People in London are losing £523m a year due to poor maths and English skills, a report has claimed.

The money is lost in not being able to check bills or get the best phone tariffs, a survey by learndirect shows.

The provider of numeracy and literacy skills looked at basic skills across 20 towns and cities in the UK.

Stoke-on-Trent was where people lost the most (£88 per head), Londoners were next (£74) and Leeds was the city to lose least (£11).

Learndirect claims £1.45bn was lost across Britain as a result of poor maths and English abilities.

Confidence hit

It has launched the ME-Q Index, the maths and English quotient, which shows how much money people are losing year on year.

It said almost 100,000 admitted to losing more than £1,000 last year due to basic skills issues like bill miscalculations, adding or taking away VAT, or the multiplication or division involved in working out foreign currency when abroad.

Sally Coady, from learndirect, said: “This research demonstrates the effects of the skills gap in the UK very clearly with the huge financial cost.

“A lack of maths and English skills can really hit you in the pocket but there is also a cost to people’s confidence.

“Some people will go to great lengths to avoid using their maths and English and it can hold them back in many areas from advancing their careers or helping their kids with homework.” (…)

Source: BBC News, UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7304645.stm

Having a baby makes you brainier — that was the rather surprising finding from an American study published earlier this month.

While in the first three months, “mumnesia” may mean she leaves her shopping in the supermarket car park and puts her handbag in the fridge — as one mother I knew did — the researchers found that in the long term, a mum’s memory and ability to multi-task improves.

In fact, it’s just one of a number of physical benefits that having a baby brings to mothers — and sometimes fathers.

But there are also the health downsides. Here, from the brain to the waistline, are some of the good — and bad — things about having children.

THE BENEFITS

Smarter brain

Doctors call it “maternal amnesia” but it is more commonly referred to as “mumnesia” or “nappy brain” — anyway, whatever it’s called, you know you’ve got it when you put your car keys in the cat’s bowl.

Men’s jokes about nappy brain are similar to those about the “time of the month”. And yet new US research says that “nappy brain”, although it exists, is a short-term phenomenon, probably due to sleep deprivation.

Previously, it was thought the cause was brain shrinkage — one study found that a pregnant woman’s brain shrinks by up to seven per cent.

But while argument rages about the cause, Allen Snyder, a leading Australian neuroscientist, says “women’s memory is not reduced during pregnancy — rather, their attention is on things that are more immediately crucial”, such as keeping that baby alive!

He described a woman’s brain as being like Albert Einstein’s; Einstein used to forget where he had put large cheques because he was a tad busy working out the theory of relativity.

American research on pregnant rats supports the idea that women who have had children are actually cleverer. It suggests that the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for memory, learning and emotion, might actually grow more neuron connections during pregnancy to accommodate an increasingly demanding environment.

Perhaps that’s why a mother can load a washing machine, feed mush into a little mouth and tell her other half what he forgot to buy at the supermarket, all at the same time.

Motherhood also gives women a more acute sense of sight. An American study found pregnant women massively outperformed non-pregnant ones in visual perception tests — usually a skill associated with men. It’s thought acute vision helps perceive threats to your offspring.

Reduced stress levels

This sounds surprising — after all, the arrival of a first baby can be an especially difficult time. “Having to reorientate as a mother is very stressful,” explains Martina Clett-Davies, sociologist and research fellow at the London School of Economics.

And it’s not just women who feel the stress of new parenthood. “Men go though this, too,” says Clett-Davies. “Many feel hard-done-by and ignored. At least women are recognised as mothers.”

However, it’s not the amount of stress that matters, but how you deal with it. Of course, there are those who suffer from the serious problem of post-natal depression (some estimates put this at as many as one-in- ten new mothers).

However, new research says most new mothers might actually be less stressed than non-mothers. The reason is oxytocin, a hormone produced by both men and women, but which women make more of to stimulate labour and breast milk.

Oxytocin is a sort of natural anti-depressant, it inhibits the release of stress hormones.

Lower risk of cancer

The good news: “Having children affects a woman’s risk of developing cancers, in most cases beneficially,” says Lucy Boyd, UK epidemiologist at Cancer Research. The risk of breast cancer drops by seven per cent with each birth; the risk for ovarian cancer drops by 40 per cent with the first child, and 55 per cent after the second; and for uterine cancer it drops by 30 per cent with the first child.

