Developing minds

Lots of cool news came out recently about human development, from chimps to little humans:

Wild chimps have been shown to understand fire and how it moves, and don't freak out like other animals do. This is exciting because humans so far had been the only animals documented as keeping their cool around fire...for the most part.

Since we're in the jungle, it's once again been show that it's good for kids to go roll around in the dirt; for one thing it correlates with lower heart disease when they're older.

But back to brain wiring, kids who get intensive language training when they're young, like reading, actually have their brains re-wired, in a good way.

New education research is also showing that kids may understand Math at a much earlier age than previously though, and there are ways that they can learn the concepts just as early as we try to teach them language.

One of the skills kids can develop is compartmentalization, which it turns out cavemen could also do much earlier than previously thought; for example, they made different, compartmentalized work stations in their camps, rather than spread everything around and sleep right next to the meat-processing spot.

Speaking of stone-age types, a study has come out that counters the idea that hunter-gatherers didn't eat any grains at all.

All this data almost makes me want to grab some popcorn and pop it over a fire while playing math games. But not before I go work in my garden patch.

Effects of prenatal exposure of phthalates in boys

First came across this in Discover Magazine:

A new study in the International Journal of Andrology has raised a storm of concern that prenatal exposure to these chemicals could make boys less masculine in their play preferences.

Phthalates, which block the activity of male hormones such as androgens, could be altering masculine brain development, according to Shanna H. Swan, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Rochester Medical Center and lead author of the new report [Los Angeles Times]. To test whether that link extended into behavior, Swan’s team tested women for phthalate levels midway through their pregnancy and then checked back in on the children four to seven years later.

The researchers asked parents to report their children’s patterns of play, but they knew they also had to separate any potential phthalate effect from the “nuture ” side of question. To determine how parental views might sway behavior, parents completed a survey that included questions such as, “What would you do if you had a boy who preferred toys that girls usually play with?” They were asked to respond with whether they would support or discourage such behavior, and how strongly [TIME].

The study of about 150 kids found that while girls were mostly unaffected, boys who had been exposed to the highest phthalate levels showed a lower likelihood than other boys to participate in what we consider typical rough-and-tumble male recreation—play fighting, pretending to play with guns, and so on. But the research might not imply the national masculinity crisis that some headlines suggest. Play in the most highly phthalate-exposed boys wasn’t “feminized,” Swan explains, since these kids didn’t preferentially play with dolls or don dresses. Rather, she says, “we’d describe their play as less masculine” [Science News]. Rather than play-fighting, she says, those boys tended toward “gender neutral” play like putting puzzles together or competing in sports.

Read full article here.

Why kids LOVE sugar

I just thought this was interesting; kids crave sugar the most, or love the sweetest juices, when they're growing the fastest. Cravings for super sweet things tends to die down around 16, around the age that most of us significantly slow or even stop growing.

Very cool study that I would have loved to have been in as a kid. Actually, according to my mother I didn't like very many sweets, AND I am only 5'2". Coincidence? Hmm...

Robot love

A baby monkey in the U.K. gets a stuffed surrogate mom with a mechanical heart while her mom recovers from a c-section, so the little DeBrazza baby can lie against the toy and be comforted by her "mom's" heartbeat. Awwww.....

Teams in Italy and the U.K. are currently developing a robot kid. This robot has been programmed to learn how to crawl, walk, an move, using the leading theories today of child development. The best part, the schematics on how to make the kid are open access, meaning ANYONE who has serious robotics training could potentially make and teach this robot kid. They hope this will speed the development of the robot, including developing nerves and sensing skin for the kiddo. My favorite part in the film clip (see link), is when the robot gets "falls asleep."

How to Be an Explorer of the World: New book

This is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. In school, at work, yes, yes, yes!!! Go Keri Smith. I'm seriously thinking about writing her a thank you Christmas Card, or at least buying several copies of her book and giving it to all the parents I know.

How to be an explorer of the world

Children and Nature

First, I apologize for my lackluster posting these last few weeks. I am being asked to blog for two different classes, and am working on a blog for work, so this unfortunately is getting little to no attention.

I do have one observation, though, which will probably turn into a research paper, but these are my original thoughts on the subject.

