Features

Green Politics in China: Environmental Governance and State-Society Relations

Joy Y. Zhang and Michael Barr

London: Pluto Press, 2013, 159 pp

The sheer size of China’s land mass, population and contribution to the global economy mean that the state of its environment has international repercussions, but “Green Politics in China” focuses mostly on the domestic scene. It is, after all, the Chinese people who are hardest hit by the pollution and environmental degradation caused by rapid industrialisation, yet they are also prime beneficiaries of the resulting development. This is one of the paradoxes facing Chinese environmentalists for, until recently, few ordinary citizens were concerned about the environment. Another paradox concerns how to relate to the authoritarian state which has a green policy, but lacks transparency and sometimes fails to enforce its own regulations due to preoccupation with economic advancement. These factors lead the authors to describe China’s green movement as “a juggling act between development and social stability”. (p. 6)

This highly informative book takes the reader inside China’s green movement to meet the activists involved in environmental NGOs
(ENGOs) and learn about their goals, methods and programmes. The movement grew out of nature clubs formed in the 90s, which monitored air and water pollution, and pooled their findings with information gleaned by academics. Today, some ENGOs organise bird watching; others offer free nature photography lessons and low-budget field trips in the hope that people will reconnect with nature, start to notice changes in their surroundings and become more involved. Still other groups stress public education, monitoring pollution on site, advancing solutions for specific problems, and enforcing existing environmental protection regulations. In all cases, the aim is to reach out to ordinary citizens, and counteract the effects of abrupt urbanisation, including the notion that what is man-made is better than what is natural. 

Those familiar with the radical tactics of environmentalists in other places might term the Chinese activities “harmless” — so non-confrontational as to be ineffective, but the authors caution against hasty, out-of-context judgments. The priority of Chinese environmentalists is not to confront the state, but to cultivate an informed public that can question policy, hold the government accountable and eventually influence decision making. According to Zhang and Barr, the ripples created by Chinese environmentalism are far broader than seen at first glance, extending to the country’s newly emerging civil society. “Public questioning of authority, at least on environmental issues, is an increasing phenomenon in China… the trend towards public disclosure of environment information and the general defence of the ‘right to know’, are both empowering and daring.” (p. 28 & 12) The ripples go beyond environmental issues to readjust the relation between state and society, and “to help pluralise the political process”. (p. 12)

In view of China’s preeminent place in global manufacturing, international factors do intervene in local environmental issues, not least as “developed countries dislocate their environmental burden by consuming goods produced in China.” (p. 33) In this respect, the book recounts an interesting story that also highlights the juggling in which ENGOs must engage. Since 2000, southern China has become a hub for making branded IT products for international companies, and such factories are big polluters. By 2009, illegal dumping by IT manufacturers was identified as an increasing threat to the soil; 41 Chinese ENGOs banded together to form the Green Alliance, which contacted 29 international IT companies whose local suppliers had been shown to contribute to the pollution. Only Apple Inc. did not respond, viewing the identity of its subcontractors as a business secret. Eventually, with the help of a California-based NGO, Apple was pressured into holding transparent discussions with the Green Alliance, but the latter’s campaign met with local resistance, “especially those young consumers who embraced Apple’s brand culture… It soon dawned upon Chinese ENGOs that to win support for their campaign, they not only needed to analyse the pollution statistics, they also had to understand and respond to the values held by domestic consumers.” (p. 82) 

 One can only wonder what public reaction would be to a similar case here in Jordan or many other countries, for that matter. The Apple case shows that despite the particularity of China’s environmental movement, which the authors quite correctly expound, there are many commonalities with green issues the world over, and many lessons to be learned from this book. 

Sally Bland

NEW YORK – Pregnant women who have been exposed to high levels of second-hand smoke have a higher rate of miscarriages, stillbirths and foetal deaths, a new study suggests.

“We often think of the diseases that second-hand smoke causes as diseases of older people,” epidemiologist Andrew Hyland told Reuters Health. “The results of this study show that second-hand smoke can affect even unborn babies.”

