Tag: Child Development

On This Day … 22 November

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People (Births)

  • 1927 – Robert E. Valett, American psychologist, teacher, and author (d. 2008).

Robert Valett

Robert E. Valett (22 November 1927 to 14 November 2008) was an American psychology professor who wrote more than 20 books primarily focused on educational psychology.

He earned the distinguished psychologist award from the San Joaquin Psychological Association and was a president of the California Association of School Psychologists.

Early Life and Education

Robert Edward Valett was born in Clinton, Iowa on 22 November 1927. His father, Edward John Valett, worked for the railroad as a pipe fitter and his mother, Myrtle (née Peterson), was a saleswoman. Valett attended Clinton High School while also achieving the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. During World War Two, he served in the US Navy Medical Corps. He then did his undergraduate work at the University of Iowa and George Williams College. Valett went on to earn an MA from the University of Chicago (1951) and an (Ed.D.) in educational psychology from the University of California in Los Angeles.

Career

Valett was a professor of psychology at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Ca., and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and taught psychology from 1970 to 1992 at California State University, Fresno where he was named Professor Emeritus. He authored several books on learning disabilities, child development, dyslexia and attention disorders/hyperactivity. He received the distinguished psychologist award from the San Joaquin Psychological Association in 1982 and served as president of the California Association of School Psychologists from 1971 to 1972.

Personal Life

In 1950, Valett married Shirley Bellman with whom he had 5 children. He died on 14 November 2008, in Fresno, California.

Book: Mindfulness for Children

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Book Title:

Mindfulness for Children: Simple Activities for Parents and Children to Create Greater Focus, Resilience, and Joy.

Author(s): Sarah Rudell Beach.

Year: 2020.

Edition: First (1st).

Publisher: CICO Books.

Type(s): Paperback and Kindle.

Synopsis:

Simple and fun mindfulness activities to do with children up to age 11 to build beneficial life-long skills that promote resilience, joy, focus, and calm, and improve overall wellbeing.

Helping children to be more mindful is a powerful gift. By being mindful they will learn to recognize and manage their emotions, be more able to calm down when they are upset, become better at focusing on important tasks, and more able to interact with others with empathy and generosity. These are fundamental skills that children will need throughout their life, but that they often aren’t taught explicitly. Think of how often we demand that children “pay attention” or “calm down”, without ever having shown them how to do so. Now parents can with mindfulness expert Sarah Rudell Beach. Parents first learn how to be more mindful themselves before teaching their children basic mindfulness skills. With easy-to-follow activities, chapter by chapter children learn to Soothe, Focus, Feel, Pause, Appreciate, and Connect. Each activity includes variations for different age groups, along with “emergency” how-to’s for particularly stressful moments.

On This Day … 19 November

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People (Births)

  • 1833 – Wilhelm Dilthey, German psychologist, sociologist, and historian (d. 1911).
  • 1937 – Penelope Leach, English psychologist and author.

Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey (19 November 1833 to 01 October 1911) was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel’s Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin.

As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey’s research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history’s status as a science.

He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions.

Psychology

Dilthey was interested in psychology. In his work Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, 1894), he introduced a distinction between explanatory psychology (erklärende Psychologie; also explanative psychology) and descriptive psychology (beschreibende Psychologie; also analytic psychology, zergliedernde Psychologie): in his terminology, explanatory psychology is the study of psychological phenomena from a third-person point of view, which involves their subordination to a system of causality, while descriptive psychology is a discipline that attempts to explicate how different mental processes converge in the “structural nexus of consciousness.”

The distinction is based on the more general distinction between explanatory/explanative sciences (erklärende Wissenschaften), on the one hand, and interpretive sciences (beschreibende Wissenschaften or verstehende Wissenschaften, that is, the sciences which are based on the Verstehen method), on the other.

In his later work (Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, 1910), he used the alternative term structural psychology (Strukturpsychologie) for descriptive psychology.

Penelope Leach

Penelope Jane Leach (née Balchin; born 19 November 1937), is a British psychologist who researches and writes extensively on parenting issues from a child development perspective.

Leach is best known for her book Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, published in 1977, which has sold over two million copies to date and won the BMA award for “best medical book for general audiences” in 1998. Leach notes in the introduction to that book: “Whatever you are doing, however you are coping, if you listen to your child and to your own feelings, there will be something you can actually do to put things right or make the best of those that are wrong.”

Early Life and Education

Born in Hampstead, London, she is the daughter of the novelists Nigel Balchin and Elizabeth Ayrton. She graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, with honours in 1959. After Cambridge, she attended the London School of Economics, where she received her PhD in psychology (1964) and lectured on child development.

On This Day … 17 November

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People (Births)

  • 1896 – Lev Vygotsky, Belarusian-Russian psychologist and philosopher (d. 1934).

People (Deaths)

  • 2014 – Patrick Suppes, American psychologist and philosopher (b. 1922).

Lev Vygotsky

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (Russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский; Belarusian: Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі; 17 November 17 (05 November (O.S.) 1896 to 11 June 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on psychological development in children. He published on a diverse range of subjects, and from multiple views as his perspective changed over the years. Among his students was Alexander Luria.

