NEW YORK—July 20,2024 — Melanie Notkin, founder of SAVVY AUNTIE, the lifestyle brand dubbed a “Celebration of Modern Aunthood,” announces that the 16th annual official AUNTIE’S DAY® will take place on Sunday, July 28, 2024.

Like Mother's Day in May and Father's Day in June, Auntie's Day is an annual day of celebration that occurs every fourth Sunday in July.

NEW YORK—May 16, 2023 — Melanie Notkin, founder of SAVVY AUNTIE, the lifestyle brand dubbed a “Celebration of Modern Aunthood,” announces that the 15th annual official AUNTIE’S DAY® will take place on Sunday, July 23, 2023.

Like Mother's Day in May and Father's Day in June, Auntie's Day is an annual day of celebration that occurs every fourth Sunday in July.

Cell Press

The new study also offers a reason: kids and adults exhibit differences in a brain messenger known as GABA, which stabilizes newly learned material.

"Our results show that children of elementary school age can learn more items within a given period of time than adults, making learning more efficient in children," said Takeo Watanabe of Brown University.

Their findings showed that children have a rapid boost of GABA during visual training that lasts after training ends. That's in marked contrast to the concentrations of GABA in adults, which stayed constant. The findings suggest that children's brains respond to training in a way that allows them to more quickly and efficiently stabilize new learning.

"It is often assumed that children learn more efficiently than adults, although the scientific support for this assumption has, at best, been weak, and, if it is true, the neuronal mechanisms responsible for more efficient learning in children are unclear," Watanabe said.

Differences in GABA were one obvious place to look for answers. While previous studies already had, the researchers noted that GABA in kids had only been measured at one time-point. It also wasn't measured at a time that had any special significance in terms of learning.

So, they set out in the new study to see how GABA levels change before, during, and after learning. They also wanted to see how that differed between kids and adults.

The study examined visual learning in elementary school age children and adults using behavioral and state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques. It found that visual learning triggered an increase of GABA in children's visual cortex, the brain area that processes visual information. That GABA boost also persisted for several minutes after training ended.

What they saw in adults that were offered the same visual training was notably different. In adults, there were no changes in GABA whatsoever.

The discovery predicts that training on new items rapidly increases the concentration of GABA in children and allows the learning to be rapidly stabilized. Further experiments also supported this.

"In subsequent behavioral experiments, we found that children indeed stabilized new learning much more rapidly than adults, which agrees with the common belief that children outperform adults in their learning abilities," says Sebastian M. Frank, now at the University of Regensburg, Germany. "Our results therefore point to GABA as a key player in making learning efficient in children."

The findings suggest that children are likely to acquire new knowledge and skills more rapidly than adults, they say. It should add further encouragement for teachers and parents to give children many opportunities to acquire new skills, whether that's learning their times tables or riding a bike.

The findings also may change neuroscientists' conception of brain maturity in children.

"Our results imply that children exhibit highly efficient inhibitory, GABAergic processing in spite of inhibitory failures that have been observed in other domains such as cognitive control or attention," Frank said. "This implies that GABAergic processing involved in different aspects of cognitive function might mature at different speeds."

"Although children's brains are not yet fully matured and many of their behavioral and cognitive functions are not as efficient as in adults, children are not, in general, outperformed in their abilities by adults," Watanabe added. "On the contrary, children are, at least in some domains such as visual learning, superior in their abilities to adults."

They say such differences in maturation rates between brain regions and functions should be examined in detail in future studies. They also want to explore GABA responses in other types of learning, such as reading and writing.

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Cell Press. "Children learn more quickly than adults." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 November 2022.

We've all been there. You made a promise you couldn't keep. Or something came up, and you didn't follow through on what you said you'd do.

It turns out children pay attention to what we say when we don't deliver.

A new study shows that by the time they reach preschool, kids understand that some reasons for reneging are more defensible than others.

"At 3 to 5 years old, kids are on to you. They know when you're giving a bad excuse," said first author Leon Li, who did the research with developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello as part of his Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience at Duke.