Hyland led the study at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. He and his colleagues found the pregnancy risks associated with women’s second-hand smoke exposure were almost as high as the risks related to their own cigarette smoking.

The study was the first to investigate the effects of second-hand smoke using quantified, lifetime exposure levels. The analysis arms clinicians like Dr Maurice Druzin, from Stanford University Medical Centre in California, with facts to try to persuade expectant fathers and others living with pregnant women to refrain from smoking at home.

“This is excellent ammunition for us to emphasise what we’ve known for a long time, but now we’ve got data to support it,” Druzin, who was not involved in the study, told Reuters Health.

“This is the first study that shows that second-hand smoke has the same effect as being a primary smoker,” he said. “That is a game changer.”

Hyland’s team used data from a study of 80,762 women between the ages of 50 and 79 years old. Researchers asked the women about their own smoking and the amount of second-hand smoke they were exposed to as children and adults, as well as about their history of pregnancy problems.

Among women who never smoked themselves, the chances of having a stillbirth were 22 per cent higher for those who were exposed to any tobacco smoke than for unexposed women. That was after the researchers took into account other potential contributors, including women’s weight, education and alcohol drinking.

For women who were exposed to the highest lifelong levels of second-hand smoke, the risk of having a stillbirth was even greater — 55 per cent higher than among unexposed women.

The researchers defined the highest level of exposure to second-hand smoke as at least 10 years of exposure during childhood, at least 20 years during adulthood and at least 10 years in the workplace.

At that level, a woman’s risk of a tubal ectopic pregnancy was 61 per cent higher than among unexposed women, and her risk of a miscarriage was 17 per cent higher.

“We’re not talking about an elevated risk of a rare event,” Hyland said of the miscarriage finding. “We’re talking about something that happens all the time.”

Nearly one-third of women in the study reported at least one miscarriage, 4.4 per cent reported at least one stillbirth and 2.5 per cent reported at least one tubal ectopic pregnancy, according to findings published in Tobacco Control.

Ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilised egg attaches outside the uterus, usually in one of the fallopian tubes. Tubal pregnancies are the leading cause of maternal death during the first trimester of pregnancy, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers cannot draw firm conclusions about cause and effect from observational studies, like the current one. But the study results point to the benefits of minimising exposure to second-hand smoke, Hyland said.

“There’s a biological plausibility that second-hand smoke could have an impact on these reproductive outcomes not only during the reproductive years but throughout the lifetime of a woman,” he said.

“The take-home message is these never-smoking women who had the highest levels of exposure to second-hand smoke had the highest risks,” he said. “These risks were generally comparable to the risks for women who ever actively smoked.”

Prior research firmly established that smoking during pregnancy is associated with a higher risk of foetal death, the authors write. Smoking during pregnancy also has been linked to infertility, premature birth, low birth weight, birth defects and sudden infant death syndrome, they add.

The American Cancer Society estimates that 10 to 15 per cent of women smoke during pregnancy and that as many as 5 per cent of infant deaths could be prevented if pregnant women did not smoke.

AMSTERDAM — Hundreds of years after wealthy merchants began building the tall, narrow brick houses that have come to define Amsterdam’s skyline, Dutch architects are updating the process for the 21st century: fabricating pieces of a canal house out of plastic with a giant 3-D printer and slotting them together like oversized Lego blocks.

Hedwig Heinsman of architect bureau Dus says the goal of the demonstration project launched this month is not so much to print a functioning house — in fact, parts of the house will likely be built and re-built several times over the course of three years as 3-D printing technology develops.

Rather, it is to discover and share the potential uses of 3-D printing in construction by creating new materials, trying out designs and testing building techniques to see what works.

“There’s only one way to find out,” she says. “By doing it.”

She envisions a future in which personalized architecture may be custom-crafted on the spot, or perhaps selected from an online store for architectural designs, downloaded and tweaked.

At the core of the project is a 6-meter (20-foot) -tall printer dubbed the Kamermaker, or “room-builder”. It’s a scaled-up version of the open-source home 3-D printer made by Ultimaker, popular with hobbyists.

