The Human Odyssey

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood Targets Child Exploitation in the Media

I've just returned from the 8th annual conference on early childhood education held in Monterrey, Mexico.  There were a number of excellent presentations on early childhood development, but in particular I was impressed with the work of  Susan Linn, author of The Case for Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World, who described her work with the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), which has been attempting to stop corporations from using characters like Sponge Bob Square Pants,Sesame Street's Elmo, and cartoon movie figures to advertise everything from sugar-rich cereals and unhealthy McDonald's "happy meals" to fish food and worthless technological toys.  I thought it was interesting when she described how certain advertising companies had developed techniques to get young children to improve their "nagging skills" in asking their parents to purchase products for them.  Thanks to the efforts of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, Scholastic Inc. will no longer be promoting the highly sexualized Bratz brand in schools. They have just published a press release directed at toy marketers to suspend holiday marketing aimed directly at children during the current economic crisis and target parents instead.

Great Quotations on Childhood

I just finished reading a cute book of quotations from Penguin Books called Child: Quotations About the Delight, Wonder, and Mystery of Being a Child, edited by Helen Handley and Andra Samelson.  Here are ten of my favorite quotes from the book:

"Babies are such a nice way to start people."

                            - Don Herold

"In a secular age, children have become the last sacred objects."

                           - Joseph Epstein

"One laugh of a child will make the holiest day more sacred still."

                          - R.G. Ingersoll

"Ah! What would the world be to us

   If the children were no more?

We should dread the desert behind us

  Worse than the dark before."

                        - Henry  Wadsworth Longfellow

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."   

                       - Rachel Carson

"My music is best understood by children and animals."

                      - Igor Stravinsky

"When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not."

                     - Mark Twain

"The lost child cries, but still he catches fireflies."

                    - Ryusui Yoshida

"Diogenes struck the father when the son swore."

                   - Robert Burton

"If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves."

                  - C.G. Jung

Parents: Don't Give Your Babies and Toddlers Cold Medicine!

On Thursday (January 17, 2008) the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a public health advisory telling parents NOT to use over-the-counter cold and cough medicines for children under the age of two.  Such medications, says the FDA, can cause rapid heart rates, convulsions, and even death. According to Charles Ganley, M.D., director of the FDA's Office of Nonprescription Products,  "These medicines, which treat symptoms and not the underlying condition, have not been shown to be safe or effective in children under 2."  Many manufacturers of pediatric cold and cough medicines have already responded to this threat by recalling their products from stores around the country. To read the FDA's press release on this warning, click here.  For information on using humidiers as an alternative to cold and cough medicines, click here.  For additional non-drug alternatives, such as nasal sprays and chicken soup, click here.

Brain Abnormalities May Cause SIDS

An article in the November 1, 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) suggests that abnormalities in the lower brainstem affecting serotonin production may be a major predisposing factor in the occurrence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in infants.  The neurotransmitter serotonin is best known for its mood-regulating characteristics (many current antidepressant drugs affect the regulation of serotonin in the brain), but it also plays a vital role in regulating blood pressure and breathing.  The research took place at the Children's Hospital in Boston, Harvard Medical School, and at a number of other institutions. SIDS is the sudden and unexpected death of an infant under the age of one which can't be explained after an autopsy, a review of the infant and family's medical history, or an investigation of the scene and circumstances of the death.  Typically, the infant is found dead after being put into bed to sleep. 

The lower brainstem controls basic vital processes such as  breathing, blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, and arousal.  In comparing the brains of infants who had died from SIDS with those who had died from other conditions, researchers discovered that the brainstems of children with SIDS has more neurons that produced serotonin, yet the neurons themselves seemed to have fewer receptors for serotonin (places where the neurotransmitter is received by the next neuron in the transmission of nerve signals from neuron to neuron), than infants in the control group.  Researchers hypothesize that SIDS infants have difficulty producing serotonin in the lower brainstem, thus creating communication problems between brain cells responsible for breathing and other vital functions. They see the larger than normal number of serotonin-producing neurons as a means of compensating for this per-neuron serotonin insufficiency.   These discoveries promise that SIDS may no longer be the great mystery it has been to infant researchers, but may be studied scientifically, and eventually result in the development of a drug or other intervention to optimize a newborn's serotonin levels in the lower brainstem, and thus prevent SIDS.  SIDS kills an estimated 2500 infants in the United States every year.  For more information on SIDS, including recommendations for preventing SIDS (such as positioning the infant to sleep on his/her back) click here.  To read the abstract of the original research paper, click here.

Book Review: The Power of Play

I've just finished reading a new book by developmental psychologist David Elkind called The Power of Play, and I would recommend it to parents, educators, psychotherapists, and anyone else who has an interest in play and children.  David Elkind was a disciple of Jean Piaget, the great French structuralist thinker who changed people's conceptions of how children think.  In this book he explains how play changes as a child moves through different cognitive stages.  In infancy, play is sensori-motor, a matter of wiggling limbs and exploring the world through the baby's senses. Toddlers like to repeat play experiences over and over again as they experience a sense of mastery over their environment.  Preschoolers enjoy dressing up in cast-off clothes and pretending to be kings, princesses, and ogres.  Once children have reached Piaget's stage of concrete operations (Elkind calls this "the age of reason"), they enjoy playing games that have rules to them, and may spend as much time arguing about the rules, and determining what is "fair," as in following them.  Older elementary school children enjoy creating their own forts and spaces where they can cooperative, compete, or just get away from others and experience some well-deserved privacy. 

The problem with today's society, according to The Power of Play, is that these natural play experiences are too often disrupted by high-tech products that are being pushed on children at younger and younger ages as manufacturers seek new markets to expand their profits.  Elkind derides, for example, Baby Einstein videos and software for children two and under as virtually worthless, and devoid of any research supporting their supposed benefits.  He points out that babies do not possess critical thinking capacities.  Thus, frequent claims by software designers that these programs will expand a baby's thinking capabilities are simply wrong.  He also criticizes the formal teaching of reading and math in preschool, suggesting that children do not reach Piaget's stage of concrete operations until five to seven years of age, and that children can't really  understand that a number or letter is both a part of the number or alphabet system, but also that it's value changes depending upon where it is in relationship to other numbers or letters (e.g. an "e" is both a letter of the alphabet, but also a sound value that changes depending upon where it is in a word, as in "fine" "fen" "feign" etc.). 

Elkind criticizes parenting and schooling approaches that utilize any of three "theories" of learning.  The "watch me" theory:  that somehow by looking at what the parent or teacher is doing the child will figure out how to do the skill.  The "little sponge" theory:  that children can just soak up any kind of learning that we throw at them no matter who they are, or what age they are.  And the "look harder" theory:  the idea that if we just tell kids to "look!" they will "get it."  This is like yelling at a blind person.  Children move through different stages of growth at different rates, and they need parents and teachers who will watch them learn, and listen to them, and help them move from where they are in their understanding of a skill or subject, to the next step of whatever they are learning. 

All in all, The Power of Play is an excellent read.  I hadn't enjoyed an education book so much since reading John Holt, George Dennison, Herb Kohl, and Jonathan Kozol's books on open education when I was in my twenties back in the early 1970's.  I recommend that people read this book, and use its recommendations (it includes suggestions for creating rich early childhood education environments based on play) to refute the encroaching high-tech world of toys and software that leave so little to the imagination and that leave our children getting ever more obese.