He is known for his concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD): the distance between what a student (apprentice, new employee, etc.) can do on their own, and what they can accomplish with the support of someone more knowledgeable about the activity. Vygotsky saw the ZPD as a measure of skills that are in the process of maturing, as supplement to measures of development that only look at a learner’s independent ability.

Also influential are his works on the relationship between language and thought, the development of language, and a general theory of development through actions and relationships in a socio-cultural environment.

Vygotsky is the subject of great scholarly dispute. There is a group of scholars who see parts of Vygotsky’s current legacy as distortions and who are going back to Vygotsky’s manuscripts in an attempt to make Vygotsky’s legacy more true to his actual ideas.

Patrick Suppes

Patrick Colonel Suppes (17 March 1922 to 17 November 2014) was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology and educational technology.

He was the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and until January 2010, and was the Director of the Education Program for Gifted Youth also at Stanford.

On This Day … 16 November

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People (Births)

  • 1944 – Oliver Braddick, English psychologist and academic.

Oliver Braddick

Oliver John Braddick, FBA, FMedSci (born 16 November 1944) is a British developmental psychologist who is involved in research on infant visual perception. He frequently collaborates with his wife Janette Atkinson.

Biography

Braddick is Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology and was formerly head of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University from 2001 until his retirement in 2011. He attained a BA (1965) and PhD (1968) in Experimental Psychology at Trinity College, Cambridge. Between 1968-1969 he was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Lorrin Riggs, Brown University, US. In 1969 he returned to Cambridge as a University Demonstrator, proceeding to become a lecturer and then reader.

By 1976, Braddick was an active member of the Cambridge Visual Development Unit, along with Janette Atkinson, his wife. The unit carried out pioneering research on the development of visual cortical function in infancy and in early visual screening. He also progressed understanding in binocular processes of both infants and adults.

In 1993, Braddick moved to University College London, together with Janette Atkinson, as professors of Psychology. He proceeded to become head of the Psychology department in 1998. He was elected fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2001 and that same year appointed Head Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford and fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

In July 2012, it was announced that he had been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, due to his contributions in the field of visual perception and its development in early childhood. Braddick is also a member of the Visual Development Unit at the University College of London and University of Oxford, a unit that specialises in child visual perception. He is a member of the Editorial Board for Current Biology.

Research

Braddick specialises in infant vision, particularly visual and visuomotor development of the dorsal and ventral streams in infants and children. In infancy, visual traits determine a manual response and the kinematic parameters of each type of response, including reach-and-grasp and surface exploration. These responses reflect the properties of visuo-motor modules which appear in infants from 4 to 12 months old. Since these modules are part of the dorsal cortical stream, they interact with the ventral stream processing in development and in the mature system.

His current research is on the perceptual development of infants with hyperopia. In addition to working on infant vision, he and his colleagues showed that adults attempting to grab a glowing item in the dark had a longer reach duration, lower average speed, as well as lower peak speed versus the same situation in the light.

According to Braddick, reliable motion perception needs a number of processes that integrate and combine visual motion signals from neighbouring locations within the field of vision. This has the effect of smoothing out spatial variations in velocity.

Reviewing Sleep & Mental Disorders in Childhood & Adolescence

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Research Paper Title

Review: Sleep and mental disorders in childhood and adolescence.

Background

Sleep problems and disorders are common in childhood and adolescence.

This review aims to throw light on the relationship between sleep problems and mental disorders in childhood and adolescence.

Sleep problems and disorders appear to be risk factors for mental disorders as comorbidities, as symptoms, and as effects of mental disorders.

Frequently, there is an interaction between sleep behaviour and psychopathology so that sleep problems contribute to the intensity and maintenance of mental disorders.

This bidirectional association is observed in early childhood as well as in school-aged children and in adolescents.

Many studies show that this association has a long-term nature beyond child development.

Both environmental and genetic factors seem to play a role in the development and maintenance of the relationship between sleep problems and mental disorders.

Various research articles show that treatment of mental disorders and treatment of sleep disorders influence each other in a positive way.

Therefore, it is strongly advised to consider sleep problems in diagnosis and treatment but also in prevention of mental disorders.

Reference

Schnatschmidt, M. & Schlarb, A. (2020) Review: Sleep and mental disorders in childhood and adolescence. Zeitschrift fur Kinder- und Jugendpsychiatrie und Psychotherapie. 46(5), pp.368-381. doi: 10.1024/1422-4917/a000605. Epub 2018 Jul 27.

Book: Internet Addiction in Children and Adolescents

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Book Title:

Internet Addiction in Children and Adolescents: Risk Factors, Assessment, and Treatment.

Author(s): Kimberly S. Young and Cristiano Nabuco de Abreu (Editors).

Year: 2017.

Edition: First (1st).

Publisher: Springer Publishing Co Inc.

Type(s): Paperback and Kindle.

Synopsis:

This is the first book to thoroughly examine how early and easy access to the Internet and digital technologies impacts children and adolescents. Experts in the field examine the research that shows the social, cognitive, developmental, and academic problems that can result when children spend excessive time in front of screens. As a whole, the book provides an invaluable resource for those who need to assess, treat, and prevent Internet addiction in children and adolescents.

