Younger Every Year

The authors used data on 426 older mothers’ relationships with their 1,823 adult children to explore the relationship between birth order and parental favoritism. The findings demonstrate that birth order continues to play an important role in explaining favoritism when families enter later stages of the life course. Last-born adult children were most likely to be named as those to whom their mothers were most emotionally close; firstborn children were most likely to be chosen as those to whom mothers would turn when facing personal problems or crises. Further analyses revealed that these patterns remained largely unaffected by family size, race, and child spacing. Middleborn children were substantially underrepresented in mothers’ choices; such a pattern is particularly striking considering that the number of middle-born children far exceeded that of firstborn and last-born children in the sample.

Original post by Suitor, J. J., Pillemer, K.

While I’m working in Mexico, my wife Diane spends much of each day in an immersion Spanish class. She began by taking Spanish classes over a period of about a year at a local community center. Now that she has the basics, an immersion class in which you have to operate in the second language is pretty effective. After two weeks of classes, the difference is striking; she now has the confidence for operating in simple, everyday conversations in social child-talk Spanish. She is determine to grow an oak tree from this acorn!
There are few things that you can do that are better for an older brain than taking on a complex new challenge like this one. Learning a second language requires careful listening, and a heavy dose of new learning on all levels of perception, memory, cognition, and motor control. This is rich food for an older brain! And beyond the benefits to Diane, your blogger reaps the benefits of having a competent translator as a boon companion! And she’s cute, too! (Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D.)

Original post by On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D.