ScienceDaily: Essential ingredients of supportive sibling relationships.
[A new paper] urges parents to think about the relationship they want their kids to have with each other–now and as adults–and to be intentional in helping them create that positive, supportive bond.
How-to suggestions included in the article.
New York looks at parents who hate parenting in All Joy and No Fun.
From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think…
A longish article at WebMD about kids and chores–the what, when, and why.
“A child has to have some responsibilities. Then by the time they go off to college, you don’t have to have a three-hour lecture on the steps of the dormitory.”
Young children are skilled negotiators, says a Swedish study–suggests letting kids work things out on their own.
The results show that children’s negotiations form part of their play, and that these negotiations have a clear purpose: to agree on both how they can be together in their play and the content of their play.
A ScienceDaily write-up of baby rat study–Abusive mothering aggravates the impact of stress hormones.
“Our work shows that, while the infant brain is wired to form attachments at all costs, abusive attachments have negative consequences in social behavior development.”
Study at ScienceDaily: Babies Grasp Number, Space and Time Concepts.
“We’ve shown that 9-month-olds are sensitive to ‘more than’ or ‘less than’ relations across the number, size and duration of objects. And what’s really remarkable is they only need experience with one of these quantitative concepts in order to guess what the other quantities should look like”…
A survey reported on the Well blog shows fidelity as criteria #1 for a happy marriage.
But what about children? As an ingredient to a happy marriage, kids were far from essential, ranking eighth behind good sex, sharing chores, adequate income and a nice house, among other things. Only 41 percent of respondents said children were important to a happy marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990.
In U.S. News: A brief interview with author Ellen Galinsky.
Her new book, Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs, includes hundreds of simple ways that parents can use games and activities to promote the development of life skills in children.
What are the seven skills? Here’s her list:
Yours may vary.
Headline: Shocker: Empathy Dropped 40% in College Students Since 2000.
Without unstructured free time with playmates, children simply don’t get to know each other very well. And you can’t learn to connect and care if you don’t practice these things. Free play declined by at least a third between 1981 and 2003–right when the kids who hit college in 2000 and later were growing up.
A study at PsychCentral: Modeling Behavior for Children Has Long-Lasting Effects.
For the experiments, the children were shown how to open a box — but in a complicated way, with impractical actions thrown in. For example, the adult would drag a stick across a box, then use a stick to open the box by pulling on a knob — which is a lot easier if you just use your fingers…
