When I think of child development...

I am now in the last week of my second MSED course, Early Childhood Development.  I want to share a few quotes and ideas I think are important when thinking about child development.

"Free the child's potential and you will transform him into the world." ~Maria Montessori

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." ~Frederick Douglass

While Frederick Douglass was not a child development expert, he was a man who saw the best and worst in humanity.  Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in 1818, but, with the help of friends, was able to escape to freedom in Pennsylvania around the age of 20.  He knew something about good people and bad people.  I believe this quote from him is very relevant to the importance of proper love, nurturing and education of children.  

Finally, the video below talks about how the science of early childhood development is showing the importance of early intervention in early childhood.

InBrief: The Science of Early Childhood Development (Video)

The Whole Child

In today's academic environment, when it comes to evaluating children, the mostly widely used method is the standardized test.   Standardized tests measure a child's knowledge in a certain subject.  This is fine in theory, but in reality the methods for testing are unreasonable and the results are questionable.  Standardized tests do not take into account students learning styles or test taking abilities.  Instead all children are expected to perform at the same level regardless of aptitude.  And are these tests measuring success of the child or the school?  Generally, the school.  How this is supposed to measure a child's true potential and success is a mystery to me.  If we are to give standardized tests, then should they not be given at the beginning and end of the year to measure what is known against what they learn throughout the year?  Teaching to the test has taken priority over teaching to standards.

One teaching method that has been recently developed is Whole Child Approach.  Launched in 2007, the Whole Child Initiative is an effort to change the conversation about education from a focus on narrowly defined academic achievement to one that promotes the long term development and success of children (The Whole Child, 2013).  The approach integrates the individual social, cognitive and emotional needs of learners into daily teaching. Seeing the child as a whole person with faceted needs and abilities, not just a student to be taught facts and figures to, is what is needed in our education system today.


In Taiwan, junior high school students prepare to take high school entrance exams in hopes of scoring high enough to be admitted to a prestigious high school, and then prepare for national university entrance exams so they can attend four year university.  If they don't score high enough, they can't apply to these schools (Huang, n.d.).  That is much different in the U.S. where entrance exams are not taken until applying for college and entrance exams are required, but students are not precluded from applying to most colleges by their scores.


References:

Huang, K. (n.d.).  Taiwan and U.S. education comparisons.  Retrieved from    http://sitemaker.umich.edu/huangk.356/standardized_testing

The Whole Child. (2013).  The whole child approach.  Retrieved from http://www.wholechildeducation.org

The Consequences of Stress on Children's Development

This week my assignment is to write about how myself or someone I know was affected by any of the following:  war, poverty, hunger, natural disasters, racism, isolation, noise, chaos, disease, environmental pollution, or violence.  Fortunately, I have not had to deal with any of these horrible things in my life.  My mother's brother died of leukemia when I was about 2 1/2 and while it did not affect me directly at the time, it had a profound effect on my mother and her family.  It is something that is still very difficult for them to talk about and there remains an emotional grief that I do not believe has been adequately dealt to this day.  While I have not experienced any of the things on above, my parents divorced when I was about 5 or 6 and it was very difficult on my sisters and I because of the things that the adults in our life were going through.  I was sent to live with my grandmother for a time as I was in school, my sisters were not yet.  Being away from my mother was difficult and it remains a time that is vivid in my memory.  It took my mother a long time to recover from her divorce and to get back on her feet and of course this had a huge impact on my sisters and me.  Without getting into specifics, times were very hard emotionally and it was very stressful on us me, as I was the oldest and responsible to help with my younger sisters.

