Bye-Bye Baby Einstein – Now Can we Please Stop the Hype?

Baby Einstein is exactly what it was designed to be – a shiny object to babysit a screaming infant or toddler. 

The children watching Baby Einstein were in many respects smarter than its creators  – not only did they know they were being babysat by a video, but they also knew they really craved recognizable human relationship and some good old fashioned nurturing. 

Yes, small children are fascinated with objects, often the simplest ones.  However, just because everything is fascinating for infants and toddlers because all of it is new, that is not a premise for a learning tool. 

Finally, Some Informed Perspective on Hyped Products?

Getting on Oprah and being hyped as the greatest thing since sliced bread doesn’t mean a product will help your child magically become brilliant.  Parents have been subjected to an endless parade of quick fixes and of all the people specializing in children, parents are often the least informed.  It most likely took a group of scared lawyers at Disney to inject some reality into the hoopla over Baby Einstein, and perhaps we can finally bridge that gap between hype and help to empower parents when it comes to products that benefit children and ones that don’t.

Two Alternatives for Real Learning

1.       Children need to “own” their learning experience

The most meaningful learning for infants and toddlers takes place when they “own” the experience through touching, smelling, tasting and interacting.  Children don’t want to be forced to explore objects in a decided sequence that they don’t control.  Instead, parents should let them explore freely, because exploration is a direct byproduct of the natural human cognitive growth process. 

Products like Baby Einstein completely miss this point.  Sure, the video presents interesting objects but when someone else besides the parent or child himself decides which objects are presented, for how long and in what manner – that is worst teaching tool possible for a small child.  They simply get frustrated and learn little or nothing.

2.       More Stories and Context

Even Albert Einstein himself likely knew that context made a story logical to his adult audiences.  It’s even more important for small children.  

Plotline, character development, continuity, predictable behaviors….they may sound sophisticated, but they are essential for intellectual growth in young children, and that is why books, videos, role play, theater and any presentation of life in artistic form is best when it relies at least partly on story. 

Story is what gets it to all make sense for a young child, for whom every iota of human behavior is still new and fresh. 

Parents should repeatedly encourage learning through story, so a child can take the bits and pieces he does recognize and use those to make sense of what he doesn’t.  Baby Einstein – which only presents long strings of random images – flunks the storyline test.

How to Make Your Teen Financially Savvy

What is the single most important financial principle that teens should know before they head out into the real world?

Entrepreneurship, in and out of the workplace.

Knowing how to forge a new idea, build a plan or strategy around it, anticipate potential pitfalls, confirm demand and interest in that idea, and build partnerships to improve its success and sustainability. 

Why?  The world economy – as it is developing now and as it will be when today’s teens are in their 20s — is one that rewards entrepreneurial skills, both in and out of the workplace.

The days of one-country corporate careers are over, and the keys to both long-term financial prosperity and career fulfillment for coming generations of graduates are agility and momentum. The pace of change in business is exponentially faster than it was even one generation ago, and expectations for cross-disciplinary application are higher.

Those who can move and change quickly, pull together new ideas that work in a short amount of time, and quickly mobilize forces around R&D, service design and production on a world scale will be the ones to beat.

Steps Parents Can Take Today

What can parents do to help teach their teen that principle? 

• Encourage financial savvy, such as savings for return, investments, stocks and mutual funds in elementary and middle school.
• In those early years, encourage children to participate in family finance discussions, learn to read bank, mortgage and credit card statements, practice calculating tips at restaurants, figuring sale prices at department stores, bargaining for a better deal at the fresh market, etc.
• Even an 8-year-old can come up with a plan to help the family save money on ATM fees, electricity usage, and groceries.

How can teens put that principle into practice?  

Parents should start supporting and brainstorming entrepreneurial activity with their TWEENS and teens as early as middle school and fully in high school.

• Children between the ages of 10 and 15 can mow lawns, babysit, hold bake sales, walk dogs, and run errands for local elderly and busy moms.
• Children between 15-18 can engineer creative solutions to everyday problems and develop those into full-blown businesses.
• Buy your high school student a subscription to entrepreneurship magazines and encourage them to study the examples of others who have come up with “big ideas” and turned them into businesses.
• Find your high school student a mentorship or apprenticeship, because these experiences are known to not only better ensure graduation, but also encourage better academic performance and a stronger commitment to college and to ambitious plans post high school and college.
• Try to achieve a mentorship in technology or other innovative industry. In Economy 3.0, every field will need tech savvy, and having these skills will give your child an advantage.
• Encourage your child to explore apprenticeships in at least 3 different fields, especially business or finance, technology and science. These are areas that support most successful entrepreneurial ventures of the next economy.

How to Help Your Child Tell Time

I have worked with schools and families for over 2 decades, and I am still amazed at the problem of telling time.  Most children under the age of 8 cannot tell time perfectly.  Half of them cannot tell time correctly within the half hour.  Why? 

For some strange reason, we do not teach children to tell time as a quantity first.  We start by teaching them the position of the hands, but most children are not cognitively wired to understand this fully until the age of 8-10.  All research done on this topic shows that children cannot tell time accurately to the minute until close to the age of 10.

And yet, time is so essential.  There are at least a dozen instances in my day of parenting my child for which I need him to “get” the concept of time as a quantity. 

How many times have you screamed “5 more minutes!” to your child who is engrossed in something at the playground, only to have them look at you vaguely and continue as if you said nothing? 

And how many times have you put your child in timeout for 15 minutes and watched them squirm, complain and ask “Is it 15 minutes yet?”  incessantly.

These things happen because children are not cognitively wired to understand time as a quantity.  So, unless you are prepared to show them what the quantity of time means, they will continue not to get it.

So what can you do? 

Fortunately, there are a blessed few miracle products out there that teach time as quantity.  My favorite is the Time Timer, which can be used for a zillion parenting purposes and communicates time as a passing (and dimishing quantity) very well.

Another wonderful tool that can be used to get children to stay in bed longer, respect a parent’s need to sleep longer (do I hear an Amen?) and generally grow to understand time supremely well compared to their peers is the Talking Alarm Clock.

Sand timers hold the fascination of young children while providing you with an extremely useful behavior management and tool for teaching time.  And if you want the best of both worlds, try the digital sand timer.

And if you would like to get your feet wet with scholarly research on children, cognition and learning to tell time, check out Time and Human Cognition.

3 Reasons Play is the Ultimate Way to Learn for Children Under 8

For most children, summertime means playtime.  For parents who are tempted to fill a child’s summer with numerous outside learning programs to “get ahead”, there are several reasons why playtime itself is the best method for gaining knowledge:
 
1. Play provides the two elements to rapid cognitive growth:  open-ended opportunities to explore new ideas with endless chances to re-engage familiar objects/experiences.  It should be a maintstay of a child’s daily experience.  
 
2. Open and mildly structured play encourages (and provides opportunities for the child to build neurological connections around) decision-making, prioritizing, distinguishing, assessing…..the foundations of critical thinking.
 
3. The most effective play (that which provides the richest and most lasting learning experiences) is done alone until the age of 5 or 6.   It is a huge misconception that young children need playmates.  Young children don’t have the cognitive wiring to understand that another child is “another child” and someone they should respect, understand, share with, etc.  This is a widespread misconception among parents, but most child and cognitive experts are fully aware that children don’t have social wiring in the brain that young.