"Baby Minds" Webinars

Did you ever wonder what goes on in your young baby’s adorable little head? I’ve never met a parent who hasn’t! Well, no one can tell you precisely, but over the past few decades developmental psychologists have come up with a wide variety of clever techniques to open that window at least a little bit. And what they have discovered about early thinking skills is really fascinating.

Some years ago, Dr. Susan Goodwyn and I made this research the basis of a book for parents entitled Baby Minds: Brain Building Games Your Baby Will Love. And this week, I’m drawing from that book, in addition to more recent work, to present a webinar with a similar name: "Baby Minds: Nurturing the Seeds of Intellectual Development." This is a 2-part webinar. In the first part (Weds., October 16, 2013 at 6PM Pacific Time), you’ll learn about how babies are Involuntary Observers, Natural Born Mimics, and Little Scientists. In Part 2 (Weds., October 23, 2013 at 6PM Pacific time), I’ll round out this modern vision of the baby to talk about how babies are Pattern Predictors, Creative Communicators, and Motivated Memorizers. In each case, I’ll be sharing not just what we know, but also how parents and teachers can use this information to create easy activities to help nurture these seeds of cognitive development.

Hope you’ll join me for what I’m going to try my darnedest to make a fun and informative opportunity to learn more about your baby. For more information and/or to register, click here.

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

A Little Change of “S-Pace”

Let's take a detour from our usual focus on baby sign language. Here’s an idea that helps take advantage of the recognition memory skills—the ability to vaguely recognize something as familiar—that babies bring with them when they are born. Have you ever noticed how many habits you’ve fallen into when it comes to “putting” your baby places? For example, it’s quite likely that you routinely put your baby to bed with his head at one particular end of the crib and keep the high chair in the same lace in the kitchen. Why? Who knows! But one thing we do know is that, as a result, your baby comes to expect to see specific things when he runs his head to the right (like the window).

Those spatial relations are well established in his memory for where things happen, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, such predictability is comforting at any age. Why not, however, a least once in a while, shake things up a bit by changing his position? Now, for example, he has to find the door of his bedroom by turning the other way. By challenging your baby to rethink these spatial memories, you provide food for thought that helps him make his memories about the space around him even richer and more flexible and sophisticated.

By the way, if you'd like to hear more tips that can help you support your baby's thinking and remembering skills, join me for my 2-part webinar, Baby Minds: Nurturing the Seeds of Intellectual Development (Birth to 12 Months). Part 1 will be Weds. 10/16/13 at 6PM (Pacific Daylight Time) and Part 2 a week later (10/23/13) at the same time. (Cost $10 includes both Parts, live and/or recorded.) Click here for more info.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Hidden Benefits of Reading the Same Book Over and Over

Even if you are bored with a particular book, reading the same storybook many times over is really good for children. In the case of dialogic reading (incorporating conversation outside of the written text into your reading time) going over the same story more than once enables a child to learn new vocabulary items well enough to us them in answer to questions. This is exactly what researcher Monique Senechal found when she read 3-year-olds a story either one time or three times. Toe two extra times make a big difference in the ability of the children to remember the meanings of ten new target words—like “angling,” “fedora,” and “satchel.” What’s more, when the three readings also included questions to the child (a la dialogic reading), the number of words remembered went up even higher—to average of almost 70 percent.

If that’s not enough to convince you, a study by Peter Jusczyk and Elizabeth Hohne has even shown that by the end of three readings, babies as young as 8 months recognize as familiar the specific words they’ve heard in the story. Unlike the 3-year-olds in Senechal’s study, babies this young aren’t learning what the words actually mean. They are, however, learning to recognize the sequence of sounds from which these words are made. Even at 8 months, then, rereading the stories leaves an impression on a baby’s mind.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

How Times Have Changed….Thank Goodness

If you want to feel proud of what you already know about how to raise an emotionally healthy child, compare your beliefs to those of a very prominent 1920’s psychologist, Dr. John Watson.

"Treat them as though they were young adults…Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinary good job of a difficult task. Try it out. In a week’s time you will…be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it [up to now].” (J. Watson, 1928, p. 81-82.)

Your “gut level” negative reaction to his advice is in part a product of the wealth of very good research on emotional development from 1970 onward. Thanks to modern technology (computers, video cameras, the internet), advances in our understanding of how the brain works, more complex statistical tools, and the entry of thousands of very bright, passionate young scientists into the field, we now know a lot more about child development than we our parents and grandparents did.

Here are just a few of the advances in policy toward children that would not have happened were it for not for research by hard-working, dedicated social scientists around the world:

• Fathers are now encouraged to attend the births of their babies and newborn babies often “room in” with their mothers.
• Hospitals no longer ban parents from their sick children’s sides but, instead, encourage involvement in care.
• Many hospitals employ “Child Life Advocates,” individuals trained to support hospitalized children emotionally when parents can’t be present.
• Adoption policies now advise adoption as soon as possible after birth instead of waiting until age 2 when the child’s “innate nature” has supposedly “unfolded.”
• Pediatricians recognize the importance of correcting visual and auditory problems as soon after birth as possible in order to avoid permanent deficits.
• Head Start and Early Head Start programs are making a significant difference in the lives of millions of children in terms of both emotional and intellectual development.
• Parental leave policies are becoming more and more common.
• To ensure adequate emotional and physical care, adult-infant ratios in child care facilities are a matter of law
• The Children’s Television Workshop started the trend of educational TV for children with the creation of Sesame Street.
• AND…last but definitely not least, thanks to our Baby Signs research

, there is growing recognition of the benefits of encouraging babies to use signs before they can speak!

Let’s hear it for research!

Happy Signing! (and don’t forget to look for us on Facebook)

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis