Tags / 57 quotes from 16 sources
#children
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Why human childhood lasts so long
It’s a question that bothers many evolutionary scientists: How come it takes so long to raise a human child? Aside from perhaps a whale or two, we have the longest childhood on the planet. Where did this decades-long sojourn come from, and why don’t other animals have to go…
Parenting, a job that only sends invoices
Yes, you have to teach children everything—even how to regulate their body fluids. And they are built to learn, which means you have to watch even your most cavalier behaviors. Both take a tremendous amount of energy. So evolutionary biologists have to wonder: Why would anyone…
Let children see you make up after a fight
Even in an emotionally stable home, one without regular marital hostility, there will be fights. Fortunately, research shows that the amount of fighting couples do in front of their children is less damaging than the lack of reconciliation the kids observe. Many couples will…
The car keys: children imitate their parents
Couples who know about the Four Grapes of Wrath and who begin preparing in advance are much less likely to trample on them once baby comes home. When conflicts occur for these couples, the effects are usually much milder. I can attest to that. I grew up in a military household…
Nature and nurture each control half of intelligence
For all of us, nature controls about 50 percent of our intellectual horsepower, and environment determines the rest. This means two things for parents: First, no matter how hard your child tries, there will be limits to what his brain can do. Second, that’s only half of the…
Inquisitiveness, the innovator's DNA
What traits separate creative, visionary people who consistently conjure up financially successful ideas from less imaginative, managerial types who carry them out? Two business researchers explored that simple question. They conducted a whopping six-year study with more than…
The Torrance test predicts creative output
Can you predict creativity in kids? Psychologist Paul Torrance created a 90-minute exam called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The tests are composed of some truly delightful problems. Children might be presented with a picture of a stuffed rabbit, then told they have…
IQ tests miss most of intelligence
From exploration, self-control, and creativity to verbal and nonverbal ability, it is clear that the intelligence stew has many ingredients. Standard IQ tests are not capable of measuring most of these elements, even though they play a powerful role in the future success of…
Talking to children raises their IQ
Speak to your children as often as you can. It is one of the most well-established findings in all of the developmental literature. The linkage between words and smarts was discovered through some pretty invasive research. In one study, investigators descended upon a family’s…
The decline of open-ended play
This kind of open-ended play was fertilizing their brains with the behavioral equivalent of Miracle-Gro. That sentence might seem strange. Open-ended play? Not “open-ended purchase of electronic educational toys”? Not French lessons, followed by hours of militant drilling?…
Television and aggressive children
decades we have known of the connection between hostile peer interactions and the amount of kids’ exposure to television. The linkage used to be controversial (maybe aggressive people watch more TV than others?), but we now see that it’s an issue of our deferred-imitation…
Video games and childhood obesity
What does that literature say about video games and developing brains in babies? There’s not much, and it paints a decidedly mixed picture. This is understandable. The subject is too new, and the technology undergirding it is changing too rapidly. So what parents of newborns…
Parenting is not a race
Write this across your heart before your child comes into the world: Parenting is not a race. Kids are not proxies for adult success. Competition can be inspiring, but brands of it can wire your child’s brain in a toxic way. Comparing your kids with your friends’ kids will not…
Authoritative parenting works best
Authoritative: Just right Responsive plus demanding. The best of the lot. These parents are demanding, but they care a great deal about their kids. They explain their rules and encourage their children to state their reactions to them. They encourage high levels of…
Musical training tunes emotional hearing
There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training. Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids—those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7—responded with…
Dismissing a child's grief over a goldfish
How might the attitudes of discouraging or ignoring emotions play out in real life? Imagine that the family goldfish, the only pet your 3-year-old son Kyle has ever known, suddenly dies. Visibly upset, Kyle mopes around the house all day, saying things like “I want fishy back!”…
The three-legged stool of moral upbringing
Families who raise moral kids follow very predictable patterns when it comes to rules and discipline. The patterns are not a behavioral insurance policy, but they are as close as research gets us right now. Many interlocking components make up these patterns; an illustration…
Warm, explained rules earn committed compliance
Overall, a clear picture emerges about how to raise well-adjusted, moral children. Parents whose rules issue from warm acceptance and whose rationales are consistently explained end up being perceived as reasonable and fair, rather than as capricious and dictatorial. They are…
Children create grown-ups
You may think that grown-ups create children. The reality is that children create grown-ups. They become their own person, and so do you. Children give so much more than they take.
