Thursday, December 2, 2010

Why Babies need more tummy time

How do we know that the babies who miss out on tummy time are at a lasting as opposed to temporary disadvantage? Looking at data from thousands of people born in 1966 in Northern Finland, a research group led by Charlotte Ridgway at the Institute of Metabolic Sciences, Cambridge, has shown that a one-month delay in infant motor development had the same detrimental effect on how a 14-year-old performs in physical education class as a one-unit increase in the same child's body-mass index. Using the same Northern Finland cohort, Ridgway and her co-authors also mapped a one-to-one link between the age at which infants stand unaided in their first year—another critical prewalking milestone—and their muscle strength and endurance, as well as cardiovascular fitness, at age 31.

Another team of researchers, led by Graham Murray at the University of Cambridge, has been looking into how early motor lags could affect other parts of the brain, like the areas responsible for cognitive functions. Using Northern Finland data as well as stats from second group of Brits born in 1946, this group found that the sooner children passed their prewalking motor-development marks, the better the more-complicated areas of their brains performed in later life. Every month in advance of the group average that a child learned to stand on his or her own translated to a half an IQ point increase at age 8. By age 26, early motor developers had higher reading comprehension. And by the time they hit their 30s, they had achieved a higher level of education and scored better on executive-function tasks like categorization—how fast they could group objects of similar shape and color.

What's the best way to make sure that babies who sleep on their backs get their share of tummy time? Dr. John Graham, a pediatrician and director of the Dysmophology Program at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, suggests parents get started soon after they bring their babies home from the hospital. (The exceptions to the tummy-time rule, Graham notes, are babies with weak or stiff necks, an occasional side effect of birth.) With babies who are too young to support their own heads, parents can lie down and cradle them on their chest, introducing the stomach position in a comforting way. When infants get older and get the head-lifting thing down, regularly placing toys around their field of view encourages them to look around and stretch. It's pretty basic, really. And if babies cry because they're not used to the stomach position, stick with it for a bit anyway. The long-term benefit is worth the short-term fuss.

source;

Monday, August 9, 2010

Dora the Role Model's Big Birthday Adventure

Dora builds confidence in children because she shows them how to deal with different situations, and she gives them a chance to respond as if they were in the same room with her,” said Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, a research and advocacy group that focuses on children and the media.

“There really was a need for a character of color in children’s programming,” Mr. Lempert said. Dora is the first Latina character to have the leading role on a children’s series. The show has been commercial television’s top-rated preschool program for most of the decade....

In recent months, as the country’s immigration debate has intensified, a bruised and bloody mug shot of Dora began circulating on the Internet. Her face featured a black eye, and blood dripping from her nose and lip. Underneath her image, a sign reads: “Illegal Border Crossing” then “Resisting Arrest.”...

Dora is not identified as being from a specific country, but as a character who could be from anywhere.

“And that means no one is excluded culturally,” said Ms. Masi de Casanova, so Nickelodeon can market Dora dolls, games, bed linens and children’s clothing to a wide range of consumers. Sales of Dora merchandise have totaled $11 billion since being introduced in 2002, according to Nickelodeon.
-‘Dora’ Special Explores Influence on Children

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Listen to your Kindergarten Teachers

Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.

On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings — not yet peer-reviewed — at an academic conference in Cambridge, Mass. They’re fairly explosive.

Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too....

But the anti-education case usually relies on a combination of anecdotes and selective facts. In truth, the gap between the pay of college graduates and everyone else grew to a record last year, according to the Labor Department, and unemployment has risen far more for the less educated.

This is not simply because smart people — people who would do well no matter what — tend to graduate from college. Education itself can make a difference. A long line of economic research, by Julie Berry Cullen, James Heckman, Philip Oreopoulos and many others, has found as much. The study by Mr. Chetty and his colleagues is the latest piece of evidence....

Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.
-Study Rethinks Importance of Kindergarten Teachers

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Hacker Role Model

New Yorker profile of WikiLeaks Julian Assange;
Assange was born in 1971, in the city of Townsville, on Australia’s northeastern coast, but it is probably more accurate to say that he was born into a blur of domestic locomotion. Shortly after his first birthday, his mother—I will call her Claire—married a theatre director, and the two collaborated on small productions. They moved often, living near Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South Wales, and on Magnetic Island, a tiny pile of rock that Captain Cook believed had magnetic properties that distorted his compass readings. They were tough-minded nonconformists. (At seventeen, Claire had burned her schoolbooks and left home on a motorcycle.) Their house on Magnetic Island burned to the ground, and rifle cartridges that Claire had kept for shooting snakes exploded like fireworks. “Most of this period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer,” Assange told me. “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled. He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned...

While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. “The austerity of one’s interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me,” he said. “It is like chess—chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.” Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, “We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.”

When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful”—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and they broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book called “Underground,” which he collaborated on with a writer named Suelette Dreyfus, he outlined the hacker subculture’s early Golden Rules: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”

Monday, July 19, 2010

The Right Role Models for Children

Some sports personalities are good role models.

We recommend the following book-
Pele, King of Soccer/Pele, El rey del futbol
By Monica Brown
Illustrated by Rudy Gutierrez

School of Pretending

An interesting essay about high school education;

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

via David Friedman

Friday, July 16, 2010

The odds are against human babies!

Interesting article;

In the fable, the tortoise wins the race because the hare takes a nap. But, if anything, human infants nap even more than kittens! And unlike the noble tortoise, babies are helpless, and more to the point, hopeless. They could not learn the basic skills necessary to their independent survival even if they tried. How do human babies manage to turn things around in the end?

In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Michael Ramscar and Evangelia Chrysikou make the case that this very helplessness is what allows human babies to advance far beyond other animals. They propose that our delayed cortical development is precisely what enables us to acquire the cultural building blocks, such as language, that make up the foundations of human achievement. Indeed, the trio makes clear that our early vulnerability is an evolutionary “engineering trade-off,” much like the human larynx—which, while it facilitates the intricate productions of human speech, is actually quite a precarious adaptation for anyone trying to swallow safely. In the same way, they suggest, our ability to learn language comes at the price of an extended period of cognitive immaturity.

This claim hinges on a peculiar and unique feature of our cognitive architecture: the stunningly slow development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). While other animals’ brain regions development in synchrony, in humans, the development of the PFC lags far behind that of other areas. The PFC is the swath of gray matter that makes up the anterior frontal lobes, and functionally, it appears to be heavily implicated in a wide-range of sophisticated planning and attention driven behaviors. Indeed, it is often referred to as the “control” center of the brain. One of its main functions appears to be that of selectively filtering information from the senses, allowing us to attend to specific actions, goals, or tasks. For this reason, “cognitive control” tasks are thought to be one of the best assessors of PFC function and maturity, and they are tests that young children reliably, and ignominiously, fail.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Parents overstate their influence on children

Some children are just born to be bad?;

It goes against the grain not just because it seems like such a grim and pessimistic judgment, but because it violates a prevailing social belief that people have a nearly limitless potential for change and self-improvement. After all, we are the culture of Baby Einstein, the video product that promised — and spectacularly failed — to make geniuses of all our infants.

Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.

“The central pitch of any child psychiatrist now is that the illness is often in the child and that the family responses may aggravate the scene but not wholly create it,” said my colleague Dr. Theodore Shapiro, a child psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The era of ‘there are no bad children, only bad parents’ is gone.”

I recall one patient who told me that she had given up trying to have a relationship with her 24-year-old daughter, whose relentless criticism she could no longer bear. “I still love and miss her,” she said sadly. “But I really don’t like her.”

For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Friday, July 9, 2010

Finding the right role models for your children

Ms. Cyrus’s appeal among those age 13 to 17 has dropped, too, according to E-Poll Market Research, a brand and celebrity research firm. Of those surveyed online recently, only 24 percent said they liked or liked her a lot, compared with 45 percent in 2008. Those who track preteens are noticing the shift. Tina Wells, a market research executive who consults with Fortune 500 companies, said Ms. Cyrus ranked No. 7 in April on its list of celebrities considered cool by children 8 to 12 years old. Two years ago she was No. 1....