Some cancers seem to be linked to increased levels of oestrogen — some scientists believe having periods (which stop when you are pregnant) is a cancer risk factor.

“It’s the pattern of hormones associated with the menstrual cycle that are to blame,” says Professor Valerie Beral, Director of Cancer Research UK’s epidemiology centre in Oxford.

During pregnancy and breastfeeding, oestrogen levels tend to be lower. “Increased oestrogen equals increased risk of cancers.”

The bad news is that motherhood puts you at greater risk of cervical cancer — if you have lots of children. It’s not clear why, but as Professor Beral explains: “If a woman has eight or more children, it doubles the risk.”

THE DOWNSIDE

Weight gain

While Hollywood stars seem to drop the baby weight by simply breathing out, mortal women can struggle to lose the pounds afterwards. But there’s no sound physiological reason why, say experts.

So whatever your personal theories about how it’s affected your metabolism or the way your body stores fat, the fact is you’re fat because you’re eating too much.

Furthermore, breast-feeding mothers, who can burn an extra 500 calories a day, have even less excuse for being overweight.

“A lot of women take pregnancy as an excuse to eat more than usual — in the first few months you need only the equivalent of an extra glass of milk and piece of fruit,” is the somewhat depressing news from Paul Sacher, research director of MEND, an organisation that works with obese families.

He adds that fathers are also at risk of putting on weight. “Anecdotally, a lot of men are sporty till they get married. Family life is more sedentary.”

When Sacher and his team try to persuade overweight families to change eating habits, it’s often men who are most resistant. “They want to continue with the take-aways, white bread and Coke,” he explains.

Weight gain, as we’re regularly told, leads to a greater risk of a host of problems, from osteoarthritis to diabetes and heart conditions.

Gum disease

Pregnancy puts huge stress on the body, but at least one health fear is unfounded: it does not leach calcium from the teeth.

Nigel Carter, chief executive of the British Dental Health Foundation, says: “It’s an old wives’ tale. Once calcium is in the teeth, it can’t be metabolised for use elsewhere in the body.”

However, that doesn’t mean that having a baby is harmless for the teeth. “The vast majority of us have mild gingivitis, a form of gum disease. As a result of hormone changes during pregnancy, this can become worse,” says Carter.

The first sign is bleeding gums. If untreated, your teeth become loose and fall out. “You used to hear mothers say: ‘I lost the bottom set with baby number one, and the top set with number two,’” says Carter.

But these days, with better care — pregnant women are entitled to free dentistry — fewer lose their teeth.

Inability to talk coherently

Who among non-parents can ever comprehend the bone-crushing tiredness of the first year of a baby’s life? Not only do mums and dads feel groggy, they behave that way, too.

As Dr Louise Reyner a senior lecturer in human sciences at Loughbrorough University, explains, it is the frontal cortex of the brain which is affected by sleep deprivation.

“This part of the brain is responsible for language and reasoning,” she says.

A sleep-deprived person will have “difficulty with word-generating tasks”. In other words, talking — ever tried having a conversation with a new parent? The fact that all they can talk about is their offspring is not necessarily a sign of parental obsession, but of an inability to string together more complex thoughts.

Sleep deprivation will not only make us tired — scientists are increasingly linking it to a depressed immune system.

So, while it may seem logical for parents who constantly catch their baby’s colds to blame the playgroup their little darling attends as a hotbed of germ infestation, it could just be that their own defence against disease is damaged.

Source: Daily Mail, UK
http://tinyurl.com/2ua92q

The early days of parenthood are filled with anxiety. Parents fret over whether their babies are eating enough, growing enough and sleeping enough. As the children get a little older, parents also worry if they are talking enough.

But how do you judge a child’s language skills? Infoture, a company based in Boulder, Colorado, aims to take the guesswork out of that question by selling a kind of verbal thermometer. The device, which costs $400, is called LENA (for “language environment analysis”), and here’s how it works. A voice recorder tucked into a child’s clothing records all the sounds in the environment. At the end of each day, special software evaluates both the amount of exposure the child has had to verbal stimulation as well as the child’s own utterances. Ultimately, the device generates percentile rankings that help assess a child’s language development, just as doctors provide such rankings for a child’s height, weight and head circumference.

Whatever its merits, LENA represents a radically new way of assessing language development. Doctors initially judge a child’s skills by asking parents about what a child can do. Kids with clear difficulties are referred to a speech pathologist for a more detailed evaluation. By contrast, Infoture would allow parents to monitor their kids more precisely and on their own. But is LENA necessary? Some linguists worry that the technology is more likely to raise false anxieties than to assuage genuine ones.

