First Time on The Pill May Increase Risk of Depression

A new study may have implications across the globe as researchers determined first time users of birth control pills may have an increased risk of depression.

As published in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers discovered the link between a first diagnosis of depression among women in Denmark when beginning hormonal contraception. The link was especially pronounced among adolescents.

Few studies have quantified the effect of low-dose hormonal contraception on the risk for depression. Mood symptoms are known reasons for cessation of hormonal contraceptive use.

Øjvind Lidegaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and coauthors used registry data in Denmark for a study population of more than one million women and adolescent girls (ages 15 to 34). They were followed up from 2000 through 2013 with an average follow-up of 6.4 years.

During the follow-up, 55 percent of the women and adolescents were current or recent users of hormonal contraception. There were 133,178 first prescriptions for antidepressants and 23,077 first diagnoses of depression during follow-up.

When compared to nonusers, women who used combined oral contraceptives had 1.23-times higher relative risk of a first use of an antidepressant and the risk for women taking progestin-only pills was 1.34-fold.

Estimated risks for depression diagnoses were similar or lower. The risk for women varied among different types of hormonal contraception.

Some of the highest risk rates were among adolescent girls, who had 1.8-times higher risk of first use of an antidepressant using combined oral contraceptives and 2.2-times higher risk with progestin-only pills.

Adolescent girls who used non-oral products had about 3-times higher risk for first use of an antidepressant. Estimated risks for first diagnoses of depression were similar or lower.

Despite the provocative findings, researchers note that the study has limitations.

“Use of hormonal contraceptives was associated with subsequent antidepressant use and first diagnosis of depression at a psychiatric hospital among women living in Denmark. Adolescents seemed more vulnerable to this risk than women 20 to 34 years old.

Further studies are warranted to examine depression as a potential adverse effect of hormonal contraceptive use,” the authors conclude.

Source: JAMA

Depression In Pregnancy Ups Risk of Emotional Problems in Kids

UK researchers have discovered that maternal depression in pregnancy increases the risk of behavioral and emotional problems in children.

This association is especially pronounced in low and middle income countries where interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy, may not be available.

Depression in pregnancy is thought to affect up to one in five women globally in the late stages of pregnancy and shortly after birth. Depression often presents as a low mood and feelings of hopelessness.

Experts believe it can result from a number of factors including life events such as bereavement, and changes in brain chemistry.

Previous work from a team at Imperial College London suggests depression during pregnancy may affect the development of the baby while in the womb, as well as affecting bonding between mother and child after birth.

Now, the same team have shown that depression or anxiety can reduce the enzyme in the placenta that breaks down the “stress hormone” cortisol, possibly causing more fetal exposure to the hormone.

The fetus may also undergo epigenetic changes under stress, where underlying DNA stays the same but expression of that DNA is altered, perhaps affecting mental health during childhood. 

Investigators explain that much of the research into depression during pregnancy has focused on high income countries. They now argue that the problem is more common in low- and middle-income countries, and hence more resources are now needed in these areas to help expectant and new mothers.

Researchers believe that research is sorely needed in the less well-to-do countries. In addition to research, investigators believe the development of low cost interventions are urgently needed.

Professor Vivette Glover, co-author of the research from theDepartment of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial, said: “Our review of available literature suggests that treating the depression itself is crucial in reducing the risk to the child, as well as for helping the mother.

“It shows targeting specific symptoms of depression by using cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, can be useful in reducing depression and therefore its effect on the child. However, there is a substantial lack of research specific to women in poorer countries, where interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy may not be available.”

Professor Glover added that in severely deprived regions where there are wars, political violence, food insecurity, and little help after natural disasters, healthcare workers have little time or resources to meet basic physical needs, let alone mental health ones like maternal depression.

The new review, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, examined studies of mental health in children under five years old in low and middle income countries such as Bangladesh and Brazil.

The report highlights the specific mental health requirements of mothers and children in poorer countries that are not necessarily relevant to high-income countries.

Investigators discovered depression in mothers in low- and middle-income countries is common during and just after pregnancy. Moreover, women are more likely than in richer countries to experience intimate partner violence and have little social support.

Furthermore, unintended pregnancies are more common, as are malnourishment, infections, and crowded living conditions.

A mother’s risk for depression is much greater in less affluent countries as risk factors are often more intense. These factors also intensify one another — for example, a malnourished mother or child may have too weak an immune system to fight an infection, exacerbating the mother’s stress which then contributes to depression.

Maternal depression in these countries is also more likely to result in poor nutrition, increased substance use, inadequate antenatal care, pre-eclampsia, low birthweight, preterm delivery, and suicide. 

The authors argue that because of the varying risk factors between different income countries, interventions for poorer countries should focus on the issues that affect these countries specifically. 

They add that mitigating the global burden of maternal depression will require a multi-faceted approach that targets child development, poverty, education, health, and prevention of violence in low- and middle-income countries.

Last week in Melbourne, Professor Glover and colleagues launched a new organization, “The Global Alliance for Maternal Mental Health”, which aims to foster more knowledge about these issues, and to generate more resources to tackle them, around the world. 

Source: Imperial College London

Put Kids Ahead of Parents in Divorced Homes

A new book by a University of Virginia psychology professor has a simple message: divorcing parents should be parents so that kids can be kids.

The advice is salient as divorce rates push near 50 percent in the United States with more than 40 percent of children being born outside of marriage. As a result, more and more children are at risk of losing their childhoods because their parents cannot, or will not, put their differences aside.

Behaviors like bickering and pitting one parent against the other endanger kids’ few precious years of childhood and can set them on the path to unhealthy relationships in their own lives, Emery said.

“Two Homes, One Childhood: A Parenting Plan to Last a Lifetime,” is Emery’s fifth book on divorce and his second aimed specifically at parents.

He says as hard as it can be, parents must rise above the sadness, anger, and heartache to focus on their parenting plan, one that takes into account a growing child’s evolving physical and emotional needs.

“Really, the only plan for raising kids in two homes that will last a lifetime is one that grows and changes along with kids’ and families’ changing needs,” Emery said in his office in Gilmer Hall.

“Sometimes in the legal system the feeling is, ‘We need to come up with a decision that is going to be a final decision.’ But how do you come up with a final decision for how you are going to raise a baby for 18 years? Or a toddler? Or even a school-aged kid?,” Emery asked.