During a weekend visit to my in-laws, three adults took five children out for a walk to visit a duck pond. Actually the grown-ups had planned to go by themselves, but as soon as the children overheard one adult saying they might take a walk to the pond, all the kids were pulling on jackets and boots and were ready to go. I found this interesting because the children had not been very interested until ducks were mentioned.

Armed with a back of frozen hamburger buns, the children raced to the pond, not even distracted as they passed a jungle gym in the neighborhood park. The ducks were particularly hungry that evening, and as we arrived all of them got out of the pond to meet us on the path to be fed. The children practiced ripping off bite-size pieces of bread and throwing it to the ducks, the younger ones sometimes getting intimidated by shoulder-height ducks and throwing half the bun at them to make them go away. The older children mentioned concern about fairness and tried to throw their bread in different spots in the duck herd (or a brace of ducks¹). Even after all the bread was gone the children did not want to leave, and even when the grown-ups started complaining about being cold the children wanted to stay and watch the ducks swim.

What I learned later that evening was that humans are born with bio-philia, meaning an innate love of animals. Babies are fascinated by animal pictures books, most children want pets, and the best part of a trip to the museum can be the pigeons strutting around outside.

However, children are not getting the same experiences today with animals that they did even a generation ago. More children today have allergies, and it has been shown that children who grow up on farms and are exposed to animal and dirt microbes have much lesser occurrences of allergies². Most children today do not even know where their food comes from³. Some child researchers are talking about nature deficit disorder, a term coined by journalist and activist Richard Louv⁴, and lack of connectedness to nature has been shown to even affect cognitive ability⁵.

Fortunately, Congress has recently passed the No Child Left Inside Act, which would encourage school curriculums which focused on environmental education, and would increase funding for environmental education programs⁶.

A child’s idea and feelings towards nature are decided by the time they are five or six⁵. I think it is incredibly important to provide children the opportunity to experience and interact with their outside environments.

1. An Exaltation of Larks: The Ultimate Edition, James Lipton, Viking Penguin, 1991.

2. “Bacteria Modulates Immune Response to Decrease Allergy Among Farm Children,” Harvey McConnell, Lancet; 360:465-66, 2006.

3. “Kids don't know their onions about food,” Graham Hiscott, The Independent, 3 December 2004.

4. Richard Louv website: http://richardlouv.com/

5. “At Home with Nature: Effects of "Greenness" on Children’s Cognitive Functioning,” Nancy M. Wells, Environment and Behavior, 32(6):775-795, 2000.

6. No Child Left Inside Act: Solution

http://www.cbf.org/site/PageServer?pagename=act_sub_actioncenter_federal_nclb_solution

Applied anthropology and technology

I have been working on an article about activism in developing nations, namely bringing alternative energies to rural impoverished communities.

Barefoot College (see youtube video), works with women to teach them on a grassroots level how to be solar engineers and run and operate a household solar power system. The college also has a lot of other programs helping women with economic independence and with human rights

The group Portable Light just won an award for their work with the Huichol. Sheila Kennedy at MIT created portable, flexible solar panels, which the Huichol women sewed onto their bags so they had a portable power source.

A third group, Light up the World Foundation, develops and installs LED lights and solar power systems in individual households and businesses.

These are example of opportunities for any anthropologist interested in the politics and accessibility of technology, using alternative energy and skipping the whole "industrial revolution" phase while growing/developing/whatevering a nation, or mostly importantly working with different groups to help provide safe, affordable, less polluting alternatives to kerosene and wood fuel.

And of course, everyone's heard about the One Laptop per Child initiative.

However, an interesting point to bring in: many of these types of groups come in with the idea that by providing light they are helping children receive an education (being able to study at night > children can finish homework > children receive good education). However, in many nations the rudimentary education provided to students is more detrimental than helpful. Children learn how to perform certain skills in an industrialized economy, and yet they don't learn enough to pass their final exams, or there are no jobs for them when they graduate. During all of these years of education, they have also become isolated from their traditional ways of subsistence - farming, hunting, fishing, or whatever. They are stuck between two different economic and cultural systems and cannot function in either one.

So not only is it important to provide children with Internet access and computers and non-toxic light sources, it's also important to make sure they are receiving an education that will serve them as adults.

