15 - Quinze / Fifteen - 15!

 

16 - sweet sixteen - 16

 

15 - Quinze - 15

 

Five!

A Lilian Flor faz cinco anos cinco!

Segue o teu Coração - Julie Fison / Ever After, from Australia with young love :)

Tradução minha para a Booksmile :)

Toddlerhood - memories :)

By Grant Snider

Illustrated Books about Children in Malawi

Click to buy on Amazon UK

Age-appropriate Chores for Children

I am in preschool

Growing Up

Toddler freak out, Dr. Harvey Karp and the caveman, bliss... :)

Melinda Wenner Moyer for Slate:

Last month, I discovered (and then nearly peed in my pants as a result of) comedian Jason Good’s blog post 46 Reasons My Three Year Old Might Be Freaking Out. (The first three possibilities: His sock is on wrong. His lip tastes salty. His shirt has a tag on it.) After exchanging a few comments on Facebook about it with a friend, she privately messaged me, frustrated with and concerned about her 18-month-old. “It's like all of a sudden in the last three weeks, she's turned into this tantrum ball and I never know what's going to set her off,” she wrote. “I'm living with a baby land mine!”

Me too. What is it with toddlers and losing their shit all the time? Is it normal that my son wails if his shirt sleeve isn’t all the way down, loves the bathtub one day but hates it the next, and manically screams “MINE!” two seconds after handing our dog a ball?

Yes, thankfully. And it’s not only normal, but reasonable. As five experts on child psychology recently explained to me, toddlers’ irrational behaviors are a totally understandable reflection of their inner turmoil and frustrations. In sum, their world is turning upside down and they don’t yet have the skills to handle it. Tantrums don’t mean your kid is a spoiled brat or needs therapy; tantrums mean he is normal.

The toddler life is not actually as cushy as it seems. Sure, I’d like 12 hours of sleep a night and all my meals prepared for me, thanks. But 2-year-olds are also going through a hellish personal crisis: They have just learned how to walk and use tools, so they really want to explore the world; at the same time, they are terrified of what that world contains and constantly fearful that their parents, whom they love and trust to a terrifying degree, will suddenly abandon them. Oh, and those same parents? They’re suddenly barking “no” all the time, seemingly just for fun. What the hell?

It’s no coincidence that kids start having tantrums around the time that parents start enforcing rules. When you say no, sweetie, you can’t have that butcher knife, your 20-month-old has no idea that you are depriving her of this awesomely shiny contraption for her own safety. “Since it’s the parent, whom they rely on for everything, who is taking it away, it’s perceived as a withdrawal of love, essentially,” says Alicia Lieberman, a professor of Infant Mental Health at the University of California-San Francisco and author of The Emotional Life of the Toddler. “They don’t know your reasoning. They just know that something they were getting great pleasure from, all of a sudden, you are taking away.” The pain that this causes, Lieberman says, is similar to what we might feel if our spouse betrays or cheats on us.

As adults, we (usually) don’t (audibly) freak out when we don’t get what we want or when somebody makes us mad because we can talk ourselves down. We can identify and label the emotion we’re feeling, which, research suggests, goes a long way toward quelling and controlling it. Our ability to label feelings stems in part from our excellent language skills, which young toddlers don’t have yet. Also thanks to language, as adults we can confront the people who are upsetting us and suggest solutions. My 22-month-old, though now very adept at informing me of his need for milk, doesn’t manage complex negotiations so well. His first response to frustration is generally to grab the nearest object and throw it across the room, which makes sense considering that his gross motor skills are among his strongest assets. If the only tool you have is an arm, you tend to see every problem as a potential projectile.

Another reality of the toddler brain: The frontal lobe, which is responsible for planning, logic, reasoning, working memory and self-control, is vastly under-developed. Because of this, “toddlers are really living in the moment, not thinking about consequences,” explains developmental psychologist Nancy McElwain, who runs the Children’s Social Development Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There’s no voice in their head saying, hmm, maybe it’s not a good idea to throw my lovie in the toilet (too bad, because lovie got very wet in our house last week).