It is tricky for any teenage star to navigate the path to adulthood. (Britney Spears? Lindsay Lohan?) But Ms. Cyrus, it seems, is alienating her fans faster than she is gaining new ones. Partly to blame is last year’s pole dance at the Teen Choice Awards, and the recent video posted on TMZ of her giving a lap dance to a 44-year-old film director.

For some mothers of Ms. Cyrus’s fans, her wrenching transition from teen idol to sexual icon has become a teachable moment.

“I’m just impressed with kids picking up on the change and saying it’s not that interesting and they don’t relate,” said Megan Calhoun of Ross, Calif., the founder of TwitterMoms, a blog for mothers that has 26,000 members. Some have expressed dismay at the shift in Ms. Cyrus’s persona. “It’s almost as if these young stars don’t realize it is a turnoff,” Ms. Calhoun said.

Some parents chalk up her behavior to teenage angst. “It doesn’t surprise me what she is going through,” said Wendy Ellis, a mother of two from Odenton, Md. “The raging hormones. She is testing the limits of the box and what is appropriate.”
-Fans of Miley Cyrus Question Her New Path

Related: Where morals and science collide

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Please Help Avoid Misdiagnosing Development Disorders


It is estimated that one in six children suffer from developmental disorders, including mental retardation, autism spectrum disorders, learning disorders, attentional disorders, genetic disorders, sleep disorders.  However, despite the fact that all these disorders originate in the brain, most of them are diagnosed solely by looking at behavioural symptoms without ever looking at the brain!  That is, they are diagnosed behaviourally rather than neurologically.  This often results in an incomplete or inaccurate diagnosis....

Almost 50% of the children previously diagnosed with autism are found to be suffering from some degree of brain seizure activity that is undetectable to the eye.  In some cases, these seizures are the cause of the child's autism-like symptoms.  In other cases, these seizures are not causal, but comorbid (coexistent) to autism and are exacerbating the child's symptoms.  And in a few cases, the seizures are mild and possibly unrelated to, or a consequence of, the child's symptoms.  In the cases where these seizures are the cause of the symptoms, once the seizures have been detected and treated, the level and speed of recovery in the children has been remarkable.

Learn more about the work of Dr. Aditi Shankardass

Monday, July 5, 2010

Making Stories from Pictures


Todays Challenge: Use one or more of the Norman Rockwell paintings, depicted in the images below, to create a new short story or poem:


A profile of Rockwell in NYT;
To me the most important part of Rockwell’s work is that it illustrates compassion and caring about other people,” the filmmaker George Lucas, who lives in Marin County, Calif., said recently. “You could almost say he was a Buddhist painter.”

Steven Spielberg, speaking from Los Angeles, had similar praise. “Anything for Norman,” he said, when asked to discuss his work. “He was always on my mind because I had a great deal of respect for how he could tell stories in a single frozen image. Entire stories.”...

Mr. Lucas and Mr. Spielberg trace their Rockwell love to their childhoods, when they pored over the covers of The Saturday Evening Post, a weekly magazine (and misnomer) that arrived in mailboxes on Thursdays. They started collecting his work before it was validated by the art world. According to his records Mr. Lucas bought his first Rockwell, a calendar illustration, on May 16, 1980. A year and a half later Mr. Spielberg bought his first Rockwell, a stirring painting that was commissioned in 1923 as an advertisement for Underwood typewriters. It shows a young writer hunched at his cluttered desk as Daniel Boone floats above on puffy clouds, a figure of glamorous virility who provides the boy with both a subject for his literary efforts and a painful reminder of his limitations.

“I hung the painting over my desk,” Mr. Spielberg recalled. “It was my deblocker. Whenever I hit a wall or couldn’t figure out where a story was going, I just looked up at that painting.”