Parents need to take charge of their own plans, not the courts, and Emery’s book offers practical advice on how to parent throughout the span of a child’s life, from infancy to emerging adulthood and beyond.

Emery understands that “Divorce Stinks,” no matter the circumstances, be they infidelity or incompatibility. Still, couples are bound together forever if they have children.

“You’re there at soccer games, you’re there at high school and college graduation, and you’re there when your grandkids are born,” he said.

So what happens if one parent is willing to do the hard work to provide a good childhood and the other is not?

“It’s all about keeping the kids out of the middle,” he said.

“I tell parents in a really bad situation that many people who think they cannot settle in mediation eventually find that they can. I tell people to keep trying, because maybe it’s horrible now, but maybe after a couple of years things will change.

“If nothing else, even if the parent is a complete jerk, I still really urge parents to do the right thing, partly because it takes two to keep a conflict going and if you don’t play your end, it’s hard for the other parent to keep fighting back.

“If they are jerks, the kids will know, they will discover it and the parent who puts his or her children first will benefit in the long run.”

Emery knows of what he speaks. In addition to directing University of Virgina’s Center for Children, Families and the Law, he is a divorce mediator and the father of five children from two marriages.

In the book, Emery based his original, evidence-based hierarchy on the needs of children growing up in two homes crafting a model similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

In his book, Emery stresses that he wants very much for children to have good relationships with both parents. But if that is not possible, his research finds “living in the middle of a war zone between two parents is more harmful to children than having a really involved relationship with only one of them.”

Emery believes parents need an evolving plan when children are young. While there is not a “one-size-fits-all” solution, Emery said for infants during the attachment phase, it’s usually best for the child to spend most nights in a “headquarters” home, usually with the mother.

“As that child becomes a toddler, more overnights with Dad get built into the equation. By the time they get to preschool, maybe parents are dividing the week and then go to a week-to-week arrangement by the time a child is school-aged,” he said.

Dealing with teens and their evolving maturity and desires becomes more nuanced. “I think when you decide to involve your teen in decisions on [where they would like to live] is really the same as when you decide to involve teens in all kinds of important decisions,” Emery said.

However, while teens get input, they don’t get to decide. Emery tells the story of his oldest child, Maggie. “She came to me and said she was tired of the back-and-forth. She wanted to live in one house. At that time, I had four more kids and her mother didn’t have any more children, so she said, ‘I want to live mostly with Mom.’”

But instead of agreeing to that immediately, Emery told her, “‘We’ve got to talk about it,’ and we did. We had long talks and we went on drives, which I always recommend for talking to teenagers because they can’t run away,” he said.

“Eventually, I agreed with her point of view. But I made it very clear to her that it was not her decision. It was my decision.”

That point, Emery said, is essential, because he didn’t want teenage Maggie to have the authority — or the weight of the responsibility — for making that decision. “It’s an adult decision,” he said.

In this regard, Emery said divorced parents and married parents are not so very different, yet society treats them very differently. One of his big goals is for parents, regardless of marital status, to act more the same and for practitioners in legal and mental health systems to treat them more the same.

“I’d like parents who live apart to think of my book as kind of a ‘Dr. Spock’ for raising kids in two homes,” he said. Spock’s influential book, “Baby and Child Care,” published in 1946, became a best-seller and remains popular today.

Source: University of Virginia

Children of Suicide Victims Need Support

A new doctoral dissertation finds that talking about suicide is associated with such strong stigma that young people whose parents have taken their own life often must turn to the internet to express their grief and receive support.

The thesis represents the view of Anneli Silvén Hagström from Linköping University in Sweden. Given that Sweden has a socialist health care system, Hagström laments that the healthcare system is not providing support for young people in the difficult life situation.

However, she admits the root problem is cultural. The topic is relevant as around 1,500 people take their own life in Sweden each year, five times as many as deaths in road accidents in the country. They leave behind relatives, who in many cases are left to cope with their grief on their own.

“If your house is burgled, several organizations whose task is to support the victims of crime may contact you and ask how you’re feeling. But not many people ask how you’re feeling when a parent has taken his or her own life. Nor does the healthcare system, which really should take this up. It’s clear that the system often does not know what young people need,” says Hagström, a social worker who recently received her doctoral degree.

In the paper, Hagström examines how young people in Sweden cope with the suicide of a parent. Hagström takes a unique focus with an analysis of young people’s narratives of the suicide. She did this by performing research interviews, two different chat forums on the internet, and a theatre performance put on by a young woman that deals with her mother’s suicide.

As may be expected, the central element in a person’s grief is the question as to why? The thesis shows that young people become extremely concerned with the question of why their parent died, which is unusual following other causes of death. They wonder about the true identity of the parent and, as an extension of this, their own true identity, as a child of someone who could take their own life.

The study also shows that the stigma associated with suicide is very strong, and this contributes to the difficulty of dealing with the loss. The stigma is reinforced by, for example, people around the young people avoiding them, or by the idea that may reach their ears that the parent who took his or her own life was selfish, leaving the child behind.

These are preconceived ideas that the young people absorb, and adopt as their own. This means that the image of the parent — who has in most cases been a good figure before death — becomes colored by the suicide. The consequence may be, in addition to feelings of shame, guilt, and abandonment, powerful anger targeted against the dead parent.

The young people describe also how they avoid talking about the suicide with people close to them — even in some cases with their family. In order to free themselves and the dead parent from the stigma, they seek actively a space outside of their everyday relationships, which may be on the internet, for example.

“Our refusal to talk about suicide is a cultural problem. What I noticed in the interviews was that the young people eventually reach the conclusion that their parent had not actively chosen to commit suicide, nor had they had the ability to predict the long-term consequences.

“The young people were able to start to reach an alternative understanding of the suicide through their conversations with others, in non-judgmental contexts. It was possible for them in this way to become reconciled with the dead parent,” says Anneli Silvén Hagström.

Hagström believes several proactive strategies could be implemented to both reduce suicide risk and improve survivor mental health. She explains that previous research has shown that children of people who commit suicide run a higher risk of experiencing social and psychological problems, and even committing suicide themselves. Therefore, starting to work actively with this group would thus be a measure to reduce the rate of suicide.

Hagström believes that the professional groups that come into contact with these young people, such as teachers, social workers, and psychologists, must acquire deeper knowledge about how to deal with people affected. It is important to create space for the question of why the parent took his or her own life, and to break the stigma.