In a paper published in the journal Cognitive Development, 64 3- and 5-year-olds were shown a series of videos in which puppets promised to show them a cool toy, left the scene to go get it, but then came back empty-handed.

Afterwards, the puppets either gave a good excuse for going back on their word ("I had to help my friend with his homework"), a bad excuse ("I wanted to watch TV"), or no explanation at all. The children were then asked whether they thought the puppets' actions were wrong or not, and why.

No matter what the excuse (or lack thereof), the children agreed that it was generally wrong to break a promise. But they were more understanding when the puppets offered a good excuse (i.e., they had to help someone), versus a lame one (i.e., they just wanted to do something fun instead).

In other words, children this age grasp that obligations to help others take priority over selfish desires, Li said.

The children's responses also revealed that a lame excuse was just as bad as none at all.

"Previous research has suggested that in some cases, young kids will just take any reason to be better than no reason at all," Li said. "But here we showed that kids do pay attention to the actual content."

When asked to explain their answers, the children's justifications changed with age. Compared with 3-year-olds, 5-year-olds were better at articulating their thinking in terms of what the puppets "should" do, or are "supposed" to do, suggesting that kids' understanding of obligations to others is more fully developed by this age.

Surprisingly, lousy excuses didn't make the children less inclined to say they "liked" some puppets, or would invite those puppets to a play date.

"Usually if someone breaks a promise and gives you a lame reason, it implies they're not really a good friend," Li said. "Children this age don't make that connection. They're just not there yet."

This study is part of a larger field of research on how children come to appreciate and act on cultural and moral norms for how we behave and treat each other.

"Morality is a type of common ground that we have with others, with mutual expectations about how we should behave and what counts as good grounds for justification," Li said.

"We're showing that young children become attuned to this common ground at an early age."

Li said the findings are also relevant to any adult who has uttered the classic fallback phrase, "Because I said so."

"Kids are paying attention and can tell that is a lame reason," Li said.

This research was supported by the Duke Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

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Duke University. "Even preschoolers can spot a cop-out: When it comes to broken promises, children as young as 3 to 5 recognize that some excuses are better than others." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 January 2023.

A new study exploring the origins of pretend play suggests infants perform interactional patterns with elements of pretense a lot earlier than thought.

Pretend play is often considered a developmental landmark, being linked to emotion regulation, language skills, cognitive reasoning, and problem-solving. It is widely accepted a child begins participating in make-believe activities when they have developed the capacity to recognize they are doing it and, in most cases, studies focus on infants who are somewhat verbal.

However, new research by the University of Portsmouth and Lund University, Sweden, has drawn connections between pretense and a child's early on playful interactions, such as clowning and teasing.

Iris Nomikou, from the University of Portsmouth's Department of Psychology, said: "We often see children using props that stand for something else, like a stick as a sword or a bowl as a hat. But before they become directors of imaginary worlds, they start off small by being actors and performing something unconventional.

"This can be pulling funny facial expressions, making unnatural noises, and even infant acting -- like they're going to do something when they're not -- to get the attention of a parent, caregiver or friend."

Pretend play is usually defined as an activity with a symbolic character, in which a signifier (e.g. a banana) is used to represent the meaning of a signified (e.g. a telephone). But the paper, published in the Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics, says variations exist in its quality, emergence and developmental progress across different contexts and cultures.

The authors argue that pretense should stop being defined as an end-product of cognitive development, and instead an interpersonal one. Its origins can then be moved to much earlier in infancy than was originally thought possible.

Valentina Fantasia, from the Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Lund University, added: "There is observational evidence of a child as young as eight months old pretending to give an object to someone, then withdrawing it as soon as they reach out.

"Most parents and caregivers have experienced these types of interactions, but still not much attention has been dedicated to investigating their broadest developmental impact or the continuity that exists with pretend play.

"What these earlier and later forms of actions have in common most, is that they are spaces in which infants and children can construct and explore different kinds of realities with meaningful others."

The study recommends further observation of early form pretense to see how pretend play can be encouraged from a younger age. If more attention is given to the role of early caregiver-infant interactions, from parents reading a book in a character's voice to playing peek-a-boo, it allows a child to 'act their part' from day one of their lives.

