Developing Child's Understanding of Games

During the first stage, beginning around age 5, the child does not yet understand there are fixed rules to the game. Children of this age will play Marbles in an improvisational way, possessing a vague notion of rules but not yet understanding the idea of fixed rules. In the second stage, around ages 8 to 10, the child comes to know that there are rules, and will regard these rules with a near religious reverence. The rules are felt to have their own implicit authority, which cannot be quest...

 Having Kids Makes One Cognizant of the Brevity of Life

Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter ...

 The Universality of Play

Gutsmuths.—Many of the ideas in PHome are better expressed, though independently arrived at, in the remarkable volume on play, published by Gutsmuths, ‘the father of play in Germany,’ towards the end of the eighteenth century. Gutsmuths recognised the universality of play among all ages and all peoples, the infinite number of games and the skill exhibited by the race in their invention and manipulation, the health-giving quality of play and its ultimate origin (though fatigue and ennui ...

 How Political Parties Strive to be Something Greater

Political parties strive to be something greater than the human beings they’re comprised of; they enshrine values and ideologies for the ages. The practical implications of this pursuit are often discussions of tax policy or judicial stances, but these debates are driven by what a certain group believes to be the best, most virtuous way to live life on earth. “The underlying unity of Whig-Republican ideology from Whiggism to Reaganisam,” Gerring writes, “can be found in three interrel...

 Decline of US Religion Between 2007 and 2014

To be sure, the United States remains home to more Christians than any other country in the world, and a large majority of Americans – roughly seven-in-ten – continue to identify with some branch of the Christian faith.1 But the major new survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally mass...

 Children Are Naturally Skeptical of Santa Claus

First, researchers asked children between the ages of 3 and 9 about the possibility of various extraordinary events, some possible and some impossible. None of the events were related to Santa or to Christmas. (Shtulman used his own 4-year-old son as a “data point” in the study.) Next, the researchers asked children to help write a letter to Santa. Although children were free to include whatever they wanted, they were specifically encouraged to ask Santa some questions. “What we found...

 Generational Replacement Behind Growth of Secularims

One important factor behind the growth of the religiously unaffiliated is generational replacement, the gradual supplanting of older generations by newer ones. Among the youngest Millennials (those ages 18-22, who were minors in 2007 and thus not eligible to be interviewed in Pew Research Center surveys conducted that year), fully one-third (34%) are religiously unaffiliated, compared with about one-in-ten members of the Silent Generation (9%) and one-in-twenty members of the World War II-era...

 Card Sorting Games for Young Children

Dimensional Change Card Sorting Task In the Dimensional Change Card Sorting Task (DCCS), children are initially asked to sort cards by a single dimension (such as color), and are subsequently required to alter their strategy to sort cards based on a second dimension (such as shape).[18] Typically, three-year-old children are able to sort cards based on a single dimension, but are unable to switch to sort the cards based on a second dimension. However, five-year-old children are able to sort ...

 The Past and Who Has Access to It

What we know about the past—and who has access to such knowledge—has changed dramatically with each such change. The changes run far deeper than the mere proliferation of data points. As written records of large estates held in monasteries in France achieved legal and social dominance, the role of women as the tellers of the past fell into decline (Geary, 1994): The technological and the social were deeply intertwined. The outcome was that different kinds of records were kept. With the in...

 Chinese Cultural Innovations Turned to Ritual

When Europeans first arrived in China, three hundred years a^ago, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection there, and they were surprised that a people which had attained this point should not have gone beyond it. At a later period they discovered traces of some higher branches of science that h had been lost. The nation was absorbed in productive industry; the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science itself no longer exist...