Back to school?

I took off from blogging a lot this summer and enjoyed doing things with my son who spent the summer here...

Children are back to school and back to eating those lunches you make...please make them healthy!

We are entering a new generation of obesity and now it's not just adults who are obese - it is expected that the number of children who are obese will hit 20% by the year 2010 - that's only FOUR years from now.

I heard or read somewhere that we are reaching that stage in obesity where this or the next generation of children will NOT have a longer life span than the parents...

Not only is obesity bad in and of itself, it makes all other medical problems worse....

I've been blogging about healthier children for a while now and hope the readers of this blog are among those who will not have obese children...It is something parents have control over during the child's early years...and good nutrition early on can never be a bad choice...

Please watch what your children eat and make sure they get exercise....

Sifting and shifting

How do you think about "things?" For starters , your brain probably starts an internal search for a likely category [or folder] in which there are already files similar to the "thing" you are thinking about. For example, since it's baseball season, and I'm a Red Sox fan, if you ask me a question about baseball, my mind goes to my sports folder, leafs through to the baseball section, then filters your question through what it finds there. If your question raises some new issues for the baseball file in my brain, then I work to fit the new information into the existing file - or I can start a new one. This is what I call sifting and shifting. And all of this happens without my being fully aware of the process.

How does the child do this? Children are not born with their parent's folders and files : ) they have to start their own filing systems : ). They do this first by licking, tasting, smelling and touching [there was a reason Freud called his first stage "oral." This very tactual process allows the child to start developing a folder for the object being so tastily "thought" about. As the child continues to interact with that same object, the files in that folder grow. The next time there is an interaction the child already has some information about that object and now can compare and contrast the new information to that which is there. And each interaction builds the files and folders in that child's brain.

Language

I overheard a conversation the other day. The mother of a one-year-old was saying that her daughter's language development had seemed to stall - but she was running all over the place. That happens - the two pieces of the development puzzle sometimes compete with each other. Some adults, the saying goes, can't "think and chew gum at the same time." Well - in adults we see it as funny - in kids - it's often part of the pattern of language development.

The body needs all that energy either for speaking or for running - and at this point in time - maybe the required energy amount is so great it can only be used for one aspect at a time. After the running is under control - the language will zoom ahead. It hasn't stopped developing - it is still undergoing the process - it's just that we aren't seeing it - or hearing it right now.

Can you put yourself in the place of a young child and listen to the language surrounds that child lives in? One researcher [Friedlander, 1971] gives a great description:

Careful analysis of home language interactions, well recorded on quality audio equipment, ends to breed an enhanced respect for the awesome intricacy of the language learning process in its natural habitat. As one listens to such recordings, it seems altogether inexplicable how so delicate a fabric as language can be woven from such crude, chaotically tangled, poorly organized, and seemingly random raw materials as the natural sounds that surround an infant in a bustling household...Speech articulation in adult and sibling conversation is almost uniformly poor...Speech messages and language signals are deeply embedded in background noise; sound intensity levels are often inaudibly low or assaultively high; the speech stream flows with great rapidity; two or more people are often speaking at one time; and grammatical structures are often incomplete or very distorted. In such a mess, what is the stimulus?

Think about the non-human background noise we live with – pets, appliances, TV’s, radios, traffic, airplanes, etc. Yet in every culture children do learn their own language – and sometimes more than one language - and they learn in spite of all else that is going their lives :- )