The second part of this assignment was to pick a part of the world and the stressors children face there.  I would have picked Taiwan, but it is an industrialized country and I did not think that their stressors are very much different than ours.  So I thought about where children are facing the worst kinds of stressors. Somalia came to mind.  Somalia is a worn torn country on the Horn of Africa, bordered on the east by the Indian Ocean and the countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya to the west and south.  Somalia has been in constant chaos and anarchy since the early 1990's.  Warlords and Islamist militias have battled each other.  Droughts have plagued the area for decades. According to UNICEF (2013), children in this country face the worst kind of deprivation and abuse in the world due to "restrictions on humanitarian access, reduced coping mechanisms, poor performance of crops, lack of access to markets, restriction of commercial and population movements, lack of income generating opportunities, and deep rooted poverty. High prices present the overriding barrier to food access."  1 in 10 Somali children die before their first birthday; Somalia has the largest population of unvaccinated children.  As they grow up, they face poverty, war, drought, hunger, disease, chaos and violence.  Boys are recruited as child soldiers, girls face early marriage and genital mutilation. Obviously, repeated exposure to all of these stressors is going to take a toll on these children's development.  We know that stress affects the brain and traumatic or stressful events can cause major depression, PTSD, and ADD/Hyperactivity, and other physical, mental and emotional disorders and brain damage.  

Considering that we live in relative safety and security in this country, it is extremely difficult to imagine that so many children face these horrible things on a daily basis.  It really makes us put our own stressors in perspective.

References:
UNICEF.  (2013).  The situation of women and children in Somalia.  Retrieved from http://www.unicef.org/somalia/children.html

Immunizations

This week I will be discussing a topic important to me and to child development: immunizations.  In recent years, this topic has become a heated debate as opponents of immunizations have become concerned that some immunizations can lead to developmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD).  The scientific community has stated equivocally that there is no link between ASD and vaccines.

The reason I chose this topic is because I have two children of my own who were born internationally and I was drawn into this debate by all they hype in the media about vaccines around the times they came home.  I did my research though and found that the U.S. has the safest and most effective vaccine supply in the world.  Vaccines protect us and the community against truly terrible diseases.  Vaccines have increased the average life span by 30 years and they save lives.  To me the "research" of the link of ASD to vaccines is tenuous at best.  I am not willing to risk my children's overall health on an assumption.  It really angers me that others are willing to risk not only their child's health, but that of others by refusing to get their child immunized.

In my opinion, assuming the very small risk associated with any vaccine is better than the risk of not being immunized.  Vaccines create "herd immunity" through immunization to disease.  If a critical portion of a community is immunized it creates a level of protection for most of the community, as a chance of outbreak is greatly reduced.  When less and less become immunized, then the risk of outbreak increases.  This can be seen in the recent pertussis (whooping cough) outbreak in Texas.  The rise in cases is attributed to a new vaccine and less children being immunized.  Since infants cannot receive the vaccine until 4 months, pregnant mothers are encouraged to take the vaccine during pregnancy.  The website www.vaccines.gov is a great source of information about vaccines.  It is very easy to read and user friendly.

I will continue my comparison with Taiwan.  According to the American Journal of Public Health (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449171/), in Taiwan all children are required to receive 16 doses of vaccines by 18 months of age, including 1 dose of bacille Calmette–Guérin (BCG/TB) vaccine, 3 doses of hepatitis B vaccine, 4 doses of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, 4 doses of oral poliomyelitis vaccine, 1 dose of measles vaccine, 1 dose of measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, and 2 doses of Japanese encephalitis vaccine.  This is not as much as the U.S. requires, but the BCG is not administered or required here.  When we brought our children home, they had to have several catchup vaccines that were not routinely give in Taiwan.  Also, one of my children kept popping positive for TB, but since I knew that infants were give the TB vaccine in Taiwan I was able to get them a blood test and verify it was the vaccine that was causing the false positive.

Being informed and advocating for your children's health is one of the greatest things you can do for your children.  It does make one feel a bit helpless when you see parents who don't do that.  But we can be sources of information and encouragement to those parents who maybe just need a little help getting access to the facts.