It takes the Kamermaker about a week to print each massive, unique, honeycomb-structured block, layer by layer. The first block, which forms one corner of the house and part of a stairway, weighed around 180 kilogrammes.

The blocks will later be filled with a foam material, still under development, that will harden like concrete to add additional weight and bind the blocks together.

Dus expects to add more printers and change designs along the way, with help from Dutch construction company Heijmans, German chemicals manufacturer Henkel, and anybody else who wants to participate and can make useful contributions.

The construction site in northern Amsterdam is also an exhibition, open to the public for 2.50 euros ($3.00).

NEW YORK — Shaped like a lopsided headband, Google Glass is an unassuming piece of technology when you’re holding it in your hands. You feel as if you can almost break it, testing its flexibility. Putting it on, though, is another story.

Once you do, this Internet-connected eyewear takes on a life of its own. You become “The Person Wearing Google Glass” and all the assumptions that brings with it — about your wealth, boorishness or curiosity. Such is the fate of early adopters of new technologies, whether it’s the Sony Walkman, the first iPod with its conspicuous white earbuds, or the Segway scooter. Google calls the people who wear Glass “explorers”, because the device is not yet available to the general public.

With its $1,500 price tag, the device is far from having mass appeal. At the South By Southwest Interactive tech jamboree in Austin this week, I counted fewer than a dozen people wearing it, including technology blogger Robert Scoble, who isn’t shy about posting pictures of himself in the shower, red-faced, water running, wearing the device.

Google, like most successful technology companies, dreamers and inventors, likes to take a long view on things. It calls some of its most outlandish projects “moonshots”. Besides Glass, these include its driverless car, balloons that deliver Internet service to remote parts of the world and contact lenses that monitor glucose levels in diabetics.

There’s an inherent risk in moonshots, however: What if you never reach the moon? Ten years from now, we may look back at Google Glass as one of those short-lived bridges that takes us from one technological breakthrough to the next, just as pagers, MP3 players and personal digital assistants paved the way for the era of the smartphone. Fitness bands, too, may fit into this category.

In its current, early version, Google Glass feels bulky on my face and when I look in the mirror I see a futuristic telemarketer looking back at me. Wearing it on the subway while a homeless man shuffled through the car begging for change made me feel as if I was sporting a diamond tiara. I sank lower in my seat as he passed. If Google is aiming for mass appeal, the next versions of Glass have to be much smaller and less conspicuous.

Though no one knows for sure where wearable devices will lead us, Rodrigo Martinez, life sciences chief strategist at the Silicon Valley design firm IDEO, has some ideas. “The reason we are talking about wearables is because we are not at implantables yet,” he says. “(But) I’m ready. Others are ready.”

Never mind implants, I’m not sure I’m even ready for Google Glass.

Specs in place for the first time, I walked out of Google’s Manhattan showroom on a recent Friday afternoon with a sense of unease. A wave of questions washed over me. Why is everyone looking at me? Should I be looking at them? Should I have chosen the orange Glass instead of charcoal?

Ideally, Google Glass lets you do many of the things we now do with our smartphones, such as taking photos, reading news headlines or talking to our mothers on Sunday evenings — hands-free. But it comes with a bit of baggage.

Glass feels heavier when I’m out in public or in a group where I’m the only person wearing it. If I think about it long enough my face starts burning from embarrassment. The device has been described to me as “the scarlet letter of technology” by a friend. The most frequent response I get from my husband when I try to slip Glass on in his presence is “please take that off.” This is the same husband who encouraged me to buy a sweater covered in googly-eyed cats.

Instead of looking at the world through a new lens on a crowded rush-hour sidewalk. I felt as if the whole world was looking at me. That’s no small feat in New York, where even celebrities are afforded a sense of privacy and where making eye contact with strangers can amount to an entire conversation.

NEW YORK – Breastfeeding is credited with a long list of benefits, but one downside of extended and intensive breastfeeding may be a higher risk of cavities in baby's first teeth, according to a new study.