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Memo to Self via Book Covers

"One interesting practical suggestion is to keep a "gratitude journal," in which you routinely list experiences and circumstances for which you are grateful."- Ben Bernanke

Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier, by Robert A. Emmons

Keep a Gratitude Journal- some reasons:

Spirituality: Those who regularly attend religious services and engage in religious activities such as prayer reading religious material score are more likely to be grateful. Grateful people are more likely to acknowledge a belief in the interconnectedness of all life and a commitment to and responsibility to others (McCullough et. al., 2002). Gratitude does not require religious faith, but faith enhances the ability to be grateful.

A related benefit was observed in the realm of personal goal attainment: Participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based) over a two-month period compared to subjects in the other experimental conditions.

Weekend Forum- Just love, Just laugh,

This week's question: How much patience do you need to be a parent?

Related:
The Best Parents Have Patience

How to Become a Patient Parent

Stubborn Pre-schoolers;
Three year olds: first, the sympathy. My grandfather always said about my brother at this age that he could wear out an iron horse and aggravate a fly to death.

I have a stubborn kid, too, still stubborn at 7 although better than he was at 3. Your daughter does sound like an extra handful though. First of all, see if you can get a book (from your local library) called "Your Three Year Old." This is part of a series written some years ago by a couple of psychologists and I have found it very useful in dealing with the psychological changes that happen as children grow older.

In the case of my son I am a single parent with no other support, so I really had to choose my battles to avoid getting totally flattened. If my son wanted to eat cereal every night for dinner for two months, that's what he ate. When we got into a fight in the morning about getting dressed warmly enough, I took him outside to feel the cool air, then he was usually good about dressing warmly enough.

The only advice I can offer you is to try to give your daughter a choice as much as possible, but not an unlimited choice. And as much as possible you make her decide, in a timely manner. So when you are fixing her hair, ask her how many ponytails she wants. When it is time to get dressed (and don't, by the way, say "Time to get dressed.") ask her to choose between pants and a dress. For dinner, you might offer her what the family is eating, or give her one other easy to fix option, such as cereal, make her decide, then stick with it.

A Parents' Primer on Patience

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Remember to send your children to Khan Academy!

The Khan Academy

"My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently....

But to Mr. Khan, occasional mistakes are part of his method. By watching him stumble through a problem, students see the process better, he argues. Sometimes they correct him in comments on his YouTube videos, and he says this makes students more engaged with the material. "Sometimes when it's a little rough, it's going to be a better product than when you overprepare," he says.

The Khan Academy explicitly challenges many of higher-education's most sacred assumptions: that professional academics make the best teachers; that hourlong lectures are the best way to relate material; and that in-person teaching is better than videos. Mr. Khan argues that his little lectures disprove all of that....

Clay Shirky, an associate teacher at New York University and a popular Internet guru, recently challenged his more than 50,000 Twitter followers with a similar thought exercise:

"If you were going to create a college from scratch, what would you do?"
-College 2.0: A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube

'Life is a Kind of Chess'

At what age should we be teaching children to think? Is Chess an effective way? Which Board games are the best?;

Research shows, there is a strong correlation between learning to play chess and academic achievement. In 2000, a landmark study found that students who received chess instruction scored significantly higher on all measures of academic achievement, including math, spatial analysis, and non-verbal reasoning ability (Smith and Cage, 2000).

Related:
Bedtime Stories for Children

Chess program has students feeling like kings and queens
It exposes them to sportsmanship -- the thrill of victory and gracious defeat,” said Sears.

Parent Michael Scholfield agrees. He has been more than impressed with his 6-year-old son Matthew’s improved behavior since learning the game at Jones.

“He’s more disciplined and patient,” said Scholfield.
Chess has taught him to lose gracefully and to win gracefully -- not to gloat. It’s all about doing your best.

Chess Links

Play Shredder Chess Online

Teaching critical thinking: A Parenting Science guide

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Kumon- can someone do a randomised trial?

Seeking feedback on the effectiveness of Kumon.

Related:
Kumon -UK
Kumon India

HomeSchool Creations

Is it the device or the technique?