The man behind the vision, Infoture’s founder, Terrance Paul, has made a fortune selling software to assess children’s reading skills. His current venture was inspired by a well-known 1995 study that found that professional parents uttered more than three times as many words to their children as did parents who were on welfare. The children in the less talkative homes turned out to be less verbal and to have smaller vocabularies. Other studies have suggested that these gaps affect later professional success.

One way to close the language gap, Paul reasoned, would be to make early assessments of a child’s language world. Parents, he figured, could use the feedback to intervene and enrich their kids’ verbal environment as needed.

But how to build the ultimate baby monitor? The company’s engineers soon found that conventional speech-recognition software was not up to the task. The sounds a baby might encounter — a raspy grandparent, a TV commercial, a sibling’s chatter — were simply too varied to analyze successfully. The best solution, it seemed, was to eschew the identification of particular words and focus on a recording’s acoustic features. Modeling every conceivable sound in a household, they designed a system that distinguishes different voices from one another, gives a rough count of the number of words directed at a child and counts also the number of conversational “turns” that are taken as child and interlocutor exchange words. In future versions, the system may also include a measure called speech entropy, which represents the increasing complexity of a child’s speech as new consonants, words and phrases are added to its repertory.

On the basis of recordings from 314 families, Infoture engineers claim that the number of conversational turns and the entropy measure track closely with language ability as determined by speech professionals. Children with diagnosed language delays, for example, have lower entropy scores than children of a similar age who are developing normally. But the method has its critics. Tom Roeper, a linguist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, points out that measures of conversational turns and the like can’t reflect a child’s mastery of syntax. Learning to speak isn’t just about speaking frequently; it’s also about knowing how to put the right word in the right place.

If a device like LENA became popular, it might create new benchmarks for speech development. Mabel Rice, a speech pathologist at the University of Kansas, speculates that parents might direct repeated questions to their children in order to score more conversational turns. The focus on quantity could also reinforce cultural biases against quieter and perhaps more thoughtful kids; consider Albert Einstein, who was late to start talking. Even so, Rice says, pressure on parents to spend more time conversing with their children could have a positive effect. Partha Niyogi, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago and an adviser to Infoture, agrees. LENA, for him, is best understood as an early-warning system. “Suppose you are talking a lot to your child, but your child is talking very little,” he says. “It could be a sign of something wrong.”

Source: International Herald Tribune, France
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/25/news/24wwlnessayt.php

(…) Children with dyscalculia have trouble reading numbers and picturing them in their mind. For example, they might mistake a three for an eight because the numbers look similar. They also have trouble counting objects and organizing them by size.

People with dyscalculia might also have a poor sense of direction. They might have difficulty keeping score during games, and limited ability to plan moves during games like chess.

Children suspected of being dyscalculic should be examined by a professional trained to recognize this condition. Experts say the disorder never goes away. But Sheldon Horowitz at the National Center for Learning Disabilities says carefully designed practice can improve math skills.

For example, a teacher might use a number line to help a child understand the difference between larger and smaller numbers. The child could be asked to point to different numbers and to describe their relationship to other numbers on the line.

Or objects could be grouped to represent numbers. Something else that can help children understand number relationships is to have a math problem described in the form of a story.

Experts say students with dyscalculia need extra time to complete their work. Sheldon Horowitz also advises letting them work with a calculator in school. (…)

Source: Voice of America
http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2008-02-20-voa6.cfm

Preschool-aged children from low-income families showed notable improvement in cognitive ability and other brain function after their parents received an eight-week training course in communication and child-rearing techniques, a new report has found.

Scientists at the University of Oregon plan to do more work in this area but presented their preliminary findings yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit group that publishes the journal Science.

They conducted the research as part of a larger ongoing study of brain development in high-risk youngsters who are part of a federal Head Start program.

In this part of their study, 28 children between the ages of 3 and 5, underwent brain scans and various standardized language and IQ tests before and after the research period. Then, during an eight-week period, parents of 14 of those children attended weekly small group meetings where they learned evidence-based strategies to improve communication with their children, promote children’s critical thinking skills and decrease family stress, according to the researchers. Parents of the remaining 14 children — the control group — received no training.

At the end of the eight weeks, researchers compared test results of the children in both groups. Testers didn’t know to which group each child belonged.