The more frequently a mother breastfed her child beyond the age of 24 months during the day, the greater the child's risk of severe early tooth decay, researchers found.

"The No. 1 priority for the breastfeeding mother is to make sure that her child is getting optimal nutrition," lead author Benjamin Chaffee of the University of California, San Francisco told Reuters Health.

Chaffee completed the study as a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley.

He and his team looked at a possible link between longer-term breastfeeding and the risk of tooth decay and cavities in a survey of 458 babies in low-income families in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Because the study lasted more than one year, most babies were eating various kinds of solid food and liquids in addition to breast milk.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that babies are fed breast milk exclusively for the first six months of their lives, with solid foods added to the diet at that point. However, the WHO also recommends continued breastfeeding up to age two and beyond, the authors note.

For the study, the researchers checked in on babies when they were about six, 12 and 38 months old. At six months, the study team gathered data on the number of breast milk bottles the baby drank the day before and any other liquids, like juice.

At the 12-month mark, parents reported whether they fed their babies any of 29 specific foods, including fruits, vegetables, beans, organ meat, candy chips, chocolate milk, cookies, honey, soft drinks or sweet biscuits.

Two trained dentists examined all of the babies at each of the visits.

Nearly half of the children had consumed a prepared infant formula drink by age six months, the researchers write in the Annals of Epidemiology, but very few still drank formula by age one.

The researchers found that about 40 per cent of children breastfed between ages six and 24 months had some tooth decay by the end of the study. For babies breastfed for longer than two years and frequently, that number rose to 48 per cent.

"Our study does not suggest that breastfeeding causes caries," Chaffee said.

It is possible that breast milk in conjunction with excess refined sugar in modern foods may be contributing to the greater tooth decay seen in babies breastfed the longest and most often, the authors speculate in their report.

More research is needed to determine what's going on, but the findings are in keeping with professional dental guidelines that suggest avoiding on-demand breastfeeding after tooth eruption, they write.

"There are two aspects of breastfeeding — the actual human milk, which has some, but very little, ability to promote tooth decay," said William Bowen, professor emeritus in the Centre for Oral Biology at the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York.

"The second is the physical aspect of breastfeeding, or even bottle-feeding, and that's where the problem arrives," he said.

Bowen was not involved in the new study.

When a baby sucks on a mother's breast or from a bottle, the baby's teeth are sealed off from saliva in the mouth. This physical barrier prevents the saliva from breaking down bacteria, and increases the chances of tooth decay, Bowen said.

Even though participants in the study came from poor backgrounds, "bad habits can form at any socioeconomic level," Bowen told Reuters Health.

About 16 per cent of babies in the U.S. were still exclusively breastfed at age six months last year, according to the National Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

The good news, Bowen said, is that it's very easy to clean an infant's teeth.

A simple wipe in the mouth with a water-dampened cloth or Q-tip can effectively remove food before the baby's first teeth, he said, adding: "It's important to get the excess food out of the mouth."

One not-so-good habit is allowing infants to stay on a mother's nipple throughout the night, Bowen said. This usually means very little saliva circulates in the baby's mouth, which can increase the risk of decay.

NEW YORK – Smokers who kick the habit appear to benefit from an improved mood, according to a new review of past studies.

On average, quitting smoking was associated with improvements in mental health similar to taking an antidepressant drug, a team of UK researchers found.

“The main message is that when people stop smoking, they feel better than they did when they were smoking,” Dr Paul Aveyard, one of the review’s authors, told Reuters Health.

“People who quit smoking may feel grumpy, irritable and bad — those feelings are similar to feelings of stress and people conflate the two,” Aveyard, from the University of Oxford, said.

“For clinicians like myself, when we see people who smoke who also have mental health difficulties, there’s often a feeling that we are depriving them of a way to deal with the stress,” he said. “But in fact we are helping these people to get better.”

