Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
When Kids Attack!

The ever-funny Alice Bradley writes about how the pains of pregnancy don’t go away after the child’s popped out.

Babies, as we are told, might bite or kick or punch or pull or grind because they are little scientists, innocently exploring their world by pummeling it into a mush. They don’t mean any harm; they just want to see what will happen when they knock something senseless, is all. The important thing, the experts will tell you, is not to make a big deal of these playful experiments. Ignore. Or simply issue a firm “No.” Do not yell or carry on. There’s nothing a baby enjoys more than a dramatic reaction, naturally — your pained shrieking is, to them, delightfully novel!

Because I had read all about this feisty period in a baby’s development, I was ready. (I might have practiced my firm yet dispassionate “No” on a few throw pillows. Maybe a stuffed animal. Who can say?) But the first time Henry decided to experiment (scientifically), his chosen subject was my mom. She didn’t know what I and the experts knew. She had not been apprised of this new thinking. She was holding him and he was gurgling and cooing, and then his hand was a fist and it landed in her eye socket. She cried out in surprise and pain. I lunged forward to stop her, which further alarmed both her and Henry.

“You’re not supposed to react!” I cried out. “The books say not to react!”

Read through to the end; you wouldn’t want to miss out on a) Expert defensive baby-repelling moves, like “The Boa Constrictor,” or b) the absolute riot within the comments to the piece, where we learn that the vast majority of people who post comments on the Internet don’t have a sense of humor.

Mar 19, 2010 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Considering Kids and Stress, Part II

Lisa Belkin, of the New York Times, takes a more in-depth look at the American Psychological Assocation’s recent “Stress in America” report that I mentioned earlier, drawing attention to some of the statistics that I glossed over.

(The disparity between children’s stress levels concerning certain things and how little their parents recognise those levels is particularly interesting. I can only conclude that most adults are really, really bad at understanding and sympathising with children – sometimes especially their own.)

Belkin also considers recent research that looked at stress and college students. Gee, that’s unfortunately all too familiar.

Nov 07, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

The Economics of Potty Training

If you’ve ever been through the potty training process with a kid, you know exactly what is meant by “the economics” of it. In just a few words: Stickers. Gummy bears. Lauded praise. Treats!

Yup, exactly.

That’s why Chicago Pop’s thorough analysis of the “Applied Economics of Potty Training” is so hilarious.

We did not invent the use of stickers as a type of currency. Stickers have been used to incent toddler behavior as long as we can remember, probably since the dawn of adhesives. Like gold or precious stones, stickers have an intrinsic value to the toddler’s eye. So the first step in potty training is to establish a standard of value between a certain amount of potty production, and a certain number of stickers. In our study, this standard was 1 : 1, or, 1 sticker to 1 poop or 1 pee-pee.

Prior to this step, poop has no value. Suddenly, it is worth one sticker, and if he pees, maybe two. The basis for exchange has been created, and through the miracle of economics, poop has become a commodity.

Of course Chicago Pop pays due diligence to the economic roadbumps along the way – chief among them, the feared “Grandparent Hyperinflation” of the commodity market. Duh duh duh!

Nov 06, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Stress Greatly Impacts Today's Kids

By Daniel Bigler :: Thursday November 5, 2009

Increasingly, health and psychology professionals as well as the public at large are recognising that adults aren’t the only ones impacted by stress – children are as well.

In what could probably be considered a milestone, the American Psychological Association included children, for the first time, in their annual survey of stress in America. USA Today has a run-down of the results of the survey, which cites school and their family’s finances as chief among the things that children were concerned about in their lives.

A major thing that sticks out as perhaps unexpected: full schedules of activities for children don’t particularly seem to affect their stress levels. It’s one area most adults worry is particularly stressful for kids – fearing children might be getting burnt out from doing too much, whether they’re “losing out on childhood.” Interestingly, most kids didn’t mind it at all.

Gabby and Izzy Cano, 11-year-old twins from Alexandria, Va., are cases in point. The sixth-graders are involved in lots of activities, but their busy lives don’t seem to cause them much stress.

They’re leaders on the student council at school, where Izzy is president and Gabby is secretary. They’re wrapping up soccer season (three times a week) and will start a weekly dance class this winter. They also take weekly cooking classes and are enrolled in violin lessons at school. “Sometimes it’s pretty busy, but it’s not too busy,” Izzy says.