A semi-functional frontal lobe also means that toddlers have practically no sense of time and patience and therefore “experience wanting as needing,” Lieberman says—i.e., when they want a chicken nugget, they really, really need it NOW! They can also have a skewed sense of cause-and-effect, developing a paralyzing fear of the bathtub because what if they go down the drain, too? Finally, let’s not forget the importance of experience when it comes to handling challenges appropriately, says developmental psychologist Claire Kopp, co-author of Socioemotional Development in the Toddler Years. The 2-year-old, she says, simply doesn’t have any experiences to draw from.

If it sounds like I’m characterizing your beautiful, special, way-above-average toddler as animal-like, that’s because I am. Pediatrician Harvey Karp, author of The Happiest Baby on the Block and The Happiest Toddler on the Block, calls toddlers “little cavemen.” “That is not meant to be derogatory, but meant to set the frame of reference for parents,” he explained to me. “It takes years to socialize our little toddlers, so it’s important for parents to cut themselves some slack. Don’t feel you’re a terrible parent because they smeared jam all over the walls.” (This is not to say that toddlers don’t also love organization and routine; they do. My son lines his toy cars up in a row every day, probably because he’s trying to build some order into his chaotic, confusing life. And his sleeve-down requirements may stem from a desire for consistency.)

The caveman analogy helps to explain yet another issue plaguing toddlers, Karp says: They are very under-stimulated. Little cavemen (and here I’m talking about the real ones) spent their days very differently than kids do today. “It was a sensory-rich environment: smells, the fresh air, shadows, birds, grass under your feet. Today, we put our little kids in houses and apartments with flat floors, flat walls, ceilings, and not too many chickens, and we think that’s normal,” Karp explains. “It is hard to spend all day with a two-year-old, and they don’t really want to spend all day with you anyway.”

Given all this, is it really that surprising that tantrums happen as frequently as they do? There are certainly good and bad ways for parents to handle poor behavior (an issue for another column), but the existence of tantrums, and the tendency for toddlers to tackle their woes through screaming and hitting and throwing, is perfectly normal because it’s sometimes “the toddler’s only recourse,” says Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard CollegeCenter for Toddler Development. If your universe were amazing and terrifying and frustrating and unpredictable, and you didn’t have good communication skills or a whole lot of experience or much of a frontal lobe, you’d freak the fuck out every once in a while, too.

High Five! 5 anos 5 :)

A good day :) Chocolate cake at school with friends, another chocolate cake at home with Daddy. Party next Sunday (another cake :))) and more pics coming up!

ONE

If I had a flower for every time I think of you,

I could walk through my own garden forever

Parabéns, Lilian Flor, adorada!

Wishlist: O Grande Livro dos Medos e das Birras

Estamos mesmo (todos) a crescer ;)

Welcome to Your Child's Brain ;)

The blog, and now the book (soon to be translated into Portuguese by yours truly ;)

At Play in the Field of the Mind

A new book argues that play may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.

This monumental book—more than 900 pages long, 30 years in the making, at once grand and intricate, breathtakingly inclusive and painstakingly particular—exhaustively explores the biological evolution of human behavior and specifically the behavior of children. Melvin Konner, an anthropologist and neuroscientist at Emory, weaves a compelling web of theories and studies across a remarkable array of disciplines, from experimental genetics to ethnology. He ranges back to the earliest, egg-laying mammals, discusses topics as seemingly modern as cross-gender identity conflicts, and draws on scientific work examining all manner of species with which humans share distinct characteristics. (In the way we teach our young, for instance, Konner points out that we resemble cats large and small far more than we do our closer genetic relatives, the large primates.) The organization of these disparate puzzle pieces is itself a tour de force. Though the sheer volume of information and the not infrequent appearance of terms like synaptogenesis and N-methyl-D-aspartate glutamate receptor can be daunting, Konner’s style is conversational (if sometimes occluded) and his tone is, well, kind. To read this book is to be in the company of a helpful and hopeful teacher who is eager to share what he’s found.