World Congress in Monterrey, Mexico Highlights the Importance of Early Childhood Development

I just got back from the 1st World Congress/7th International Early and Preschool Education Conference in Monterrey, Mexico.  In addition to participating in a colloquium with educators and politicians (see photo above), I also gave a keynote talk on "Awakening the Natural Genius in Every Child" to 4000 early childhood educators.  The Congress was part of the Universal Forum of Cultures, a three-month extravaganza of cultural events involving 1.5 million people in Monterrey (the third largest city in Mexico). I was impressed with all the work being done, particularly in Latin America, to further the lives of young children.  I visited a site in Monterrey created by CENDI (Centros de Desarrollo Infantil - Center for Early Childhood Development) that provides low income parents in Monterrey with child care, medical care, parent training, pre-natal instruction, and many other services (see photo on left).  I couldn't help but think that while I was visiting this full-spectrum developmental center, our president, George Bush, was busy vetoing a bill to provide medical care to more children in the United States.  Accompanying us on our tour to the CENDI site was Dr. James Heckman, the 2000 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, who has been focusing his energies on research demonstrating the positive economic impact of providing for the health, emotional, and educational needs of young children, as opposed to neglecting those needs and having to pay billions of dollars in costs as a result of mental illness, violence, illiteracy, and other societal ills.  His book Inequality in America, sheds important light on the importance of nations' investing in their young children.  Another important individual I met during the conference was Dr. Franklin Martinez Mendoza (below left), who was a key architect in the development of the early childhood development program in Cuba, a country with a literacy rate of 99.8% (higher than the United States). Also impressive was a presentation given by Dr. Osmar Terra, the Secretary of Health for the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, who laid out in most brilliant fashion the latest work in neuroscience chronicling the negative impact of trauma on the brain in infancy and early childhood.  There were in all over 100 presenters at the conference, and I count myself lucky to have met so many wonderful people who are working to make the lives of young children around the world better.

Parents: Don't Let Your Babies Watch TV

On a typical day in America, 68% of infants (aged 0-2) are watching television.  Up to 20% of American babies have a television in their bedrooms.  That's what a survey in the journal Pediatrics this month (May, 2007) reveals.  Pediatrics is published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which recommends in its media guidelines to parents that children from ages 0-2 watch NO television at all. So who's not getting the message?  The survey revealed that only 6% of the parents of children from 0-2 were aware of these guidelines.  The study also indicated that ethnicity, family income, and parental education were not relevant to who did and didn't watch TV.  What's going on?  The authors of the study write: " It is clear that in many American families, television is an almost constant presence in daily life. Among young children, this means that they will watch more television."  Baby is just following its role model parents.

Here's the problem.  During the years from 0-2 the brain is going through an incredibly rich process of transformation.  The baby's brain is a veritable thicket of dendrites or brain connections that are strengthened or weakened depending in part upon what kinds of environmental stimuli she receives.  Now, baby has just come into the world, so the most important thing for her wellbeing and survival is that she spend a lot of time interacting with the real world, not watching a fake world.  Through multi-sensory contact with nature, toys, people, and virtually every concrete thing she comes into contact with, she builds a cognitive and emotional map of the universe she will inhabit for the next several decades.  Even a moment of time in front of the television for these little ones, is a moment when they are deprived of this multi-sensory richness.  Television, for all it is cracked up to be by media people and educators who should know better (e.g. "it can be very educational" they claim), does not have visual richness (it's made up of pixels, not real substances), nor does it have auditory richness (infants are particularly sensitive to the hum of electronics, and digital music is no replacement for live music), and of course, importantly, there are no opportunities for hands-on interaction (a joy stick for baby is no substitute for baby's tactile and kinesthetic curiosity about the world), and above all, there is no human contact in watching TV.  Baby is being hardwired for a lot of important social and emotional patterns that will help or hinder her for the rest of her life.  If her "substitute mother" is an electronic box, rather than a warm living and loving parent, then she's going to be wired to relate to people as machines instead of human beings.  This is not a good thing for baby, nor is it good for society (we have enough evidence of people disconnecting from real human contact as it is in our fragmented culture).  So, parents, don't let your babies watch TV.  Period.  You wouldn't leave them out on a busy highway.  You would leave them in a room with a rabid pit bull.  You wouldn't leave them in a room with medicine bottles and electric sockets laying around.  So, don't let them watch TV.  TV is the electronic equivalent of all of these other things, only instead of inflicting physical damage, the damage is subtle cognitive, emotional, social, neurological corrosion that may not even be apparent until years later.  If only 6% of parents know the American Academic of Pediatrics guidelines of no television for infants, then it's up to you to spread the word.  Download a copy of the AAP guidelines (click here) and share them with other parents.  Your baby will thank you. 

