Parents as First Teachers (Paft) is a nationwide free home-visiting programme funded by Ministry of Education. It’s based on the philosophy that parents are their children’s first and most important teachers.

The eight parent educators in the Manawatu/Tararua/Rangitikei region visit 343 families between them once a month, co-ordinator Celia Thomas says.

Paft is for babies to three-year- olds with educators sharing with parents information and practical ideas on how ways to provide exciting, inexpensive educational experiences for their children and develop a love of books.

Educators show parents how to use toys to support and check on their child’s development.

For example, hearing is a big focus at four months so educators take toys that make sounds. At 17 months, when children want to be mum and dad’s helper, paint and play dough are used.

Activities that encourage peek-a- boo are good to help children deal with separation anxiety and help them learn about object permanence, Mrs Thomas says.

That software comes when parents develop attachment with their baby, nurture them and learn to understand how they communicate with their parents. The emotional support babies get from that attachment survives them for life.

Paft educators encourage learning based around a child’s strengths. For example, if little Zac can’t stop moving a door or pushing his toy car, he’s learning about force and motion or cause and effect, and parents can provide extra activities to support that.

A child’s interests move quickly from one activity to another so educators encourage parents to recognise this.

Educators find their work rewarding because they see parents making connections with their children and progress in recognising development, Mrs Thomas says.

Paft is part of the Team-Up campaign fronted by former All Blacks captain Tana Umaga; the campaign aims to get parents more involved in their children’s education. Umaga told the March issue of Rise magazine, published by the Ministry of Social Development, that every child has talent and the way to realise potential is to work hard and be committed.

“Parents need to help kids develop commitment,” Umaga says. “Kids can go a long way with a bit of help from mum and dad every day.” Paft, which has been operating in New Zealand since 1992, also offers group meetings and outings, plus developmental milestone checks. (…)

Source: Manawatu Standard, New Zealand
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/eveningstandard/4449200a20378.html

Undiagnosed eye problems in babies and young children can affect early learning as well as physical and emotional development.

That’s why experts, including the American Optometric Association, recommend that children receive their first eye screening at 6 months and their first formal eye exam at the age of 3-1/2.

“They don’t need to verbalize or know the alphabet,” said Merrimack optometrist Kevin Chauvette, who specializes in children’s vision therapy, a subspecialty of optometry.

Chauvette, who owns and operates Merrimack Vision Care, said a trained practitioner can identify nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism in an infant or young child, information that can be used to treat and prevent future problems.

“We’re trying to get the word out about the six-month screening,” Chauvette said. “A lot of parents just don’t know, and they depend on the school or the pediatrician to tell them what to do.”

Chauvette isn’t faulting anyone for the gap.

Screening recommendations for children are relatively new, he said, having been established about a decade ago.

Like other preventive health-care measures, he added, vision screening has been slow to catch on.

“The problem with vision is a lot of things can go wrong with the eyes that don’t cause pain,” the optometrist said. “If they don’t have pain or blurriness, people assume everything is OK.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For example, adults who have glaucoma, a disease that causes blindness, must undergo eye-pressure testing to confirm the condition. Otherwise, they will have no idea they are losing peripheral vision a little at a time.

By contrast, eye screening for children can identify eye problems that, left untreated, can lead to amblyopia or lazy eye, learning disabilities, behavior problems and other consequences, Chauvette said.

He said children who rub their eyes excessively, skip over short words, lose their place or cover one eye when reading may have vision problems. The same goes for the child whose handwriting is sloppy and disorganized.

During a baseline exam, Chauvette said he looks for symptoms such as a crossed eye or an eye that drifts outward, conditions that can be treated and corrected using a patch, eyeglasses or vision therapy.

“Children’s eyes change rapidly, and studies show that 80 percent of what is learned in the classroom is through the sense of vision,” he said, explaining why experts recommend annual eye exams for children after they start school.

Children’s eye exams are different from those given to adults.

“We look for factors that lead to lazy eye, the ability to learn at school,” Chauvette said, linking vision to both academic and social success. “Of kids having difficulties, a dramatically high percentage has underlying eye problems.”

He said experts believe that an increasingly sedentary lifestyle is to blame.