Dividing the book into four often overlapping “levels of observation”—the genome, the nervous system, society, and culture—Konner assesses the development of the brain from the first vertebrates through the hominins, with their slow-growing, enormous, super-energetic brains. This development depended on a high-quality diet of fruit and then cooked foods, both plant and animal, and particularly aquatic fauna—not to mention the grandmothers and other “helpers at the nest” who ensured that children were fed. In fact, human brains are so large that were they to reach full size in utero, women’s bodies would not be able to deliver them. Much of the brain’s growth occurs after birth: the human brain more than doubles in volume during the first 12 postnatal months, and nearly doubles again over the subsequent 12 months. This means that infants, with their far from fully developed brains, are extraordinarily helpless for a long period after birth. One reason humans evolved into creatures that walked upright may have been so that mothers could carry offspring who could not yet cling to them.

Konner then explores the genetic and neurological foundations of basic temperament and gender identity and of formative behaviors such as infant attachment and the acquisition of language, and he describes the interrelationship between the biology and psychology of puberty. Unlike animals that hurtle from infancy to puberty, the humans who have escaped the risks of infancy but not yet embarked on the risks of adulthood experience a sort of mini-transformation during the “five-to-seven shift,” and emerge with markedly enhanced powers of cognition into a period of slow growth. This prolonged halcyon phase, sandwiched between the confusion of early life and the intensity of adolescence, seems evolutionarily designed to imbue children with the culture that our enormous brains make possible—the culture that our species (almost) alone can claim.

The sine qua non of culture is socialization, a process we share with many other species. For mammals, it begins with an extreme bond between mother and offspring—a bond that has existed since early in the age of the dinosaurs, when even the infants of egg-laying mammals could feed directly from their mothers’ bodies and demand attention by crying. (Mammalian young cried at high pitches that their mothers could hear but reptilian predators could not.) Although the mother-child bond forms the core relationship, we are cooperative breeders. There is “ample evidence,” developed most prominently by the pathbreaking anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, that “human mothers have always gotten help” from fathers, grandmothers, older siblings, and other relatives. Still, some evidence suggests that kinship is not the be-all and end-all it is often believed to be. Research on the !Kung hunter-gatherer society, for example, shows no particular advantage to having a full complement of parents and grandparents, and in cases in which children have few kin, other adults apparently take up the slack, supporting the idea that indeed, it takes a village. Crucially, the many years that human females live after menopause confer a unique advantage on the species, in that grandmothers are almost always involved in child care, allowing their children, particularly their daughters, to produce more and healthier children.

Konner is especially interested in play, which is not unique to humans and, indeed, seems to have been present, like the mother-offspring bond, from the dawn of mammals. The smartest mammals are the most playful, so these traits have apparently evolved together. Play, Konner says, “combining as it does great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness, is a central paradox of evolutionary biology.” It seems to have multiple functions—exercise, learning, sharpening skills—and the positive emotions it invokes may be an adaptation that encourages us to try new things and learn with more flexibility. In fact, it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.

Finally, Konner argues that even if culture is as subject to the laws of evolution as other aspects of physiology and behavior, it is, in its complex forms, unique to our species. (He does emphasize, however, that humans share with other animals a host of qualities and emotions—love, grief, altruism, heroism, loyalty, shame, dignity, awe, thought—that have wrongly been ascribed to humans alone.) Humans may not be the only ones who teach, but we alone create and build in a cumulative way, and we alone suspend ourselves in “webs of significance we ourselves have spun,” as Konner, borrowing from Clifford Geertz, elegantly puts it.

Ultimately, Konner is attempting to construct a sort of theory that encompasses all of human life. The evolutionary processes he describes are the way in which at every level—the genome, the nervous system, society, and culture—we, who carry along information accumulated over billions of years, continually interact with the environment, and thereby learn and change in response to it. Children, who are shaping and organizing their very selves, experience this most powerfully. And it should not be surprising, he speculates, if children—in the midst of the most exploratory phase of human life, thanks to “their huge, fast-growing, thoroughly dynamic brains”—have throughout the history of the species often been at the vanguard of cultural innovation.

This book is the flower of an astoundingly productive and innovative period of scholarship on evolutionary behavior; it sums up a generation’s worth of thinking and research. But although a work of singular importance, it’s not flawless. Konner’s efforts sometimes flag: his writing fails to sustain a consistent precision and focus. Relatedly, at times Konner seems overwhelmed by the encyclopedic nature of his project. When he sifts and assesses evidence, he’s always judicious and often brilliantly imaginative. Too often, though, The Evolution of Childhood reads like a compilation of research and findings rather than a work that distills that material to create an elegant synthesis—this book hasn’t been subjected to the rigorous and comprehensive editing that a work of such significance demands. But only a book of such staggering ambition can be faulted for failing to achieve consistent greatness.