Dead Iraqi Children: Who Talks About Them in the Iraq Debate?

I just read that a U.S. helicopter attack against suspected insurgents in Bagdad today has killed a number of children at a primary school.  Also, another report today that a suicide car bomber killed many people, including children, at a holy Shia shrine in Kufa.  These reprehensible actions come on the same day that a report by Save the Children surveying 60 countries ranked Iraq as the worst country for saving the lives of children under 5.  According to their State of the World's Mothers Report, Iraq's child mortality rate has soared 150% since 1990.  Some 120,000 Iraqi children died in 2005 before reaching their fifth birthday.  Since the beginning of the Gulf War in 1990, children in Iraq have been subjected to war, terrorism, and a lack of medical services, food, and other necessary goods as a result of the sanctions placed on Iraq by the United Nations during Saddam's regime.  While politicians are talking about the best "exit strategies" for the war in Iraq, or how to "win" this terrible conflict, or how we're going to "support the troops," meanwhile, these poor children are being slaughtered right and left, and hardly any of this makes it onto the 6 o'clock news.  What would happen if, along with the photos of the U.S. soldiers who have been killed in Iraq, news organizations like PBS would also put up photos of dead Iraqi children and their grieving parents?  Perhaps the parents on all sides of this conflict (U.S., Shia, Sunni, Al Quaida etc.), would feel some sense of empthy for these families.  For once, I would like to see compassion for children overcome all the ideologies (Democracy, Christianity, Islam etc.) that have put us in this senseless mess.

Vatican May Release Unbaptized Infants from Limbo

The Vatican this week released a document recommending that unbaptized babies who die should be released from limbo and given salvation.   Only the Pope can make such a definitive declaration, but the fact that Pope Benedict XVI served on the committee that created this document before he became Pope may bode well for little ones. Limbo (from the Latin limbus, which means "edge" or "boundary"), has been part of informal Church history since St. Augustine declared in the 5th century that children who die unbaptized will go to hell.   It has never been official church dogma, but over the centuries, limbo was declared by some in the church to be a place that unbaptized babies would go to in death where they would not be able to see God (only those in heaven could), but they would not suffer either (as those in hell do).  Thus, limbo exists, as it were, "in limbo" between heaven and hell.  The 41-page document, titled "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized," was written by the 30-member International Theological Commission, which acts as an advisory panel to the Vatican.  It suggests that the concept of limbo reflects "an unduly restrictive view of salvation."   To read the full report (online subscription necessary or $5.00 fee sent to site), go to OriginsOnline.com, a branch of the Catholic News Service.  Dante wrote about limbo in The Divine Comedy:  Hell, Canto IV, where he placed many figures from the classical era in the time before Christ.  To see what other blogs have written about this subject go to: State of the Queen, Darwiniana.

