Parenting is serious fun: The Tumblon blog

Today the New York Times published a short personal tech piece on the role of technology in child development called So Young, So Gadgeted.  Journalist Warren Buckleitner contends that we are moving in uncharted territory:

[A]t what age should children get their first cellphone, laptop or virtual persona? These are new questions being faced by 21st-century parents, and there is no wisdom from the generations for guidance. You can’t exactly say to your teenager, “When I was a boy, I didn’t have an unlimited texting plan until I was in high school.”

Tumblon can help parents navigate these uncharted waters in three ways. First, by providing customized, interactive child development information, parents can better understand their children in order to judge what forms of technology are appropriate for them. Second, by recommending developmentally appropriate resources (of which technology is a part), parents can know how to use technology and use creative developmentally appropriate ways to engage their kids without technology. Third, by connecting parents to one another and allowing them to recommend and rate resources (coming soon . . .) parents can learn from the wisdom of this generation, who are going through the same experiences they are having.

The horizon of parenting has changed, and tumblon will help parents answer the pressing questions of 21st-century parents.

Have you ever heard a parent speak to a four-year-old using a tone of voice and vocabulary that you would expect tp be used with a one-year-old? We instinctively recognize that there is something demeaning and condescending in speaking to an older child that way - and no doubt the child senses it too.

In the development of tumblon, we have assumed that good parenting rests on reasonable expectations adjusts to children’s changes. Parents should speak to a one-year-old in one way, and to a four-year-old in another, and each way should fit the child’s abilities. This is, in a phrase, developmental parenting.

The challenge for parents is to keep current on what to expect, since their children are constantly changing. Tumblon meets that need by providing concise, relevant, interactive milestones help parents to know, at a glance, what is reasonable to expect of their children. With this knowledge, a parent can avoid “babying” an older child, or have unreasonably high expectations for the younger one. And when expectations are reasonable, everyone is happier.

So check it out, and find out how tumblon can assist you in developmental parenting.

A new study published by Ohio State University researchers suggests the role fathers play in the nurture of infants is significantly shaped by mothers:

A study of 97 couples found that fathers were more involved in the day-to-day care of their infants when they received active encouragement from their wife or partner. . . . [M]ost theories about maternal gatekeeping have focused on how negative reactions by mothers can keep fathers from getting involved in child care. But this study showed that encouragement by mothers may be just as important, if not more important, in shaping the role of fathers. (Science Daily)

We have intentionally designed tumblon to facilitate parents working as partners. By giving both parents the same access to concise, reliable developmental information, we help parents to avoid the situation where one is the ‘expert’ and the other is ignorant. Likewise, by encouraging both parents to record memories and milestones, we encourage both parents to pay attention to the constant changes in their child. However, most fundamentally, we aim to foster a culture of nurture among parents so that both parents encourage each other in their roles, and together are informed and inspired to partner in parenting. After all, just like our kids, we try harder and have greater satisfaction when someone is encouraging us.

In a recent study of an initiative called Parents as Teachers, released in the March issue of Journal of Primary Prevention confirms that enabling parents during the first four years of a child’s life measurably improves school readiness.

[A]ccording to the researchers, kindergarten readiness is the most important significant predictor of third-grade achievement and far outweighs other demographic variables such as age, gender, poverty and minority status in predicting subsequent third-grade performance. (PR Newswire)

Researcher Dr. Edward Ziegler of the Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University states:

“Brain development research shows you get the biggest payoff the earlier you start. The first nine months are the most critical. By starting at birth, Parents as Teachers starts at just the right time…” (ibid)

Tumblon shares Parents as Teachers’ conviction that parents are the key players in education, and that the first five years of life are the most important time to shape school readiness. That conviction has driven our content selection and site design - in order to equip parents to engage their children appropriately from birth.

The Journal of Primary Prevention research reinforces tumblon’s position that equipping parents is critical, regardless of the socio-economic or educational level of parents:

The study also refutes views that such services should be limited to high-poverty children, by showing that school readiness scores of non-poverty children were also enhanced through Parents as Teachers participation. (ibid)

So, our hats are off to Parents as Teachers for their excellent work, and we hope to join them in making a significant contribution to the parents, families and schools - not just in the United States, but around the world.

In The Baby Book, the Sears state emphatically that:

“Like language development, interaction with caregivers can profoundly affect social development” (p449)

That sounds like a statement of the obvious; of course interaction affects social development. The underlying issue, however is that caregiver interaction must adjust to each stage of a child’s development in order to affect it positively. The parent who nurtures a three-year-old in the same way as a one-year-old will affect the three-year-old in harmful, not helpful, ways.

In order to adjust appropriately to the changing child, a parent must have healthy expectations of the child at each stage. Yet, as noted in a recent post, a “significant number of parents [have] unrealistic expectations about their baby’s development” across economic and educational lines. How can a parent develop realistic expectations, particularly with a first child? They need reliable, timely developmental information. What was reasonable to expect 3 months ago may not be reasonable anymore, because children change. For that reason, Tumblon’s child pages provide a simple, one-page overview of a child’s current development, integrated with developmentally appropriate activities, books and toys so that in 3 minutes parents can have ample ideas for how to interact appropriately with their children.

If you haven’t yet, now is the time to check it out.

