Comments (10)

By Mom Unplugged, February 21, 2008 3:31 pm

(

On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning was a VERY interesting story (“Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills“) about how children’s play has changed in the last century. Instead of engaging in self-directed, imaginative, improvised play, play has become centered around toys and the latest movie or TV show: “Essentially, instead of playing pirate with a tree branch” they play “Star Wars with a toy light saber.”

Commercialization is only partly to blame, as child safety has become more of a concern in recent years. Parents are now more reluctant to let their children run loose around the neighborhood. They enroll kids in structured, adult-lead activities.

This change in play-habits has actually changed children’s brains according to researchers. Imaginative play helps kids develop what is known as “executive function,” which is a cognitive skill necessary for self-regulation (controlling emotions and behavior, resisting impulses, and exercising self-control and discipline).

Read this interesting excerpt from the NPR piece:

We know that children’s capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn’t stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at the National Institute for Early Education Research says, the results were very different.

“Today’s 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today’s 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago,” Bodrova explains. “So the results were very sad.”

According to executive function researcher, Laura Berk: “Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain.” In fact, good executive function is a more reliable predictor of success in school than IQ. Poor executive function leads to high dropout rates, drug use, and crime. Of course there must be a middle ground here, but the better a child’s ability to self-regulate, the better they will perform in school, and in life.

So here is yet another reason to turn off the TV, ignore the terrible whines, agonizing howls of boredom and claims of inhumane parental treatment and see what happens. They just might surprise you with the games they come up with on their own. And…they will be improving their executive function skills!

I urge you to listen to this fascinating NPR piece (7 min 50 sec), or at least read the online transcript.

+ Some suggestions for activities that promote self-regulation:

(from researchers Deborah Leong, professor of psychology at Metropolitan State College of Denver, Elena Bodrova, senior researcher with Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning, and Laura Berk, professor of psychology at Illinois State University, found on the transcript page of the NPR website):

- Play “Simon Says”

- Encourage “complex imaginative play” (child plans and acts out scenarios, invents own props, etc. Best if play lasts for several hours)

- Activities that require planning (the examples given are: games with directions, patterns for construction, recipes for cooking)

- Read storybooks with your children

- Encourage children to talk to themselves (“fosters concentration, effort, problem-solving, and task success”)

+ A related Unplug Your Kids post: Let Your Kids be Bored

(Photo (taken in Madagascar) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and photographer Harald Kreutzer.)

Comments (0)

By Mom Unplugged, February 19, 2008 8:34 am

If you would like an opportunity to let some big corporations know your concerns about their social and environmental impact, particularly with regards to your children, then head on over to Parents for Ethical Marketing (aka. Corporate Babysitter). Lisa has been contacted by a marketing agent who wants feedback from parents to pass along to her corporate clients. She has a few questions that she would like interested parents to answer.

Instead of all of us engaging in our usual collective grumble about unsafe toys, poor environmental practices, and the like, here is a chance to get productive and speak up!

Comments (6)

By Mom Unplugged, January 30, 2008 9:39 pm

For those of you who have not been keeping up with the blogs Shaping Youth or Corporate Babysitter (aka. Parents for Ethical Marketing), there has been a HUGE debate raging over a certain Target print ad. The debate even made it into a New York Times article! Since I have been away on another planet for the past two months (between the holidays and blog moving), I only just discovered this controversy last night as I tried to play a little catch-up with my Blogroll.

There has been enough said on all sides of this debate, so my two-cents on the intention or appropriateness of the photo would really be overkill at this point in the process. Besides, any intelligent remark would only be drowned by the endless sea of flaming comments that are bombarding these two unfortunate bloggers.

My point in bringing this up is not to stir up further controversy, but to mention my revelation when I first read about the Target ad: I must really be living under a rock to have not seen this ad that everyone else in the universe HAS seen!

Part of this ignorance or innocence (depending on your point of view) stems from the fact that I live in the boonies. The nearest Target is about 3 hours away so we don’t see billboard ads for anything much other than Cellular One and local businesses.

The other, and more major cause of my uninformed state, is obviously my lack of television. With TV, we would be exposed to far more marketing than we are now. This controversy made me think more about advertising and children.

Since the average child in the US is supposedly exposed to 40,000 TV-ads annually, it seems that parents ought to come up with some sort of strategy for dealing with this commercial barrage.