The thesis shows also that death does not mean the end of a young person’s relationship with the parent. The continued relationship can provide healing in grief, and professionals should for this reason encourage it.

“The grief here is a complicated grief. The last thing that the young people want is to be like the dead parent, to be in a bad way, and reactions to the loss can arouse the fear that they themselves will take their own life. But knowing how the young people think makes it possible to calm their fears and assure them: ‘This is normal for someone in your situation’.”

Source: Linköping University/AlphaGalileo

Kids with ADHD More Sensitive to Repeat Failures

New research finds that children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) will avoid situations that may have a risk of failure thereby missing opportunities to learn and grow.

Researchers explain that children with ADHD are potentially more exposed to criticism than typically developing children. Their difficulties with focusing, elevated activity levels and impulsive actions often get them into trouble with their parents, teachers, and friends.

This makes it important to find out how punishment affects the behavior of children with ADHD. Are they more sensitive to punishment, or are they less sensitive to punishment? A team of researchers from Japan and New Zealand presented children with ADHD and typically developing children with a computer-based game that involved reward and punishment.

“When we first began this study, there had not been a lot of experimental research done,” said Dr. Gail Tripp, one of the authors of the paper and director of the Human Developmental Neurobiology Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST).

“We need to be extremely careful about using punishment, especially when working with children. Some of our first attempts to study ADHD and punishment were not very successful, because the children simply abandoned the task when they kept losing points or did not get enough rewards.”

This time, the researchers were able to develop a computer-based game that was engaging but still incorporated an element of punishment. Children with ADHD and typically developing children chose between playing two simultaneously available games.

Both games were presented at the same time on a computer screen, and looked the same: a two by two grid in which a mix of fun characters and sad faces appeared after pressing a button on the screen. Four matching characters equaled a “win,” while four sad faces equaled a “loss.”

Any other combination was a neutral outcome. The children could switch between playing the two games as often as they liked. Altogether, 210 children took part in the research, with 145 diagnosed with ADHD. All children were living in Japan or New Zealand and spoke English as their first language.

“The chance of winning rewards was equal for the two games, but one of the games was designed to have a four times higher likelihood of losing: playing on that game, a child would be ‘punished’ more often than with the other one,” Tripp said.

In both games, when a child won, the computer gave him or her 10 points and played a simple animation; when a child lost, the computer took away five points and played a laughing sound. All children began with a positive balance of 20 points and the game continued until either they reached 400 points or completed 300 trials. Each child won a prize at the end of the game.

The rewards were also arranged to discourage children from playing on one game exclusively or switching every time. A session lasted typically half an hour. The reason for such an extended game was to observe fairly stable performance over time.

“What we actually saw was that both typically developing children and children with ADHD developed a preference — what we call ‘bias’ — for the less ‘punishing’ game,” Tripp said.

“Both groups played the less punishing game more often. But over time, the children with ADHD found losing points and the laughter more punishing than typically developing children.”

During the first 100 trials, there was no difference between the two groups of children. But later on, the preference for the less punishing alternative increased substantially in the children with ADHD, while the choices of the typically developing children were stable for the duration of the task.

By the 200th trial, the children with ADHD were much less likely to play the more punishing game. The results suggest that children with ADHD avoid punishment more often over time than typically developing children. The latter seemed less distracted by punishment and kept their focus on winning.

Researchers believe this finding has important implications. “If a child with ADHD is reluctant in doing a task, or if the child gives up easily, it might be important for the parent or the teacher to check if the task has the appropriate balance of reward and punishment,” Tripp said.

“We are not saying that the task has punishment built in, rather that the effort needed to do the task might be perceived as punishing by the child. The more effortful a task is, the more incentives a child is going to need to keep persisting, and simple but frequent rewards, such as smiles or words of encouragements, can help children with ADHD to stay on the task.”

The same could be said for typically developing children, but this is especially important for children with ADHD, as they seem more sensitive to repeated experiences of punishment or failure, and are more likely to miss opportunities for success.

The study appears in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Source: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University — OIST/AlphaGalileo

Research Explains Sensory Integration Difficulties in Autism

New research confirms that individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have significant sensory deficits that influence social interactions.

Investigators determined the brains of individuals with ASD appear to lack feedback loops that help to process tactile information. This faulty processing results in social challenges.

Belgium researchers explain that many individuals with ASD are over- or undersensitive to sensory information. Some feel overwhelmed by busy environments such as supermarkets, others are less sensitive to pain, or dislike being touched.

Prior research has found that the severity of daily social difficulties of individuals with ASD is strongly related to the extent to which they are sensitive to touch. In fact, the sensory challenges impact function more so visual or auditory sensitivities.

To determine why this is the case, doctoral researcher Eliane Deschrijver and her colleagues investigated how the brain of individuals with and without ASD uses own touch to understand touch sensations in the actions of others.

Prof. Marcel Brass clarifies: We think that the human brain uses the own sense of touch to distinguish one’s self from others.

For example, when I perform an action that leads to a tactile sensation, for instance by making a grasping movement, I expect to feel a tactile sensation that corresponds to this.

If my own touch tells me something else, the tactile sensation will probably belong to the other person, and not to me. The brain can thus effectively understand others by signaling tactile sensations that do not correspond to the own sense of touch.”

In a series of experiments with electro-encephalography (EEG) conducted at Ghent University, the scientists showed that the brain activity of adults with ASD differs from that of adults without ASD while processing touch.

The research showed that the human brain of individuals without ASD indicated very quickly when a tactile sensation does not correspond to the own sense of touch.

This means that the human brain is able to signal that a tactile sensation of a finger that touches a surface does not correspond to own touch.

Investigators discovered a different pattern in the brain of adults with ASD, however.

Their brain signaled to a much lesser extent when the external touch sensation did not correspond to their own touch.

Those individuals that experienced stronger sensory difficulties showed a stronger disturbance of the neural process, while they were also the ones that experienced more severe social difficulties.

“It is to my knowledge the first time that a relationship could be identified between the way individuals with ASD process tactile information in their brain, and their daily social difficulties.

The findings can yield a novel and crucial link between sensory and social difficulties within the autism spectrum”, concludes Eliane Deschrijver.

“These findings primarily lead to a better understanding of the complex disorder, and of associated difficulties. It is yet too early to conclude on the impact on interventions.