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University of Portsmouth. "Pretend play should be studied in children from a younger age, according to researchers." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 10 November 2022.

Ohio State University

In fact, young Americans haven't changed the number of children they intend to have in decades.

Women born in 1995-1999 wanted to have 2.1 children on average when they were 20-24 years old -- essentially the same as the 2.2 children that women born in 1965-1969 wanted at the same age, the study found.

Still, the total fertility rate in the United States was 1.71 in 2019, the lowest level since the 1970s.

What's going on?

The results suggest that today's young adults may be having a more difficult time achieving their goals of having children, said Sarah Hayford, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

The data in the study can't explain why, but the results fit evidence indicating that young people today don't think now is a good time for them to have children.

"It's hard to have children in the United States right now," said Hayford, who is also director of Ohio State's Institute for Population Research.

"People feel more worried about the future than they might have been several decades ago. They worry about the economy, child care and whether they can afford to have children."

Hayford conducted the study with Karen Benjamin Guzzo, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of the Carolina Population Center. Their results were published online Jan. 10, 2023 in the journal Population and Development Review.

The researchers used data from the National Survey of Family Growth, which has been asking people about their childbearing goals and behaviors for several decades.

The NSFG doesn't interview the same people each time, but it allowed the researchers to track a group of people born around the same time -- a cohort, as scientists call these groups -- as they passed through their childbearing years.

They looked at 13 cohorts of women and 10 cohorts of men born between the 1960s and the 2000s. They were all asked how many children they intended to have, if any.

"Americans have been pretty consistent with how many children they say they want to have from the 60s to the 2000s," Hayford said. "Men generally say they want slightly fewer children than women do, but, like women, their preferred number of children hasn't changed much."

The percentage of people who said they don't plan to have any children has increased, from about 5-8% in the 1960s and 1970s to 8-16% in the 1990s and 2000s. But that alone can't explain the decline in the number of babies being born.

Hayford noted that the number of unintended births, especially among people in their 20s, has declined in recent decades, which has helped reduce the birth rate.

"But that doesn't change the fact that people aren't having as many children as they say they want, especially at earlier ages," Hayford said.

"It may be that they're going to have those kids when they're 35, but maybe they won't."

For example, the study found some evidence that people are reducing the number of children they say they intend to have as they get older.

"As they age, they may be realizing how hard it is to have kids and raise kids in the United States and they're saying they only want to have the one child, and don't want a second one," she said.

In addition, would-be parents may have more difficult conceiving as they get older.

Larger economic and social forces are also having an impact on birth rates.

The birth rate declined significantly during the Great Recession that started in 2008, which is a typical response to an economic downturn. However, the birth rate continued to decline even after the recession was over, Hayford said.

This study ended before COVID-19, but the pandemic served as another fertility shock, at least at first.

"It remains to be seen whether fertility will be able to rebound not just from the Great Recession, but from the pandemic as well," she said.

For those who are concerned about America's dropping birth rates, this study suggests that there is no need to pressure young people into wanting more kids, Hayford said.

"We need to make it easier for people to have the children that they want to have," she said. "There are clear barriers to having children in the United States that revolve around economics, around child care, around health insurance."

The research was supported by grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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Ohio State University. "Falling birth rate in US not due to less desire to have children: Young people's concern about future may be delaying parenthood." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 12 January 2023.

Introducing the SAVVY AUNTIE® Signature Collection by Melanie Notkin: Notebooks, journals and more for aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews

Lined blank journal (or petite notebook) has 120 pages

Slim and lightweight at 5.5" x 8.5" (14 cm x 21.6 cm), these notebooks are designed to fit in most purses, bags and backpacks to tote your #Auntiepride everywhere you go

Perfect as a diary to store experiences and memories of #Auntlife

Keep it on the nightstand for writing words of #Auntspiriation, gratitude, and dreams

Track your #Auntgoals and keep organized for #AuntDuty

Great for planning #Auntventures with nieces and nephews by relation and by choice

Proud PANKs® (Professional Aunt No Kids) will love it for the office and home office — not to mention busy #Auntrepreneurs on-the-go

