27 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Have Children Tell Stories to Reduce Anxieties
A toddler falls and scrapes an elbow. A kindergartner loses a beloved pet. A fifth-grader faces a bully at school. When a child experiences painful, disappointing, or scary moments, it can be overwhelming, with big emotions and bodily sensations flooding the right brain. When this happens, we as parents can help bring the left hemisphere into the picture so that the child can begin to understand what’s happening. One of the best ways to promote this type of integration is to help retell the...
1 Having children tell and re-tell stories of traumatizing experiences can help them understand and master their feelings of it.
27 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Upstairs and Downstairs Brain
Our amygdala (pronounced uh-MIG-duh-luh) is about the size and shape of an almond and is part of the limbic area, which resides in the downstairs brain. The amygdala’s job is to quickly process and express emotions, especially anger and fear. This little mass of gray matter is the watchdog of the brain, remaining always alert for times we might be threatened. When it does sense danger, it can completely take over, or hijack, the upstairs brain. That’s what allows us to act before we think... 1 
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notesOur instinctive, more primitive brain overrides our logical, more advanced from time to time. Children are even more prone to it.
20 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Study Children to Understand the Primitive Mind
The fundamental hypothesis of genetic epistemology is that there is a parallelism between the progress made in the logical and rational organization of knowledge and the corresponding formative psychological processes. With that hypothesis, the most fruitful, most obvious field of study would be the reconstituting of human history—the history of human thinking in prehistoric man. Unfortunately, we are not very well informed in the psychology of primitive man, but there are children all arou... 1 notes
notesMakes sense when you think about how evolution adds layers onto what exists.
12 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
A Wish for Children to Understand the Physical Sciences
If one might wish for impossibilities, I might then wish that my children might be well versed in physical science, but in due subordination to the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. ... Rather than have it the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament. 1 notes
notesThomas Arnold speaking about his own children, and his wish for them to understand and appreciate the grandeur of the cosmos.
31 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Parents Who Know Their Child's Emotions have Power Over T...
Why does this work? We know only a couple parts of the story. The first is that parents who possess emotional information gain the great power of behavioral prediction. Moms and dads become so acquainted with their children’s psychological interiors, they become pros at forecasting probable reactions to almost any situation. This results in an instinctive feel about what is most likely to be helpful, hurtful, or neutral to their child, and in a wide variety of circumstances. That’s abou... 1 notes
notesParents who pay attention to their children's emotional states can recognize the inner workings of their children and respond to them more effectively. Teach your children the names of the emotions they are experiencing to give them control over them.
28 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Children are Scientists
Thousands of experiments confirm that babies learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They experience sensory observations, make predictions about what they observe, design and deploy experiments capable of testing their predictions, evaluate their tests, and add that knowledge to a self-generated, growing database. The style is naturally aggressive, wonderfully flexible, and annoyingly persistent. They use fluid intelligence to extract information,... 1 notes
notesThey explore, test hypotheses, and record everything in memory to understand the world.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Workplaces Conducive to Raising Children
We could also immediately change workplaces to allow for part-time work that has similar benefits and pay to full-time work and to allow for flexible hours and career paths. Our own workplaces, the universities, provide both very good and very bad examples. For years professors have worked at home and determined their own schedules with no loss of productivity. On the other hand, the career structure of universities is deeply in conflict with the imperatives of evolution—the years when we e... 1 notes
notesAcademia seems like it could be condusive, due to the independence and freedom; however, the long and demanding hours make it less than ideal. Telecommuting offers the ability to multitask like our ancestors.
06 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Vygotsky's View of Child Learning
Vygotsky saw that adults, and especially parents, were a kind of tool that children used to solve the problem of knowledge. in contrast to our—probably necessary—parental megalomania. Vygotsky noticed, for example, how adults, quite unconsciously, adjusted their behavior to give children just the information they needed to solve the problems that were most important to them. Children used adults to discover the particularities of their culture and society.
But Vygotsky also thought that... 1 notes
notesParents and culture are a crucial part of child learning.
12 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Teaching Children Wonder Does Not Require a Scientific Ba...
A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfa...Just appreciating the wind, or admiring nature in without explanation is enough to instill a sense of wonder.
01 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
Self Control in Children is Predictive of Success as an A...
"Children who had the greatest self-control in primary school and preschool ages were most likely to have fewer health problems when they reached their 30s," says Terrie Moffitt, a professor of psychology at Duke University and King's College London.
Moffitt and a team of researchers studied a group of 1,000 people born in New Zealand in 1972 and 1973, tracking them from birth to age 32. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the best evidence yet...A study measuring children's self-control found a correlation between low self-control and problems later in life.