Parenting is about developing hearts
Seeing his personality blossom was truly a gift. This is the message I want to leave you with as we part ways. As a new parent, you may feel sometimes that all children do is take from you, but it is just a form of giving in disguise. Kids present you with an ear infection, but…
A playroom full of choices
There may be as many different types of playrooms as there are families, but every one of them should have the following design element: lots of choices. A place for drawing. A place for painting. Musical instruments. A wardrobe hanging with costumes. Blocks. Picture books…
Epigrams On Programming
Teaching computer science
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
Healthy Eating: Helping Your Child Learn Healthy Eating Habits
Food eating tips for kids
Offer new food. When trying a new food at a meal, be sure to include another food that your child already likes. Don't give up on offering new foods. Children may need many tries before they accept a new food. Don't say "Clean your plate." Try not to manage your child's eating…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
Justice is reprisal and exchange upon the basis of an approximate equality of power.
Origin of Justice.—Justice (reasonableness) has its origin among approximate equals in power, as Thucydides (in the dreadful conferences of the Athenian and Melian envoys) has rightly conceived. Thus, where there exists no demonstrable supremacy and a struggle leads but to…
Leielui (italian Edition) (de Carlo, Andrea)
I figli che crescono e si allontanano
Fino all’anno scorso avevano la naturalezza di una piccola tribù di selvaggi: la costante ricerca di contatto fisico e mentale, la sovrapposizione continua di voci e gesti, il parlarsi addosso, ridersi addosso, dormirsi addosso. C’era un fluido meraviglioso che scorreva tra…
Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana
What makes us human is languaging
What makes us human is languaging. "Humanity arises in the social dynamics in which languaging takes place". This is difficult to prove but Maturana cites examples of feral children brought up by wolves so that what we find are wolves with the genetics of Homo Sapiens. They…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
L'esame di ammissione alla scuola materna
Per ottenere prestazioni eccellenti, ci si prepara sin dall’infanzia. Nella società giapponese tutto è concatenato: l’iscrizione alla università prestigiosa dipende dalla frequentazione della scuola superiore prestigiosa, e così via. Persino l’esame di ammissione alla scuola…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
Unfinished skyscrapers as silos for shadows
We’d reached the perimeter of the legal slum, and the megalithic immensity of the twin skyscrapers loomed before us. Concreting had been completed to three-quarters of their height, but there were no windows, doors, or fittings on the unfinished buildings. With no flash or…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Psyching up a struggling son
We attempted to psych him up using positive mental attitude techniques. “Come on, son! You can do it! We know you can.
Helping our son without really believing in him
we began to realize that what we were doing to help our son was not in harmony with the way we really saw him.
Focusing on what we couldn't control
As long as we focused our efforts on those things, we accomplished nothing, except to increase our own feelings of inadequacy and helplessness and to reinforce our son’s dependence.
Daily behavior betrays how we feel
pressing problems, immediate concerns, and outward behaviors. I become reactive. And the way I interact with my children every day often bears little resemblance to the way I deeply feel about them.
Family as a center undermines the family
Another common center is the family. This, too, may seem to be natural and proper. As an area of focus and deep investment, it provides great opportunities for deep relationships, for loving, for sharing, for much that makes life worthwhile. But as a center, it ironically…
A family mission statement
Many families are managed on the basis of crises, moods, quick fixes, and instant gratification—not on sound principles. Symptoms surface whenever stress and pressure mount: people become cynical, critical, or silent or they start yelling and overreacting. Children who observe…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Toddlers radiating silver light
I found myself—literally, as though I had just woken up—in the middle of Hampstead Village. I was standing in front of Christchurch, and in the forecourt of the church was a nursery school. The children were little more than toddlers, mostly two or three years old. They were…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The taboo of taboos: you’re it
But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or “pretending” to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it’s always the inspector. This, then…
Society's game with self-contradictory rules
Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules. Just because we do not exist apart…
There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy
..the individual—instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world—is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless and alien universe, his principal task is to…
Befuddled adults, befuddled children
Instead of giving our children clear and explicit explanations of the game-rules of the community, we befuddle them hopelessly because we—as adults—were once so befuddled, and, remaining so, do not understand the game we are playing. A double-bind game is a game with…
The social indoctrination of an independent self
He has no way of resisting this kind of social indoctrination. It is constantly reinforced with rewards and punishments. It is built into the basic structure of the language he is learning. It is rubbed in repeatedly with such remarks as, “It isn’t like you to do a thing like…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Choosing the late lama's possessions
Without necessarily adopting a deliberate strategy, a child could sense from the reactions of the group which object should be his settled choice. This is not remotely fanciful: even horses can do as much.
