he can confide, and who he trusts won’t talk behind his back, that’s all he needs. Research shows that to get all the benefits of friendship, one is the magic number. Don’t crusade for him to acquire friends the way he used to collect Pokémon cards.

Don’t freak out if your son doesn’t have friends from time to time. In his study of 350 kids, Bukowksi found that every single one went through a period when he had no friends. “There is going to be turnover in friendships,” says Bukowski. “These downtimes are a chance for parents to encourage the importance of relationships and take stock.” And so …

Talk about friendship. Even though most boys don’t want to have a heavy sit-down about their buddies, you can still talk about the importance of friendship in a way that will get your point across. Bukowski and Way both suggest talking about your own friendships: how much they mean to you; what disappoints you. Just don’t overshare! A simple, “I really care about my friendship with Mike and it bums me out when he doesn’t return my emails” will do. Elizabeth had great success recently when she told her sons that a friend is someone who can keep your secrets and doesn’t treat you well one day and then turn on you the next. Both of her sons told her which boys they knew who fit this description. And then they also were able to say which kids didn’t and how it makes them feel when that happens.

Give him a chance to bond over things he loves. You can’t stage-manage a middle schooler’s friendships they way you could when he was in elementary school. But you can provide boys with opportunities to do things with kids who share their interests—filmmaking classes, batting practice, hip-hop. But don’t think that just because your kid has met another LEGO robotics nut that your work is done. “One of the challenges for middle school boys is to change their friendship relationships from being activity based into experiences that are more relational,” says Bukowski. “If a 7^th grade boy is playing basketball together with his friends, he should be aware that he shouldn’t gloat about it if he’s better than his friend. Boys who are friends compete with each other, but they can manage that competition.” If your son has a hard time not lording his greatness over others, Bukowski recommends watching the ESPN TV show Pardon the Interruption, which pits two sports reporters against each other to hash out the issues of the day. “They fight about everything,” he says. “But it never becomes personal. You always have the sense that they love each other.”

***

And how, over a year later, have our boys fared? Elizabeth’s son did make friends at his new school while also staying close to a few guys he’s known since he was little. He’s bugging her about seeing The Hunger Games with his pals on the day it’s released, is excited about being on the middle school tennis team, and is going to camp with four classmates this summer. Josh’s son took up the electric bass and made friends through his school’s jazz band. He and his friends have co-ed parties, go ice skating together, and never stop IMing. Proving, as is always the case with parenting, that solving one concern just begets another.

Simon Baron-Cohen - Testsoterone on My Mind and in My Brain

From Edge, a conversation with research psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen - an expert in sex differences and autism - on his favorite hormone (and mine), testosterone. In the interest of full-disclosure, I have often disagreed with Baron-Cohen, feeling that some sex and gender traits are more socially constructed than biologically determined, but he is an important voice in this field.

His most recent book is The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (2011), but I also recommend The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism (2004), which is a great introduction to his thinking on sex differences and the origins of autism.

At the Edge site, there are some videos and the question and answer transcript - go check it out.

TESTOSTERONE ON MY MIND AND IN MY BRAIN

A Conversation With Simon Baron-Cohen [4.30.12] SLIDE SHOW

This is a hormone that has fascinated me. It's a small molecule that seems to be doing remarkable things. The variation we see in this hormone comes from a number of different sources. One of those sources is genes; many different genes can influence how much testosterone each of us produces, and I just wanted to share with you my fascination with this hormone, because it's helping us take the science of sex differences one step further, to try to understand not whether there are sex differences, but what are the roots of those sex differences? Where are they springing from? And along the way we’re also hoping that this is going to teach us something about those neuro-developmental conditions like autism, like delayed language development, which seem to disproportionately affect boys more than girls, and potentially help us understand the causes of those conditions.

 
Introduction by John Brockman

"I thoroughly enjoyed the evening last week," emailed Brian Eno. "A lot of interesting people got connected together and everyone told me they enjoyed themselves."

He was referring the first-ever London Edge Reality Club meeting, featuring a presentation by Cambridge research psychologist Simon-Baron Cohen which Eno hosted at his studio in Notting Hill before an assembled group that included artists, curators, museum directors, writers, playwrights, scientists in fields such as biology, math, psychology, zoology, the editors and correspondents of Nature, The Economist, Wired, The Guardian.

Baron-Cohen held forth before this diverse group on his latest research on the properties and effects of the hormone testosterone, while showing its relevance to his earlier research in sex differences and autism.

The variety of people at the meeting reflected the singular place in the London cultural scene occupied by our host, an artist, "non-musician", composer, columnist, record producer (U2, Cold Play, Talking Heads, Paul Simon).

Eno, Edge, Bono, Pavarotti - Miss Sarajevo | One HD

 

Perhaps this should be your new Reality Club venue outside America?", he continued, "I'd be happy to make it available whenever you need it." Short answer: an emphatic yes. But first, we need to check with Larry and Sergey to make that Google's search algorithms and infrastructure are robust enough to handle the combustible combination of Eno's dual relationships to "Edge" (the guitarist for U2) and "Edge" (edge.org).

—JB

 
SIMON BARON-COHEN, Psychologist,  is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; Author, The Science of Evil; The Essential Difference.

Simon Baron-Cohen's Edge Bio Page

Click on "Slide Show" Link at Top for Photo Album

Simon Baron-Cohen, Research Psychologist, Cambridge; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; Stanley Buchthal, Producer (Hairspray); Philip Campbell, Editor, Nature; Geoffrey Carr, Science Editor, Economist; Marcus du Sautoy, Mathematician, Oxford; Brian Eno, Musician, Artist; Mary Evers, Osteopath; Ed Hall, Cambridge, Student; Melanie Hall, QC (Queen's Counsellor); Maja Hoffmann, Kunstalle Zurich Foundation; Bruce Hood, Cognitive Psychologist, Bristol; Alok Jha, Science Correspondent, Guardian; Koo Jeong-A, Artist; John Lloyd, Comedy Writer, TV Producer; Katinka Matson, Co-founder, Edge; William McEwan, Cambridge; Hans Ulrich Obrist , Co-Director, Serpentine Gallery; David Rowan, Editor, Wired.UK; Simone Schnall, Social Psychologist, Cambridge; Tom Standage, Digital Editor, Economist; Tom Stoppard, Playwright; Seirian Sumner, Zoologist Institute of Zoology; Richard Wentworth, Artist, Curator; Russell Weinberger, Edge; Rosie Williams, Biologist, Cambridge; Hilary Wynter, Banker 

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TESTOSTERONE ON MY MIND AND IN MY BRAIN

[SIMON BARON-COHEN:] What I want to talk about tonight is this very specific hormone, testosterone. Our lab has been doing a lot of research to understand what this hormone does and, in particular, to test whether it plays any role in how the mind and the brain develops.

Before I get to that point, I'll say a few words by way of background about typical sex differences, because that's the cradle out of which this new research comes. Many of you know that the topic of sex differences in psychology is fraught with controversy. It's an area where people, for many decades, didn't really want to enter because of the risks of political incorrectness, and of being misunderstood.

Perhaps of all of the areas in psychology where people do research, the field of sex differences was kind of off limits. It was taboo, and that was partly because people believed that anyone who tried to do research into whether boys and girls, on average, differ, must have some sexist agenda. And so for that reason a lot of scientists just wouldn't even touch it.  

By 2003, I was beginning to sense that that political climate was changing, that it was a time when people could ask the question — do boys and girls differ? Do men and women differ? — without fear of being accused of some kind of sexist agenda, but in a more open-minded way.

First of all, I started off looking at neuroanatomy, to look at what the neuroscience is telling us about the male and female brain. If you just take groups of girls and groups of boys and, for example, put them into MRI scanners to look at the brain, you do see differences on average. Take the idea that the sexes are identical from the neck upwards, even if they are very clearly different from the neck downwards: the neuroscience is telling us that that is just a myth, that there are differences, even in terms of brain volume and the number of connections between nerve cells in the brain at the structure of the brain, on average, between males and females.

I say this carefully because it's still a field which is prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, but just giving you some of the examples of findings that have come out of the neuroscience of sex differences, you find that the male brain, on average, is about eight percent larger than the female brain. We're talking about a volumetric difference. It doesn't necessarily mean anything, but that's just a finding that's consistently found. You find that difference from the earliest point you can put babies into the scanner, so some of the studies are at two weeks old in terms of infants.

You also find that if you look at postmortem tissue, looking at the human brain in terms of postmortem tissue, that the male brain has more connections, more synapses between nerve cells. It's about a 30 percent difference on average between males and females. These differences are there.

The second big difference between males and females is about how much gray matter and white matter we see in the brain: that males have more gray matter and more white matter on average than the female brain does. White matter, just to be succinct, is mostly about connections between different parts of the brain. The gray matter is more about the cell bodies in the brain. But those differences exist. Then when you probe a bit further, you find that there are differences between the male and female brain in different lobes, the frontal lobe, the temporal lobe, in terms of how much gray and white matter there is.

You can also dissect the brain to look at specific regions. Some of you will have had heard of regions like the amygdala, which people think of as a sort of emotion center, that tends to be larger in the male brain than the female brain, again, on average. There's another region that shows the opposite pattern, larger in females than males: the planum temporale, an area involved in language. These structural differences exist, and I started by looking at these differences in terms of neuroanatomy, just because I thought, at least those are differences that are rooted in biology, and there might be less scope for disagreement about basic differences.

I've talked a little bit about neuroanatomy, but in terms of psychology, there are also sex differences that are reported. On average, females are developing empathy at a faster rate than males. I keep using that word 'on average' because none of these findings apply to all females or all males. You simply see differences emerge when you compare groups of males and females. Empathy seems to be developing faster in girls and in contrast, in boys there seems to be a stronger drive to systemize. I use that word ‘systemizing’, which is all about trying to figure out how systems work, becoming fascinated with systems. And systems could take a variety of different forms. It could be a mechanical system, like a computer; it could be a natural system, like the weather; it could be an abstract system, like mathematics; but boys seem to have a stronger interest in systematic information. I was contrasting these two very different psychological processes, empathy and systemizing. And that's about as far as I went, and that was now some 11 years ago.

Since then my lab has wanted to try to understand where these sex differences come from, and now I'm fast-forwarding to tell you about the work that we're doing on testosterone. I'm very interested in this molecule, partly because males produce more of it than females, and partly because there's a long tradition of animal research which shows that this hormone may masculinize the brain, but there's very little work on this hormone in humans.

Before I tell you about the testosterone work, I should just mention one somewhat controversial study that we published back in the year 2000, and that was a study of newborn babies. What we wanted to do was establish whether the sex differences that you find in behavior, or in the mind, in human beings, were purely the result of culture and purely the result of postnatal experience, or whether biology might also be contributing to those differences.

We did a study that we call the Newborn Baby Study, where we studied just over 100 babies aged 24 hours old. This was a study conducted in Cambridge. The babies had just popped out of the womb. The mothers had signed a consent form saying that they were happy for their baby to take part in research. We would have loved to study the babies as soon as they came out, but the obstetricians asked us, out of respect for mother and baby, if we would wait 24 hours, which we were happy to do; and then when the babies were settled and the mother was settled, we presented these babies with two objects: a human face or a mechanical mobile suspended above the crib. So, two very different kinds of objects, one mechanical and one animate and human. And we looked to see whether babies, aged one day old, looked longer at the human face, a social stimulus, or looked longer at the mechanical object.

The objects were presented one at a time, and we counterbalanced, that's to say we varied the order, whether the baby saw the face first or the mechanical object first. What we found, just cutting to the chase, was that if we compared babies in terms of looking longer at a social stimulus or looking longer at a mechanical stimulus, more boys seemed to look longer at the mechanical stimulus, and more girls seemed to look longer at the social stimulus, the face. We were finding a difference that was there as early as 24 hours old; and that, to me, was pointing to biology being a contributing factor to sex differences.

People who really want to argue that all sex differences that you find in the mind and in behavior can be explained by cultural factors might still have argued that in those 24 hours, that mother and baby or father and baby had been interacting, that parents may have been somehow shaping their sons and daughters to have different patterns of interest. That is just possible, because in 24 hours, people would argue, there's plenty of room for experience. But it's equally plausible that what we're seeing is babies arriving on day one with slightly different patterns of interest: with girls on average, being more oriented towards people, being more inquisitive about people, and boys, again on average, being slightly more oriented in their attention towards the physical environment, and patterns in the physical world.

Now we're up to testosterone. We picked testosterone, this molecule, just because we were looking for a candidate biological explanation or mechanism for these sex differences we were observing. And the animal research was pointing to the fact that before birth there's a surge in the production of testosterone. Testosterone is suddenly produced at very high quantities and then it drops off again around birth. And the animal researchers were arguing that this surge in the production of testosterone, that the fetus is producing a lot of testosterone during fetal life, because it has some permanent and organizing effect on brain development. And they were able to show that in rats.

You can do experimental manipulations of this hormone in rats, that would be completely unethical in humans: you can either deprive the animal of its testosterone, for example, by castration at birth (since testosterone, one source of it in males is the testes); or you can inject extra testosterone, for example, into a female rat at birth, and look at the effects of brain and behavior. And that experimental evidence was pointing to long-term “organizational” effects on brain development.

Just to take an example, if you have a female rat that's given extra testosterone either during pregnancy or at birth, and then look at that female rat's behavior post-natally, her behavior is much more like a typical male rat. Ways that you can test this include, for example, letting the rats run through mazes, finding their way through a maze. If you take male and female rats, usually the male rats will get through the maze faster, learning a spatial route more quickly; but female rats that have been given extra testosterone are much more like typical male rats, so their behavior has been changed. And then if you look at post-mortem, at the rat brain, the female rats that were given extra testosterone, in terms of their neuroanatomy, the female rat's brain looks much more like a typical male rat's brain.

There was a hypothesis from animal research that testosterone was this special molecule that masculinizes the brain, and it was looking clearer and clearer in other species, but no one had found a way to demonstrate it in humans. What we've been doing over the last decade is to try to find a way to test it in humans. And the way that we settled on was to look at women in pregnancy who were having a procedure called amniocentesis. Many of you will have heard of this: this is where a pregnant woman has along needle introduced into the womb, the baby is in the womb surrounded by amniotic fluid, and the needle goes in as part of a medical, clinical procedure, to take some of that fluid. That's called amniocentesis, where you take some of the amniotic fluid that surrounds the baby. Usually this is done because there's some suspicion that the baby might have Down's syndrome, and the doctor wants to analyze the amniotic fluid for chromosomal abnormalities, as a test of whether the baby will indeed go on to have Down's syndrome.

These women were having this procedure, and the research had been telling us that if you wanted to look at hormones like testosterone, in terms of their potential influence on the human brain, you'd need to find a way of measuring it during pregnancy. We put these two things together and asked these women, if you're having an amniocentesis anyway, can we take some of the fluid, with your consent, and analyze it for testosterone levels that you find in the fluid? This is when the baby is sometime between 12 and 19 weeks of pregnancy. It's a little window when amniocentesis takes place. If you think of pregnancy as 40 weeks, normally, nine months, roughly 40 weeks, this is at the end of the first trimester, the first third of pregnancy, and just going into the second trimester, the middle of pregnancy.

We were getting this opportunity to measure hormones, but particularly testosterone, whilst the baby was still growing, at a point when the brain is developing very rapidly. And then the design of our research was that we would then store the fluid in our deep freeze, wait for the baby to be born, and follow up the babies after they were born to see if there was any correlation between their testosterone levels in the womb and how they turned out as children.