In my mind, there are three approaches to dealing with kids and TV commercials:

1) Don’t worry about the number of ads they see:

The easiest approach, but you still might want to read on. I have some suggestions further down for discussing ads with your kids and teaching them a bit about media manipulation.

2) Limit the number of ads that your children view:

Some practical suggestions for accomplishing this:

- Limit their network TV viewing time.

- Choose PBS over advertising channels. They’ll see some “brought to you by…” stuff, but that seems far less blatantly manipulative than mainstream ads.

Or:

3) Totally eliminate TV advertising from your children’s lives:

How to do it:

- Get rid of the TV (but this is awfully drastic and is not for everyone)

- Allow them to watch only PBS or any other commercial-free channels out there (won’t work if the “brought to you by…” bothers you too.)

- Have them watch only videos and DVDs.

- TIVO or videotape the kids’ programs minus the ads. Have them watch the recorded versions.

How to handle TV advertising and your children is a very individual choice and one approach does not work for all families. I am not preaching any particular philosophy here! Think about it, and decide for yourselves.

But whether your children see a lot of ads, or only a few, I think another important aspect of dealing with advertising and children is to talk to them about the ads that they see. Here are some suggestions:

For young children:

- Have them call out “Commercial!” whenever an ad comes on. Children under the age of 5 often have a hard time distinguishing between a program and a commercial.

- Have kids count the number of ads in one hour, or time the length of each commercial.

- Talk to children about what is being advertised and how it is made to seem appealing. Do they think that Barbie can really dance all by herself?

For grade-schoolers:

- Show kids that you are skeptical. Ask them who they think created the ad. What is the message? What information is missing from the ad? Do you believe what is being shown? Show them that many ads attempt to make the viewer feel that life would be better, or more comfortable, or “cooler” with the product in question.

For pre-teens:

- Mute the ad and have your child tell you what he or she thinks the ad is saying. Or have your child cover their eyes and then describe to you what they think the ad showed.

For better or for worse, ads are a part of our world and they aren’t going to go away anytime soon. So learning to deal with advertising and how it works seems to me to be an important life lesson, one that even TV-free kids will have to learn eventually.

LINKS:

Some of my suggestions came from PBS Parents: Children and Media

A related post of mine: Combating Commercials

Image thanks to Wikimedia Commons and photographer David Monniaux.

Comments (8)

By Mom Unplugged, December 8, 2007 11:28 pm

I still remember growing up and seeing TV ads with Barbie looking gorgeous and twirling around by herself and thinking that if I had that particular Barbie, she would dance around like that and be like a best friend to me instead of a plastic doll, and my life would be perfect. Well, Santa did occasionally bless me with that wonderously miraculous gift of the moment, but the wonderous gift never did what it seemed to in the ads, and it never changed my life.

How do we explain to kids that what is in the ads they see, is not what would come in the package under the tree? The easiest way is to have no TV, so they see no ads.

Barring that more radical approach, the book Unplug the Christmas Machinehas some good suggestions for how to teach your kids about TV commercials:

According to this book, studies have shown that children under the age of 5 cannot distinguish TV commercials from actual programs. (Thanks for the link Dana!)

The authors suggest that parents watch at least one hour of TV with children, in order to discuss commercials.

+ Have young children call out “commercial” whenever an ad appears.
+ Talk to children (especially older children) about what is being advertised and how the product is made to seem appealing.
+ Have older kids count the number of commercials in one hour, or even have them time the length of each commercial.

Here are some ideas that grabbed me from the website PBS Parents: Children and Media:

+ For Grade Schoolers:

“When watching TV with your child, question the commercials.Voice your skepticism by posing questions such as these: Who do you think created this ad? What do you think the message is? What might the advertiser not be telling us? Do you think you can believe what you see? Start with obvious targets—ads promoting high-fat foods, for example—then move on to more subtle ads, such as those promoting a cool or attractive lifestyle. Explain how advertisements are often meant to make people feel that something is missing from their lives. “

+ For Pre-Teens:

Try muting an ad and have your child tell you what he or she thinks the ad is saying. Or…have your child close their eyes and tell you what he or she thinks it is showing.

There are so many more wonderful ideas grouped by age at PBS Parents: Children and Media, that I shall just have to link to them by age here:

Preschoolers
Grade Schoolers
Pre-Teens
Teens

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Quote of the Day:

“Adolescents, youths, and even children, are easy victims of the corruption of love. Deceived by unscrupulous adults, who, lying to themselves and to them, draw them into the dead-end streets of consumerism.”

