Just wondering….

My daughter, RM, is convinced that her heart goes “beep, beep, beep”.

From a few months ago but this issue just boils my blood:

Apparently a mother traveling with her toddler were kicked off of a plane. No, the toddler wasn’t crying or throwing a fit, he was saying bye-bye to the plane and that annoyed the flight attendant. In fact she told the mother that she should have given her child Benadryl to shut him up. The mother rightly replied that, “‘Well, I’m not going to drug my child so you have a pleasant flight.” They were then kicked off the Continental ExpressJet plane.

This was after a more than 11 hour delay at the Houston airport. The stewardess should be praising the parent that the kid was so well behaved!

As a parent of 2 + stepchild, I have to say I really get ticked off whenever, I read hear about people, especially parents who have “angels” making snap judgments about another’s parenting ability. Especially with their offers of unwanted and useless ‘advice’.

Here are some things for the righteous think about:

• That person might be a single parent - not everyone has a loving and supportive spouse.
• There might be a nasty divorce in progress, and the kids are acting out as a consequence.
• The dad or mom (sister, brother, etc) might have recently died
• The kids might have been kept up all night by the next-door neighbors fighting.
• They just got back from a trip and the kids are severely jetlagged.
• The kid is autistic
• The kid was sexually abused (and not by the parent!) and is dealing with the trauma the only way they know how
• They might have just been evicted and are now living in a homeless shelter
• The parent might have just found out they have cancer and no medical insurance.

So next time you have an opinion, please just stuff it! Your attitude is the last thing that is needed.

You don’t know the full story.

P.S. And for Continental ExpressJet’s wonderful customer service, wikipedia prominently includes the full details! You got to love it.

Littlest participated in this study about a year ago at Stanford.

The Card Sort game is a well known task in which two through five year olds are asked to sort six cards according to one dimension (shape or color), and then sort six more cards by a second dimension, (the opposite – color or shape). The children sorted these cards into boxes with conflicting dimensions. For instance, when sorting a green flower, the child had the choice of a box with a green sailboat or a box with a yellow flower. The game is designed to assess children’s ability to switch between rules.

As expected, almost all of the children were able to correctly sort the first six cards regardless of whether they were asked to sort by color or shape. However, once the rule was switched and they were asked to sort using the opposite dimension, the younger children had trouble inhibiting their desire to use the first rule they were taught, although they clearly understood the new rule.

Past research on the Card Sort task has shown that different training methods may help children learn to successfully pass the Card Sort task when they might otherwise not be able to do so. This study was designed to assess various training methods and investigate whether children’s improved performance would carry over to a new Card Sort task with different cards and boxes.

Children played the Card Sort game with one of four training variations including having children watch a video of another child sorting correctly, telling the children whether or not they were sorting correctly, having the children label the cards by their shape or color before sorting them, and no training at all.

We found that children who labeled the cards on their own before sorting them performed significantly better in the Card Sort game, and our findings suggest that this training condition was the most effective way to teach 3-year-olds how to pass the Card Sort task. We posit that children in this condition learned a strategy for completing the task and were able to refocus their attention to the relevant sorting dimensions.

We are currently testing more children in this Card Sort task to confirm our initial findings, as well as designing another study to further investigate these training methods.

A year ago at age 3, littlest “failed” miserably.

One of our cats died over the weekend, and it was interesting the reaction of the kids.

Arianna (3 1/2) was really melodramatic. “Sunshine is dead” spoken in a pseudo-emotional level. Rosemarie (4 1/2) is more concerned about death and understanding that Sunshine is permanently gone. We buried him dead in the garden so there would be some permanence attached to death. We avoided euphemisms and talked frankly about Sunshine’s body is no longer working and he is not going to “wake up”.

Rosemarie is doing pictures showing the car that hit Sunshine. Fortunately, no one saw it happen.

File this under “words that should be in the dictionary”. Rosemarie (4yrs-old) has this great word, “yestertime”. If yesterday means the day before today, then “yestertime” should exist and mean some time before yesterday.

What a great word!