Child growth and development

When I was a child the school summer holidays seemed to fly by. However for my parents I’m sure it seemed like an eternity.

My friends and I occupied the days by going fishing, riding our cycles and generally enjoying being outside with the sun on our backs, british weather permitting of course !

Not for us watching TV and laying around the house. No doubt, our parents wanted to know where we were going and what we were doing but they didn’t have too worry too much.

It was a fairly innocent age before 24/7 news and the start of advertising aggressively to children.

Two things have happened that have changed the way children occupy their free time and neither can be attributed to them.

Firstly, parents are rightly or wrongly more worried about letting their children out of their sight. This is due to the stories on the news of children being harmed or abducted by strangers. This unfortunately has always happened and statistics show that cases of this nature have not increased. What has changed is that it is reported alot more on the News channels that were not around when I was young.

Secondly is the advent of Wii’s, XBox 360 and the like that by consequence have meant our kids exercise less. Advertisers actively target the childrens market as they know that for the child the gadget is a must have and for the parent it gives the peace of mind of knowing that their child is closeby and occupied, albeit not physically active.

The consequence of this is that we have a nation of inactive children that are bored unless they have a computer game in their hand and parents that would like their kids to be more active but are too worried to let them out of their sight to be active and burn up energy.

So what to do with the school summer holidays just around the corner?

What if you could get your child outside in the fresh air whilst being active and more importantly sale?

What about a garden trampoline ? It ticks all the boxes.

Your child will be outside in the fresh air.

Your child will active, occupied & energetic.

You will know where your child is and they will be safe.

Ok, I’m not going to say that a trampoline will keep them active and occupied all day but it will go a long way to relieving their boredom and your stress levels !

You don’t need a massive garden or lots of money as they come in all sizes and budgets. All have safety nets and can even be left out in all weathers so no need to store in the overflowing shed.

My kids love their trampoline and I love the peace and quiet I get from them bouncing up and down on it.
There are hundreds of trampolines on the market. At giftsinspired.com we have brought together the major suppliers on one site to allow you to easily chose the right trampoline for your garden and budget.

Keep your sanity and your kids active this summer!

Posted on June 16th, 2008 by Irina Benjamin
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Children all around the world like to play. Most of us believe that it is important for children to play and provide them vast variety of toys. Psychologists study children’s play and try to understand the purpose of the play. They classify children’s play in different ways. Pretend play is usually referred to children playing different social roles and social situations. For example, cooking, cleaning, ironing, going to the restaurant. It was noted that children as young as 12-15 month can be involved in a pretend play. Psychological research has found that younger children are able to pretend better with real or similar to real objects. Toy cookers, caps, plates, kettles are easy to find in almost any toy shop. Some of the toy shops even use classification of toys that was defined by psychologists. For example, Amazon uses classification of their toy products as pretend play and make-believe play. But how children’s play help children to develop?

Most psychologists agree that children’s play is important for their development but other social experiences are similar important for them. When children play social roles like pretending being a doctor, a firefighter or a builder they develop understanding of social roles in the society. Children’s play is important for developing social competence. Social competence might include understanding of the characteristics of the social partner, such as their age and gender, the ability to adjust their own behavior to different social situations, controlling their own behavior and emotions. Research has shown that children who involve in sociodramatic play are indeed appear to have higher level of social competence. However, it is difficult to say the exact amount of pretend play needed to develop social skills.

By playing different social roles children develop the kind of behavior and language that is used in a particular society. For example, when pretending the situation going to the restaurant children practice conversations that are usually used in the society: “I’d like to order fish and chips, please.” “Can I have a bill please?”. Children acquire understanding of shared meanings of the society and learn kinds of dialogues used in the society. However, if we consider dialogues that are used in fantasy play we can expect it to vary from one occasion to another.

Children’s play that is classified by psychologist to be a fantasy play seems to play slightly different role in child’s development. It is a play when children pretend to be a pirates, spiderman, monsters and so on. Some characters do not exist in the real life. Psychologists believe that fantasy play may play role in the development of imagination.

There are several factors that can affect children’s play:
• Parents can encourage play in their young children. Parents can show children an example of how to pretend. Several studies have shown that if parents model the pretend play children would engage in it more often.
• Schools can encourage pretend play by providing appropriate toys to children, such as dressing-up clothes, hospital props. They can also encourage by taking children to visit a farm or a factory.
• Some studies reported that social class affects children play and children from lower social class usually engage less in pretend play then children from higher social class. Such studies were highly criticized by other psychologists.
• There were noted sex differences in children’s play. Some of them might be due to social influences. However, boys do prefer rough-and-tumble play more then girls.
• It is also believed that boys prefer

Posted on May 5th, 2008 by Irina Benjamin
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Look at this picture. Do you know exactly what are those animals? Even if we don’t know the exact name of this species we can gather that they are belong to monkeys because they look like monkeys. People sort things around them into categories. This helps us to structure the world around us. When we think about the thing we see it means that we are consciously trying to recognize it. Young infants don’t speak. Do they categorize things around them in the same way adults do?

Many psychological research found that young infants can indeed categorize things around them. For example, when they see an object for the first time they store the representation of it in the memory. Next time, when they see an object with similar features this object is compared to representations of the objects stored in the memory. If it is similar to those objects that were seen earlier then the novel object belongs to its category.

Researchers found that infants as young as 3-4 months have the ability to categorize things. Some species might have genetically inherited information about certain things like their predictor. Do people have any genetically inherited information stored in their memory? Psychological research suggests that it is unlikely. In their experiments they showed infants furniture to find out whether infants can categorize it. Experimental results have shown that infants can categorize furniture. It is unlikely that infants’ people have an inherited knowledge about different types of furniture! Our brain has an ability to learn about the world around us. How young infants learn if they don’t speak? Mandler (1997) suggested that they categorize on the basis of informations that we acquire through our senses. For example, infants might use information about color, shape, texture, sound and so on.

Does it imply that young infants that infants that have an exposure to lots of toys of different texture, sound, shape and color would develop quicker or better then those that do not? Let’s see now at the toy industry and the way they market to us toys for young infants. There are lots of toys made of different soft toys made of different texture materials, toys of different shapes so that an infant can learn them and compare, toys with different sounds and of different color. On some toys there was written that such toys help development of an infant. This is how businesses use psychological research to market to us their products.

Posted on May 3rd, 2008 by Irina Benjamin
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