I suppose that certainly does highlight how adults’ sociological concepts of what is and should be “childhood” – including our own Western idealised hopes for our children to experience a care-free, blissful growing-up, wrought out of a “Leave it to Beaver” nostalgia – often don’t match up with the real thing, or even what kids want for that matter.

I don’t want to read too far into this without consulting kids, but I might guess that children ultimately just want to feel a sense of connectedness and engagement to a broader life and culture, in some way. Many kids fulfil this need on their own, through their own unique, peer-based communities and by “hanging out” – but perhaps they’re also generally alright with meeting this need through programming and activities.

Another gem from the survey:

63% of the 235 parents who were among participating adults said they believed their stress levels had slight or no influence on their child’s stress levels.

I’m just blown away by that number – which of course doesn’t reflect the reality of kids. How can such an overwhelming percentage of parents believe their lives and behaviour doesn’t have an effect on their kids? Naturally children’s social relationships and the well-being of the people around them are going to be a profound role in the well-being of children’s own lives.

To end with, an ultimate reminder of how truly connected kids are to the broader world, even when we think they aren’t paying attention or don’t care:

Gabby Cano says she sometimes worries “about the problems of the world.”

“You kind of want to help, but it’s not easy to know what to do.”

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"Damning" Interview with Baby Einstein Creator

BoingBoing shares from an old 2001 interview with “Baby Einstein” video series creator Julie Aigner-Clark:

“Everything I did in the first videos was based on my experience as a mom. I didn’t do any research. I knew my baby. I knew what she liked to look at. I assumed that what my baby liked to look at, most other babies would, too.”

I’m not exactly sure if that’s as “damning” as BoingBoing spins it, especially since most people seem to have had the common sense over the years not to accept everything on labels as fact. Actually it seems that most parents use Baby Einstein as a convenient, “I’m sleep deprived, the laundry is piling, and that darn kid still hasn’t taken his nap” babysitter for when things are tough – figuring, hey, it might not help, but it probably isn’t going to seriously harm or murder their babies. (At least that’s what a columnist for the Boston Globe says.) And hey, who’s to blame parents? They have a tough job.

Still, as long as we’re gonna actually have these things around, it’s nice to be clear about what Baby Einstein DVDs are actually bought and used for. And that means no hyperbolic “research claims,” Disney.

Oct 29, 2009 :: Tagged under: , :: #

No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund

I don’t think it’s going to come as a shock to anybody that the Baby Einstein videos and DVDs don’t actually turn your baby into Einstein – but as the New York Times reports, the Walt Disney Company is now issuing refunds to parents who don’t feel they’ve lived up to the “educational promises” the series once touted.

“We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.

…

Despite their ubiquity, and the fact that many babies are transfixed by the videos, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under 2.

In 2006, Ms. Linn’s group went to the Federal Trade Commission to complain about the educational claims made by Disney and another company, Brainy Baby. As a result, the companies dropped the word “educational” from their marketing. But the group didn’t think that was enough.

Now, Disney’s offer of refunds – or “enhanced consumer satisfaction guarantee” – are a sort of implicit reckoning with the actual research behind the issue, after having long-ridden the “educational” label’s coattails onto success.

Sure, the controversy is bound to get overblown – but I think the real thing here is that social scientists can sort of reclaim (at least to a degree) their stake in the “educational research” department. Just because the packaging says something’s educational, doth not make it so. (And if you want proof, Paula Slade at the Examiner has compiled a terrific list of the actual research on under 2s and how media affects their development.)

Whether parents continue to play the Baby Einstein DVDs remains to be seen; who knows, they might have other reasons to plop their kid in front of the TV. But at least now, hopefully, companies will be a little less loose with co-opting the “educational” and “research based” labels for use in their marketing – and parents will be a little more cautious about believing such labels.

Or to summarise things another way: “An occasional Twinkie won’t kill you. But don’t let anyone ever sell it to you as a carrot.”

Oct 24, 2009 :: Tagged under: , :: #

Texting, Surfing, Studying?

This pretty much sums up the state of adults’ understanding of children and their relationship with the new digital age we live in.

The New York Times:

Parents are digital immigrants, Dr. Christakis said; children are digital natives. “In the 20th century, you worried about a digital divide separating rich from poor,” he said. “That’s narrowed, and the one that’s emerging is separating parents from their children. We’re fairly clueless about the digital world they inhabit.”