NY mom lets kid ride subway, gets socially whipped

I did not know about this until the article in Newsweek came out, but apparently a woman let her 4th grader ride the subway alone to go home early from a shopping trip. I say good for her. Kids today are too protected, coddled, and not trusted to be responsible human beings. She even created her own blog, Free Range Kids. I hope this trend continues, with books like A Nation of Wimps and most modern psychologists promoting independence in children rather than protecting, it's time that America regained its independent, rugged streak and grew up a little bit!

Traveling far away from home is bad

Well, I didn't make it to Victoria, BC, for a number of reasons, the final clincher being that I couldn't find my passport or two other kinds of government-issued ID. I'm sure it was boring anyway; just a bunch of archaeologists talking about cool stuff they found, not to mention historical studies of cultural land use. :(
Since I couldn't get my academic fix this weekend, I'll try to get one here: I'm surprising myself about the whole Texas polygamist raid and the issues that are stemming from it. Usually I am dead set against any form of domestic or child abuse, and treating women unfairly, and am all for taking kids and women out of bad situations. However, I think taking over 400 kids away from their mothers and the only society they've ever known and first locking them up in a sports arena and then separating them into different foster homes borders on child abuse itself, and certainly negligence at the bare minimum. It was really irresponsible of the Feds to handle the situation the way they did, and while there are no easy answers in a situation like this, there had to be a better one than the one they chose. Maybe arrest and remove the men who are dominating these women and children? Argh!
Anyway, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Review: The Association for the Study of Play Conference

I am currently sitting in the airport on my way home from the 34th annual conference for The Association for the Study of Play (TASP), held in sunny Tempe, AZ.
I gave a presentation about how parkour is a form of grown-up freeform play, as opposed to soccer or working out at the gym. Freeform or "unstructured" play is something you see kids do all the time, but grown-ups generally stop doing it all together. Parkour does not, and instead encourages grown-ups to keep that kid spirit of finding play in every aspect of your environment, and seeing play as important as work or leisure.
But enough about me, onto the conference. Most of the conference was dominated by early childhood development researchers (0-5 years old), and how play is beneficial to them. Which is great, I'm all for it. However, that sort of meant that left the rest of us anthropologists, sociologists, pirmatologists, psychologists, older kid play specialists, and other researchers out on our own. We were heard, for sure, but the conference was truly dominated by them; there were only seven sessions out of 21 that didn't feature early childhood studies (this count includes workshops and panels).
But all moaning aside, it was a great conference, for one thing because you didn't have to explain why you were studying play, or why it was important/beneficial/worth studying/etc. I reluctantly stayed through Saturday for the session on the use of digital photography in play studies, and it was the best session of the whole event. Two of the women were doing exactly what I'd like to do as a study and research focus (namely giving people (kids) cameras as learning and research tools and see what they come up with). Unfortunately, neither of them good answer exactly what they were going to do with their research once it was done. Dr. Laurelle Phillips had expanded the use of cameras at her school to other classrooms, but the school was located on her university so they could afford to buy three cameras per classroom. Doctoral candidate Carol Borran wasn't sure what she was going to do with her work other than get her thesis. I spent the majority of Saturday talking with her and Dr. Pat Broadhead, and they were wonderful, both encouraging me to take time off from my research studies but also pursue a doctoral degree in my area of study. Dr. Broadhead said I could be Professor of Playful Spaces, which I must admit does sound cool. Usually the whole reason to go to conferences is to network, and while I regret I really didn't get into it until the very last day, I got to see some amazing research and speaking with those two women was wonderful; just to hear their attitude about things, to get an outsider's view of American attitudes to policy and pushing back against "the man."
There was a paper I wished I'd seen but was canceled, which was a study of portrayal of masculinity through MMA fighting.
I got some good sun, good experience presenting (I think this was the first time ever I wasn't really nervous going up and presenting in front of a group. I almost wondered what was wrong with me), and some good brain stimulation. So all in all good stuff.
For now I will leave you with a meditative question from the chair of the conference, Dr. David Kuschner: "If there is a toy in the woods and there is no one to play with it, is it really a toy?"

Some links to get your brain churning in the new year

First is an interesting blog I stumbled upon, and it may become part of my list: http://neuroanthropology.wordpress.com/

Next is an article that by itself isn't so wow-zowy, but the fact that they are addressing the issue of just how important movement is to children's development is wonderful.

Finally, I stumbled upon this program whose soul purpose is to get teachers to use puppets more in their teaching arsenal. Too cool!