If the results can be confirmed in future studies of other groups with ASD, such as (young) children, they could provide a target for optimizing treatment”, explain Dr Wiersema, Deschrijver’s doctoral chair.

Research findings appear in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Source: Ghent University/Alphagalileo

New Study Challenges View About Children’s Moral Judgment

Children’s ability to make moral judgments has often been underestimated, according to a new study.

When making moral judgments, adults tend to focus on people’s intentions rather than on the outcomes of their actions — hurting someone intentionally is much worse than hurting them accidentally.

However, the prevailing view in developmental psychology is that younger children’s moral judgments are mainly based on the outcomes of actions, rather than the intentions of those involved, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England.

To investigate this claim, the researchers set out to look at the reasons for the findings of two of the most influential and frequently cited studies in this area, both of which provide strong evidence that young children’s moral judgments are mainly outcome-based.

These studies also tested adults, which allowed researchers to establish a mature response against which children at various ages can be compared. Many of them also made outcome-based judgments, according to the UEA researchers, who say they question the methods that were used.

The team, led by Dr. Gavin Nobes of UEA’s School of Psychology, replicated the studies — published in 1996 and 2001 — and examined the effects of rephrasing one of the questions.

While in the original studies children were asked whether the action was good or bad, the new question asked about the person who acted.

As in previous research on whether moral judgments are based on intention or outcome, children were asked about pairs of stories in which accidents took place. In one the intention was good and the outcome bad, and in the other the intention was bad but the outcome good.

In the UEA study, when the original question was asked, the findings were very similar to the previous studies. Researchers found that children’s and adults’ judgments were primarily outcome-based. Regardless of intention, they judged accidents with good outcomes to be good, and accidents with bad outcomes to be bad.

However, when the question was rephrased, the four to five year-olds’ judgments were equally influenced by intention and outcome, and from five to six years they were mainly intention-based.

The older children’s and adults’ judgments were essentially reversed, from almost exclusively outcome-based in response to the original question, to almost exclusively intention-based when the rephrased question was asked.

“This area of research is about a fundamental aspect of morality,” said Nobes. “For most adults, if someone does something bad deliberately, they are worse than if they did it accidentally. The long-held claim has been that young children judge according to the outcome of an event, rather than according to the person’s intention. If that is the case, then children’s moral judgments are fundamentally different from adults.”

“However, our findings indicate that for methodological reasons, children’s ability to make similar intention-based judgments has often been substantially underestimated,” he continued. “We show that they can be remarkably adult-like in their thinking. The implication is that even young children, from around the age of four, can make intention-based moral judgments, just like adults.”

If an adult got a judgment wrong, a five year old child is bound to get it wrong too, he noted. That led the researchers to look at whether the authors of the original studies asked “appropriate, relevant” questions, he said.

“It appears that they did not, yet the robustness of the original findings has rarely, if ever, been questioned,” he said. “Neither have these studies been replicated, nor alternative explanations investigated. This is a concern when research findings are subsequently used by researchers and others to inform their work with children.”

The new study involved 138 children aged four to eight and 31 adults. They were told four stories involving accidental harms (positive intention, negative outcome) or attempted harms (negative intention, positive outcome).

The stories, pictures and questions were identical to those of the original studies, except that each participant was asked the original acceptability question about two of the stories, and a rephrased acceptability question about the other two, the researchers explained.

Examples of the acceptability questions included:

Original: “Is it okay for Ethan to give Chris a big spider? How good/bad is it to give Chris a big spider? Is it really, really good/bad or just a little good/bad, or just okay?

Rephrased: “Is Ethan good, bad or just okay? How good/bad? Is he really, really good/bad, just a little good/bad, or just okay?”

“Our findings could hardly have been clearer,” Nobes said. “The main implication is that, when the rephrased, person-focused acceptability question was asked, there was no evidence at any age to support the claim that children’s judgments are primarily outcome-based.”

“It appears that the majority of participants both in our study and in the original studies interpreted the original acceptability question to be solely about whether the outcome was good or bad, and so did not take the person’s intention, and therefore culpability, into account,” he continued.

“The wrong question was asked in the original studies,” he claimed. “We know the replication worked because when we asked the same questions we got the same or very similar results. We made a minor change, but the results are dramatically different, and the only possible explanation is the rewording of the question.”

Source: University of East Anglia

An 'Adventure' For Kids And Maybe For Their Parents, Too

Finn is in the middle, with the skinny arms. Jake is the dog. Together, they have Adventure Time. Cartoon Network hide caption

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Cartoon Network

Finn is in the middle, with the skinny arms. Jake is the dog. Together, they have Adventure Time.

Cartoon Network

Count plenty of grown-ups among the millions of fans of Adventure Time, a kids' show on Cartoon Network. Some are surely Emmy voters. (It's won three.) Others are very possibly stoners. Still others are intellectuals. Lev Grossman falls in the last category. He wrote two best-selling novels, The Magicians and The Magician King, and he's Time's senior book critic.

Grossman's critique of Adventure Time? "It's soooo smart! It's sooo intelligent!"

Hang on. He's just getting started.

"I am a little bit obsessed with it," Grossman continues. "It's rich and complicated the way Balzac's work is, which is a funny thing to say about a cartoon."

For the uninitiated, Adventure Time is set in a surreally pastel post-apocalyptic kingdom crawling with mutated candy creatures, bizarre princesses — think Slime Princess and Lumpy Space Princess — and our two heroes. They're Finn and Jake, a gangly human boy and his moon-eyed yellow dog.

The show's creator, Pendleton Ward, modeled Jake partly after Bill Murray's sardonic camp counselor in the 1979 movie Meatballs, a cooler-than-cool older-brother figure who can laugh at his charges without being mean and whose teachable moments are anything but cloying.

"Jake sees his own death in one episode," says Ward. "And Finn has to deal with that. Jake's a hip guy. He can watch his own death, and he's comfortable with it, and that's a weird thing, especially for Finn, who's superyoung, and it's really hard on him."

In the episode, called "New Frontier," Jake experiences a vision during which he's taken to an afterlife of stars and darkness by a little bananalike creature (voiced by Weird Al Yankovic).

"When I die, I'm gonna be all around you," Jake reassures Finn. "In your nose. And your dreams. And socks! I'll be a part of you in your earth mind. It's gonna be great!"