They found that children whose parents received the training showed larger increases in standardized measures of language, IQ, memory, and attention compared with children in the control group.

“We were actually fairly astonished at the magnitude of the changes,” said Helen Neville, an Oregon neuroscience professor who leads the school’s Brain Development Lab. The professor, who holds a doctoral degree in neuropsychology, has spent 30 years studying the brain and its ability to change, and her work has been supported primarily by the National Institutes of Health, according to Oregon University information.

Among the findings, the average IQ score of children whose parents received training improved by six IQ points, while the score of the control group children showed no statistically significant change, she said.

The former group of children also showed improvements in receptive language skills, which is basically the ability to understand and follow direction. Their average score in the beginning was 100 standardized points, but increased to 110 points after their parents received training, she said, while the average standardized score of control group children in this test area didn’t change.

The parent training program was developed by Oregon University doctoral student Jessica Fanning, who recently competed her dissertation.

The professor said her team tried to determine whether this type of parental training program affects a child’s cognitive development and brain development.

“It does,” she said, adding it’s important to note that the youngsters themselves didn’t receive any special tutoring or help during this time.

Parents who received the training also benefited, reporting lower stress levels than the control parents and displaying changes in interactions with their children — like allowing more opportunities for their child to talk and guide the interaction, the researchers found.

“Our findings are important because they suggest that kids who are at high risk for school failure can be helped through these interventions,” said Courtney Stevens, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Brain Development Lab who presented the preliminary findings. “Even with these small numbers of children, the parent training appears very promising.”

The researchers will do another study with another group of children to see whether they can repeat their findings. They also will track the children over the long term.

The goal, they said, is to eventually be able to show policy-makers the best ways to design educational programs.

Parental training is just one intervention being tested: Researchers are also testing the use of music and attention training with high-risk children. According to University of Oregon materials, this research is being funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, which is part of the Department of Education.

Source: Washington Times, DC
http://washingtontimes.com/article/20080216/NATION/484801576/1002

Mice lacking a certain brain protein learn some tasks better but also forget faster, according to new research from MIT that may explain the phenomenon of autistic savants in humans. The work could also result in future treatments for autism and other brain development disorders.

Researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT report in the Feb. 13 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience that mice genetically engineered to lack a key protein used for building synapses–the junctions through which brain cells communicate–actually learned a spatial memory task faster and better than normal mice. But when tested weeks later, they couldn’t remember what they had learned as well as normal mice, and they had trouble remembering contexts that should have provoked fear.

“These opposite effects on different types of learning are reminiscent of the mixed features of autistic patients, who may be disabled in some cognitive areas but show enhanced abilities in others,” said Albert Y. Hung, a postdoctoral associate at the Picower Institute, staff neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the study. “The superior learning ability of these mutant mice in a specific realm is reminiscent of human autistic savants.”

Autism is one of a group of developmental disabilities known as autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), in which a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others is impaired. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that one in 150 American children have an ASD. Occasionally, an autistic person has an outstanding skill, such as an incredible rote memory or musical ability. Such individuals–like the character Dustin Hoffman played in the film “Rain Man”–may be referred to as autistic savants.

Hung said that while it seems counter-intuitive that loss of an important synaptic scaffold protein would result in improved learning among the mice in this study, the absence of this protein may “trap” the mice’s synapses in a more plastic state, which means the synapses are ready to respond to input but not maintain it in long-term memory.

Aberrant synapse development and faulty structure of dendritic spines–tiny protrusions on the surface of neurons that receive messages from other neurons–are often associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, in humans. (…)

Source: MIT News, MA
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/savants-0212.html

Ryuta Kawashima, the scientist behind the smash-hit “brain training” games on Nintendo DS portable consoles, turned down the chance to become a millionaire, saying he’d rather work for a living.

The self-confessed workaholic — who says he has no time for games, even his own — is instead busy at his job, trying to come up with new inventions aimed at Japan’s growing elderly population.

“Not a single yen has gone in my pocket,” said the soft-spoken 48-year-old professor with round-rim glasses.

“Everyone in my family is mad at me but I tell them that if they want money, go out and earn it.”

His brain-training software, which incorporates quizzes and other simple mental stimulation, is credited with introducing a new demographic to video-game machines as older people try to prevent senility.

Royalties from the brain training software for the Nintendo DS alone have reached 2.4 billion yen (22 million dollars), with 17 million titles sold worldwide since its debut in Japan in May 2005.

