"Social and Emotional Development
abc's of child development for parents for early care providers
Social and emotional milestones are often harder to pinpoint than signs of physical development. This area emphasizes many skills that increase self-awareness and self-regulation. Research shows that social skills and emotional development (reflected in the ability to pay attention, make transitions from one activity to another, and cooperate with others) are a very important part of school readiness"
experts seem to think that baby/toddler reading and learning to read in school are the same. They aren't. Of course babies and toddlers don't have the brain development to learn to read like a 6-year-old. Early literacy experts have come to understand that babies and toddlers learn to read differently.
Although no one can explain exactly how baby/toddler reading works, babies do have capacities from birth to age 3 for picking up reading–including phonics patterns and decoding–similar to their capacities for picking up languages.
hese events require intimate physical contact such as snuggling with a book or cuddling with the baby or toddler at the computer.
The interview with Wang, a neuroscientist, along with one of his coauthors, Dr. Sandra Aamodt, celebrates the release of their new book, Welcome to Your Child's Brain, which synthesizes research on how the brain develops from infancy to adolescence and provides scores of tips for parents. The interview and a report on NPR's web site, "How to Help Your Child's Brain Grow Up Strong," are chock full of great advice that dovetails with best practices for baby/toddler reading:
• Don't use force.• Realize that children reach cognitive milestones at different times.• Expect babies' brains to do very complicated things. • Take advantage of the baby's special language capacities.• Capitalize on babies' attraction to language. • Use active and social exposure to words.• Encourage bilingual learning in babyhood.• Teach self-control.• Take advantage of your child's natural sense of fun.
"The most simple way is to talk to your baby and around your baby a lot" and "Respond when the baby speaks, even if the baby isn't forming the words correctly or you don't understand it.
add reading aloud and talking about the story to increase the number and quality of word data going into the baby/toddler brain in the first three years of life.
most of all, add book sharing and word games, because the attention and fun with words and books are a wonderful vehicle for physical contact and bonding.
About 1 in 5 children struggle with phonemic awareness and other disabling issues, so dismissing reading as something that seems as simple as telling "the letter 'b' from the letter 'd' and so on" and saying that "it's something that older children can do without any effort at all," is oversimplification.
Many babies learn to read some words before they can speak them.
Children have to think in words before they can read them. But they don't necessarily have to speak them before they can read.
Teaching your baby or toddler to read joyfully and informally is easier than teaching a child to read formally at age 6.
Teach your baby/toddler to read and bring loving physical contact, language, thinking, feelings, bonding, creativity and expression into one simple act. There may be no better way to help your child's brain grow up strong than to teach your child to read joyfully.
"Three Core Concepts in Early Development
Healthy development in the early years provides the building blocks for educational achievement, economic productivity, responsible citizenship, lifelong health, strong communities, and successful parenting of the next generation. This three-part video series from the Center and the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child depicts how advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, and genomics now give us a much better understanding of how early experiences are built into our bodies and brains, for better or for worse."
Seth Pollak, PhD
College of Letters and Science Distinguished Professor of Psychology and
Professor of Anthropology, Pediatrics, Psychiatry and
Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin at Madison
approach research on child development from both basic science and applied, public health perspectives.
My particular area of interest is in understanding how the quantity and quality of early experiences in children's lives influences how children think about and process information.
the goal of our research is to better understand the role that early experiences in children's lives have on development of brain structure and function.
This fellow was featured on the PBS series, "This Emotional Life". He was doing some interesting work with children who had experienced trauma and separation.
"A conference dedicated to making a difference.
Be prepared to be inspired, empowered, perhaps even transformed.
An interdisciplinary conference devoted to improving children's lives by highlighting innovative programs and by making the newest research and insights from neuroscience, child development, psychology, & medicine understandable & applicable to those who work directly with children."
Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) is a video coaching program that aims to strengthen positive interactions between caregivers and children.
If an adult’s responses are consistently unreliable, inappropriate, or simply absent, children may experience disruptions to their physical, mental, and emotional health.
FIND coaches film families for 10 minutes as they engage in everyday activities, such as playing a game or having a snack. The coaches then edit down the footage to three brief clips that highlight positive instances of parent-child interaction, and share these with the caregiver in weekly structured coaching sessions.
streamline the process for sending and receiving video files for analysis, resulting in a far more cost-effective solution that maintained participant confidentiality
The researchers developed and have employed a protocol for editor certification to ensure the reliability of the edited footage.
We assist organizations and communities who want to improve outcomes for people living in poverty.
Conferences for youth and adults living in poverty and the Navigator/Neighbor program for matching trained citizens who are not in poverty with citizens who are in poverty), Poverty Competency assessments, customized action planning tools, books, articles, research, informative free newsletter, a resource focused website, and other educational materials for making a difference
If we intend to support children we need to understand the roots of poverty so we can support families. Donna Beegle can help us understand what it means and how to help families.
Dr. Beegle was named a 2013 Woman of Influence by the Portland Business Journal! The annual Orchid Awards honor women who are compelling, affect change and represent their positions with strength, wisdom and grace.
"Our Mission:
Communication Across Barriers is dedicated to broadening and improving opportunities for people who live in the war zone of poverty
Our far reaching goals:
Assist communities and organizations to "fight poverty, not the people who live in it." We illuminate real and structural causes of poverty and provide life changing information that shatters common myths and stereotypes about people who live in poverty
Offer research-based strategies and insider perspectives for improving relationships, communication, and opportunities across poverty barriers
Develop an army of speakers and trainers who can educate and assist communities in breaking poverty barriers
Provide models and programs that increase a connected, collaborative, community-wide approach to fighting poverty
Educate and engage people not in poverty with tools and avenues for making a difference in their own communities"
"What is a Videative?
The word videative [vid´-é-ã-tive] refers to the combination of text and video segments to create an integrated viewing experience (video + narrative = videative). The text explains the video and the video exemplifies the text. Our videatives help you see what children know™ and thereby help you better support their learning."
Our lab specializes in studying a region of the brain known as prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the cognitive abilities that depend on it, especially in young children.
Those abilities are often called executive functions and consist of cognitive control functions such as cognitive flexibility, inhibition (attentional control, self-control), working memory, reasoning, and problem-solving.
We have recently documented marked advances in executive functions due to an early childhood school curriculum (Tools of the Mind) that requires no specialists or expensive equipment, just regular teachers in regular classrooms.
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how children's minds change as they grow up, interrelations between that & how the brain is changing, and environmental and biological influences on that.