Exercise in pregnancy boosts babies' brains

Babies' brains showed more mature patterns of activity, linked to better mental performance in later life, when their mothers took at least three 20-minute sessions of moderate exercise a week. The early stage findings are the first from a randomised controlled trial in humans to show that a pregnant mother's exercise routine could have such an impact on her baby's brain.
"We know exercise is good for all kinds of things in pregnancy. It makes mothers feel better, gives them more control over their weight gain, and also has an impact on their child's weight gain in life. We're saying here's an added bonus, that exercise gives your child a head-start in brain development," said Elise Labonte-LeMoyne at the University of Montreal.
Pregnant mothers who exercise boost babies' brains, claim researchers The Guardian 10/11/13

Swaddling babies incorrectly can cause them hip problems, doctors warn

Parents have been turning to the old-fashioned practice in order to settle their babies and help them sleep better. Swaddling, which involves wrapping the baby in sheets or blankets with their legs out straight and arms pinned so that they cannot move, has been shown to induce sleep and soothe excessive crying and colic. But, say doctors who specialise in orthopaedics, evidence shows that the practice increases the risk of developmental hip abnormalities. Professor Nicholas Clarke of Southampton University hospital writes in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood that one in five babies are born with a hip abnormality, perhaps because of a breech birth or family history. Although these can resolve unaided, swaddling can delay it.
Clarke says that parents should be advised on "safe swaddling" if their babies are at risk of hip development problems. "In order to allow for healthy hip development, legs should be able to bend up and out at the hips. This position allows for natural development of the hip joints. The babies' legs should not be tightly wrapped in extension and pressed together."

Swaddling can cause hip problems The Guardian 28 October 2013

The development of laughter - New Research

The Baby Laughter Project, which has surveyed parents from more than 20 countries, has shown that games like peek-a-boo are perfect for showing one such fundamental development - object permanence.
The person who most greatly influenced our current view of childhood development was Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. In the earliest months of life, Piaget said that babies are only able to learn about the world by directly interacting with it through grasping, shaking and sucking. With each experience, he concluded, children gradually build up a picture of how the world works - a kind of naïve physics.
Dr Addyman has collected nearly 700 questionnaires about baby smiles and laughter from around the world. "Laughter and smiles start incredibly early, just like tears," says Dr Caspar Addyman, a baby laughter researcher at Birkbeck College in London.  Dr Addyman thinks that studying babies' laughter can be just as effective at helping us pinpoint developments in the way their minds are expanding. "You can't laugh at something until you get the joke, so what they laugh at really tells us about their understanding of the world," says Addyman.

Peek-a-boo: A window on baby's brain By Anna Lacey BBC Health Check 19 October 2013