Oct 18, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , , , , , :: #

Engaging Your Baby with Talk

From the NY Times, on the importance of parents spending time talking to their barely-verbal young infants and toddlers:

“Young children require time and one-on-one feedback as they struggle to formulate utterances in order to build their language and cognitive skills. The most basic skills are not being taught by example, and society is falling prey to the quick response that our computer generation has become accustomed to.

“Parents need to be reminded of the significance of their communicative model.”

In other news, running with strollers is apparently a thing now.

Oct 02, 2009 :: Tagged under: , :: #

Enforcing Bedtimes Improves Kids' Health

CNN.com:

Setting bedtimes can improve sleep quality and quantity for infants and toddlers, according to a growing body of research. Not getting enough sleep affects children’s behavior, memory, attention, and emotional well-being, experts said.

Important research, but I might also draw attention to this comment from a reader named Karen:

Every human has a different sleep pattern and circadian rhythm. I don’t believe in rigidly enforced bedtimes for anyone. I find that, speaking to other parents, rigidly enforced bedtimes are typically more about the convenience of the parents, who want “an evening”, than it is about children’s well-being.

I’d propose that a child having a stable, trust-based relationship with an adult who recognises and can appropriately respond to the child’s body cues probably has a much more positive impact on that child’s development and well-being than arbitrarily set bedtimes.

Sep 20, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Helping Kids Cope with Stress

I’m a bit sick of solution-touting parenting books, but I don’t really mind the idea behind this one: Helping parents recognise when their own child is stressed, and helping them process that stress.

I’m glad the idea that stress can equally affect children as well as adults is making it out into the public sphere, and I often wonder if we truly underestimate how stressed some of the children in our communities become. Unfortunately, “every day” stress on kids is a relatively new topic of study among academics and we just don’t know much about it.

Dr. Michele Borba has a few (uggh) “tips” for parents, though, about how they might recognise an stressed-out kid:

Think stress is just for adults? Not these days. In fact, a recent iVillage poll found that almost 90 percent of mothers think kids these days are far more stressed than when they themselves were growing up. Research finds that between 8 and 10 percent of American children are seriously troubled by stress and symptoms; if left untreated, stress can not only affect your child’s friendships and school success but also his physical and emotional well-being. Overscheduled days, competition, school, treadmill-paced lives, home problems, scary nightly news, and stressed-out parents are just a few contributors.

Interesting that the sources of stress she lists are almost universally parent-afflicted.

Sep 10, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Babies Don't Have to Crawl Before They Can Walk: Challenging the Taken-for-Granted About Childhood

By Daniel Bigler :: Friday July 17, 2009

I’ve always loved this rather esoteric fact: babies don’t have to crawl before they can walk.

Those of us in the West have always tended to have a very linear, defined view of child development – we’ve pretty much just assumed, based on what the books tell us, that crawling is a crucial step in development that precedes walking. When we really examine infant development across cultures, though, we find this isn’t the case. The Scientific American revisits this myth:

According to anthropologist David Tracer of the University of Colorado at Boulder, babies of the Au hunter-gatherers of Pa pua New Guinea do not go through a crawling stage. Instead their parents and other caregivers carry them until they can walk. Yet Au children do not appear to suffer any ill effects from skipping this phase. In a presentation given to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago this past April, Tracer argued that, in fact, not crawling may be entirely normal and possibly even adaptive.

For children in many parts of the world, it’s healthier for them to be carried. Bangladeshi children who crawl have a greater exposure to ground pathogens and thus are more likely to get sick; so, their mothers carry them. Likewise, many African tribes swaddle or carry their children on their back, to prevent them from roaming the more dangerous ground terrain.

From different contexts emerge different practices. Human beings, in case you hadn’t noticed, are incredibly adaptive.

I get the sense, though, that most Westerners would still believe there’s something just ever so slightly antiquated or barbaric about this keep-the-baby-off-the-ground practice. Safety is a swell concern; but can’t those African villages just implement more environmental regulations to police those unsafe dirt floors? Children’s mobility is at stake! They won’t grow up to like traveling! They’ll be picked on by the kids who reach the ground first!

It’s jarring to see children deprived of what we largely consider a right of mobility… surely, as everything we know about child development tells us, this mustn’t be right.

There’s another factor that researchers have noted about the indigenous cultures that practice this – unrelated to a culture’s environmental adaptability, in fact. They’re finding these poor, mobility-deprived babies often hold a far greater degree of what researchers label “child-embeddedness” within their community. These children matter more, and are much more of a natural part of life for those around them. While Westerners might value a child’s independence – to the grand extent that we positively cherish a child’s first steps, and soon shuttle them off to child care so they can “learn things” and be individuals and socialize with others their age – mothers from these indigenous cultures might instead choose to keep their children close to them, keeping them more integral and interdependent to their own lives and work.