It is widely known that quitting smoking has saved lives. But it’s nearly impossible to prove that smoking causes specific health problems, or that quitting prevents them, because of other differences that exist between smokers and non-smokers that could impact health and well-being.

With that in mind, “the claim of this paper that quitting is as good as drugs needs more research,” Dr Prabhat Jha, of the University of Toronto Centre for Global Health Research in Canada, wrote in an email to Reuters Health. Jha was not part of the new analysis.

For their review, the researchers examined data from 26 studies of smoking cessation. Some studies included smokers in the general public and others focused on people in psychiatric hospitals. Participants smoked an average of 20 cigarettes per day initially.

All of the studies assessed participants’ mental health before quitting smoking and about six months later, on average.

Compared to people who continued to smoke, the studies showed drops in anxiety, depression and stress and improvements in psychological quality of life among quitters.

Other explanations related to mood improvements among quitters need to be considered, the researchers write in the British medical journal BMJ. For example, it’s possible that life events improved people’s mood, leading them to quit smoking.

Still, there is “an entrenched belief in our culture that smoking ‘calms the nerves’ and can help alleviate stressful situations,” psychiatry researcher Benjamin Le Cook of the Cambridge Health Alliance in Somerville, Massachusetts told Reuters Health in an e-mail. He said this message has met little resistance from public health, mental health and medical communities so far.

The current review serves as a reminder that tobacco withdrawal symptoms like anxiety can easily be confused with mental health problems, said Brian Hitsman of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Both he and Le Cook were not involved in the review.

HANOVER, Germany – Internet users may before long have a secure solution to the modern plague of passwords, in which they can use visual patterns or even their own body parts to identify themselves.

Developers at the world’s biggest high-tech fair, CeBIT, say that one of the biggest frustrations of having a smartphone and a computer is memorising dozens of sufficiently airtight passwords for all their devices and accounts.

“The problem of passwords is that they are very weak, they are always getting hacked, and also from a user point of view, they are too complicated, everybody has 20, 30, 60 passwords,” said Steven Hope, managing director of Winfrasoft from Britain, the fair’s guest country this year.

“They all have to be different, no one can remember them, so everybody writes them down or resets them every time they log in. They don’t work in the real world today.”

Passwords have proliferated so much that it’s a daily struggle for users to cope with so many of them.

And as millions of Internet users have learned the hard way, no password is safe when hackers can net them en masse from banks, e-mail services, retailers or social media websites that fail to fully protect their servers.

Many simply throw in the towel and use no-brainer codes like “123456” and “password” –– which are still the most common despite how easily they can be cracked, CeBIT spokesman Hartwig von Sass said at the event in the northern German city of Hanover.

In response to the vulnerabilities and hassles of the antiquated username-and-password formula, Winfrasoft has developed an alternative based on a four-colour grid with numbers inside that resembles a Sudoku puzzle.

Users select a pattern on the grid as their “password” and because the numbers inside the boxes change once per minute, the code changes too, making it far harder to hack.

“There is no way anybody could see which numbers you are looking at. You see typing numbers but you don’t know what the pattern is because each number is here six times,” Hope said during a demonstration.

Backup from body parts 

Biometric data offers another alternative to seas of numbers, letters and symbols.

US giant Apple has already equipped its latest generation iPhone with a fingerprint reader to boost its security profile.

But a group of European hackers, the Hamburg-based Chaos Computer Club, demonstrated that the system could be pirated using a sophisticated “fake” fingerprint made of latex.

Japan’s Fujitsu turned to the other end of the hand and has developed an identification system based on each person’s unique vein pattern.

At its CeBIT stand, the company was showing off its PalmSecure technology on its new ultra-light laptop computer which has a small sensor built in.

Meanwhile Swiss firm KeyLemon has developed a face recognition system using a webcam.

The computer registers parts of the face, “the eyes, the eyebrows, the shape of your nose, your cheekbones, the chin...” a company spokesman said.

The person must then only sit in front of the screen to be recognised and gain access to the computer.

The system, already used by some three million people according to the company, still has a few kinks however so users must remember to take off their eyeglasses, for example, or have consistent lighting in order to pass the identity test.

