Our brave new world? | Integrated Learning Therapy

Parents these days seem to be faced with many more challenges than were offered in the past. It isn’t possible any more to bring your children up the way your parents raised you. There has simply been too much change too quickly, with technology literally transforming our homes and our lives. Everything seems to happen much, much faster than it did in Grandma’s day, thanks to the phenomenon of ‘electric speed’ (a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan). This started with the growth of global mass media and is still accelerating wildly.

For adults, this is an exciting time to be living through but we need to be aware of its impact on our children’s lives. Children are not adults. They still have to develop through years during which they acquire the skills needed to live in the social and educational world. They have to learn to focus their attention, defer gratification, acquire self-control, emotional balance, social awareness and empathy, academic skills and a set of good morals. This side of human development can’t occur at a rapid pace; it happens in ‘slow time’. Children of today need the same time-consuming, old-fashioned parenting that has resulted in healthy-minds-in-a-healthy-body since the origins of mankind.

There have been many social changes in the past decades as well. Technology means that we have far more contact with other cultures but this might mean that today’s children have less contact with their own cultural history. Not only this, but today’s lifestyle sees fewer extended family groups, many single-parent homes, a majority of working mothers feeling pressurised on all sides, less stable marriages and the never-ending warnings concerning junk food, electronic babysitters, too much screen time, technobrats, small homes with no access to gardens in which to play; danger on the streets; the demands of consumerism, peer pressure and more. And there are no definitive answers for all of these. The old certainties enjoyed by our parents and theirs have disappeared. Parenting today simply isn’t easy!

The physical side of child-rearing is more simple. Small beings have the same needs as they always have: good, nourishing food, plenty of exercise and play and sufficient sleep. It is the emotional and social support that demands time, attention, communication and love from caregivers. It may be these aspects of children’s development that are most threatened by the side effects of rapid technological and social change.

We see these side effects reflected in children’s attitudes and behaviours. Too many show increasing distractibility, impulsivity and self-obsession. Too many seem to be unable to learn effortlessly, to enjoy life and to thrive socially. This points to the difficult truth that even though it’s more difficult now than it ever was before, good parenting is more essential than ever.

Don’t be drawn into the paralysis caused by the rapid changes, uncertainty of what is the best practice and guilt because of your situation. The social media becomes a tool to help gather information so that you can concentrate of providing a secure, healthy environment in which your child can grow. Use technology to ‘get wise’ and plan how you are going to ensure that your family is able to cope with modern life without losing touch of their humanity.

Content of this post is based on Sue Palmer’s book entitled ‘Toxic Childhood’, published by Orion Books.

Image supplied by Freepik

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.