Internet Addiction in Children and Adolescents:

  • Provides tools that help predict a child’s level of risk for media-related problems.
  • Examines how to diagnose and differentiate Internet addiction from other psychiatric conditions.
  • Explores evidence-based treatment approaches and how to distinguish pathology from normal development.
  • Shows how to create inpatient treatment programs and therapies to address media addiction.
  • Highlights the psychological, social, and family conditions for those most at risk.
  • Evaluates the effects of the excessive use of electronic games and the Internet on brain development.
  • Explores the physical risks that result from excessive media use and strategies for combating the problem.
  • Examines school-based initiatives that employ policies and procedures designed to increase awareness of excessive media use and help educators identify students who misuse technology, and that provide strategies of intervention and communication with parents.
  • Identifies signs of problem Internet behavior such as aggressive behavior, lying about screen use, and a preference for screen time over social interactions.
  • Outlines the risk factors for developing Internet addiction.
  • Provides strategies for treatment and prevention in family, school, and community settings.

Practitioners and researchers in psychology, social work, school counseling, child and family therapy, and nursing will appreciate this book’s thorough review of Internet addiction among children and adolescents. The book also serves as an engaging supplement in courses on media psychology, addiction counseling, abnormal psychology, school counseling, social issues, and more.

Book: The ACOA Trauma Syndrome

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Book Title:

The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships.

Author(s): Tian Dayton.

Year: 2012.

Edition: First (1st).

Publisher: Health Communications.

Type(s): Paperback and Audiobook.

Synopsis:

The ACoA syndrome is a post-traumatic stress reaction in which pain from the stress of growing up with parental addiction emerges years even decades later in adult relationships.

Adult Children of Alcoholics suffer from a post-traumatic stress created by their dysfunctional family situations.

Through insightful analysis and thoughtful examination, bestselling author and renowned psychologist Tian Dayton shows ACoAs how and why this family trauma has such a profound effect on adult relationships and provides the tools for marshalling resilience and restoring health and happiness.

Dr. Dayton explores how our brains and bodies process childhood trauma and how those traumas can become the catalyst for unhealthy, self-medicating behaviours including drug and alcohol abuse, food issues, and sex, gambling, and shopping addictions.

Readers who have experienced previous trauma will learn how they developed PTSD and how they can heal both personally and interpersonally.

Book: Raising Generation Rx

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Book Title:

Raising Generation Rx – Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality.

Author(s): Linda M. Blum.

Year: 2015.

Edition: First (1ed).

Publisher: American Psychiatric Association Publishing.

Type(s): Hardcover, Paperback and Kindle.

Synopsis:

Recent years have seen an explosion in the number of children diagnosed with “invisible disabilities” such as ADHD, mood and conduct disorders, and high-functioning autism spectrum disorders. Whether they are viewed as biological problems in brain wiring or as results of the increasing medicalisation of childhood, the burden of dealing with the day-to-day trials and complex medical and educational decisions falls almost entirely on mothers. Yet few ask how these mothers make sense of their children’s troubles, and to what extent they feel responsibility or blame. Raising Generation Rx offers a groundbreaking study that situates mothers’ experiences within an age of neuroscientific breakthrough, a high-stakes knowledge-based economy, cutbacks in public services and decent jobs, and increased global competition and racialised class and gender inequality.

Through in-depth interviews, observations of parents’ meetings, and analyses of popular advice, Linda Blum examines the experiences of diverse mothers coping with the challenges of their children’s “invisible disabilities” in the face of daunting social, economic, and political realities. She reveals how mothers in widely varied households learn to advocate for their children in the dense bureaucracies of the educational and medical systems; wrestle with anguishing decisions about the use of psychoactive medications; and live with the inescapable blame and stigma in their communities.

The Importance of Positive Mental Health for both Mother & Child

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Research Paper Title

Positive Maternal Mental Health, Parenting, and Child Development.

Background

While maternal mental health is an important influence on child development, the existing literature focuses primarily on negative aspects of maternal mental health, particularly symptoms of depression, anxiety, or states of distress.

The researchers provide a review of the evidence on the potential importance of positive mental health for both mother and child.

The evidence suggests that positive mental health is a distinct construct that is associated with improved birth outcomes and potentially with specific forms of parenting that promote both academic achievement and socioemotional function.

They review studies that provide a plausible biological basis for the link between positive mental health and parenting, focusing on oxytocin-dopamine interactions.

They caution that the evidence is largely preliminary and suggest directions for future research, noting the importance of identifying the operative dimensions of positive maternal mental health in relation to specific outcomes.

Finally, they suggest that the inclusion of positive maternal mental health provides the potential for a more comprehensive understanding of parental influences on child development.

Reference

Phua, D.Y., Lee, M.Z.L. & Meaney, M.J. (2020) Positive Maternal Mental Health, Parenting, and Child Development. Biological Psychiatry. 87(4), pp.328-337. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2019.09.028. Epub 2019 Oct 16.