"That episode was really tough to tackle, writing it for a children's television show," Ward remembers. "It was hard for us to really not make it so sad and scary that you feel really sad and scared watching it."

Adventure Time insists on emotional honesty — even in its bad guys, usually depicted as cardboard villains in kids' cartoons.

Grossman offers the shrill, socially maladapted Earl of Lemongrab as an example. An unlikable character, his story is movingly explored and raises questions nearly every kid has wondered about: Why do I seem weird to other people? Why do I seem weird to myself?

Or take the buffoonish, bandy-legged and morally compromised Ice King. "[He's] psychologically plausible," Grossman observes. "He's an old lecherous man who has a magical crown. It's made him into this strange, awful individual who goes around capturing princesses."

The king's crown wiped his mind and warped his body. He'll die if he takes it off.

"Which is this rather moving tension, and he doesn't remember who he used to be, but other people do," Grossman says. "It's very affecting. My dad has been going through having Alzheimer's, and he's forgotten so much about who he used to be. And I look at him and think this cartoon is about my father dying."

In spite of the critical admiration, the warm feelings of fans and the prestigious awards, Adventure Time nearly never aired. "It actually felt like a great risk," says Rob Sorcher, the Cartoon Network's chief content officer. "It's not slick. It doesn't feel manufactured for kids, so who's it for?"

Um, perhaps partly for the kind of grown-up who might watch Yo Gabba Gabba with a little chemical assist?

"For me, it doesn't come from that place," says Ward. "For me, it comes from my childhood, wandering in my mind. You can't really go anywhere when you're a kid. I don't have a car, I don't have anything. I just have my backyard and my brain. And that's where I'm coming from when I'm writing it." He pauses. "I can't speak for all the writers on the show."

Ward and his mother used to watch cartoons together when he was a kid, but he claims today he's not writing specifically for a co-viewing audience of parents and kids. Still, author Grossman says Adventure Time works for him and his 8-year-old daughter, Lily, equally.

"It's really important for us to have something we can enjoy together and talk about together. It gives us in some ways a common language for talking about more important issues," he says.

Adventure Time's world used to be our world. Then it was destroyed by a war. It's strewn with detritus such as old computers, VHS tapes and video games from the 1980s.

"It takes my childhood, the shattered pieces of it, and builds it into something new, which is now part of Lily's childhood," he says, almost in wonder.

Fangs And Fishnets For The Win: 'Goth Barbie' Is Monstrously Successful

Mattel executives say they did not anticipate the runaway success of the goth-influenced Monster High brand when it debuted in 2010. Mattel hide caption

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Mattel

Mattel executives say they did not anticipate the runaway success of the goth-influenced Monster High brand when it debuted in 2010.

Mattel

We've got two words for you: Goth Barbie.

Not only does such a thing exist, but after Barbie, it's the best-selling doll in the world. The dolls of Monster High are bone-thin beauties all related to famous monsters. They come with books and Web episodes that follow their stories in that place where everyone feels like a freak — in high school.

Monster High is made by the world's biggest toy company, which also manufactures Barbie. But no one at Mattel expected Monster High to become one of the biggest retail sensations of the past several years. Last winter at Toy Fair, New York's annual showcase of top toys, Monster High wannabes were everywhere — even zombie princesses that Walt Disney could have never imagined, including zombie Snow White and a zombie Little Mermaid.

In the hopping Toy Fair compound run by Mattel, Barbie's pink displays seemed almost dowdy and passe next to Monster High's glamorous dolls, which look like the underfed love children of Tim Burton and Lady Gaga. Mattel's Dana De Celis is showing off a pretty brunette doll with flowing hair and wolfish ears: "She's our werewolf so she's gonna howl for us," De Celis says as the doll issues an electronic wolf howl. "She tosses her head back, she arches her back, she closes her eyes and she is literally howling at the moon."

"The message about the brand is really to celebrate your own freaky flaws, especially as bullying has become such a hot topic," says Cathy Cline. She's in charge of marketing for Mattel's girls' brands — and sales have surged 56 percent this year, thanks to Monster High. "And it's also one of the fastest growing brands within the entire toy industry," Cline adds.

Mattel had no idea Monster High would — in just three years — become a billion dollar brand, says Kiyomi Haverly, vice president of design at Mattel. "Honestly, it was very surprising to us. We just noticed girls were into darker goth fashion." And Twilight and zombies — but Monster High dolls are designed for girls ages 6 to 12, so they're not too terribly dark.

The characters are plugged into the same kind of things a cool 16-year-old might enjoy, like rockabilly, snowboarding and environmental activism. Draculaura, for example (she's Dracula's daughter), can't stand the thought of blood. "She's a vegan. She's turned off by meat," says Haverly. "Girls could really relate to that because that's part of what they're thinking of these days."

But that 21st century relatability surprised toy analyst Gerrick Johnson, who says he didn't take Monster High seriously when the dolls debuted in 2010. "I didn't think it would work. Why does Barbie work? Barbie works because she's aspirational. Girls want to be like Barbie." Johnson says he figured the "ghoulfriends" of Monster High would be more like Shrek. "Shrek has never worked in toy format, because no boy wants to be a green ogre from the swamp. He wants to be Luke Skywalker."

But for Rebecca Salms, Monster High, with all its fangs and fishnets, feels far more relatable than Barbie. Salms is the mother of a 9-year-old and is a self-described ex-goth. But, she says, there is one thing about them that really turns her off. Monster High dolls make Barbie look fat. "Their arms are so skinny that you need to take off the hands to get the sleeves on the arms," she says. "That's how scrawny they've made them."

That hasn't deterred Salm's daughter, Keiko, who's playing with her Monster High dolls in her sunny, lavender-painted upstairs bedroom with her friend, Jade. They have between them exactly 30 Monster High dolls, and together they play out a scene where two of the dolls set out to teach snooty mummy Cleo DeNile a lesson.

The doll that may ultimately learn a lesson is the toy world's reigning queen. Recently, Barbie sales have been dropping.

How To Introduce Kids To Tough Topics? Art And TV Can Help

Sue Glader wrote Nowhere Hair after finding that many children's books about cancer were too depressing or scary. Courtesy Sue Glader hide caption

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Courtesy Sue Glader

Sue Glader wrote Nowhere Hair after finding that many children's books about cancer were too depressing or scary.

