We ♥ Baby!

Dan just found this story online:

A giant study, which surveyed more than 13,000 children, found that using the handsets just two or three times a day was enough to raise the risk of their babies developing hyperactivity and difficulties with conduct, emotions and relationships by the time they reached school age. And it adds that the likelihood is even greater if the children themselves used the phones before the age of seven.

Uh oh, indeed. This is a serious problem not only for me but for perhaps almost every woman who is pregnant in our modern society. Dan and I chose to get rid of a land line years ago. My cell phone is my only phone. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to “limit” use. I also have a cell phone for work that I use periodically throughout the day since I’m on the road so much. We certainly can commit to not letting our child have a cell phone until over the age of seven, but to not use my cell phone? Nearly impossible! There have been lots of little adjustments I have made to keep my baby as healthy as possible, but this is really quite the conundrum!

Link to story

Picture used in this post by Max Shirley

Check out this amazing story about a small boy who has never slept. Not one day in his short life. His parents split the duty of staying up with him to ensure he is being cared for and safe.

“(My husband) has the day shift and I kind of have the afternoon shift,” mother Shannon Lamb said. “We share the night shift because no one can sleep in the house when he is up anyway.”

Rhett has a condition called a chiari malformation, a rare abnormality where brain tissue protrudes in the spinal canal. via BoingBoing

Recording every moment of their son’s first three years of life, MIT researcher Deb Roy and his wife hope to understand how children learn language. To do that he did what many parents do. He bought a video camera. Er… he actually bought eleven video cameras and 14 state-of-the-art microphones. He then connected these to five Apple XServes and 4.4 Terabytes of storage in order to record every waking moment of their son’s early life.

‘My ultimate goal is to understand how language works,’ Roy explains. ‘But for all of the interest in how children learn language, there’s no comprehensive data of even a single child’s development,’ Roy says. ‘Most researchers rely on speech recordings that cover less than 1.5 percent of a child’s complete linguistic experience.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Granted, we may live in California by the time the Bean is ready for kindergarten, but these sorts of issues really concern us and are a strong motivator for us to find a private or charter school that doesn’t face the same pressures as public schools:

According to Ellis, the effort to cram 10 months worth of education into seven months in order to make sure that students meet state standards on standardized testing is far too demanding. The solution? Teach the younger students skills that they will need in future grades, so that they will be prepared to meet the state’s expectations when the time comes. Long gone are the years in which students are taught how to socially interact with others and how to behave appropriately in kindergarten. Throughout the last decade, the expectations have risen, and students are expected to know how to read entering first grade. While this may be a good thing academically, the same students who are excelling in the classroom at a young age are failing socially.

This, of course, will be much to my family’s chagrin, considering I have many relatives who work in public schools. And, to be honest, we may not even be able to afford private school. But we sure like to dream about finding the perfect school that will not have to teach to tests, will encourage creativity and will teach to where the students are rather than to where they’re supposed to be according to standardized tests. Read the rest of this entry »