I should say one other thing, which is that this was premised on the idea that children are more different to each other than they are similar. Those of you who are parents know this very well: that you might have two or three kids and despite the fact that they've grown up in the same home, they've got the same parents, they seem to have very different personalities, very different patterns of interest, and very different rates of development. Part of the challenge, scientifically, was also to try to understand this variability in development, individual differences in development, and we were anchoring our research by looking at one factor, testosterone, which varies, with some people being very low in testosterone, other people being average or very high in testosterone, and seeing whether that scale of individual differences had anything to do with individual differences we see post-natally: for example, in rates of language development, in how sociable children are, and on other dimensions.

The study was that the woman had her amniocentesis while she was pregnant, we then waited for the baby to be born, and we've invited these babies in pretty much every year since their birth. We started off with about 500 of these babies, that's the cohort, where their testosterone levels are known, and we've been following them and they're now about 12 years old. So it's a story that's been unfolding whilst we've been able to measure the behavior as they grow, and see whether it has anything to do with their testosterone prenatally.

At their first birthday, we looked at eye contact. And I was particularly interested in this, because my main area of research is autism, and children with autism make very little eye contact. Their eye contact is at the extreme, showing very little interest in faces. But we'd already heard from that newborn baby study that there seems to be, on average, a sex difference in how interested people are in faces, and making eye contact, with girls being, on average, more interested in faces than boys, but there's a whole spectrum of individual differences. And what we found was that the higher the baby's prenatal testosterone, the less eye contact they made at their first birthday. That was simply measured by inviting the toddler into our lab, videotaping them and then later coding those videotapes for how many times the baby looked up at their mother's face. That was at the first birthday.

At the second birthday we looked at language development. We got parents to fill in a checklist of how many words does your child know, and how many words can your child produce. We were looking at the size of children's vocabularies. What we found, which was quite striking to us, was that by two years old, there were some children who had very small vocabularies, only about ten or 20 words, they were kind of at the low edge of normal development; and there were some kids who were really chatty and had 600 words. So the size of the differences in vocabulary was immense. And then we could look back at their testosterone levels.And once again, we found a significant correlation: that the higher the child's prenatal testosterone, the smaller their vocabulary at two years old. So this same hormone seemed to be related not only to patterns of social interest, whether you look at faces, but also to communication, how talkative you are and your rate of language development.

I don't want to go through all the steps, but we've also looked, when they were four years old, at empathy, finding that prenatal testosterone is negatively correlated with empathy. So again, it's the same pattern we were just hearing about: that if you were higher in testosterone during the pregnancy, it meant that you were slower to develop empathy as a four year old. And again, there are different ways that you can measure that. You can ask parents to fill in questionnaires about their child's empathy. You can actually get the child to take various empathy tests, or you can also get information about how easily the child mixes in school with other children. But the hormone, once again, was showing relationships with social behavior at school age.

We were also interested in that concept of systemizing, how strong a child's interest was in systems of different kinds. Was this a child who liked to collect things, to have the complete set, for example, that makes up a system? Was this a child who loved to take things apart and put them back together again? So, very much interested in construction and assembly and figuring out how things work? Was this a child who spotted the small differences between different makes of cars, or little toy cars, and could tell you the differences between different varieties of system? Again, what we found, but this time the correlation was flipped over, was a positive correlation with prenatal testosterone. The higher the child's prenatal testosterone the more interested they were in systems of one kind or another.

When they were about eight years old, we figured it was time to invite these kids into the MRI scanner, so that we could look directly at the question of whether testosterone is actually changing the way the brain is developing. Up until now we'd only done what's called behavioral studies, where we could find relationships between testosterone and behavior. But by eight years old a child is old enough to stay still, which is essential in a brain scan, because if the child squirms and moves around too much, then you can't interpret the results. These children, by eight, were able to tolerate having an MRI scan and we were able to look at the structure of the brain and see if it had any relationship to prenatal testosterone. And in fact, there are lots of interesting relationships.

