“And he sailed off through night and day…to where the wild things are.”

May 17, 2012

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on May 13, 2012.

In 1981, I wrote a term paper for a college course on children’s literature.  I was so fascinated and absorbed by the topic that I had to set time limits on how long I would work on it, so I could focus on other courses. Don’t get me wrong; I liked my other courses. But nothing compared to delving into the creative mind of Maurice Sendak.

Perhaps some of my intrigue came from not meeting the Wild Things until I was a student teacher in college. The preschoolers in our campus nursery school would find any Sendak book on the shelf, as if there was a secret child magnet sewn into the binding. Then they would find me, and tug on my hand until I stopped whatever I was doing, and plop happily into my lap to hear their favorite stories. In my younger, more flexible years, I could fit three children in my lap and tuck another two in under my arms. Together we would venture Into the Night Kitchen, or sail with Max in and out of a day and over a year to Where the Wild Things Are. They could read them again and again. So could I. 

Can You Hear Me Now?

April 30, 2012

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on March 4, 2012.

Once Upon A Time ... Tales of Executive Functions at Work

April 22, 2012

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on April 15, 2012.

In the glorious days before homework ruled our evening household schedule, our elder daughter, Leslie, would come home from nursery school and see to the lives of all 27 children single-handedly. She knew precisely what each child was doing, and helped him or her carry on with many adventures. Occasionally, we would come into her bedroom and see their world for a moment in time, a panorama of drama and action sprawled before us from one end of her rug to under her bed. Through our naïve adult eyes, the whole community seemed frozen in motion. Leslie knew otherwise.

Executive Function Skills Are Essential to America’s Present and Future

April 12, 2012

There have been an increasing number of highly influential calls for America to wake up to the importance of what are called "executive function skills."

Take the high school graduation rate. Economics professor at Princeton University and former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, Cecilia Rouse, was recently asked on PBS's Need to Know what she would do to improve the high school graduation rate (where America is reported as 21st among the top 28 industrialized nations). In addition to stating that she would invest more in the early childhood years and would provide more support, including mentors, for children in the 8th to 9th grade transition, Rouse called for a rigorous curriculum that includes promoting executive function skills. She says:

When you talk to employers, they say that students and job applicants ... don't have the executive functioning kind of skills to really be able to function in today's workplace.

Let’s Put the Child Back Together—The Social, Emotional, Physical, and Cognitive Child

April 02, 2012

Learning equals intellect.

Is this true? Increasingly, this seems to be the prevailing wisdom.

In 1990, the president and 50 state governors established National Education Goals. The first goal was notable in that it included children before school entry, stating "all children in America will start school ready to learn" by the year 2000. As time passed, "ready for school" became shorthand for fostering children's literacy, which became shorthand for ensuring that children were ready to learn to read and write.

These national goals were accompanied by a call for educational accountability, which also became shorthand for many of the debates that swirl around us today -- testing children on their competence in literacy and math -- now a primary indicator of school and teacher success.

Partly in response to the over-emphasis on intellectual learning, a parallel movement gained momentum. It was a call for fostering children's social-emotional development. It was a means of righting the over-emphasis on intellectual learning, but continues the unfortunate tendency for adults to see children's learning as divided -- it's either social-emotional or intellectual.