“Children are not outside playing. They’re looking at a computer, a flat world. They have more visual problems because they’re not interacting with a world in three dimensions, which is a necessary part of vision development,” Chauvette said.

In treatment, children are asked to accomplish complex tasks that require peripheral and central vision, as well as balance and motor skills. For example, a child might be asked to balance on a rail while tossing a ball.

“There’s almost nowhere in the brain where, if you make an incision, it doesn’t affect some part of vision,” Chauvette said, adding that vision influences balance, posture, memory and emotion.

Furthermore, a child identified with a learning disability has a 50-50 chance of having an undiagnosed vision problem, he added.

“If you intervene early, it’s fixable, treatable. It can be reversed,” Chauvette said of conditions that left untreated, can lead to failure in school and a constellation of social and personal problems.

Only about a third of all children have had an eye examination or vision screening prior to entering school, according to the American Optometric Association.

Nashua optometrist Ann Irwin, for example, said she has referred children for vision therapy and is pleased that state officials are talking about requiring an annual eye exam for all children before they begin school, similar to mandates for vaccinations and medical and dental exams.

Whether a child has vision problems, or is suspected of having them, Irwin said, she reminds parents to protect their child’s eyes.

“Children need sports goggles and sunglasses,” she said.

Source: Nashua Telegraph, NH
http://tinyurl.com/2adtyo

The development of fine motor skills is an important aspect of your child’s growth. One which you as a parent can help develop with a few simple and easy steps.

Fine motor skills refers to your child’s ability to use their hands. It encompasses writing, handling utensils and other tools, tying shoelaces, undoing buttons and closing zips. Children begin to develop fine motor skills from around three months of age.

In the first instance a baby’s hand and arm movements appear free of control, however as they age and the skill develops their movements show purpose and controls is established. Even at this tender age it is possible to help with the development of fine motor skills as a toddler.

By setting foundations early in life development milestones may be easily attained. Here are some helpful tips from around three months to early childhood.

Babies

- Provide babies with a range of rattles and objects to hold. They should be light and easy to clasp. Two handles are great as they allow baby to benefit from pass the object from hand to hand.

- From about six months provide the baby with Cradle gyms and activity boards. These have a variety of parts for baby to hold, push, twist, spin and a range of other things. It may take a while before baby can deliberately activate these but in the meantime they will get great pleasure from wildly waving their arms about in attempt. Not only do these activities assisting hand-eye co-ordination, a fundamental fine motor skill, but they also teach about cause and effect.

- Allow baby’s hands to be free. Free from mittens, and free to roam where ever they want, obviously with in reason though.

- Provide a range of objects like blocks, balls, dolls, in different materials and fabrics. This will encourage the child to want to touch them.

- Play clapping and finger games. There are a range of songs and games that involve the hands. Your child learns from watching you, so show them all the things your hands and fingers can do.

- Point to pictures in books and point things out for your child to look at as you travel. Get your child to point to pictures as well.

Toddlers and beyond

- Continue with similar ideas as to babies just add complexity and smaller objects may be increased. Smaller object for your child to handle will increase dexterity.

- Water play. Tipping water between bowls or cups and jugs is a wonderful way to develop fine motor skills and teaches again about cause and effect. (…)

Source: American Chronicle, CA
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/49726

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

Want to boost your baby’s brainpower?

Then you’d better get started early!

With recent news that breast milk can improve a baby’s IQ, it seems the little’uns’ intelligence rests partly in the parents’ hands.

So what can you do to create teeny boffins in waiting?

“Parents know instinctively that the early years are the foundation for their child’s future learning,” says child development expert Dr Carol Cooper.

“In fact, 75 per cent of brain development happens in the first few years.

“There are many early influences that can have a profound effect on a child’s success in later life.”

Here’s Dr Carol Cooper’s top five tips for brainy tots…

1) Rock and roll

“Singing will stimulate your baby’s brain and help set the foundation for language skills.

“Learning the rhythm of music is also linked to good mathematics skills later on in life.”

2) Nutrients are key

“Good nutrition is essential,” says Carol. “And Omega-3 provides natural building blocks for brain development.” …

3) Make your baby giggle

“Unlike adults, babies love it when you tell a joke over and over and this helps them learn to pay attention, and to develop their memory,” says Carol…

4) Science class

“All infants are eager to learn, so give your child simple activities and toys that involve building – like stickle bricks or building blocks,” advises Carol.