As I mentioned, one region of the brain that differs between males and females is that region called the planum temporale, a language area, and that's related to prenatal testosterone. The hormone is having an effect on the way the brain is growing, just looking at the volume of different regions in the brain. We looked at one other region, which is the corpus callosum. Some of you will have heard of this: it's the connective tissue between the two hemispheres, and the hormone was correlated with the asymmetry of one part of the corpus callosum, just towards the back of that structure. This was the first evidence that the hormone in humans is having an effect on brain structure, brain development, and it was mirroring what the scientists who do animal research had been telling us all along, but we needed to demonstrate it in humans.

I want to bring this back to my interest in autism: autism is a neurological disability, and it affects boys much more than girls, and we were interested in the possibility that that same hormone, prenatal testosterone, might be a risk factor, or might be playing some role in the outcome of autism. I told you that the sample of children we were studying was about 500 kids. And autism is a relatively rare condition. It affects about one percent of the population. What that means is within 500 kids, there might be five children who have autism, which would be way too small a number to be able to draw any inferences about prenatal testosterone and association with this medical diagnosis.

We've been tackling the problem in two different ways. The first way is that within these 500 children we've used a dimensional measure of autism, rather than looking at whether the child has autism or not. We've been looking at the dimension of autistic traits, where you can look at the number of autistic traits a child has. The assumption is that we all have some autistic traits and that autism isn't categorically different to the rest of the population. It's simply at an extreme of a bell curve, a normal distribution of autistic traits. There are ways to measure autistic traits. Most of them are questionnaires. You get the parents to fill out a questionnaire, which is basically a way of describing how many autistic traits their child has, and then independently, you can look at their prenatal testosterone and see if there's any correlation.

What we found, maybe some of you have anticipated the result of this particular stage of the research, is that the higher the child's prenatal testosterone, the more autistic traits they were showing at different stages in development, at two years old, and we've repeated that at four years old. That's telling us about prenatal testosterone and autistic traits. But what we'd really like to do, and this is bringing you right up to date with where our research is, is to see whether there's any relationship between prenatal testosterone and actually developing autism.

As I've already explained, having a sample of 500 kids doesn't allow us to answer that question, so we've been collaborating with scientists in Denmark, in Copenhagen, at the Biobank there, because in Denmark they've been collecting amniotic fluid from women who have amniocentesis in Denmark. But they've been collecting those samples since 1980, so they have 100,000 samples sitting in their deep freeze. And for a scientist, that's a wonderful opportunity. The other thing that Denmark has is a national register for psychiatric diagnosis. Every time anyone in Denmark develops any kind of psychiatric condition, they're put into a central database, and so we know across the whole of Denmark, who has autism. We can go to the Biobank and fish out their amniotic fluid if it's in there, to analyze it for prenatal testosterone.

Whereas in our normative study of 500 children, we were dependent on doing the first measure of the hormones in pregnancy and then waiting for life to unfold over a ten-year period, in this new study, we can work backwards. We can say we know who's got autism, and we can look to see whether their amniotic fluid is still in the deep freeze. That then gives us, if you like, a fossil record of what their hormones were like, what their levels of testosterone were like when they were in the womb. It's reverse engineering the problem. And to just tell you where we're up to, we've just completed that study. The analysis is going on as we speak, so we hope to publish the results of that study later this year. Effectively, that will tell us whether testosterone levels are elevated prenatally in children who go onto receive a diagnosis of autism. And we're relatively confident that those results will be available during 2012.

This is a hormone that has fascinated me. It's a small molecule that seems to be doing remarkable things. The variation we see in this hormone comes from a number of different sources. One of those sources is genes. Many different genes can influence how much testosterone each of us produces, and I just wanted to share with you my fascination with this hormone, because it's helping us take the science of sex differences one step further, to try to understand not whether there are sex differences, but what are the roots of those sex differences? Where are they springing from? And along the way we’re also hoping that this is going to teach us something about those neurodevelopmental conditions like autism, like delayed language development, which seem to disproportionately affect boys more than girls, and potentially have us understand the causes of those conditions.