My Connections To Play

When children pretend, they’re using their imaginations to move beyond the bounds of reality. A stick can be a magic wand. A sock can be a puppet. A small child can be a superhero.
~Fred Rogers

American Children's Television Host

Pausing to listen to an airplane in the sky, stooping to watch a ladybug on a plant, sitting on a rock to watch the waves crash over the quayside—children have their own agendas and timescales. As they find out more about their world and their place in it; they work hard not to let adults hurry them. We need to hear their voices.

~Cathy Nutbrown

Contemporary British educational theorist

The quotes above represent play in my childhood.  Playtime was a time for me to do what I wanted to do, how I wanted to do it.  I was left relatively unsupervised and to my own devices, which suited me just fine.  I learned a lot about society and my role in it through my play, and built my understanding of the world as well.  

Growing up, my toy of choice was my baby dolls and my barbie dolls.  I spent hours playing mommy and dressing and undressing my barbie dolls.  I LOVED to play house.  I read and colored all the time.  When I wasn't confined indoors, I was outside, running around, playing with my sisters and neighborhood kids exploring or playing at whatever we could conjure up.  Even though it was 30+ years ago, I remember my childhood playtime fondly.  

Growing up, my siblings and I weren't allowed to be in the house when it was nice outside.  My play in childhood was supported by parents and grandparents who understood the value of just being outside and exploring, but also that toys lent something to play as well.  I had toys, but I seem to remember not having the ones I really wanted (or maybe I just wanted what my friends had).  Even so, I still had lots of Barbies and baby dolls and whatever else my mother could offer me that nobly served their purpose in my play activities.  

MY 3 ESSENTIAL PLAY ITEMS:

"GET OUTSIDE!"  Playing outside was a big part of my youth.  

Dream Date Barbie-I loved this outfit. Of all the Barbies, this is the one I remember the most.  

My first Cabbage Patch (not my actual doll).  She looked just liked this, her name was Trudy, and she was my cherished friend.

I am always amazed at the way play has changed in the last 15-20 years.  Sometimes I wonder at the fact that up until recently childhood was not relegated to learning toys, electronics and ready made activities.  We didn't have all that, and neither did the generations before us, and we all seemed to have done alright.  My goal for my children is the love of the basics of play,  toys that they have to figure out how to work and how to be outside and run around, something they are actually good at.  They are learning that the best things in life don't have to be expensive toys or electronics.  

As adults, we do not often get the opportunity to play like we did as children, but we can still do it.  Playing WITH children can be very enjoyable.  Building Lego cities or playing soccer with them are great ways to teach children the value of play and that grownups like it too.  Fun and relaxation are very important to adults for decompressing and building relationships with others.  We should always remember to keep play in our lives.  After all "All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy".   

Relationship Reflection

"No man is an island entire of itself, each man is a part of the continent, a part of the main". 

~ John Donne, 1624. 

This week we are discussing the importance of family relationships and partnerships.  Relationships and partnerships are important because, as John Donne said so eloquently, we are all part of a larger system.  There are many instances in life where we cannot function as just the individual, we need others. Human nature compels us to form relationships, which help society function.  The partnerships and relationships I have in my life are few in number, but that is okay.  Each has a give and take that provides me with something I need and something the other person needs.

The first, and most important, relationship in my life is with my husband.    We have not just a relationship, but a partnership.  We work together to raise our children and support our family, financially and emotionally.  My husband is my friend and partner and an essential part of my support system.  What makes our relationship a partnership is that we are working together toward a common goal as parents and spouses, which makes it different from most of my other relationships.

Another relationship that is important to me is the one I have with my mother.  She has always been there for me and did her best to raise me and my sisters to be competent, independent women.  We now have a relationship that is mutual in that she can ask me for advice and I feel fine offering it to her.    

The other significant relationship in my life is with my sisters.  We have been able to form friendships over the years as we left childhood and school behind, got married and started raising families of our own.  Though we all live in different states, modern day communication allows us to stay in touch and support each other.  As the oldest, it has always been my job to take care of them, but it is nice to now be able to have mutual relationships where they can help me now, too.  

Leaving home and forming adult relationships outside of my family was a difficult experience for me at times.  It took time and maturity, but I have learned that the relationships we form in life, while some are temporary and others are long lasting, each have something to contribute to us as individuals.  Just like a garden, relationships and partnerships require care, attention, and maintenance.  

Professionally, the best experience I have had in learning about partnerships and family relationships has been in working with children and their families.  I am constantly learning how to navigate the intricacies of each individual family's dynamic and how to adjust to their comfort level when it comes to building relationships with them.  

New Course-EDUC 6161 Effective Programs and Practices

I am now in my third course of my master's program, Effective Programs and Practices.  Here I will be discussing issues which effect early childhood programs in policy and practice, and what they mean to me.  Enjoy! :)

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.