Parenting Today Nov/Dec 2010
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| Happy Holidays from Child Development Institute This will be our last newsletter for this year. Please follow our blog for great ideas for the holidays including delicious holiday recipes and fun holiday activities for the entire family. Thank you for your support of our site. We wish you and your family a most happy and safe holiday season!
Coming Next Year at Child Development Institute:
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| This Month's Featured Articles Smart Ways to Stay Safe This Holiday Season Hopefully this report will be a wake-up call. It is the goal of this report isn't to bring you down during the holidays. Rather it is to give you something else to think about. The purpose of the report is to help you consider what could go wrong in several areas: holiday decorations, drinking and driving, becoming a victim of theft, toy safety and keeping your home safe when you are away from home. Increase your chances of staying secure as you put these smart ways to stay safe this holiday season into practice. All children have the capacity to assert their opinion and do so to varying degrees of intensity. This trait can be wonderful when the child is agreeable and articulate; it can be excruciating when he or she has a tendency towards very strong, negative opinions. How a child manifests his or her needs, wants, likes, and dislikes is governed by a complex set of factors that is still not clearly understood on a biological level. Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a childhood psychiatric disorder that affects 6 to 10% of children. Since all children have moments or periods of time when they are more argumentative, sullen, or disagreeable, the diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder needs to be made carefully and symptoms need to be present for a consistent period of time and over various settings. Your Baby's Brain Health; Development and Environment In the course of our life spans, there is no greater period of time of rapid change in the brain than in the first few months of life. Hour by hour, new growth takes place, new connections are formed, and rhythms develop that correspond with the rhythms of the environment. A noise occurs in the nursery, maybe the chirping of a bird just outside the window, and the infant brain responds with a spark, not yet understanding the meaning of the sound, but ready to transform that spark into a simple brain connection that will spark again if it hears that bird again the next morning. The baby hears mother's muffled voice on the phone in the next room, then soon mother appears at the side of the crib, and and the baby's brain starts to make the connection that mother is still nearby even if she can't be seen. Learning Challenges in Mathematics One of the most common problems for any student, and any parent attempting to help their student, is mathematics. This one is very close to home for me, as my 14-year-old daughter has often struggled with math over the years. When younger, she seemed to think that the answers appeared by magic, rather than by a systematic unfolding of steps. When I attempted to explain these steps, how it is necessary to get the basics before moving on to the higher forms of math, and how logical, systematic, and predictable it all is, she had trouble believing me. One of the first lessons my wife and I learned is that sometimes it takes something or someone other than a parent to help with math. | |||||||||
Latest Blog Posts
| Some Gift Ideas For Your Consideration Click N Read Give your child the gift of reading. This program is great for beginning readers 4 & up and builds reading skills for any child up to 5th grade. | ||||||||
| © Copyright 2010 - Child Development Institute, LLC All Rights Reserved/span> The information in this newsletter is solely for informational purposes. IT IS NOT INTENDED TO PROVIDE MEDICAL ADVICE. Neither Child Development Institute, LLC nor Dr. Myers nor any of the editors, columnists or authors take responsibility for any possible consequences from any action taken which results from reading or following the information contained in this information. The publication of this information does not constitute the practice of medicine or psychology, and this information does not replace the advice of your physician or mental health care provider. Before undertaking any course of treatment, the reader must seek the advice of their physician or other health care provider. | |||||||||
The holiday season will soon be upon us. Most people don't think about the dangers around the holidays. They simply don't want to think about them because the holidays are supposed to be full of laughter and good cheer. Unfortunately, each year there are people whose homes burn down, there are car accidents, people's homes are broken into and worse. While it would be great if the holidays could be nothing but merriment and having a good time, it isn't reality.
Something like a computer, a baby's brain comes pre-wired to take in, remember, and begin to adapt to the demands of the environment. But that's where the analogy with computers ends, because unlike a computer the infant brain builds its own hardware as it grows to meet the demands of the rich tapestry of his or her environment. There is a term brain researchers use called plasticity referring to this kind of biological adaptation. Plasticity is the brain's ability to change, adapt, and program itself in different ways to meet the demands of the environment. In one famous case of plasticity, a young girl in a terrible car accident became blind when lost a portion of her brain dedicated to sight. A couple of years later, she told her mother she was "seeing things." Her mother, not believing this was possible, tested her daughter and found that she had begun to regain her ability to see basic shapes and shadows. In this amazing case, a portion of the girl's brain that had nothing to do with vision began to adapt itself to sight. Although this was a rare case, neurologists and psychologists use it as an example of the adaptable nature of the young child's brain.
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