Courtesy Sue Glader

Parents steer their kids to media for all kinds of things: as a distraction so they can make dinner, to teach letters and numbers, and for pure entertainment. There are also times when parents rely on books, TV, museums and other media when they aren't quite sure how to approach a difficult topic by themselves.

Linda Ellerbee is the queen of hard subjects. Domestic abuse, Sept. 11, alcoholism and living with HIV are among the many tough issues she's covered in the 22 years since she's hosted NickNews on Nickelodeon. The show is written for 9- to 13-year-olds, and Ellerbee says her one rule of thumb is don't dumb it down.

"Our viewers are smart people," she says. "They are merely younger, less experienced and shorter." They also possess a more limited vocabulary, but Ellerbee she still uses words they might not know, like "intervention" or "hijacking."

"If I'm going to use a word that I think a 10-year-old might not understand," she says, "I either explain what the word means or use it in such a way that it's absolutely clear what the word means. I don't change the word."

NickNews is also known for letting kids do the talking: Children who've experienced all kinds of difficulties go on air to explain what their lives are like and how they're coping. Ellerbee says it's an effective way to explain a hard subject to young people. But, she cautions, don't do it too soon.

"That's why we haven't gone to Newtown yet to do a show with those kids or, you know, about what happened," she says. "It's about timing. You need to sort of let some things settle."

For the producers of Glee, meanwhile, the right time was four months after Newtown. Last April, the Fox series did an episode in which the high school goes on lockdown when a student's gun goes off. Some Newtown, Conn., residents urged people in the community to boycott the show.

The way adolescent brain works is such that 'bad things happen to other people' ... So what I think ['Glee'] did was to strike empathy and understanding amongst that age group.

Dr. Jennifer Powell-Lunder

Psychologist Jennifer Powell-Lunder says the dangers of that Glee episode vary depending of who's watching it. "It is not a good show for kids who've been through such a trauma to be viewing," she says. "And it's very simple: Because it's too close to home, it retraumatizes them."

For teenagers who haven't experienced a similar tragedy, Powell-Lunder says, the episode was well done. "Really, the way the adolescent brain works is such that bad things happen to other people," she says. "So what I think it did is strike empathy and understanding amongst that age group and amongst all of us about the fear and the terror of the unknown."

The Right Book For Rough Subjects

In the late 1980s psychologist Jerome Singer warned, "Television is like having a stranger in the house." Most parents wouldn't want their children learning about the dangers of the world from a stranger, and that includes TV, he said when he was at Yale. At the same time, some parents need help starting the conversation. For young children, the right book can help, especially since reading together naturally lends itself to conversation.

In When Leonard Lost His Spots, Leonard transitions from leopard to lioness. Here, Leonard is shown as a cub, dreaming of life without spots. Courtesy Happy Family! hide caption

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Courtesy Happy Family!

In When Leonard Lost His Spots, Leonard transitions from leopard to lioness. Here, Leonard is shown as a cub, dreaming of life without spots.

Courtesy Happy Family!

Case in point: The picture book When Leonard Lost His Spots: A Trans Parent Tail by Monique Costa addresses an issue you rarely find in children's literature — transgender. With playful rhymes and Disney-like illustrations, a tiger cub tells how he feels about his father becoming a female:

"I didn't know how to react.
Or even what to say.
I pretended not to notice him.
I wish he'd go away."

The cub feels shame, anger and fear. That openness is something publishers Cheril Clarke and Monica Bey-Clarke were drawn to. Their company, My Family!, focuses on children's books about nontraditional families. "It doesn't shy away from the fact that [the] cub is struggling inside," Clarke says. "It's a very honest story from a child's point of view."

But if a book for small children is too depressing, some adults just won't buy it. When Sue Glader was diagnosed with breast cancer, she went looking for books to read to her nieces and nephews. "I saw a lot of things that were really very sad and very scary or supertechnical for a young child," she says. So when she was going through chemotherapy, she wrote the book Nowhere Hair:

"A sparrow might have borrowed it to warm her fancy nest.
Perhaps she stuffed a pillow to help grandma get some rest.
The day I asked her where it went
She had a simple answer
'I'm bald because of medicine
I take to cure my cancer."

Glader's advice for talking to kids about hard subjects is be "silly ... in the right places."

Sculpting And Touching Tragedy

As hard as it might be to talk to a child about cancer, it's still a relatively concrete and present subject. Talking about difficult issues in the news is a different challenge. When it's the so-called "crime of crimes," many adults would rather not think about it at all, let alone talk about it with kids.

Artist and activist Naomi Natale is trying to get young people, as well as grown-ups, to understand genocide with a project called One Million Bones.

Pre-K through 12th-grade students at several hundred schools around the country have been sculpting human bones out of clay for a mass grave to be displayed on the National Mall to honor the victims of genocide.

At Georgetown Day Middle School in Washington, D.C., 12-year-old Cole Wright-Schaner made a spine. "It was kind of disturbing to make it, thinking of all the people that have died in the African countries," he says. "It really opened my eyes to genocide and what's going on in the world. We live in such a safe country."

Natale says the simple, physical process of making a bone is what makes genocide personal. "If you can think about the bone that's in your hand, and that you're using your hands to craft another bone, you know — representative of our lives and evidence we existed," she says.

Life-size wax figures at the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum depict the grim realities of slavery. Courtesy Great Blacks In Wax Museum hide caption

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Courtesy Great Blacks In Wax Museum

Life-size wax figures at the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum depict the grim realities of slavery.

Courtesy Great Blacks In Wax Museum

And young people can comprehend a difficult subject better by seeing it or touching it. At the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, they get to do both.

Joanne Martin founded the museum with her late husband, Elmer Martin. They assembled an exhibition on slavery that is both extraordinary and grim: The museum has actual slave chains and shackles that visitors can hold. The weight alone drives home the brutality of slavery.

There's also a replica of a slave ship. Narrow, creaky steps take visitors down below. It's dark and there are life-sized statues of men, women and children with chains and shackles around their legs and their necks.

On a recent trip to the museum, fifth-grade teacher Damien Samuels said his students from KIPP Middle School in Charlotte, N.C., were "significantly affected" by the slave ship. He says teaching the complete story of slavery is challenging. It's easy to find stories about escaping slavery and abolitionists but most media skirt the really difficult parts.