Birth (Beginning of EDUC 6160:Early Childhood Development)

I am now in the beginning of my second course, Early Childhood Development, in my Master's program.  We will be learning about the stages of early childhood development.  This week we were given the assignment to write about a personal birthing experience.  I have none to share.  My children were adopted and I have never given birth.  I have never been in the room with any of my sisters when they gave birth, nor with a close friend or relative.
I wish that I had been the one to give birth to my children.  They are such a blessing to me and I am grateful to the women who brought them to me.

My children were born in Taiwan so I chose to read about childbirth in that country.  Taiwan is an industrialized nation that practices western medicine.  99% of women give birth in hospitals.  Much of what I read states that many of the practices used on Taiwanese women in childbirth are decades old practices and are highly discouraged, or not at all recommended, by the World Health Organization.  Women (almost 100%) are routinely administered I.V's, enemas and shaved and given episiotomies, and about half are given labor inducing drugs.  Also, they are constantly strapped to fetal monitoring machines (recommended monitoring every 30-45 mins if higher risk), so they cannot get up and walk around.  Cesarean sections account for almost 35% of births (a good level would be 12-15%).  Women are made to give birth laying flat on their back.  Medical intervention is seen by Taiwan doctors as a safety precaution, but health officials have been warning that such procedures are contributing to higher mortality rates in Taiwan, while many other countries' rates are falling.  Tradition combined with a lack of understanding of how these practices are harmful rather than helpful continue to keep the practices ongoing in a large number of hospitals throughout the country.  (http://taiwanonymous.blogspot.com).

I do believe these birthing practices are in many ways detrimental to not only the mothers, but the infants.  High rates of cesarean sections, unnecessary use of drugs, fetal monitoring and less than desirable birthing positions do have ill effects on the infants, evident in the high infant mortality rates in Taiwan.  To what degree they affect normal development, I do not know.  I think the care a mother takes with her pregnancy prior to birth is more important to development than the birthing.  My children have developed normally and are on track.  Their birth mothers had access to prenatal care and gave birth in hospitals, but I don't know the circumstances.  Like any mother, I am just glad they are healthy and thriving.

References:
Taiwanonymous.blogspot.com (2009, February 12).  On childbirth in Taiwan: Taiwanese women, why aren't you angry?  Retrieved from http://taiwanonymous.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-childbirth-in-taiwan-taiwanese-women.html

Reflections on Foundations: Early Childhood

I am now in week 8, the final week, of the first course in my Master's of Education in Early Childhood Studies program.  It has been 8 weeks already??  The time has gone so fast.  I really learned a lot from this course.  Learning online was definitely a challenge at the beginning, but after the first week or two, I got into a pretty good routine that will carry me through the rest of the program. I think the things I learned from this course WILL be the foundations for my learnings in the rest of the program and will make a positive contribution to my career as a early childhood professional.  I am so glad I made the decision to go with this program.  I am looking forward to the next course, Early Childhood Development.

Code of Ethics and Ethical Conduct in Early Childhood Education

The NAEYC and the Division for Early Childhood (DEC) of the Council for Exceptional Children both have position statements which offer guidelines for responsible behavior and professional practice.  Below I have listed three that are most meaningful to me.

1.  We shall demonstrate in our behavior and language respect and appreciation for the unique value and human potential of each child.  (DEC)

2.  Above all, we shall not harm children.  We shall not participate in practices that are emotionally damaging, physically harmful, disrespectful, degrading, dangerous, exploitative, or intimidating to children.  (NAEYC)

3.  In a caring, cooperative workplace, human dignity is respected, professional satisfaction is promoted and positive relationships are developed and sustained.  (NAEYC)

I chose these because my personal code of conduct and professionalism includes respect for all children, families and staff; advocating for children and creating a safe and nurturing environment; and ensuring all staff are happy and productive.

Links:
NAEYC Code of Conduct and Committment to Ethical Conduct: http://www.naeyc.org/files/naeyc/file/positions/PSETH05.pdf

DEC Code of Ethics:
http://www.dec-sped.org/uploads/docs/about_dec/position_concept_papers/Code%20of%20Ethics_updated_Aug2009.pdf