The Transitional Object: A Half-Way House for Identity Formation

I fly a lot, and when I travel I see a lot of people carrying teddy bears in the airport; not just children; adults too.  Everytime I see somebody carrying one onto a plane, I think of the idea of the "transitional object."  This term was coined in 1951 by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott.  It's a developmental concept, and refers to a critical point in a child's early development when she is starting to separate her own identity from that of her mother.  Up until that point, according to the "object relations" school that exists as one branch of psychoanalysis, baby sees "mommy and me" as one.  It would perhaps be better to say that when a child has an experience at this very early level, it experiences "I" as "mommy-me" in a fused whole. Eventually, baby separates her own identity from mommy, and realizes that there are a whole range of ways in which to experience the world as an independent identity (e.g. through language, play, art, etc.), where "I" am playing with "a doll/truck/dog"; where "I" as a subjective entity can come into relationship with an objective "thing" that is out there in the world.  There is, however, an in-between state in development, when the child has not yet fully separated from mommy, nor has she begun to experience herself as an "I" in direct relationship with the objective world.  This is what Winnicott called "the transitional space" ; a place existing between subjective and objective reality, between "I and "object."  In this in-between space the child experiences a particular object such as a piece of cloth or a furry part of a teddy bear as neither mommy-me nor "I am in a relationship to a real object" but as a kind of mix of the two.  This transitional object has pieces of "mommy-me" on it, so to speak, and also pieces of the external world.  It serves as a half-way house, in essence, for the child to begin to separate herself from this omnipotent identity she has with her mother (e.g. "when I wish for food, mommy-me brings it to me"), and to start making contact with the real world out there (where ultimately she will experience herself as getting her own food). But at the same time she is still infusing this object with lots of "mommy-ness."  If the relationship with mommy has been a "good enough" one (another term coined by Winnicott) then this transitional object will be a nurturing, soothing experience.  If the relationship with mommy has been bad (e.g. abusive, neglectful, hurtful etc.), then this object can become threatening (one thinks here of the doll "Chucky" in the recent series of horror films).  At any rate, whether it be a Linus blanket or a soft doll or teddy bear, or something else (Winnicott said it could also be a word or musical refrain), this transitional object helps to relieve anxiety and enables the child to ultimately face the unknown with confidence.  When a child or adult carries a teddy bear or doll onto an airplane, this may be a residual memory of that first transitional object, since many people find flying anxiety-provoking.  Carrying teddy into the "friendly" skies may help these individuals face this on-going project of heading into the unknown with assurance.

For more information, read D.W. WInnicott's book Playing and Reality.

New Diagnostic Category for Child Trauma in the Works

Up until now, children who have been deeply traumatized during their early lives, and who have responded to this trauma with severe negative changes in behavior, attention, emotional regulation, or social interaction, have been diagnosed by psychiatrists as having post traumatic stress disorder, conduct disorder, pervasive developmental disorder, or any of a number of other psychiatric disorders.  Recently, however, a group of researchers have been working on a new diagnosis that may make better sense of what has happened to these children:  developmental trauma disorder (DTD).  DTD is being proposed for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) slated to come out in 2011 as the DSM-5.  Among the criteria for this diagnosis would be exposure to one or more forms of developmentally adverse traumas such as abandonment, betrayal, physical or sexual abuse, and emotional abuse. It could also be used with children exposed to war, natural disasters, community violence, and other collective experiences.  The team working on this is part of The National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a consortium of 70 child mental health centers funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (a part of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services).  To support this diagnosis, the team is building a set of data from children referred to these centers, tracking a 20-year longitudinal study of 4,000 Australian child survivors of natural disasters, reviewing an extensive child trauma literature, and studying the latest findings on the neurobiological consequences of traumatic interpersonal stress in childhood.  About 3 million cases of child abuse and neglect are reported in the Unietd States every year (with one million of those substantiated), acccording to the Administration on Child, Youth, and Families.

Mother and Infant: The Primal Relationship

A mother's relationship to her infant during the first few months of life is an archetypal one. That means that baby sees the mother not as a personal mother, but as the "great mother" -- the all sustaining mother earth.  The infant's connection to the mother is very much a primal one, for he depends on the mother for his very survival. Understanding this can help one appreciate the joys and sorrows an infant goes through during the day. For when the mother is with the infant nursing him calmly, his whole world is at peace. And when she leaves him for a short period, sometimes it is as if the whole world had deserted him and left him totally alone. Mothers needs to trust their deepest intuitions at this time, for they are usually the best guides to follow in nurturing their infants. Nature has provided mothers during the first few months of an infant's life with instinctual behaviors that help them nurture their children in the best possible way. In some ways, they are guided by the same deep instincts that bond mother and child together in the animal kingdom. Trust those bonding impulses, for they have been worked out and refined in the course of millions of years of evolution.