children
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Ultrasound
Your dad thinks technology is amazing, baby. You keep on growing in there, and we’ll see you in a bit.
You are viewing stuff tagged with children.
I don’t know who wrote this, but however old they were, it was wise beyond their years:
Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”
and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.
From the Paris Review’s famous interview of E. B. White, 1969:
Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common.
In Notes on an Unhurried Journey, John A. Taylor reminds us of the nature of childhood:
When we adults think of children, there is a simple truth which we ignore: childhood is not preparation for life, childhood is life. A child isn’t getting ready to live, a child is living.
The child is constantly confronted with the nagging question: “What are you going to be?” Courageous would be the youngster who, looking the adult squarely in the face, would say, “I’m not going to be anything, I already am.”
We adults would be shocked by such an insolent remark, for we have forgotten, if indeed we ever knew, that a child is an active, participating and contributing member of society from the time of birth.
Childhood isn’t a time when he is moulded into a human who will then live life; he is a human who is living life. No child will miss the zest and joy of living unless these are denied…by adults who have convinced themselves that childhood is a period of preparation.
How much heartache we would save ourselves if we would recognize the child as a partner with adults in the process of living, rather than always viewing him an an apprentice. How much we could teach each other: adults with the experience and children with the freshness. How full both our lives could be.
Little children may not lead us, but at least we ought to discuss the trip with them; for, after all, life is their journey, too.
“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.”
—Rachel Carson
Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Homework:
Robinson and Harris posit that greater financial and educational resources allow some parents to embed their children in neighborhoods and social settings in which they meet many college-educated adults with interesting careers. Upper-middle-class kids aren’t just told a good education will help them succeed in life. They are surrounded by family and friends who work as doctors, lawyers, and engineers and who reminisce about their college years around the dinner table.
…
As part of his research, Robinson conducted informal focus groups with his undergraduate statistics students at the University of Texas, asking them about how their parents contributed to their achievements. He found that most had few or no memories of their parents pushing or prodding them or getting involved at school in formal ways. Instead, students described mothers and fathers who set high expectations and then stepped back.
Dear baby,
Hidden Valley Lane is a great name for a street. Just saying it aloud makes me think the way it rolls off the tongue is rivaled only by the bucolic imagery it evokes. It’s the name of the street on which my family (you know, your dad, grandparents, and auntie Katy) lived for a few years in the late 1980s. In the backyard grew a raspberry patch and on the hot days late in the summer when it was time to pick, my mom gave us little margarine containers to carry the berries. They had little blue “Byerly’s” on the side of them, and the bushes in their raised beds were taller than me.
Your dad thinks technology is amazing, baby. You keep on growing in there, and we’ll see you in a bit.
Few articles I read, only about one a year, get saved on my computer. These are articles describing an invaluable overarching idea, a critique of our modern world so potent that I want to reference it so I don’t forget it and can incorporate it into my own life planning. The following is one of those articles.
It is with a sense of numb relief that I mark the completion of dental school in this space. My final check-out meeting was this morning, graduation is this Friday. I started four years ago, on a hot August day. I lived elsewhere then. Mykala and I weren’t married. I had no idea what I was in for. It’s no understatement to say I was a different person.
The pollen outside today was actually visible. It was raining pollen onto the car, and I could see many little granules of it running in delicate rivulets down the glass. Surprisingly, both Mykala and I seem to either be getting used to the constant congestion of allergy season or our bodies are adjusting. Mykala might have mono, and by extension so might I. Both of us have histories of remarkably poor ear nose and throat health. My future children (not yet on the way, though Mykala and I frequently talk about you in the abstract), if you are reading this, I am very sorry for your ears — you can blame both myself and your mother.
Alex Williams at The New York Times, ‘New York’s Literary Cubs’:
“My whole life, I had been doing everything everybody told me. I went to the right school. I got really good grades. I got all the internships. Then, I couldn’t do anything.”
Today, I saw a four year old (I didn’t get a look at her teeth so I can’t tell you for sure, but I’m pretty sure she was four) on a cell phone. Having a conversation. While walking next to her father. I’m always making sarcastic remarks about how young kids are starting earlier and earlier with cell phones, but confronted with the reality of it in person, it made me feel more sad than smug.
This morning, I was thinking about raising children. Admittedly, I know v̶e̶r̶y l̶i̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ nothing about it because I haven’t done it. I do think that when raising children, inspiring speeches carry almost no effect, while leading by consistent example is one of the most potent positive effects you can have on a child’s life.
THIS IS A REAL QUOTE FROM A REAL ARTICLE:
In Manhattan, the brutally competitive nursery and kindergarten admissions process is leading many parents to sign up their toddlers for therapy. “Preschool admissions tests loom large,” said Margie Becker-Lewin, an occupational therapist on the Upper West Side. “In many cases, parents know there is nothing wrong with their child, but they feel caught in the middle.”
The Secret to Raising Smart Kids in Scientific American:
Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.
The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.
Rates of Caesarean sections are climbing, according to a Time magazine article that raises more questions than it answers:
Rates of C-sections have been climbing each year in the past decade in the U.S., reaching a record high of 31% of all live births in 2006. That’s a 50% increase since 1996. Around the world, the procedure is becoming even more common: in certain hospitals in Brazil, fully 80% of babies are delivered by caesarean. How did a procedure originally intended as an emergency measure become so popular? And is the trend a bad thing?
Praise is effective when specific - Good, new, peer-reviewed research revealing that praise can be very damaging to your children. Studies suggest that specific praise that is neither overused nor undeserved is the key to doing your part to mold children’s self-esteem into a healthy balance.