“It develops creativity in the brain, and helps them grasp the basic concepts of maths and physics.” …

5) Cuddle time

“Infants have a huge number of sensory receptors,” explains Carol, “And touch is the first tool they use to learn about the world…

Source: The Sun, UK
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/article433676.ece

DVDs that claim to make babies brighter are not only ineffectual, they take away vital development time with loving care-givers

A few years ago I was asked to help to launch Baby Einstein in this country. I was put off by the name – images of overzealous parents hot-housing their small children in the vain hope of growing their IQs – and became more dubious when I looked at the content, which was mainly coloured patterns and music reminiscent of Fantasia, but nowhere near as attractive. I couldn’t see what this was doing for babies, so I declined.

There are now a number of similar ranges, many having names that contain the same questionable promise – Brainy Baby, Baby Bright, which claims a scientific approach, and Baby IQ which has harnessed no less a mentor than the London Symphony Orchestra. Most of these titles consist of live action or simple animation and show bright patterns, other babies and basic scenes involving animals, nature, abstracts etc.

Overall, the content of these DVDs promotes passive viewing by a baby rather than using the DVD platform as an opportunity for interactive play with a parent or carer. The majority suggest that the baby will benefit intellectually from absorbing the visual and aural content. I’m aware of no credible scientific data to back up these claims and there’s no supporting material to help to guide or reassure parents. In short, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these are products with no real benefit to babies and give parents a false notion that watching television can improve a child’s intelligence.

All parents have a fervent desire to ensure that their children are given the best possible chance to realise their full potential. Most parents, however, are unaware that babies start to develop their brain-power from the moment that they are born. They’re wired to communicate and, moments after birth, will poke out their tongues at you if you talk animatedly while making eye-contact. They’re already developing learning skills, memory and understanding.

In their first year, babies make half a million brain connections a second. That’s why their brains triple in weight in the first 12 months.

However, this ripening can’t occur in a vacuum. Caring adults are needed to help children to grow their highly receptive brains by interacting with them. Not surprisingly, parents and other care-givers are crucial components in the cognitive development of their babies. But with so much conflicting information out there, parents are often confused and don’t know where to begin.

It’s tempting to clutch at straws which must be the reason why the mystique grew up around the fabled, though disputed, Mozart effect – a theory stating that classical music increases brain activity more effectively than other kinds.

The Mozart effect, though first described by a Frenchman in 1991, really surfaced only in 1993 when a US psychologist and a physicist at the University of California reported that brief exposure to a Mozart piano sonata could raise an IQ score 8-9 points. A New York Times piece in 1994 extrapolated their findings to “. . . listening to Mozart actually makes you smarter”. Subsequent studies have cast doubt on this claim. But it hasn’t stopped a slew of baby products such as Baby Mozart, Mozart for Babies, with the implied claim that they will promote, among other things, the development of logical thinking and maths ability. For parents wanting to do the best for their babies it has purchase appeal, even if in reality the benefits are unproven.

If it’s baby cognitive development you’re after, we have to look at what sights and sounds do for the brain. We can do that using a Positron Imaging Technology scan, which can map out in three dimensions what’s going on in the brain by measuring bloodflow. With this scan you can identify which activities stimulate which areas of the brain.

Watching TV, or for our purpose, looking at changing colours and images, stimulates the occipital lobes at the back of the brain. Accompanying sounds and music stimulate the temporal lobes at the sides of the brain. So far, so good, except that the part of the brain in which we’re most interested for cognitive development is the prefrontal cortex at the very front of the brain and it’s left relatively untouched by either of these activities.

As it happens, in the experiments of Dr Kawashima, of Nintendo DS Brain Training fame, the prefrontal cortex lights up like a Christmas tree by reading aloud. Yes, all that early book-reading with you is what your baby really needs.

Let’s say you are a model parent, can you make your baby more intelligent? The scientific consensus says that you can’t. Nothing can. The baby’s interaction with the care-giver is all about giving her the skills and confidence to make the most of the intelligence she has, which in fact makes all the difference to successful child development.

A DVD in front of which you park your baby doesn’t help her to reach her full potential. Developing cognition does involve sight and sound, but only when mixed together with joyful human interaction through touching, talking, smiling and feeling. Then learning, memorising, socialising and motor skills all move forward together. In one year, a baby leaps from seeing a cat for the first time to understanding that her family’s cat, a picture of a cat and a toy cat, though very different, are all cats. She has learned that a cat is not only a thing but a concept with its own essential qualities. Huge!

Emotional development is much neglected but crucially important in the first 18 months. Acquiring emotional control and balance will make a baby friendly, generous, outgoing and loving, but only if a parent patiently coaches her.

And what about relationships? The relationship a child forms with her parents, and in the first instance with her mother, is the blueprint for all other relationships. Babies become social by imitating. They first imitate facial expressions, then movements, then speech, then whole patterns of behaviour. They are born longing to talk and, as I’ve said, will have a “conversation” with you from birth if you use their special language. Baby birds don’t sing if they don’t hear birdsong in their first six weeks. Human babies are much the same with speech – the more they hear and interact, the more they learn.

In August, I was contacted again by Baby Einstein (now owned by Disney) through its PR agency, which said it was looking to acquire scientific backing with expert endorsement and would I consider possibly acting as a spokesperson. This was just after an article appeared in Newsweek, reporting research from the University of Washington that for every hour that infants of 8-16 months watch videos such as Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby they understood 6-8 fewer words than other babies who were not exposed to such videos. Researchers said that their results pointed to these DVDs being a poor substitute for warm, human, social interaction.

Professor Fred Zimmerman, associate professor of paediatrics at Washington University, lead author of the study and interviewed by Newsweek said: “Parents are getting a very mixed message here – they are hearing loud and clear from marketers of these products that they can be very educational. But, in fact, there’s no scientific evidence.” Professor Zimmerman contends that baby videos are displacing time a child would spend with a carer. “So”, he says, “there’s a possibility that what’s on the screen is pointless, if not outright harmful. Baby videos may be undoing all the benefit of a parent’s hard work in terms of reading and story-telling.”

In the US, Professor Zimmerman believes that a third of parents have bought into claims of the marketers who promise to build vocabulary and enhance cognitive development. The baby brain industry is now worth $20 billion (£10 billion) annually, according to Susan Gregory Thomas in her book Buy, Buy Baby.

Those marketers will defend their share with every weapon and argument they can muster, including trying to get me onside. But I’ve declined a second time.

–– A spokesman for Disney says: “The company has always been committed to maintaining the highest standards of practice. Baby Einstein products are designed as interactive tools for parents – helping them to expose their little ones to the world around them in playful and enriching ways.”

Source: Times Online, UK
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article2778730.ece

Many Parents Believe That Watching Videos and DVDs May Help Bring Out the Budding Genius in Their Babies

The titles lure aspirational parents eager to do what’s best for their infants: Baby Einstein, Baby Galileo, Baby Shakespeare and even Brainy Baby with its original motto, “a little genius in the making.”

But do these enormously popular and profitable videos and DVDs devised for viewers too young even to sit up provide educational enrichment, as supporters contend? Or are they a skillful marketing scheme for products that may actually impede cognitive development, as critics say?

Those questions have been reignited by a highly publicized study by veteran child development researchers at the University of Washington.

The Seattle team surveyed more than 1,000 families in February 2006 and found that infants between 8 and 16 months who regularly watched Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby videos knew substantially fewer words — six to eight out of 90 — than infants who did not watch them, according to parental reports. The deficit, which increased with each hour of video viewing, was not seen among babies who watched other programming, such as “Sesame Street” or “SpongeBob SquarePants” or adult shows such as “Oprah.”

The study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, is the first to examine the impact of videos that have been heavily promoted as educational, according to lead author Frederick J. Zimmerman, a University of Washington associate professor of public health and pediatrics. Zimmerman called the negative effect “large and significant” but said the study stopped short of establishing a causal connection.

“Parents should not panic,” Zimmerman said. Fifteen minutes of video viewing, he said, is unlikely to matter. But some babies in their study watched as much as four hours per day — a circumstance facilitated by the automatic replay feature on Baby Einstein DVDs.

