Teach Diversity to Toddlers
July 31, 2008
Ideas about diversity start early. The United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council recently reported that kids as young as 5-years-old do better when they go to schools with kids from more-diverse backgrounds.
The leader of this study, Rupert Brown, says:
We found that, when the proportion of ethnic minority children in a school is at least 20%, both ethnic minority children and majority children tended to have higher self esteem, children had more friendships with children from other ethnic groups, and there were fewer problems with peer relationships such as bullying.
He adds:
Our findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the more contact children have with other ethnic groups, the more cross-group friendships they will have and the less prejudiced they will be.
Eating and Energy
July 30, 2008
Our parents—preaching about kids cleaning up their plates at meals—had a good idea for more reasons than we knew. David Pimentel and his colleagues recently found that 19 percent of all the energy used in the United States goes to making food. So as a major impact on reducing our use of energy, these scientists suggest a simple idea: Eat less.
If nearly 20 percent of our energy use goes to food, eating less can clearly reduce our nation’s energy needs. Plus, the average American adult eats about 3,750 calories every day, which can be as much as 1,500 too many.
So if you tell your kids to clean up their plates, remember: You’re not just saving food, but energy too.
Of course, if you pile a kid’s plate with mountains of food, nothing gets saved whether the kids eats it all or not. Maybe you could try reminding your child that she must eat whatever she puts on her plate, but let her decide how much to take. Encourage her to take smaller amounts to start.
Teach your kids to eat only what they need.
Teach them to save.
Robots Help Autism
July 29, 2008
Helping autistic kids can get frustrating, but not if the teacher is a robot. Maja Mataric, PhD, and graduate student David Feil-Seifer explore how bubble-blowing robots might help autistic kids. In short, these scientists found that an autistic child became more sociable when playing with an interactive robot—one where a child can push a button to make “Bubblebot” blow bubbles.
Bubblebot is an interactive, bubble-blowing robot. (Image courtesy of USC Viterbi School of Engineering.)
So far, only a few autistic kids have been tested with these robots. Clearly, more work remains to be done. Still, modern technology might be slowly finding advanced ways to help autistic kids really interact with the world around them.
You can even watch a video of Bubblebot in action.
Math Equality for Kids
July 28, 2008
Boys and girls now do about the same in math on standardized tests. That’s what Janet Hyde and her colleagues reported in Science. So if your daughter wants to pursue a career in engineering, math, or any other science, encourage her.
To give her some role models, send her to Biographies of Women Mathematicians.
Teach Kids to Make Happy Choices
July 25, 2008
Categories of choices trigger happier decisions. In the The Mere Categorization Effect: How the Presence of Categories Increases Choosers’ Perceptions of Assortment Variety and Outcome Satisfaction, which appears in the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, Cassie Mogilner, a PhD candidate in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and her colleagues report that people are happier with choices if the options come in categories. So if you are faced with picking, say, music downloads from a site that just lists thousands of songs versus one that categorizes the songs—as rock, rap, or whatever—you’ll end up happier making a choice out of the categories.
This information could help you make your kids happier with choices, even ones that might not be their favorites but that a parents wants them to make. Here’s an example: Imagine that you want your kid to eat vegetables but you just let them pick from everything in the house that they could eat. First, your kid is probably not very likely to pick carrots over candy. But what if you gave your kid categories to choose from for a meal? Maybe you could give three possible choices for the entree, three choices under vegetables, and three choices categorized as fruits. Then, tell your child that they get to pick one thing from each category.
Maybe that will make your kid happier, even when selecting celery over sweets. Give this a try and let others know what happens.