Those days are gone. Dr. Berger started complaining to Zimmer a while back that one of its artificial-knee models was failing prematurely, and he went public recently with a study that he says proves it. Zimmer told him that the problem was not the artificial knee, but his technique, and pointed to data overseas indicating that the knee was safe.


Last year, Zimmer did not give Dr. Berger a new contract. The company says it routinely rotates consultants.

“I trained hundreds of doctors for them and made them tens of millions,” Dr. Berger said in interview here, in which he also lambasted Zimmer executives as dissembling, out-of-touch bureaucrats. “So was this just a coincidence? Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t.”...

Amid the booming use of artificial joints in the United States, the breakup between Dr. Berger and Zimmer highlights what experts say is a troubling situation for patients and doctors: when disputes arise about orthopedic implant safety, there are no independent referees or sources of information because no one tracks the performance of the devices.

“There is no way of knowing who is right because we don’t have the data,” said Dr. Kevin J. Bozic, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, San Francisco....

While producers of implanted heart devices have a voluntary system in which outside panels investigate problems, American makers of orthopedic devices do not. Many of the artificial joints that surgeons like Dr. Berger use, including the Zimmer knee at issue, are cleared under law by the Food and Drug Administration for sale without testing in patients. In addition, no one in the country tracks the long-term performance of artificial hips and knees, a $6.7 billion annual business that surged as baby boomers reached middle age....

As he tells it, his relationship with Zimmer frayed over a version of a widely used Zimmer knee, known as the NexGen. The model at issue, called the NexGen CR-Flex, is designed to provide a greater range of motion than the standard NexGen.

Most surgeons implant an artificial knee using a cement-like adhesive to bond the thigh bone to the portion of the device that bends. But some specialists, like Dr. Berger, try to avoid adhesives because the cement can break down and cause device failure. So Zimmer also sells an uncemented version of the CR-Flex that relies instead on the bone naturally fusing with the implant.
-Surgeon vs. Knee Maker: Who’s Rejecting Whom?

Saturday, June 19, 2010

A Happy Father's Day

Bryan Caplan reflects on being a father;

Father's Day is a time to reflect on whether you want to be a parent--or want to be a parent again. If you simply don't like kids, research has little to say to you. If however you're interested in kids, but scared of the sacrifices, research has two big lessons. First, parents' sacrifice is much smaller than it looks, and childless and single is far inferior to married with children. Second, parents' sacrifice is much larger than it has to be... Instead of trying to mold your children into perfect adults, you can safely kick back, relax and enjoy your journey together--and seriously consider adding another passenger.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Book Cover Art

Agree, Disagree?

Question for the Day

What dividing moments do you remember of your children’s childhood? Which ones did you not notice until they had passed?

Eat Brown Rice

Just replacing a third of a serving of white rice with brown each day could reduce one’s risk of Type 2 diabetes by 16 percent, a statistical analysis showed. A serving is a cup of cooked rice.

The study, which used data from two Harvard nurses’ health studies and a separate study of health professionals, isn’t the first to point a finger at foods like white rice as a culprit in Type 2 diabetes. A 2007 study of Chinese women in Shanghai found that middle-aged women who ate large amounts of white rice and other refined carbohydrates were also at increased risk for diabetes compared to their peers who ate less....

But, Dr. Sun said, there were many possible explanations for why brown rice eaters are at lower risk for Type 2 diabetes. In addition to having a lower glycemic index than white rice, brown rice also contains important nutrients like magnesium that are stripped during the refining process; it also contains much more fiber. Earlier studies have found that having these nutrients in the diet protects against diabetes, Dr. Sun said.
-Eating Brown Rice to Cut Diabetes Risk

Monday, June 14, 2010

Three Little Pigs- which one grew up to be an engineer?

An interesting article about a new fad in teaching kindergarten kids engineering;

All 300 students at Clara E. Coleman Elementary School are learning the A B C’s of engineering this year, even those who cannot yet spell e-n-g-i-n-e-e-r-i-n-g. The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum....

“We say they’re born engineers — they naturally want to solve problems — and we tend to educate it out of them.” ...