"Even the textbooks shy away from certain images," Samuels says. "I think this museum does a very good job at showing the graphic details. So I think this is a very, very good opportunity for [the students] to really, really appreciate what their ancestors have been through."

The Great Blacks in Wax Museum also includes many stories that celebrate African-Americans' achievements over the decades, from civil rights to space exploration to the White House. Leaving young people with a sense of hope is important whenever media tackle hard subjects, says Nickelodeon's Linda Ellerbee.

"Wherever bad things happen, you always find good people trying to make it better," she says. "And there are more good people than there are bad people."

Pedal Power To Horsepower: Toys Point Toward Future Of Cars

Kids play with toy cars like the Cozy Coupe partly because they want to imitate their parents: turn a steering wheel, open a door, strap a Christmas tree to the roof. But toy cars aren't just fun and games; they can suggest future trends in the automobile industry. Frank Guido/Flickr hide caption

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Frank Guido/Flickr

Kids play with toy cars like the Cozy Coupe partly because they want to imitate their parents: turn a steering wheel, open a door, strap a Christmas tree to the roof. But toy cars aren't just fun and games; they can suggest future trends in the automobile industry.

Frank Guido/Flickr

Morning Edition has reported that the Toyota Camry is the best-selling car in the U.S., and the Ford Focus is the world's best-seller.

Now it's time for a correction of sorts because it turns out the dominance of the Focus and Camry is rivaled by another car. It's American-made, has zero emissions and is highly affordable. We're talking about the Cozy Coupe — the yellow-roofed, red-bodied, kid-sized toy car.

Toys like the Cozy Coupe are more than just child's play. In fact, if you want to find out about the future of the auto industry, there's no better place to start than at a playground — like the one at California's Culver City Montessori School, where Cozy Coupes are one of the most popular toys.

Culver City Montessori teacher Micah Card explains that wanting to be "like Mommy and Daddy," as one child puts it, is a major part of a toy automobile's appeal.

"They really enjoy the Cozy Coupe cars because ... it has a roof, it has a door to open, it even has [a] little gas nozzle. They'll fight over those cars," Card says. "They don't really care so much for the open-top type ... because it's not as close an approximation to what their family drives. You know, they want to do what their parents do."

Do Cars Mean Freedom, Or Pollution?

Children become aware of cars, buses, trucks and planes — and the toys based on them — very early on. Richard Gottlieb, who makes a living analyzing trends in the toy industry, says playing with cars is fundamental.

"When they do these archaeological digs from Egypt or Rome they'll find little horse and chariots," he says. "They're primitive ... [the kind] that kids play with. So I think the desire to roll things has always been there."

Mark Takahashi is now one of the "car people" at Edmunds.com — but at the age of 2, the future automotive editor, like his co-worker Mike MaGrath, was more of a toy-car person. Courtesy Mark Takahashi hide caption

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Courtesy Mark Takahashi

Mark Takahashi is now one of the "car people" at Edmunds.com — but at the age of 2, the future automotive editor, like his co-worker Mike MaGrath, was more of a toy-car person.

Courtesy Mark Takahashi

Gottlieb says the eagerness to play with cars hasn't changed but what kids think about those cars has.

"From an aspirational sense, I don't think children aspire to drive as much as they used to," Gottlieb says. "I think they aspire to have a cellphone, but not necessarily a car."

Indeed, driving as a rite of passage has diminished greatly in recent years. For some, cars still mean freedom, speed and escape; for others they mean isolation, gridlock and pollution.

Gottlieb says kids pick up on that, which is why you see more and more cars that have faces and stories, as in Pixar's Cars movies.

"If you really think about it, the children are engaging the characters; they're not engaging the brands," Gottlieb explains. "Maybe not great news for the car companies, but I think that probably signals some of the loss of prestige for driving among youth."

The declining appeal of the automobile might not be good news for toy companies either. Kids' love for cars used to drive a passion for their toys; at least that's how it worked for Mike Magrath.

Today, Magrath is an editor at Edmunds.com, an online source of automotive information. At the office building where he works, nearly every single one of his co-workers has toy cars strewn across his or her desk. Magrath can still remember the first car he fell in love with.

"Mine was probably a pedal car. It wasn't a toy car per se, like a Matchbox or a Hot Wheels, but I remember this small, I think it was rocket-ship designed — it had pedals, and you could run it with your feet."

"I would always try to go just as fast as I can down through the kitchen and down the stairs. It's all I wanted ... because I thought if I hit those stairs fast enough, I would just leave the house," he remembers. "It just ended up with my mom installing a safety gate. But I loved that toy."

Magrath didn't know at that age that he wanted to work with cars.

"I just knew that cars sort of represented something I could play with, something that I could go out and have adventures in," he says. "And it never stopped."

Kids' Cars Go Green

The connection between the fantasy world of toy cars and their real-life counterparts is absolutely direct — a highway that moves in both directions, very fast. Car companies license their designs to toy companies, and toy companies reflect auto trends in their merchandise.

Felix Holst, left, is the head designer of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars for Mattel. Holst demonstrates some of his team's designs to Aaron Schrank, center, and Sonari Glinton. Courtesy Kristin Hull hide caption

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Courtesy Kristin Hull

Felix Holst, left, is the head designer of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars for Mattel. Holst demonstrates some of his team's designs to Aaron Schrank, center, and Sonari Glinton.

Courtesy Kristin Hull

At the intersection of those worlds is Felix Holst, the chief designer of Matchbox and Hot Wheels for Mattel, the toy conglomerate. He calls his home base in El Segundo, Calif., "the most wonderful place in the world."

Holst takes toy cars very seriously. He and his team design dozens of them a year, and they sell well over 6 million a week.

Holst's job is to listen to little boys and girls and give them (and their parents) what they want. What he's found is that the new generation of children — 3- to 6-years-olds — really cares about issues like green design.

"Six-year-olds are talking about green design in school. ... Six-year-olds are learning about energy conservation and recycling," he says. "They're learning about pollution. They're learning about gasoline engines vs. electric cars."

So Holst has been designing cars that signal to kids that they are fuel-efficient — that they represent something different than the experience their parents are having right now. He says car designers have to learn a new visual language to make cars attractive for modern children.

"What we're finding ... for kids is that driving is not — it's not an appetizing prospect," Holst says. "It's very difficult. It's very costly. It's dangerous. ... They're more connected now than they ever were before."