Under the rules of his employer, state-funded Tohoku University, Kawashima could take up to half the proceeds with the rest going to the school.

But Kawashima, married to a high-school classmate with four sons, is happy to live on his annual salary of around 11 million yen (100,000 dollars).

“To hear this may put you off — but my hobby is work,” he told AFP in an interview at his office in the northern city of Sendai.

Asked whether he ever thought of taking the royalty money and moving to a tropical island, Kawashima simply said: “I wouldn’t know what to do there. If I had such time to spare, I want to do my research.”

Indeed, it seems like nothing gets in the way of work. When for instance he decided last year to lose 20 kilogrammes (44 pounds), he just cut down on food, he says, adding: “If there is time for physical exercise, I want to use it for research.”

Kawashima became interested in brains when he was a teenager, saying that he “wanted to put my brain in a computer so it would be around to see the last day of humanity”.

While that ambition may still be a long way off, Kawashima pours his portion of the royalties from his work into funding research. He has built a 300-million-yen laboratory at the university’s Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer where he works, and another lab worth 400 million yen is due to be completed in March.

Kawashima has received public praise for his apparent philanthropy, but says other researchers have the right to earn money from their work if that is what motivates them.

People can train their brains just as they do their bodies, Kawashima says.

He no longer uses his own software to keep his own brain nimble, he says, confident that his research work is enough.

Now in the fourth year of an education ministry-funded project looking at youngsters’ brain development, he says he does not yet know how children’s minds are affected by long hours playing video-games.

“Having fun is not studying. Making them study is not to entertain children but to pressure them to make efforts. People fall to lower and lower places unless they are driven to go higher,” he said. (…)

Source: AFP
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gMwDe1ovbiILhtf3JKM2Ez79rGvA

People have been trying to figure out why we sleep for almost as long as we have been conscious of being awake, tossing and turning in the dark.

After a few restless nights, most of us can’t even think straight. We are less able to make sense of problems, make competent moral judgments or retain what we learn, even though studies show our brain cells fire more frenetically to overcome the lack of sleep. Lose too much sleep and we become reckless, emotionally fragile, and more vulnerable to infections and to diabetes, heart disease and obesity, recent research suggests.

Yet scientists probing the purpose of sleep are still largely in the dark. “Why we sleep at all is a strange bastion of the unknown,” said sleep psychologist Matthew Walker at the University of California in Berkeley.

One vital function of sleep, researchers argue, may be to help our brains sort, store and consolidate new memories, etching experiences more indelibly into the brain’s biochemical archives.

Even a 90-minute nap can significantly improve our ability to master new motor skills and strengthen our memories of what we learn, researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel reported last month in Nature Neuroscience. “Napping is as effective as a night’s sleep,” said psychologist Sara Mednick at the University of California in San Diego.

Moreover, slumber seems to boost our ability to make sense of new knowledge by allowing the brain to detect connections between things we learn.

In research published last April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Walker and his collaborators at the Harvard Medical School tested 56 college students and found that their ability to discern the big picture in disparate pieces of information improved measurably after the brain could, during a night’s sleep, mull things over.

It is these patterns of meaning — the distilled essence of knowledge — that we remember so well. “Sleep helps stabilize memory,” said neurologist Jeffrey Ellenbogen, director of the sleep medicine program at Massachusetts General Hospital. (…)

Sleep is controlled partly by our genes. The difference between those of us who naturally wake at dawn and night owls who are wide-eyed at midnight may be partly due to variations in a gene named Period3, which affects our biological clock. Variations in that gene also make some people especially sensitive to sleep deprivation, scientists at the U.K.’s University of Surrey recently reported.

For many of us, though, sleeplessness is a self-inflicted epidemic in which lifestyle overrides basic biology. “In this odd, Western 24-hour-MTV-fast-food generation we have created, we all feel the need to achieve more and more. The one thing that takes a hit is sleep,” Dr. Walker said. On average, most people sleep 75 minutes less each night than people did a century ago, sleep surveys record. (…)

The expectation of a nap, however, is by itself enough to measurably lower our blood pressure, researchers at the Liverpool John Moores University in England reported in October in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Indeed, regular nappers — working men who took a siesta for 30 minutes or more at least three times a week — had a 64% lower risk of heart-related death, researchers at the University of Athens reported last February in the Archives of Internal Medicine. (…)

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://tinyurl.com/yobeo9

(…) The Haley school is in the vanguard of a national back-to-nature movement - often called “No Child Left Inside” - that within the last two years has seen the creation of dozens of regional programs to draw families and students outdoors.