In Zimmerman’s view, parents have been “misled” about the benefits of baby videos, which can displace real-world parent-child interaction and creative play, both known to be essential for cognitive development.

No Screen Time

Other experts agree. No empirical study, they say, has demonstrated benefits for any video or television programming in children younger than 2. That is the chief reason the American Academy of Pediatrics advises no screen time for this age group, a recommendation that experts concede is widely ignored. Studies have linked heavy TV viewing among children older than 3 to attention and learning problems, sleep disturbances and obesity.

Earlier this year, researchers reported that 20 percent of children younger than 2 had a television set in their bedroom. Another study by Zimmerman’s team found that 40 percent of 3-month-olds regularly watched an hour per day, a figure that rose to 90 percent by age 2.

And a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2005 found that about 25 percent of families owned at least one baby video and that nearly half of parents considered them important educational tools. (Parents also said they used videos to entertain their babies or when they needed to take a break.)

A decade ago, programming aimed at infants and toddlers was virtually nonexistent. Since then, videos, DVDs, affiliated books and toys and even a 24-hour cable TV channel called BabyFirst TV have emerged, creating an industry with annual revenue estimated to exceed $1 billion.

“These videos are incredibly seductive and hit parents where they are most vulnerable: fears about academic success and intense time pressures,” said educational psychologist Susan Linn, co-founder of the advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Last year the campaign, with the support of the AAP and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby, alleging that they engaged in false and deceptive advertising. At issue were claims by the manufacturers that the videos promote language skills, foster infant development or provide “a jump-start on learning.” The matter has not been resolved.

“The hype that these are educational makes parents feel less guilty about sticking their kids in front of the tube,” said Washington area psychiatrist Michael Brody, who chairs the AACAP’s committee on media.

Brody, who teaches a course on children and media at the University of Maryland, says videos have helped fuel a kind of arms race involving “hypercompetitive parents who use their children as objects” and seek to ensure they are keeping up — or better yet, excelling.

Industry Response

Makers of baby videos dispute such criticism. They dismiss Zimmerman’s study as methodologically flawed and point out that the language gap was not seen in infants between 17 and 24 months.

Brainy Baby chief executive Dennis Fedoruk said in an e-mail that his Atlanta-based company’s videos are “tools that parents can use with their children, much like a book, to introduce academic basics.”

Fedoruk said he has received “thousands of unsolicited testimonials from customers who have seen a positive result in their own children from watching our videos,” including improved scores on an IQ test.

Susan McLain, vice president and general manager of Disney-owned Baby Einstein, which has an estimated 90 percent share of the market, said company officials “took offense” at the notion that their line of 24 DVDs, many bearing the names of luminaries — da Vinci, van Gogh, Mozart, Newton — might be harmful.

“We’ve never claimed they’re educational,” said McLain, who said she played them for her 4-month-old daughter. The goal is to “instill in infants a love of classical music and art and nature.”

“Our core position has been about the discovery of meaningful moments for Mom and baby,” she said. “That was Julie Aigner-Clark’s vision.”

Aigner-Clark, a Colorado English teacher, founded Baby Einstein in 1997 when she filmed the first video, which cost her $15,000, using borrowed equipment. Four years later, when she sold the company to Disney, it had sales of $20 million, President Bush noted when he singled her out in his 2007 State of the Union address as representative of “the great enterprising spirit of America.”

Aigner-Clark has said she drew the logo herself and chose the name to reflect Albert Einstein’s “love of the arts, simple curiosity and passion for discovery” — and not because his name is synonymous with genius. (Baby Einstein pays royalties to the late physicist’s estate.)

Her initial goal, she said, was to expose her baby daughter Aspen to “the arts and sciences,” only to find there were no “age-appropriate products.”

She and her husband shot “scenes on a tabletop in my basement,” she recounts on Ladies Who Launch, a Web site for female entrepreneurs. “I put a puppet on my hand and plopped my cat down in front of the camera.”

“Everything I did in the first videos was based on my experience as a mom,” she continued. “I didn’t do any research. . . . I assumed that what my baby liked to look at, most other babies would, too.”

Her timing was flawless. Baby Einstein was launched during a decade of unprecedented interest in infants’ cognitive development. A few years earlier, researchers had published a study of the so-called Mozart effect, a theory about the beneficial effects on learning of exposure to classical music.

