Showing only Notes + Links tagged children
Decades of research have demonstrated that the cortex is astonishingly plastic at a young age and that many important traits and habits seem to solidify before the age of 4. (This isn’t to discount the power of plasticity in the adult brain - it just takes a lot more work to make it happen.) When combined with the brilliant work of James Heckman, this research led policymakers to realize that investing in pre-K education had an incredibly high-rate of return. Here’s a chart, demonstrating the “rate-of-return” of various public investments.
For more about the problem and how states are cutting back on early education read the full post: Investing in the Developing Brain : The Frontal Cortex.
Google had a really sweet Eric Carle logo yesterday, which I was going to mention before I fell asleep and lost all my open tabs. Oh well!
The Frontal Cortex : Unstructured PlayTeresa Belton, a research associate at East Anglia University in England, first got interested in daydreaming while reading a collection of stories written by children in elementary school. Although Belton encouraged the students to write about whatever they wanted, she was startled by just how uninspired most of the stories were.
“The tales tended to be very tedious and unimaginative,” Belton says, “as if the children were stuck with this very restricted way of thinking. Even when they were encouraged to think creatively, they didn’t really know how.”
After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of “empty time,” or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. “It was a very automatic reaction,” she says. “Television was what they did when they didn’t know what else to do.”
The problem with this habit, Belton says, is that it kept the kids from daydreaming. Because the children were rarely bored - at least, when a television was nearby - they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. “The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere,” Belton says. “But that’s a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice.”