This is not the environmentalism of the past, which usually argued that children need to appreciate nature so they will help protect it. Instead, the new sales pitch is based on self-interest: Walking in the woods, smelling the roses, and digging in the dirt are good for mental health, learning, and brain development. Being close to nature may foster people’s ability to concentrate, improves the behavior of children with attention disorders, and boosts science test scores, research shows.

“The tragedy we are facing in this generation is that there is no time for children to explore, to play, to go outside,” the influential pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton said before a panel discussion this month at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. (…)

At Haley, where students don’t have ready access to the woods or lush backyards, studies often involve long-running themes relating to animals, habitats, and the human impact on the environment. The school has wetlands and gardens, and it is building an outdoor classroom. Students often visit the neighboring Boston Nature Center, and fifth-graders take a week-long trip to Camp Beckett in the Berkshires, where they explore and study forest ecosystems.

Explaining his approach, principal Ross Wilson cited a 2003 paper by Harvard researchers Christopher Wimer and Ronald F. Ferguson, who argue that students learn more when their daily lessons, stored in the brain’s short-term memory, are placed in a larger framework, allowing them to enter the mind’s long-term memory. (…)

Nature may help children in other ways. In 2004, a University of Illinois study found that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder experienced “significant symptom abatement” after spending time outdoors.

A California Department of Education study from 2005 showed that sixth-graders improved their science scores by 27 percent after taking week-long outdoor education classes. Several University of Michigan studies have suggested that proximity to nature enhances people’s ability to concentrate. (…)

“In terms of our recent American experience, this has been a big change in the last 30 years,” said Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” a keystone text of back-to-nature advocates published in 2005.

“The era of kids going outside and not coming back until the streetlights are on is unlikely to return,” said Louv.

“The 1950s aren’t coming back.”

But getting outdoors is still crucial to the human experience, and early contact can go a long way, said E.O. Wilson, the subject of an upcoming PBS documentary that updates the life story he told in his own memoir, ‘Naturalist.’

“There is no substitute for having your personal, precious body out there in the middle of nature,” he said. (…)

Source: Boston Globe, United States
http://tinyurl.com/2eqelg

Remember when a toy was just something to play with? We knew children learned by playing but we weren’t hung up on it. Now the competition among toy manufacturers seems designed to encourage competition among parents to make sure their toddlers have a big edge on other toddlers before they reach the competitive world of kindergarten.

Nothing is just a toy anymore. “Encourages sensory explorations, develops fine motor skills, encourages gross motor activity, helps develop eye-hand co-ordination, visually stimulating” and that’s only a teether! Granted, it seems like a very nice and interesting teether, but I shudder a bit at the thought of Christmas future.

A toy to hang on the crib says “contributes to baby’s understanding of cause and effect, the link between baby’s actions and the resulting reaction: when she kicks the kick-pad with her feet (cause), she causes interesting activity in the aquarium (effect). An action that begins quite randomly gradually becomes intentional as she learns about her ability to make things happen. With practice, she learns that there is a link between the force of her kick and the motion she creates, so that when she kicks harder, the movement is stronger, causing the creatures in the water to bounce about more, and vice versa.” All true I’m sure, but by this time, I instinctively pledge to resist being sucked into over-analyzing toys and play.

(…) They have the most wonderful wooden blocks on-line (just Google wooden blocks for kids) but the block manufacturers don’t say “encourages sensory explorations, develops fine motor skills, encourages gross motor activity, helps develop eye-hand co-ordination, visually stimulating” even though blocks do all of that. They also stimulate the imagination (nobody tells you what to build); teach patience in dealing with life’s frustrations (when they all fall down); and provide opportunity for lessons in sharing and co-operation (helping build it again) and pacifism (it’s not nice to throw them at your sister). Block manufacturers need to get with the times. Grandmothers know about blocks, but a young mother might think she was not a good mother if she chose blocks instead of a laptop computer for her three-year-old.

Yes, they have laptop computers for three year olds, brightly coloured learning toys that I’d say are the very best thing if you want your children to get a head start on entertaining themselves while sitting down and moving nothing except their fingers. (…)

Source: ChronicleHerald.ca, Canada
http://thechronicleherald.ca/AtHome/998493.html