That theory, which has since been largely discredited, was seized on by politicians, including then-Gov. Zell Miller of Georgia, who advocated sending parents of newborns in his state classical music tapes. The Clinton White House held a conference on brain development during the first three years of life, and parents across the country flocked to stores with names like Zany Brainy to buy educational toys designed to nurture their children’s budding intellect.

“It was a perfect storm,” said child psychiatrist Brody.

How Babies Learn

Some child development experts say it is highly unlikely babies know what to make of commercial baby videos, which they describe as a noisy, rapid-fire melange of images, sounds and words in multiple languages that seem to have little connection to one another but may be attention-grabbing.

“Babies can barely recognize objects at all,” Zimmerman said. A picture of a horse and a bouncing cow to illustrate the concept “farm” — along with the word “farm,” which they cannot read, is likely to be baffling, he said.

“A 1-year-old is not going to learn to read: They don’t have the cognitive architecture.”

Studies have found that before age 3, babies have substantial difficulty learning from a two-dimensional image; they learn, instead, from touching or tasting or otherwise experiencing the three-dimensional world around them.

Developmental psychologist Rachel Barr, director of the Early Learning Project at Georgetown University, said she regards baby videos as “a personal choice for people to make” but recommends that “parents think about how they use them and how often they use them. An hour is a long time.”

“A screen is a very difficult thing for a child under 2 to process,” she said. Young children do not learn by osmosis, as many adults believe.

Barr cited a study conducted several years ago by University of Massachusetts researchers, who found that 1-year-olds who saw a video about how to use a puppet had to watch it six times to learn how to do it, while those who received a live lesson did so immediately.

McLain said Baby Einstein videos are “based on well-established principles that babies can absorb and respond to different sights and sounds.” Brainy Baby’s Fedoruk said his videos were created by “educators with time-tested expertise.”

Some parents are fans.

Deborah Ankutse, a former software engineer in Round Rock, Tex., said she played Brainy Baby videos for her son, now 6, and is convinced that they helped him learn to talk early and to read when he was 27 months old.

“I used them as a teaching tool, and I think they’re very important,” she said.

Catherine Stocker of Bethesda said she regards the 10 or so Baby Einstein videos she owns as “3-D mobiles” for her sons, ages 1 1/2 and 4 1/2 . She sometimes uses them on long airplane trips when she and her children watch on her laptop or a portable DVD player.

“I don’t compare them to other activities I would do with my kids” at home, she said, “but with what else would they be watching on TV for 20 minutes while I throw dinner in the oven.”

To Harvard’s Linn, the widespread use of these videos raises a more vexing question.

“In this digitized world, do we want to raise a generation of children who are either bored or anxious if they’re not in front of a screen?”

Source: Washington Post, United States
http://tinyurl.com/yp2lfh

The baby has recently started to laugh in response to outside stimuli. We all live for it. We crave it. All three of us will do anything in our power to hear that tiny little munchkin giggle. The strangest things tickle his funny bone. If somehow we find a magic button, we will repeat the action over and over and over again just to please him. It has reached the levels of a cult following in our home.

One of the things that will send him into hysterics makes no sense why he finds it funny, but it works every time. If you position yourself directly in front of him while he is sitting in his car seat, rotate your head quickly in a clockwise direction and say “Boo” after your head has made a full rotation, he laughs. Counterclockwise doesn’t work. Saying anything after your head has made the full rotation doesn’t work. But that exact combination gets him laughing every time. My neck has been sore and I’ve been dizzy ever since this has been discovered…

He especially thinks being naked is funny. Getting his diaper changed is hysterical. Bath time is a hoot. This is dangerous. I am worried that encouraging this behavior will result in a serial preschool streaker.

When he’s in a good mood, he laughs when we sing to him. We sing him silly songs that we make up to the tune of “Henry the Eighth.” He loves it. His chubby little legs start kicking and he laughs and coos while we sing to him…

I’m not sure what we did for fun in our house before the baby was born. I know we laughed, and I know that it wasn’t this much work before he came into our lives. But I don’t know what could be more fun than my husband, my son and I doing everything in our power to please him and, in turn, all laughing from the infectious laugh of the baby.