Ai que já não há bacios, quanto mais penicos!

A potes

Pergunto a mim próprio quantas crianças, de norte a sul do País, conhecem o bacio ou penico por pote. Avalio por mim, que, por uns breves instantes, fiquei perplexo perante o título Ruca Aprende a Usar o Pote, mais um título da infindável colecção referente a esta personagem da série televisiva. Tão perplexo como a personagem quando vê o objecto: «O Ruca pegou no pote e colocou-o na cabeça, para imitar um chapéu.»
A ficha técnica ajuda-nos a perceber tudo: o título original é Caillou — Le pot. A tradução e adaptação é de Sara Costa, a quem mando este recado: segundo certos estudos (Rice e Wexler, 1996, e Restrepo e Kruth, 2000, v. g.), a omissão do pronome possessivo é uma marca clínica de crianças com distúrbio específico da linguagem — mas de crianças falantes do inglês e do francês! Os tradutores portugueses devem desbastar, se querem escrever português de lei, os pronomes possessivos, marca sobretudo do inglês. Os revisores devem acompanhá-los ou substituí-los nesta nobre tarefa. 
Assim Mesmo-

Orchid or Dandelion?

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

Read all  The Atlantic

Vamos Plantar uma Árvore

PORQUÊ:

* Milhares de hectares ardem anualmente em Portugal, é imperativo reflorestar

* + Floresta = Redução de Carbono;

* + Floresta = Incremento Biodiversidade;

* Reflorestar = Benefícios para todos;

* Plantar Árvores = Oportunidade de proximidade (Amigos + Familía + Colegas + Vizinhos);

* Participação = propôr + fazer = Mudar o mundo;

* Sustentabilidade = Pequenas Acções x Muitas Pessoas = Grande Mudança;

* É através do exemplo que melhor transmitimos valores aos nossos filhos;

O Daniel Lucas aos 18 meses

Adora água, é mesmo Aquário (ninguém me convence que se chama signo do ar), água no banho, água na piscina, água na praia, água a lavar as mãozinhas no lavatório, água na cara do spray refrescante (sei lá!);

Adora bolas e bolinhas para brincar, de todos os tamanhos e materiais, e rouba-as no jardim e na praia, e assim conhece outros meninos;

Prefere meninas mais velhas, a sua primeira paixão é a Madalena, colega na Ama, que vai em Setembro para a escola;

Não anda, corre;

Corre descalço pela relva fora;

Saltita quando corre e até as bochechinhas abanam;

Corre tão depressa que fecha os olhinhos;

Entretém-se muito com os seus livrinhos;

Faz pose para a fotografia, o vaidoso;

Já gosta de andar com óculos de sol;

Sorri para toda a gente;
mas parece ter pavor que lhe levem a Mamã ou o Papá, donde, choradeira que por vezes afugenta amigos e conhecidos;

Ri-se com os disparates e as figuras tristes que fazemos, e que repetimos para o ver rir mais, como diz a Ana, «é mesmo menino»;

Come sozinho e faz hum-hum, nham-nham;

Gosta de animais – o cão dos avós, a gata da Filó, todos os que veja na rua;

Entrou na montra de uma loja de puericultura para espreitar o manequim infantil que estava lá sentado;

Levanta-se da base do escorrega sem pôr as mãos no chão;

Levanta os bracinhos e diz Eehhhh quando entende que fez uma proeza;

Quer calçar as peuguitas, lavar-se com a esponja no banho, descalçar os sapatos, subir as escadas;

Gosta de brincar às escondidas;

Canta e dança com grande satisfação;

«Fala ao telemóvel» com pausas e aparentes modulações de voz;

Pega nos telecomandos, e noutros objectos que lhe pareçam adequados, e mexe neles como se telecomandos fossem, apontados para a televisão;

Mede 80 cm, acho que pesa menos de 15 kg, e tem 12 dentinhos;

Compreende a mesma ideia em duas línguas;

Está neste momento com o Papá e a Bisavó no Alentejo.