“Face recognition and fingerprint recognition are additional safety security features; they will never have only face recognition or fingerprint recognition” but rather use them as a crucial backup to passwords, he said.

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo is cribbing from Yelp’s online reviews of local merchants to soup up its search engine.

Ratings and excerpts from Yelp’s merchant reviews began to appear in Yahoo’s search results on Wednesday.

Financial terms of the partnership weren’t disclosed. News of the deal first leaked out last month, so it didn’t come as a surprise. Yahoo’s stock dipped seven cents to $37.49 in afternoon trading while Yelp’s shares gained $2.48, or nearly 3 per cent, to $92.48.

Yahoo Inc. is hoping the snippets from Yelp Inc.’s popular service will spur more people to rely on its search engine when they’re looking for information about a specific city. Yelp could generate more revenue and polish its brand by having its content featured in Yahoo’s search results.

Boosting search traffic is a high priority for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer because the queries spawn insights into users’ interests. That knowledge can then be used to sell advertising.

Yahoo ranks a distant third in Internet search behind Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing.

Neither of those search engines will be able to highlight Yelp’s material in the same way that Yahoo now can.

Google had been showing Yelp snippets it in its search engine a few years ago, prompting Yelp to complain that it was being cheated out of revenue and traffic. After US antitrust regulators opened an investigation in 2011 into whether Google was trying to stifle competition, the company stopped using Yelp’s reviews in its local search results.

Yahoo’s search market share has been steadily slipping since the Sunnyvale, California, company began relying on Microsoft’s technology to produce most of its results in 2010. That alliance still gives Yahoo the flexibility to add other features to its search results.

Microsoft also helps sells some of the advertising displayed alongside Yahoo’s search results. Ad revenue initially slumped after Microsoft and Yahoo joined forces, but the numbers have been looking better during the past two years. After subtracting ad commissions, Yahoo’s search revenue last year rose 6 per cent to $1.7 billion.

Yelp’s revenue last year totalled $233 million, a 69 per cent increase from the previous year.

The days are gone where one device would connect to the web via a simple modem supplied by the telecoms. Now a WiFi router has become a must in any home that has an ADSL subscription. Installing and managing it can be a breeze or a nightmare. It all depends on what you expect from it and to which extend you are, or are not, tech-minded. In any case, however, the device will prove extremely useful.

In the most common setup a WiFi router is an additional, small digital network and communication device that takes the Internet signal from the modem and can then make it available to countless wireless computer-like devices: tablets, smartphones and others, without the need for cables, as the name implies. Moreover, and perhaps as interestingly, the router creates an internal wireless network that enables all these digital devices to communicate and exchange data and files between them all, regardless of the Internet; hence its usefulness. In other words, even if your Internet connection is down, a wireless router still has a useful role to play!

A simple, “dummy” ADSL modem is not enough anymore for many a reason, and they all make perfect sense. First comes mobility. Even assuming that you only have one “poor lonesome” laptop computer in your home that you want to connect to the web, a modem wouldn’t be practical enough for you need to move around, free of wires. Typically, with one laptop and one standard, unsophisticated modem, the connection is made through an Ethernet or network cable. The need to move your single laptop from one room to another implies adding and installing a wireless router.

From the moment you have, in addition to a computer, at least one tablet or one smartphone at home, which by today’s standards is a rather common situation, a router becomes an absolute necessity, just after water, electricity and food; and this hardly an exaggeration. Some try to live without the device by relying on the 3G network of their mobile phone service provider. But till now 3G doesn’t provide the same kind of performance as ADSL, be it in the download speed or in the available monthly download quota, or even pricing.

New, modern routers offer a wealth of features. Admitted, some are complex to understand and manage but if you are not particularly a tech-head you can always ask a friend (or a smart teen-ager, as usual) to help. Besides you would normally need to tackle the sophisticated part of the setup only once. Other than that the basic features are not difficult at all to set if one is willing to read the user manual.

