Sehajpal represents a growing trend of preschool-age children putting away the toys and picking up a pencil for private tutoring sessions. Driven by increasing competition to keep up with the baby Einsteins, parents are doing whatever it takes to give children an advantage they hope can be parlayed into better grades, better schools and better futures…

As a result, pre-academic preparation — including homework — is being shifted to children as young as 3 and 4, while academic skills once expected of first-graders are now being taught to 5-year-olds. A knowledge of phonemic sounds, words, shapes, names of animals and parts of the body are de rigueur these days for incoming kindergarteners, who also are expected to know how to write their names and be able to count to at least 30…

Parents who pay for private tutoring say they want to give their children an edge when competing for spots in elite preschools and kindergartens. Others say their children simply seem ready and eager for academics. Many say they want their children to have an extra layer of individual attention in addition to the traditional preschool classes, which typically range from 20 to 24 students…

Leon, herself a preschool teacher, said the more early learning children receive the better. “There’s a lot of pressure on public schools right now to make sure we succeed.” …

Leon said parents walk a fine line between pushing their children too hard and preparing them for a lifetime of academic rigors.

Source: Los Angeles Times
http://tinyurl.com/27fegf

“If parents are overweight, their children are at much greater risk for the development of weight problems,” said Dr. William Dietz, director of the division of nutrition and physical activity for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Genetics may be partly to blame, but more often the culprit is lifestyle, said Dr. Thomas Robinson, associate professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital…

“It is amazing to me how many young children, even under a year of age, are fed sugar-sweetened soft drinks and French fries and other fast foods,” Robinson said. “If a parent eats junk food and has it in the home, that is the food their child will learn to eat, no surprise.”

Source: Hattiesburg American
http://tinyurl.com/25fqxl

The numbers are overwhelming: Autism is diagnosed more frequently now than childhood cancer, diabetes and AIDS — combined…

No one knows why the numbers are going up, or even how fast they’re increasing. No one knows what causes it. All they know is there’s no cure…

Autism disorders are characterized by three key problems: a broken communication system that often affects both listening and speaking, limited ability to form social relationships, and highly focused, repetitive behavior…

In early childhood, millions of neurons in the brain typically migrate from the center to the periphery, and create connections. Autism interferes with this process. The connections in the parts of the brain that control language learning, social intelligence, mental flexibility and other behaviors fail to develop normal “wiring.”

Early intervention takes advantage of the fact that the younger the brain, the more flexible or “plastic” it is. With guided, repetitive stimulation and rewards, new mental pathways can be created to compensate for some of the abnormalities.

Source: NorthJersey.com
http://tinyurl.com/2356f6

Now the race starts early, with an emphasis not on ideology but on the skills and experiences the children will need in the elite life they are expected to lead…

“These people are rich economically but lacking in basic manners, and they are not very fond of their own reputation,” said Wang Lianyi, an expert in comparative cultural studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing. Of the 35 million Chinese who traveled overseas last year, he said, many were shocked to discover that they were often viewed as having bad manners.

To address that, some of the newly affluent, like Ms. Lei, take their young children for extended stays overseas. London and New York are popular choices, because the children can get a head start on speaking Western-accented English…

It is hard to say how many Chinese have the money to lavish such attention on their children, but the limited number of surveys that have been done and anecdotal evidence indicate that the number is exploding…

FasTracKids, which started in Shanghai in 2004, has since opened two more outlets here and another in Guangzhou, and it is planning a fifth in Hangzhou.

The private program’s after-school sessions are held in brightly decorated classrooms, where fewer than a dozen children, typically 4 or 5 years old, are taught by as many as three teachers. The program emphasizes scientific learning, problem solving and, most attractively for many parents, assertiveness…

“Americans respect people who came from nothing and made something of themselves, and they also respect rich people,” Mr. Wang added. “In China, people generally don’t respect rich people, because there is a strong feeling that they are lacking in ethics. These new rich not only want money, they want people to respect them in the future.”