The Growth Of Independence In The Young Child
Parents' own childhoods influence childrens development
In this way we come full circle. The emotional disturbances in parents which hinder the natural development of dependence and independence in their children spring almost always from a disturbance in this very function in the parents' own childhoods. Problem children grow up to…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
What children need, money cannot buy
Raising healthy children is a labor-intensive operation. Contrary to the news from the broader culture, most of what children need, money cannot buy. Children need time and space, attention, affection, guidance, and conversation. They need sheltered places where they can be…
Enjoying children beats college theory
“When I hire those college students, they are full of theory but don’t know what to do in the classroom. I’d rather hire someone with no college but a true enjoyment of young children.”
Children's interests drive the curriculum
“The child’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting-point for all education” (6). According to Dewey, children’s interests form the basis for curriculum planning. He believed that the interests and background of each child and group must be…
Dewey and going green
John Dewey supported parents at a time when the United States was transitioning from an agricultural to an industrial age. Had someone mentioned “going green” to Dewey, he would have thought we were referencing learning activities for children about color. But as we ponder his…
Montessori's child-sized classrooms
Montessori created a school environment to make up for the impoverished conditions of many of the children’s homes. She determined that to be comfortable, young children need furnishings their own size and tools that fit their small hands. Because such things were not available…
Careful observation as Montessori's method
Since Montessori trained as a doctor, she brought the skills of a scientist to the classroom. When she turned her energies toward the education of young children, it seemed only natural to use her scientific skills. She believed that if you are going to teach, you need to know…
Adults who do too much for children
It is clear that Montessori had strong feelings about the tendency of adults to undermine children’s competence by doing too much for them. She used the word serving in her discussions and cautioned teachers that children remain incompetent if adults do for them what they are…
Toddlers also need firm limits
At the same time, they need consistent, firm, reassuring limits set by caring adults.
Small choices for toddlers
Most two-year-olds aren’t ready for “What would you like for lunch today?” But choosing between a cheese sandwich and a peanut butter sandwich offers just the right challenge. Looking at a drawer full of clothing might reduce a toddler to tears or a tantrum because the choices…
The egocentric preoperational child
According to Piaget, after the sensorimotor stage, children’s cognitive development enters the preoperational stage, which extends from the second year of life through age seven or eight. The preoperational stage is when children’s thinking differs most from adult thought…
Ironing the baby: single-focus thinking
Preoperational children also tend to focus on one attribute of an object or person at a time. It is hard for them to think of their mother as their grandma’s daughter, for instance. This single-focus thinking is revealed in children’s conversations, if adults know how to listen…
Preschoolers can't hold several qualities at once
Clearly, the children do not make the connection that an iron might be a good tool to use on clothes or curly hair but not on babies. These children are not cruel or limited, but they are incapable of holding several qualities of an object or situation in their minds…
Self-regulation beats early academics
There is growing evidence today that suggests that a preschool-age child’s ability to apply cognitive control, also called executive function, is a better predictor of later school success than any academic learning acquired during the preschool years. Executive function…
Worry Less About Children's Screen Use, Parents Told - Bbc News
Screen time and children
The recommendation that children should not use the devices in the hour before bedtime comes because of evidence that they can harm sleep. The devices stimulate the brain, and the blue light produced by them can disrupt the body's secretion of the sleep hormone melatonin. While…
Zappa Quotes
The cool-person syndrome
The cool-person syndrome is peculiarly American. Part of that has to do with the way the educational business is run in the U. S. It’s not based on how much you can teach your child: it’s based on how much money the suppliers of basic materials can make off your child…