Fabulous gift for every aunt-by-relation, aunt-by-choice, great-aunt, and godmother in your #Auntourage for their birthdays, holidays, Auntie's Day® (every 4th Sunday in July) and Mother's Day (for all the other "mothers" in a child's life

AUNTIE UP! Collect all items in the SAVVY AUNTIE® Signature Collection by Melanie Notkin including journals, notebooks and more designed for aunts, nieces, nephews, and uncles, too. Keep checking back for more designs!SAVVY AUNTIE is a Celebration of Modern Aunthood

Savvy Auntie (SavvyAuntie.com) is the beloved lifestyle brand for aunts-by-relation, aunts-by-choice, and godmothers founded in 2008 by Melanie Notkin, the national bestselling author of SAVVY AUNTIE: The Ultimate Guide for Cool Aunts, Great-Aunts, Godmothers, and all Women Who Love Kids (William Morrow/2011) and the Booklist Starred Review memoir: OTHERHOOD: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness (Seal Press/Penguin Canada/2014)

Melanie Notkin is creator of Auntie's Day® celebrated every fourth Sunday in July since 2009 and coined the term PANK® (Professional Aunt No Kids) for the growing demographic of women who are childless by circumstance, challenge, or choice — and love the children in their life. Find Melanie Notkin on social media @SavvyAuntie

"We were so excited about this study because it applies to clinicians, caregivers and educators who can put it into practice," Morini said. "It's simple stuff, nothing out of the ordinary. But it could really help boost the outcomes."

June 17, 2021

Michigan State University. (2021, June 16). A quarter of adults don't want children -- and they're still happy. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 17, 2021 from

Photo: Canva

“All women in the ‘family village’ should be valued for their love of, and generosity toward, the children in their lives,” says Notkin. “Aunts provide ‘QualAuntie Time’ helping develop nieces and nephews through bonding and play. And of course, many aunts are known for the gifts and ‘Auntventure’ experiences they give these children.”

Founded by Melanie Notkin, Savvy Auntie is a “celebration of modern aunthood” serving aunts by relation (ABR), aunts by choice (ABC), godmothers, and all women who love a child-not-their-own. Savvy Aunties can find resources and community at SavvyAuntie.com, , Facebook.com/SavvyAuntie Facebook.com/groups/savvyauntie Instagram.com/SavvyAuntie and Twitter.com/SavvyAuntie

April 5, 2021

New research led by a University of Georgia faculty member in collaboration with a University of Southern California research group has shown in a rodent model that daily consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages during adolescence impairs performance on a learning and memory task during adulthood. The group further showed that changes in the bacteria in the gut may be the key to the sugar-induced memory impairment.

Supporting this possibility, they found that similar memory deficits were observed even when the bacteria, called Parabacteroides, were experimentally enriched in the guts of animals that had never consumed sugar.

"Early life sugar increased Parabacteroides levels, and the higher the levels of Parabacteroides, the worse the animals did in the task," said Emily Noble, assistant professor in the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences who served as first author on the paper. "We found that the bacteria alone was sufficient to impair memory in the same way as sugar, but it also impaired other types of memory functions as well."

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a joint publication of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and of Health and Human Services, recommends limiting added sugars to less than 10 percent of calories per day.

Considering the role the hippocampus plays in a variety of cognitive functions and the fact the area is still developing into late adolescence, researchers sought to understand more about its vulnerability to a high-sugar diet via gut microbiota.

"We found that rats that consumed sugar in early life had an impaired capacity to discriminate that an object was novel to a specific context, a task the rats that were not given sugar were able to do," Noble said.

In this task, sugar had no effect on the animals' recognition memory.

"Early life sugar consumption seems to selectively impair their hippocampal learning and memory," Noble said.

Additional analyses determined that high sugar consumption led to elevated levels of Parabacteroides in the gut microbiome, the more than 100 trillion microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract that play a role in human health and disease.

"(The bacteria) induced some cognitive deficits on its own," Noble said.

