(Photo source: flickr - szeretlek)

I came across a number of articles regarding a new study, published in the July/August issue of Child Development. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Massachusetts. They looked at group of 50 children, who were aged from 1 to 3 years.

In this research, children came to a laboratory playroom with a parent. Each child was invited to play with toys for an hour. During half of that time a television was turned on remotely in the room, playing an episode of Jeopardy! that included commercials.

Dr. Daniel Bronfin, a pediatrician with the Ochsner Health System in New Orleans and senior author of th study concluded that:

“All of the concerns we have with children watching programming for children still apply to secondhand viewing. It distracts from the work of childhood, from play,”

The Washington Post was one of the news agencies reporting on the study and HealthDay Reporter Serena Gordon reported the following findings:

Even if young children aren’t watching the TV, it may be distracting them from their play and depriving them of developing critical attention skills

Children’s play episodes were shorter — about half as long — if the TV was on, compared to when it wasn’t, [and] children were more likely to move from toy to toy during the time TV was on

WebMD also reported on the study and noted the following about it:

In background information published alongside the findings, researchers write that child development experts contend that imaginative play is crucial to healthy cognitive and social skills development.

Researchers from this study speculate that constant background TV sound and fleeting images may interrupt that healthy development.

While obviously I did not know any of this research information, we made a decision when our first child was only a baby, not to have the television on in the background and later on to have set TV times. It was for the adults as much as the children. I felt that the children deserved to have my whole attention, not a small fraction that I could spare away from the TV. This is the same reasoning that I avoid where possible working on the computer around the children as well, utilising, sleep times and time when dad is around so they have an available adult.

How do you manage the TV in your home? Or have you gone completely cold turkey and don’t have a TV? Part of me would really like to do this, but even though I don’t watch a lot of TV, I can’t seem to let go! I would love to hear what you do.

Technorati Tags: brain development, Child Development, play, tv

• Junk Food Ads During Children’s Television Shows
• Bullying - Who Is Likely To Be A Victim?
• Fighting The Materialism Battle With Self Esteem
• Baby Smiles Addictive

This is the title of an interview by Andrea Sachs in Time magazine with the author of a new book called A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting. Hara Estroff Marano is the author in question and she is editor-at-large at Psychology Today magazine.

Marano believes firmly that there are now a generation of children that are growing up unable to cope with disappointment and failure.

“these kids lack coping skills because they’ve not been allowed to fully function. They are the products of parental anxiety and all the lumps and bumps have been taken out of life for them, so they have no idea how to manage the normal vicissitudes of life.”

Marano’s voice is adding to a number of social commentators who all have concerns over the resilience of the current and coming generations.

In the interview Sachs asks Marano about the importance of play and how it is currently valued by society and I thought her answer was impressive:

“Play builds brains and gives children the ability to impose self-control and creates within brain circuitry the ability to pay attention. When you look at kids playing, adults see it as a waste of time. They have no clue what play does. Vigorous social play stimulates the growth of brain cells in the executive portion of the brain in the frontal cortex, and that lays the foundation for the circuitry of self-regulation, which is what you need to pay attention when you’re at school.”

The more I read about modern parenting, the more I see “experts” encouraging parents with what seems to be a back to basics approach. Such an approach was articulated in the advice that Marano gives in her last answer in her interview with Sachs:

“One, back off and give kids some credit and some leeway to demonstrate their competence. Two, let kids play freely without monitoring. Three, eat dinner together at least five nights a week: aside from the sense of cohesiveness, it gives all that security that is the breeding ground for success. No matter where you are on the socioeconomic spectrum, it is more correlated with school adjustment and achievement than any other single thing that parents can do.”

So is this approach the new “fad” in parenting or are we just seeing a correction back from parenting that went to the extreme?

Technorati Tags: children, independence, over parenting, parenting, play

• The Dilemmas Of Modern Parenting
• The Impact Of Background TV
• 10 Parenting Books That Would Make Great Christmas Gifts
• Am I Over Parenting?