Selling Toys, Creating Customers

The companies that Mattel contracts with — that is, all the major automakers — increasingly have to talk that language to kids as well. Ford's Patrick Mulligan says companies like his go to great lengths to make an impression on kids through licensing deals.

"When a company makes a toy of a Mustang, and it's going to have an engine sound, we make sure that that engine sound sounds like a Mustang," he says.

Kids can tell the difference, Mulligan explains.

"They know a Ford from a Chevrolet from a Dodge from a Toyota, and they have their favorite," he says.

Before Mulligan was in the car business, he was in the toy business. He says that because today's children are less interested in brands, it's not enough to just get kids to know a Ford from a Chevy. He wants kids to know what Ford is about.

"It's things like figuring out ways to integrate SYNC ... into a toy so that children see how Ford is a company that's at the leading edge of technology," he explains.

Car companies are hoping that if they can interest these kids in driving now, they'll be drivers in the future — and that when they trade in those Cozy Coupes for highway-ready vehicles, they might be choosing between brands they recognize from their toy boxes.

Teens Find The Right Tools For Their Social-Media Jobs

Once upon a time, it was MySpace. (Huh. Turns out you can still link to it.) Then Facebook happened. And Twitter. And beyond those two dominant social-media platforms, there are a host of other, newer options for staying in touch and letting the digital universe get a look at your life. And for certain kinds of sharing, some of those other options make more sense to tech-savvy teens than the Big Two do.

On today's All Things Considered, NPR's Sami Yenigun talks to a roomful of teenagers to see who uses which for what these days. (The answer, like most involving tech or teens, is subject to change like the weather.)

When you need to illustrate a story about proliferating social-media platforms, it's good to know that an enterprising stock photographer has probably thought about it already. Anatoliy Babiy/iStockphoto.com hide caption

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Anatoliy Babiy/iStockphoto.com

When you need to illustrate a story about proliferating social-media platforms, it's good to know that an enterprising stock photographer has probably thought about it already.

Anatoliy Babiy/iStockphoto.com

Some takeaways:

Facebook is for finding old friends, and maybe for arranging parties. (Unless they're the kind of parties you don't want the police knowing about. "Oftentimes, parties that are all over social media get busted by the cops really easily," one 17-year-old tells Sami.)

Twitter is more for personal expression. "People be in their feelings on Twitter — they vent," says Jamal Royster, 18.

Visual communication? It's a different mode of connection. And as with text-based platforms, use cases vary among the teens Sami talked to.

Vine is where you publish (and watch) short video clips — seven seconds or so. People make all kinds of clever short films with the app. Check out Waka Flocka Elmo, a recent viral hit recommended by 17-year-old Jesse Aniebonam.

Instagram, a relative veteran in the pics-and-flicks category, is the go-to app when it comes to documenting your days and nights. "I Instagram everything," says Grace Plihal, 18. "It's kind of my way of showing myself to the world, I guess."

(Interesting, that, given how much control Instagram gives users over the look and feel of what they post. "Showing myself" is a telling way to put it.)

But the observation that struck me most, when Sami told me about the shape of his story, was this one, from 13-year-old Caroline Lamb. There are times when you want to take a back seat to the story you're telling, she suggests — and those are the times for Tumblr.

Here's how she puts it in her own words:

Oh, one last entry: Snapchat is for selfies you don't want to show up later — like when a college admissions counselor goes Googling for you. Users send snapshots back and forth using a proprietary app.

What makes 'em different from the photos in the MMS messages you can send using most phones' built-in text-messaging programs? Well, you can set Snapchat images to self-destruct: They disappear at most 10 seconds after the recipient views them.

So, Snapchat? It's a near certainty that you don't want to know what the teenagers in your life are doing with it.

From Classic Toys To New Twists, Kids Go Back To Blocks

Legos and other interlocking toys are only one kind of blocks that remain popular with kids. iStockphoto.com hide caption

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iStockphoto.com

Legos and other interlocking toys are only one kind of blocks that remain popular with kids.

iStockphoto.com

I visited Toy Fair in New York City hunting for ideas for our summer series about kids' culture. One of the big takeaways was the increasing popularity of construction games such as Legos. Sales shot up nearly 20 percent last year. Now, it seems, every major toy manufacturer is scrambling to add new games geared toward kids building things.

Concurrently, I happened to visit the National Building Museum, where an impressive exhibition, PLAY WORK BUILD, showcases the museum's vast collection of block sets and building toys. It also takes blocks into the future – with the David Rockwell-designed Imagination Playground, an azure-blue block fantasy for the under-5 crowd.

That prompted this story on blocks, which starts with a small business selling wooden blocks made in the U.S. (specifically the Unblock, designed and created by the Azmani family in Wisconsin) to the gigantic Legos, Hasbros and Mattels of the world, selling high-concept blocks that often seem like nothing so much as vehicles for cross-promotional licensing.

That prompts the question — what makes a block a block? I asked Karen Hewitt, a toy designer who's written about the history of blocks.

"That it's three dimensional," she offered. "That it's nonrepresentational, it doesn't have anything until a child gives it a name or function. And usually, blocks are modular. They relate to each other in some forms in ratio of size, or shape. They're predictable, so they keep their shape, no matter the material. And blocks basically rely on balance for building."

What would Maria Montessori or Friedrich Froebel think of Minecraft? They were pioneers of early education who made block play central to their philosophies. Minecraft is the hugely popular virtual game that invites its 10 million players to manipulate a world made of blocks.

"Montessori was quite a brilliant woman. I think she'd be very interested in what's going on today," Hewitt observes dryly. She was polite about Minecraft ("It just doesn't have that sensory feeling for me") but copped to a real fascination with new games that synthesize real blocks and with ones on screens. For example, the inevitable Lego-Minecraft tie-in, or a math-based game, Building Blocks, that uses actual and virtual blocks.

But Hewitt believes the lesson of blocks is even more fundamental and powerful than exploring ideas of geometry, spatial relations, patterning and numbers. When kids play with blocks, they're beginning to build.

"The ability to construct has to do with our whole culture — where do we live, how do we make our homes," she says. "It's really the beginning of thinking about survival.

Kids have loved blocks for so long and so loyally, it's a bit of a surprise Hollywood has not attempted to cash in. Blocks: The Movie. Sounds like a blockbuster.

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