For generations, parents of babies and young children in the UK have used the ‘red book’ to record their child’s development, keep track of vaccinations and monitor baby’s growth.
However, in a recent update from the UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock announced that in a new bid by the government to stay current and to help improve health services for new mothers and babies, the ‘red book’ will be going digital in 2024.
The news that Google is developing an AI (Artificial Intelligence) nanny has been making the rounds and whilst it’s not a shocking announcement, it is a disturbing one.
In the past few years, we’ve seen a multitude of announcements about robots and other artificial intelligence that claim to be able to raise our children.
Technology and the internet are all around us. For most people, smartphones, tablets and computers are an integral part of life be it for work, pleasure, or both and it’s understandable that children will pick up on that and want to be involved.
Many young children have access to tablets, smartphones or computers and enjoy using them to discover and learn new things. But, when does this access to technology become dangerous for children, and at what point does it turn into something potentially damaging like internet addiction?
Continue reading “How You Can Help Prevent Internet Addiction”
Austrian scientist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1865) developed a holistic theory of education based on three 7-year cycles of development. He believed that education needed to respect these cycles and the type of thinking or feeling that a child experiences. The first cycle from birth to the age of 7 children are immersed in action and are motivated to play and create. From 7 to 14 children explore ‘feeling’ and from 14-21 they develop their cognitive or thinking abilities.
Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was the first female doctor in Italy. She specialised in paediatrics and worked with children from disadvantaged backgrounds, setting up a nursery for children where the only toys were simple objects and staff were told to observe rather than intervene. Based on the results of her experiment she developed her own method, now known worldwide as the Montessori method, founded on her observations.
She believed education starts at birth and that children have special periods where they are more able to learn certain skills. It is the role of the adult to identify these periods and offer the child specially adapted activities. She felt that all children were naturally able to learn and curious about the world around them, learning through movement (particularly the hands) and the senses (which led to the development of her sandpaper letters), and show spontaneous self-discipline when in an environment that meets their needs.
Psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) wrote many papers and books about child development. His work focused on three main areas – language and its influence on thought, the zone of proximal development and the social context in which learning takes place. Vygotsky was a constructivist; he believed that a learner builds their knowledge and understanding directly from what they experience.
Vygotsky encouraged people to talk to children and to label what was happening to help them understand abstract concepts. He felt that language was developed through social interaction and saw the effect that adults talking about everyday experiences had not only on a child’s language (their grammar and vocabulary) but also on the formation of ways of thinking and interpreting experiences. He noted that children observed conversations between others and that they use what is said, what is done (both body language and actions) and what is felt to interpret the social situations they observe. Finally Vygotsky observed how children talk to themselves when carrying out tasks to unify action and language, and that this disappears around the age of 7, however it can reappear for difficult tasks. Even adults talk to themselves when faced with something difficult!
Froebel (1782-1852) was one of the very early theorists concerned with play. He believed that it was vital to child development, and that children enjoyed it. He was also the first person to set out a comprehensive theory of how children learn and how others could apply his work. His work is still popular because it allows children to be children, and not progress onto the next stage of development too quickly. He was very interested in the mother-child attachment and pioneered women teachers as well as free play, sensory experiences and plenty of time outdoors.
Burrhus Skinner (1904-1990) was a behavioural theorist whose work was mostly based on experiments carried out on rodents. He believed that animals and people were essentially the same, but that people were simply capable of more sophisticated learning. His argument was that all behaviour is linked to nurture and that behaviour is intrinsically linked to punishment and reward. By punishing negative behaviour and rewarding desirable behaviour an animal or person will learn to behave in the expected way. Skinner, however, prioritised reward over punishment, and advocated breaking things down into achievable steps with plenty of positive reinforcement and reward for each step. His work also influenced education by encouraging the repetition of the same type of sum or word.
Arnold Gesell (1880-1961) studied children to observe and record their growth and development. He divided normative development into 10 areas, named gradients of growth. He was a maturationist, so ignored outside influences although he understood the conflict between nature and nurture, and identified the developmental milestones which are widely used today.
He categorised development into 10 areas.
John Bowlby (1907-1990) was a psychoanalyst best known for his work on attachment. He thought that many mental health and behavioural problems stemmed from the first years of life, and that babies are born with an inbuilt need to form an attachment to one figure – usually the mother. This primary bond was the most important attachment and formed the pattern for all other relationships in a person’s life. Children should be cared for by this person up until the age of 2, ideally the age of 5, and any disruption avoided. Short term separation, he thought, led to distress which was separated into 3 stages.
