Featured article

Making Connections

May 06, 2010

By Ellen Galinsky

When my son Philip was two years old, he specialized in carrying bags of stuff around in an old canvas bag. Sometimes it was filled with stuff he brought from home; sometimes he filled it with stuff he found in new places.

A closer look revealed that Philip liked to sort the stuff he was carrying. Sometimes he made piles of things that were the same or similar—one pile of children’s books and another one of toy animals. Sorting by sameness meant that he was also sorting by things that were different from each other—blocks were different from the toy animals. And Philip was also sorting by how things are connected with each—a big toy clown was the daddy clown and the small toy clown was the baby clown.  Little did I know it at the time, but this was the emergence of the skill of Making Connections.

In this video on Making Connections, Judy DeLoache of the University of Virginia has created a very clever experiment to study the emergence of Making Connections, specifically how children learn that one thing “stands for” or represents something else. 

The Moral Life of Babies: New York Times article

May 05, 2010

As baby steps become giant leaps

May 03, 2010

By Julie Marsh

My younger daughter lost her first tooth last week.

This is the same daughter who will start kindergarten in August, who’s been riding a bike without training wheels since Thanksgiving, who proudly identifies sight words and spends hours painstakingly creating works of art with any craft supplies she can find. The same daughter who was a newborn when we moved to Colorado, who screamed instead of speaking for her first three years, who consistently hit developmental milestones late and drove me to bury my copies of “What to Expect…” on the basement bookshelves.

Tips for Parents

April 28, 2010

A Tip Sheet for parents and professionals prepared for the April 16-17, 2010 conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois

By Ellen Galinsky

FOR the past two decades, parents have felt ever-increasing pressure to buy expensive, high-tech learning toys and enroll their children in special activities that will give them an edge in getting into a good college and embarking on a rewarding career. Yet employers overwhelmingly report that young employees are not prepared for the demands of the 21st-century workplace. Specifically, they complain that the kind of skills successful workers need are typically not taught in school nor tested for — skills such as communicating effectively, working well with diverse groups of people, thinking outside the box, and being ongoing learners.

All these skills involve enhancing the “executive functions” of the brain—the brain functions we use to manage our attention, our emotions, and our behavior in pursuit of our goals. And none of them requires expensive equipment, coaches, or tutors. Here is a list of the seven life skills and a few research-based tips for fostering them that professionals can pass on to parents.

Closing the Achievement Gap

April 19, 2010

By Ellen Galinsky

This year, a number of changes are planned by the Obama Administration, the Department of Education, the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers and others to address the achievement gap in the United States, a gap that begins before children even enter school and widens as children grow up.