Do your children tug on your sleeve and ask for unhealthy food? If so, you’re likely not alone. According to The Kaiser Family Foundation report:

Children ages 2–7 see an average of 12 food ads a day on TV. Over the course of a year, this translates into an average of more than 4,400 food ads—nearly 30 hours (29:31 hr) of food advertising.

The content of those food ads is telling:

34% are for candy and snacks, 28% are for cereal, and 10% are for fast food.
4% are for dairy products, 1% are for fruit juices, and none are for fruits or vegetables.

If you haven’t already intuited it, there’s something you can do: turn off the television. (Beth Bader at Eco Child’s Play gives further helpful support for this approach, based on the findings of the Kaiser report.)

But turning off the television begs the question: What are you going to do instead? Check out your child’s profile on tumblon, and in less than 2 minutes you can see what skills your child is developing. Click through one of the milestone links, and you’ll have interactive resources at your fingertips, including books, toys and activities that support your child’s current development. You’ll enjoy interacting with your child - and indirectly you are shaping her food choices!

A paper presented at the Pediatric Academy Society meeting in Honolulu this week reported parents’ need for quality, timely child development information. Reuters reports:

Nearly a third of U.S. parents know surprisingly little about typical infant development, and this lack of understanding can rob their babies of much-needed mental stimulation, researchers said on Sunday. . . .

Even when the researchers controlled for factors like the mother’s age, education, income and mental state, they still found a significant number of parents with unrealistic expectations about their baby’s development.

And that had a negative impact on the parent-child relationship. “Parents who had less knowledge had less quality interaction with their kids,” [said researcher, Dr. Heather Paradis].

The bottom line is that having realistic expectation of children improves the parent-child relationship through quality interaction. That is precisely the need that tumblon addresses. By presenting parents with a simple, interactive snapshot of their child’s current developmental and literacy milestones, we provide a service unavailable anywhere else. Our mission is to change those statistics in the years to come by equipping parents across social, educational and economic strata with the right information at the right time.

William Carlos Williams, doctor and poet, counseled Robert Coles, then only a medical student, on how to interact with his patients:

“Their story, yours, mine - it’s what we carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.” (The Call of Stories p30)

His observation carries weight for parents in the art of parenting. Truly listening to children’s stories, and preserving them for the future, is a powerful way of respecting and learning from our stories. Tumblon makes recording, preserving and sharing those stories simple and fun so families can enjoy and learn from those stories for years to come.

When I was a third-grade teacher, I read The Story of Ruby Bridges to my students as often as I could, and every time it reduced me to tears. I was aware that in this story there was something precious and beautiful that touched the depths of who I am, and could do the same with my young students. This story affected me in those ways because through stories we recognize, construct, and communicate meaning.

Young children are no exception; they tell stories, although it is not uncommon to see parents tune them out or shut them down because the stories seem nonsensical. However, these children, like their parents, are simply seeking a story that makes sense of their experiences. These early stories can be as profoundly insightful as they are simple, if we will listen attentively. For children are continually constructing meaning, and the most natural way do it is through stories.

Parents are even more involved in story-telling. Whether we invent original stories or poems, watch them on television or in a theater, recite oral family histories, or read to our children, we are constantly communicating meaning. We are expressing a story about the way things really are. This is the very nature of literature, of art, and of life: to construct and express meaning. The quality of those stories we hear and tell, both in form and content, inevitably shapes the form and content of our children’s stories. They learn (or fail to learn) the art of story-telling, and the vision of what is good, true and beautiful by listening to stories.

The stories that children and parents tell, in turn, shape the stories that they create. In the life of a family, shared experiences become part of the family’s shared story - which can reach far beyond the family. For example, Ruby Bridges’ family told and embodied stories that enabled Ruby, at 6 years old, to be an instrumental figure in the history of the United States when she became the first black child to attend a white elementary school. That is the role that stories play in shaping families, society and history.

For all of these reasons, stories are the unifying thread of tumblon:

• We recommend great children’s literature to parents.
• We encourage parents to record their children’s memorable words and stories.
• We enable parents to preserve family stories in words and photos (and soon video too).
• We facilitate sharing those those stories safely with family and friends around the world.

We believe that through this service we can enrich the stories families enjoy, tell and create so that their family stories may influence the wider society like the Bridges family did.

Why is it that children can play for hours in a sandbox, but last only 10 minutes on the jungle gym before they want to run to the swings? Sand engages the creative faculties of children by allowing them to create, demolish, and invent other worlds. There are only so many ways to climb up the jungle gym and go down the slide. (Of course the kids who begin to pretend that they’re pirates, and the apparatus is a ship may play on it for hours!)

In our forthcoming recommendations section, parents will find a common theme among the developmentally appropriate toys we recommend. Like sand, many of them are open-ended. They furnish opportunities for self-directed, creative play that build a child’s sense of wonder, engagement and accomplishment. Since they are open-ended, children outgrow them slowly, if ever. For example, wooden building blocks can fascinate an 11 month old, captivate a 5 year old, and engage a parent just as completely in building a block city.

Tumblon’s recommendations of activities, literature, toys and developmental parenting tips intentionally encourage what Robert Louis Stevenson captures so beautifully in his poem, Block City:

What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks.
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home.