With a WiFi, or wireless router you can decide to give full access to your home devices and restricted access to those guests who come to visit and who want to use your network from their smartphone for example, this by assigning different access passwords. You can also easily set various levels of parental control in a very flexible manner. You can block specific sites to specific devices in the house. A good wireless router will also act as a media server, allowing you to playback the music or video stored on any device on the network, from any other device on the network, wirelessly of course. This alone is worth the purchase and the trouble.

Even better, most new models come with a USB port where you can plug an external storage device, a USB flash drive or an external hard disk. This unit then becomes a convenient common storage area that all devices in the house can share and use. For instance, save photos and music there and make them accessible to every tablet, laptop or smartphone in the premises. Or use it to make automated, programmed backup sets for security.

The best-selling brands of wireless routers are Cisco, Linksys (a Cisco sub-brand), Trendnet, Asus, D-Link and Netgear. For JD50 to JD100 you get a decent wireless router in Amman, and JD100 to JD200 will buy you a very sophisticated one. The speed or performance is indicated with the letters b, g, n or AC. The first two are old, slow and practically obsolete, while “n” is a faster one. AC is the latest and provides unprecedented performance.

NEW YORK – Preschoolers who sing, tell stories and eat dinner with their families tend to be emotionally healthier and better adjusted socially than kids who don't have such routines, a recent study has found.

Researchers examined the number of daily routines that more than 8,500 children practiced with their families. They found each ritual was linked to a 47 per cent increase in the odds that children would have high so-called social-emotional health, which indicates good emotional and social skills.

Social-emotional health "allows children to express their feelings, understand others' emotions and develop and sustain healthy relationships with peers and adults," said Dr Elisa Muniz, the study's lead author and a paediatrician at Bronx Lebanon Hospital in New York.

Such development plays a key role in enabling kids to thrive in the classroom, researchers said.

"There is strong scientific evidence that children who possess these abilities to a greater degree are more likely to succeed in school," Muniz said.

The researchers used data from a long-term study conducted by the National Centre for Education Statistics to gather information about kids and their families as it relates to childhood development and readiness for school.

Children in the study were taken from a national sample of those born in 2001, and data about them were collected from questionnaires, childhood assessments and interviews of the child's main caregiver. The study followed children from birth until they began kindergarten. The recent report used information about the children that had been collected when they were preschool-aged.

Researchers examined how often children participated in five family routines: having dinner as a family at least five times a week; reading, storytelling or singing at least three times a week; and playing at least a few times a week.

Kids' mothers also rated their child's social-emotional health using a 24-item survey. The children were an average of just over four-years-old.

Muniz and colleagues found that about 17 per cent of the children had high levels of social-emotional health, and that children who took part in more family routines were more likely to be socially and emotionally advanced. The exception was reading, which was not clearly linked to social-emotional health.

For example, 11 per cent of the children who had no family routines had high social-emotional health, compared to 25 per cent of those whose families engaged in all five routines. Three quarters of the children participated in at least three family routines.

The study was published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioural Paediatrics.

Researchers said the results weren't surprising given how important ongoing nurturing interactions with caregivers are to young children's health and development.

"When you are happy and secure, you are much more able to learn and interact in healthy ways," said Dr. Claire McCarthy, a paediatrician at Boston Children's Hospital who was not involved in the study.

"When (children) are unhappy, insecure or unsure of their environment, energy goes into dealing with that, and not into learning," she told Reuters Health.

Family routines also help build skills that are crucial for success in academic and social settings, she noted.

"The routines in the study can help with what we call 'executive function': skills like problem-solving, negotiation, planning and delayed gratification. Having good executive function skills is absolutely important for school success," said McCarthy.

Parents can foster kids' social-emotional health in many ways, including practicing the routines in the study. Yet the goal - spending time together to foster communication and loving relationships - can also be achieved through other activities that suit each family's schedule and interests, researchers said. These include taking family walks, making dinner together or having a family movie night.

"Every family is different, and every family knows best what will work for them," said McCarthy.