In short: every social group is led by a different worldview concerning children, and this system of beliefs and values changes how we interact with children.

In the West, it’s our past and our ideas of the future that guide the present. Our everyday efforts and practices in how we interact with children are particularly led by decades-upon-decades’ worth of “the research,” and by what “good science” tells us. Our histories have instilled in us deeply-held doctrines of what a child’s life and growth should look like, and similarly, our worldviews lead us to be deeply concerned about the future, about how our children will manage and navigate this unseen world. We’ve gotten raising kids down to a science: a science we call the field of “Child Development,” which every new parent must worship at the altars of upon delivery of their first child, paying homage for nine months beforehand to the prophets Spock, Montessori, Vygotsky… We’ve come up with firmly routed practices and conceptual frameworks that will, we think, get our kids safely into tomorrow – provided of course that we don’t veer from the path and mess them up too badly along the way.

We’ve gotten pretty good at this “child development” thing too; so good, in fact, that we’ve created an alternate, co-existing – yet ultimately artificial – “culture of childhood,” one situated external of our regular culture and lives for our children to exist in. We’ve segregated children into separate spaces apart from our own, different experiences than ours, and we’ve done it in the name of what is most “developmentally appropriate.” We do it, we rationalize, to help them develop as individuals and learn how to become a part of society.

Both our worldview and our scientific history clearly deeply impact and feed our practice, to a profound degree. We know more about children than ever, certainly, and we work harder than ever to engineer the “right” experiences for them to develop “properly.” But I do wonder if our knowledge and beliefs can also petrify us – if they can cripple our ability to change, to consider new ideas, to learn new ways of being and form new practices.

Babies don’t need to crawl before they can walk, after all.

There are other ways – many other ways – of existing with children, and I’m increasingly skeptical that any one of them is “the right” way.

Marilyn Fleer, who has conducted research on Australian indigenous family and education practices, suggests we should call into question our narratives of education and ultimately child development – not simply taking for granted our educational discourses and the theoretical frameworks upon which they are based. She suggests taking a post-Vygotskian, post-child centered lens at our children’s places in the world, orienting and defining our “best” practices not by the theory that has come before, accepted blindly, but by our individual, living communities. We should have an eye toward our own social histories, carefully examining how they’ve helped established the practices and institutions we have in place today – analyzing what we have inherited.

“For the structure of human exchanges, there are precise foundations to be discovered in the institutions we establish between ourselves and others;
institutions which implicate us in one another’s activity in such a way that, what we have done together in the past, commits us to going on in a certain way in the future. … The members of an institution need not necessarily have been its originators; they may be second, third, fourth, etc. generation members having ‘inherited’ the institutions from their forebears. And this is an important point, for although there may be an intentional structure to institutional activities, practitioners of institutional forms need have no awareness at all of the reasons for its structure – for them, it is just ‘the-way-things-are-done’. The reasons for the institution having one form rather than another are buried in its history.” – John Shotter

We need to be in a constant state of reconsideration of this history, analyzing how it fits with the communities before us, and considering the possibilities that different pasts might once have born. We need to leave nothing taken-for-granted.

Consider the act of learning, if you will:

“For many of us, the concept of learning immediately conjures up images of classrooms, training sessions, teachers, textbooks, homework, and exercises. Yet in our experience, learning is an integral part of our everyday lives. It is part of our participation in our communities…” – Etienne Wenger

Why do we have schools? Is it because they are the places children learn?

For many cultures, including the ones named earlier, children learn by being in and among their societies. They learn by being “embedded” among adults. They learn by observing those around them. Our practices of schools and teaching, clearly, would be superficial in these contexts.

We have these things because we value them, or because our pasts tell us they are necessary, or perhaps just because they’ve become traditions… but they are not the only right way of raising kids.

I am not suggesting we should necessarily change a thing about how we raise our kids. But I am suggesting, as Fleer writes, that we need to apply meaning to the things in our lives through “a dynamic process of living in the world” – not simply accepting inherited meaning from the past. We need to be much more reflexive about our practices and our concepts of childhood, considering whether what we hold from the past really fits with our communities today.

We can’t take anything for granted… Especially not the fact that babies don’t have to crawl before they can walk.

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