At the same time, Congress is considering legislation, endorsed by more than 100 businesses and organizations like I.B.M. and Lockheed Martin, to promote engineering education from kindergarten through 12th grade...

Engineering is not a requirement in most states. (New Jersey is an exception: the state standards mandate some exposure to engineering by second grade.)...

They plan multiday projects, often built around classic and popular stories like the Three Little Pigs, and take students step by step through the engineering process: design, build, test, evaluate.

“They have to have the thinking skills of an engineer to keep up with all the innovation that’s constantly coming into their world,” Ms. Morrow said.

First graders were recently challenged with helping a farmer keep rabbits out of his garden.

In teams of four, they brainstormed about building fences with difficult-to-scale ladders instead of doors and setting out food decoys for the rabbits. They drew up blueprints and then brought them to life with plastic plates, paper cups, straws and foam paper.

Then they planned to test their ideas with pop-up plastic rabbits. If the fences were breached, they would be asked to improve the design.

“It gets your brain going,” said Elizabeth Crowley, 7, who wants to be an engineer when she grows up. “And I actually learn something when I’m doing a project — like you can work together to do something you couldn’t do before.”

In the kindergarten class that was designing homes — none out of hay, wood or brick — for the three pigs, Ms. Morrow started the lesson by asking the 20 children sitting cross-legged on the carpet if they knew what engineers do.

“They can write poems?” one girl guessed.

“Well,” Ms. Morrow allowed, “they could write a poem about something they build.”

But if they were still unsure about the language of engineering, the students were soon immersed in its nuts and bolts.

They tweaked their houses, adding ever more elaborate improvements to thwart the wolf. Then they huffed and they puffed.

And not a single house blew down.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Parenting Advice from Ken Arrow

When my PhD thesis advisor, Ken Arrow, found out that I was soon to have my first child, he said to me, "Just remember, it is an investment."
-Joshua Gans, Parentonomics, p 212

Friday, June 11, 2010

Assorted on Potty Training

Why I don't care if my son goes to kindergarten in pull-ups;
Depending on which website you peruse, the average age of toilet training for boys ranges from about 31 to 38 months. At 46 months old, Dashiell is long in the (baby) tooth to be sporting diapers. According to his preschool teachers, everyone else in his class is running around happy and dry in their X-Men and Ni Hao Kai-Lan underwear.
 
In this laissez-faire attitude toward the toilet, I am apparently unusual. Potty training — and the anxiety related to it — is big business: Toilet Training in Less Than a Day is a bestseller on Amazon; there are chapters of the organization Diaper Free Baby in over 35 states; and sites like Pottytrainingconcepts.com sell charts, pee-on-demand dolls, and “toilet-time targets” (for your son or daughter to aim at). And then there’s the Potty Mate, which allows you to record encouraging audio messages that play back when your child unfurls the toilet paper roll (like, say, “Nice #2 there, Junior!”). I’d venture to say I’d rather have my son potty-train at age 5 than think that the Charmin should be speaking to him.

Diapers in Kindergarten?

Toilet Training and Incentives: Child No.2 (Part I)

The Infant Brain

For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study.

Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills only gradually, others that many of our mental attributes are innate.

Sigmund Freud concluded that infants didn't differentiate themselves from their environment.

The pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought babies' perception of the world began as a 'blooming, buzzing confusion' of colour, light and sound, before they developed a more sophisticated worldview, first through the senses and later through symbol.

More recent scholars such as the leading American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky have argued that the fundamentals of language are there from birth. Chomsky has famously argued that all humans have an innate, universally applicable grammar.

Over the last ten to twenty years, new research has shed fresh light on important aspects of the infant brain which have long been shrouded in mystery or mired in dispute, from the way we start to learn to speak to the earliest understanding that other people have their own minds.
-The Infant Brain, (BBC In Our Time)

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Welcome to ABCs of Parentonomics

Has been reading Joshua Gans Parentonomics. This blog is my attempt to make sense of parenting and its economics, science and psychology.