- Pope Benedict XVI, quoted today while talking about Christmas (heard on tonight’s NPR All Things Considered)

Sorry this is so “heavy.” I am not Catholic, nor do I usually get into religion on my blog, but I did think this was a quote worth thinking about, no matter what one’s beliefs.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Read all the Christmas/Holidays Unplugged posts here.

Comments (5)

By Mom Unplugged, November 13, 2007 7:29 pm

Here I am, ruminating in my corner about Christmas and fussing to myself about the annoying day I have had (running late…then a glass fell and exploded all over the kitchen/dining area requiring extensive and immediate vacuuming…running really late…then forgot it was son’s “Snack Day” so had to rush to grocery store on way to school…running really, really late, etc, etc…all day long). Meanwhile, it is Children’s Book Week this week and a good part of my blog is about … children’s books!

Oh well, I blame Pluto and my biorythms.

I discovered that it is Children’s Book Week by finally catching up on some of my blog reading and finding this interesting post at Not Quite Crunchy Parent. MC Milker cites an interesting statistic in her post:

“…60% of children’s books sold are entertainment tie-ins or based on licensed characters.”

I find this fascinating, yet not surprising. In this day and age it is pretty obvious that a child can see the movie, watch the TV show, buy the plush toy and the action figures, go to McDonald’s and get more toys, and read the books all tied in to the same commercial character.

I guess this is all a form of “branding.” However the flip side is that if it takes Sponge Bob, Care Bears, or Transformers to entice a child to read, I suppose these books do serve some purpose. But there are so many other WONDERFUL children’s books out there, that you don’t have to settle for boring, silly, and commercialized.

Even if you have spent only several minutes reading this blog, I think you will probably have figured out that my preference leans towards what I call “Unplugged Books,” books that do not tie in to TV shows or movies. As MC Milker points out, these books can be harder to find. Walmart doesn’t usually carry them, and even at a “real” bookstore like Barnes & Noble or Borders you might have to know what you are looking for when you go in, or at least be prepared to spend a lot of time digging around.

Of course, root around your local library too. Sometimes a good children’s librarian will put interesting, high-quality, lesser-known books on display. Those displays can be a good place to start.

Where I live, our only non-religious book sources are Walmart, Kmart, and a tiny, poorly stocked bookstore. Our library is pretty small too, so I end up buying a lot of books online.

My tricks for finding “Unplugged Books” online are the following:

- Find some online toy stores that sell “natural” or “Waldorf” toys and see if they sell books. Many of them do. I can guarantee that you won’t find any Sponge Bob or Scooby Doo at those stores (or save time and check my Unplugged Book Stores list).

-These types of “natural” stores often have links to other similar stores or websites, and those links might lead you to books. Look for a “links” section in the main page index.

- Find an interesting-sounding recommended title on a blog (such as mine!) and pull it up on Amazon. Look at the section labeled “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” and any “Listmania!” links that might appear in the left sidebar. I often find wonderful books I had never heard of, simply by following these links. Also, check for other books by the same author. I guess this is the online equivalent of browsing at a good library. I love it!

- There are a lot of blogs out there that often write about children’s books. You won’t find these bloggers recommending anything too mainstream either. The blogs I am familiar with that often recommend children’s books in the posts or sidebars are the following:

Painted Rainbows and Chamomile Tea

Wildwood Cottage

A Wrung Sponge (the blog author, cloudscome, is a children’s librarian)

The Rowdy Pea

The Owl and the PussyCat

Jen Robinson’s Book Page

If you know of other useful children’s literature blogs, please tell me about them in the comments.

- Of course, I must humbly mention that I also write a lot of reviews of children’s books. You can find them by clicking my category “kids’ books” (right sidebar, “What I Write About” drop-down menu). You can also click the subcategories to help find the kind of books you are looking for.

- Lastly, in case you missed it earlier, I should once again direct you to my list of Unplugged Book Stores (top right sidebar). These are stores that sell non-mainstream, “Unplugged Books.” Please check the list regularly because I am always adding new links as I find them.

I hope you find this advice helpful in your search for great children’s books. It takes a bit more effort, but trust me, the results are really worth it! Have fun!