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/world/asia/22elites.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

In a survey of 1,060 senior middle school students in Hangzhou, capital of East China’s Zhejiang Province, about one-third said they had started dating, and 23 per cent said that it’s OK to have sex at their age. In a survey by the Municipal Women’s Federation of Beijing, 8 per cent of the girls aged between 13 and 19 said they had had sex…

Contrasted with the openness about sex is a lack of knowledge. In the Hangzhou survey, about one-third did not know what actions would cause pregnancy and two-thirds could not name the transmission methods of venereal diseases…

Without proper guidance from adults, these teenagers are using TV programmes such as “Friends” and “Sex in the City” as primers on relationships and sex, says Zhang Xiaoji.
A Green Apple House survey shows that 70 per cent of under-age visitors learned about sex through magazines, movies, TV and the Internet, and 24 per cent by reading books. That means parents are source of information for only 1.7 per cent and 1.3 per cent of the children…

School-based sex education programmes have three problems, Zhang Xiaoji said: “Schools do not attach importance to sex education, there’s no official textbook and the teachers are ill-trained.”…

Sex education for children is a challenge for all parents, but Chinese parents seem to be particularly clumsy with it. During their adolescence, sex education didn’t exist, and sex out of wedlock was still a burning shame…

“Sex education, in essence, is about helping your children to become good men and women,” Zhang Meimei said. “Think of it as a part of the life skills you want to give your children.” …
Both Zhang and Wang agree that the role of sex educator may be a difficult one for Chinese parents, but it is one they must learn to take on.

Source: CHINAdaily
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-09/23/content_695298_2.htm

Memorization and drills help students learn the basics

… Many Asian countries have long realized drilling and memorization are vital, too. The tools reinforce what’s being taught and provide building blocks for mastery of higher level math. The council’s report echoes that assessment.

The United States now may be seeing the folly of largely abandoning drills and memorization. U.S. eighth graders rank well behind eighth graders from other nations on international tests. Many Asian countries rank high. Singapore is No. 1…

… At the classroom level, teachers should focus on the early mastery of addition and subtraction, the “quick recall” of multiplication and division and the clear understanding of decimals.

Source: Charlotte Observer
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/opinion/15569519.htm

The number of newborn babies in Shanghai has increased every year since 2001, with an average annual birth rate of about 70,000, according to the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission.

And now that many young parents have become aware of early education, the business is becoming more competitive in the city.

Hundreds of early education centres, focusing on children aged 3 and under, have sprung up over the past few years…

“Many parents have no idea what teachers will teach in the class,” she said. “As long as they hear something good from their kids, they are willing to pay.“…

Each district in Shanghai has established an early education centre that costs less than these high-priced ones, but with an overall shortage, parents say they do not have enough options.

Source: People’s Daily Online
http://english.people.com.cn/200609/21/eng20060921_304814.html

Music lessons may improve memory and learning ability in young children by promoting different patterns of brain development, a study shows…

Because good scores on the test — which involved listening to a series of numbers and remembering them — were associated with general intelligence skills such as literacy and mathematical ability, the findings suggest that music could be useful for building the learning capacity of young minds…

“…It is very interesting that the children taking music lessons improved more over the year on general memory skills that are correlated with non- musical abilities such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ.

Source: Times Online
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2366426,00.html

The experts who signed last week’s letter believe the pressures on young people are escalating – and unless parents and politicians join to stop them society may witness the very death of childhood itself…

Despite Kinross’s glowing testament to ditching “junk culture”, writer Pat Kane, author of Play Ethic, can’t agree with the experts who say modern childhood has been poisoned by the growth of electronic media…

“I think these people should go and have a look at MySpace and MTV and at gaming culture. These places are about friendship, sharing interests, talking to others and learning. I’ve made my kids web-literate and text-literate so they can recognise what isn’t healthy out there – but as a culture there is nothing inherently ‘junky’ about what kids are doing.”…

Oxford University childhood history expert Professor Laurence Brockliss, however, views the moral panic among the experts who contacted the Telegraph as nothing more than misplaced nostalgia for their own childhood in the relatively carefree 1950s and 60s, combined with a middle-class obsession about childrearing, which has been fuelled by the trend for having fewer babies.

Source: Sunday Herald
http://www.sundayherald.com/58029

Education and childhood are subjects about which everybody claims a reasonably informed opinion…

…Though depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are being diagnosed in more children than before, this does not necessarily mean that they are becoming more common…

The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education, a recent book by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Uta Frith of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, spells out dozens of cases. Brain research, for example, has shown that the fine motor co-ordination needed to manipulate a pencil develops no earlier than the age of 5. Yet handwriting is often taught formally to younger children who will not be able to accomplish it…

Science has also established that the period between 6 months and 3 years is a critical phase for learning. But while this leads some educationists to recommend “hothousing” toddlers, with flashcards and learning videos, the true picture is more complicated. The evidence suggests that though depriving children of a rich environment at this age is detrimental, enhancing it adds little. Too much hothousing may even be harmful…

Then there is the teenage brain. Go back ten years and it was thought that the brain stopped developing around the age of 5. It is now known that it undergoes another rapid phase of development during adolescence and keeps changing well into the 20s.

Source: Times Online
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8122-2357942,00.html