Noble said future research is needed to better identify specific pathways by which this gut-brain signaling operates. "Identifying how the bacteria in the gut are impacting brain development will tell us about what sort of internal environment the brain needs in order to grow in a healthy way, Noble said.

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February 26, 2021

The study suggests that the link between cardiorespiratory fitness and cognitive health is evident even earlier in life than previously appreciated. Yet, as previous reports suggest, preschoolers are failing to meet daily recommended guidelines for physical activity.

While the study does not prove that cardiorespiratory fitness enhances cognitive abilities in young children, it adds to a growing body of evidence that the two are closely linked -- even in children as young as four years old, the researchers said.

In other words, if you want to help your young nieces and nephews perform better academically and in general, help them stay or get fit. Go for walks, hike, play games like tag, or play a sports activity outside together as often as you can.  

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A 10-month-long research experiment conducted in Japanese daycare centers found that toddlers were more likely to move their spoons towards their food immediately after the caregiver had changed the position of the plates or the food on them in order to give the toddler the opportunity to try to feed themselves.

The group of international researchers also found that the amount of time that toddlers spent looking at the caregiver's hands was significantly longer than the time spent looking at their face. Moreover, toddlers were 8 times more likely to look at the caregiver's hands than perform any other action when the caregiver was moving items around on the table.

However, toddlers were more likely to look at their caregiver’s face in order to check whether or not they were watching their behavior after the toddler had fed themselves with the spoon or we just playing with their spoon.

So, if you want to help a toddler niece or nephew learn to eat with a spoon, use your hands. And when they gaze at your face, smile encouragingly. Before you know it, your little niece or nephew will be feeding themselves!

This research was coordinated by an international research collaboration led by Kobe University's Professor NONAKA Tetsushi (Graduate School of Human Development and Environment) and the University of Minnesota's Professor Thomas A. Stoffregen investigated the interactions between toddlers learning to use a spoon and their caregivers during mealtimes at a daycare center in Japan. The research findings were published in Developmental Psychobiology on December 11, 2020.

Kobe University. "Do toddlers learning to spoon-feed seek different information from caregivers' hands and faces?" ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 December 2020

How can I help my nieces and nephews through a divorce?

My brother and his wife have separated. The kids are blaming their mom and being very mean to her. I even had to use my aunt voice and explain that it is their dad who wanted to separate.

They are so confused and hurt. I don't know what to do. How can I help get my nieces and nephews through this?

[answer]
Divorce is difficult for most everybody and particularly the children. Usually, the kids are angry at the parent with whom they feel safest. So, don’t try to figure out who is right or wrong -- mom or dad. Allow them to voice their anger, fear, and sadness.

To be most helpful to them, your role is to listen and accept their emotions. Encourage them to express their feelings through written (or dictated) words and pictures.

I also suggest you take a look at The Boys and Girls Book on Divorce by Richard Gardner. It is very helpful and, depending on their ages, the children can read it too.

I hope this is helpful.

Warmly,
Natalie Garfield

www.The SenseConnection.Wordpress.com

Have you ever said something like this: "Who's a lovely baby yes you are now where's teddy gone oh look here is teddy" to a baby niece or nephew? How is the baby supposed to parse through the sentences to understand which is the "baby" Auntie is referring to and which is the missing "teddy" in question?
There are two problems about language that young children have to solve:

Professor Rebuschat said: "This is a chicken-and-egg type of problem: Which comes first, the word or the sentence?"

"So, when you say a sentence including "teddy," very often baby's teddy bear will be nearby and in view," Professor Rebuschat said. "When this occurs repeatedly over time, the child is able to figure out from "look at teddy" that "teddy" means that cuddly brown thing."

Professor Padraic Monaghan added: "We have discovered that the chicken-and-egg problem of learning language can be solved just by hearing lots of language and applying some very simple but very powerful learning to this. Our brains are clearly geared up to keep track of these links between words and the world. We know that infants already have the same power to their learning as adults, and we are confident that young children acquire language using the same types of learning as the adults in our study."

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Lancaster University. "How we learn words and sentences at the same time." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201130113528.htm 30 November 2020. (accessed December 7, 2020).