Source: Coshocton Tribune, OH
http://tinyurl.com/2ncxgg

While cavities decreased in permanent teeth, a new study shows 28 percent of 2-to-5-year-old children surveyed from 1999 to 2004 had cavities compared with 24 percent of children surveyed from 1988 to 1994.

For the past four decades, tooth decay in baby teeth had been decreasing. But the latest federal report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides the first statistical evidence that this trend is reversing, dental experts say.

Reasons for the upswing were not studied, but experts say the troubling pattern shows the preschool-age crowd might be getting too much sugar and not enough fluoride and not brushing properly.

“I see so much decay,” said pediatric dentist Roy Beam, of Kids World Children’s Dentistry in Riverside. “Baby teeth are just like adult teeth. They will decay.” …

The key is early prevention, experts say. The American Dental Association recommends a child visit the dentist by age 1…

“Kids are eating more prepackaged meals, less fruits and veggies, and more items that are presweetened,” said Dr. Bruce Dye, of the National Center for Health Statistics…

Multiple snacks with simple carbohydrates, such as crackers, fruit snacks, pasta and cereal, are also likely contributing to the increase, said Dr. Mary Hayes, a Chicago pediatric dentist and spokeswoman for the American Dental Association.

“It’s this idea of grazing,” she said. “With the wrong foods, you are simply allowing the bacteria to thrive and causing an acid attack on the tooth more often.”

It’s the same story with a child sipping juice all day or going to bed with a bottle…

Experts say another issue contributing to the climb in youngsters’ cavities is the growing number of bottled water drinkers.

Bottled water typically doesn’t contain enough fluoride to prevent decay, according to the American Dental Association.

“If you chose not to use fluoridated water, you are removing that chance for prevention and success,” Hayes said.

Parents should also help their children brush. Unless children can tie their own shoes, they do not have the motor skills to brush properly, Hayes said…

Source: MiamiHerald.com, USA
http://www.miamiherald.com/360/story/260277.html

In the digital age, it’s simpler toys that may make children smarter

Parents these days are willing to try almost anything to give their toddlers an educational edge: Mozart, baby DVDs, even flash cards.

It turns out that blocks may make their toddlers smarter.

Children who played with blocks scored on average 15 percent higher on language tests — an early indicator of cognitive development — than their peers who didn’t get a chance to stack and pile, according to research released Monday by the Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

“Many toys make claims they are actually educational for kids,” said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, who led the study. “The interesting thing is that things like blocks never made such claims.”

The researchers relied on funding from Canadian toymaker Mega Bloks for the research, which appeared in this month’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

It is a bit of old school knowledge for today’s hyper-involved parent, who is inundated with electronic interactive toys. Sometimes lost in this crowded toy marketplace is the fact that parent-child interaction is the best way for toddlers to learn.

The research is also more fodder for the nostalgic parenting movement. “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” which celebrates such old standards as marbles and tree houses, remains a New York Times best-seller, and learning through play has become a rallying cry for parents and educators.

The science of play is that toddlers learn by doing — say stacking blocks or building a Lego tower — because they begin to grasp the world around them. Kids who engage in imaginative play also may have better impulse control and longer attention spans, according to the research paper.

“I think nowadays too many parents rely on the television for example,” said Dr. Tanya Remer Altmann, author of “The Wonder Years: Helping Your Baby and Young Child Successfully Negotiate the Major Developmental Milestones.” She didn’t take part in the study.

“They don’t spend enough one-on-one time down on the ground playing blocks,” she said.

It is also possible toddlers in the study watched less television because they were too busy playing with their blocks, said the researchers, who work at both the Seattle Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center and the University of Washington.

Even though educational toys are big business, there is little independent research that proves the toys help young children learn, Christakis said.

Blocks “are one of the few toys that actually now have shown that they do” help, Christakis said.

With so little research and strong parental interest in giving children an edge, Christakis worries families may move away from blocks and other proven toys.

Researchers cautioned against going too far with their blocks study because it was limited to 175 children ages 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 from low- and middle-income families, and for other reasons.

But the research paper suggested the data could help create strategies to boost language development and maybe cut the amount of time toddlers spend in front of the television set.

Source: Seattle Post Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/333869_blocks02.html