In an earlier post on planning school holiday activities, I spoke about how I like to plan time with the kids so we are just at home and doing our own thing. This is not exclusive to the school holidays, but is something that I try to do throughout the school week and the weekends. Sometimes getting the balance is difficult, but I feel that is essential that I have this time to nourish and continually develop my relationships with the kids.

A number of years ago I read a fantastic book by Stanley Greenspan called The Challenging Child. I had sought this book out to try and help me manage the behaviour of my Little Rascal. He was our second son and his personality was completely different to our eldest son. What had worked with our Thinker, was simply not working for Little Rascal. In the book he goes through the different child-types and gives an insight as to how they see the world that they are in. He then offers guidance on how to parent this child taking into account their strengths and talents.

Reading this book was great on two levels, firstly it made my issues seem insignificant compared to some of the case studies; and the second was that it taught me about the concept of “Floor time”. The books spends considerable amount of time going through this process, but in brief it is a “special unstructured time that you set aside for yourself and each child”. It a 30 minute block of time, that in its entirety you have that child leading whatever activity he has chosen and he has your full attention.

Now at first I thought that I was giving each of them plenty of time like this (I had 2 boys and a newborn baby girl at this point), so I observed my own behaviour for a couple of days and what I found was that:
· Often I would choose the activity and instigate or lead the play
· Sometimes I would go to and fro to the activity, as I completed chores as well (I am very fond of multi-tasking!)
· Would answer the phone if it rang
· Would get distracted by the needs of another child.

So I made a concerted effort to have a dedicated 30 minute play session that was of his choice and led by him. How did this help me manage his behaviour you may ask? Well I got to understand him a little better. Through some imaginary play, I worked out that he found the noise levels of large groups agitating, “too loud” he would say. I also worked out that he wanted to do more for himself. “I can do this” was a common phrase to hear from him.

We (my husband also spent time doing the same thing as well) stuck at this for some months and then once I felt we had a better handle on things pulled back a bit. We used this format for our eldest when he was 7 and were trying to work through some stuff with him. He was very keen on chess at the time and we would generally spend the 30 minutes playing this. This planed time provided him with an open environment in which he talked easily and I got to find out some things that helped me manage his behaviour better. And he taught me how to play chess, which was a bonus!

30 minutes a day across four children is something that I cannot achieve in the normal run of everyday life. During school terms, a couple of times per week at 20 minutes each the best that I can manage. This is why when it comes around to school holiday time; I plan time at home, so I can spend more time with each child. We still do lots of ad hoc play and running around, but the children know that they have their allocated time and look forward to it.

At the moment, there is no issue (out of the ordinary that is!) that I am working on with any of the children, so we modify the practice a little. The modification means that the other children can participate in the time if they want to, but whose ever turn it is gets to choose the game and it is to be done their way.

For example backyard cricket is the most popular choice by the boys these holidays, but they have different preferences in the rules. Little Rascal will generally state that there you can’t go out first ball, there is “auto-wickie” (automatic wicket keeper for any edges behind the stumps) , you can run on overthrows and byes and that it is “running wicket” (you can be run out at either end). The Thinker is generally the opposite of this, but they both are happy to play in each other’s turn because they know that they get a chance to do this too. Possum prefers playing “mums and dads” at the moment and the boys then go and play cricket by themselves! Babaganouski is obsessed with cars and balls, so that is about all we do together. If we have had consecutive days were we have been out or had visitors and been unable to have the allocated time, one or all of the children will ask “when is it my time next?”

Planning time with each child sounds so simple that it needn’t be mentioned, but in a hurried world I enjoy the time that I take out from everything else to stop and play.

Technorati Tags: Children's Activities, parenting, play

• 10 Parenting Books That I Love!
• 10 Steps To Get Children Involved In Housework
• He’ll Be Ok: Growing Gorgeous Boys Into Good Men (Part 1).
• Reorganising The Toy Shelf.