2008-03-06

According to Piaget, you have to teach the theory of mind to a 2 to 6 year old. There's a critical point for learning object permanence --- can you induce critical points?. And young children also fail in the conservation of quantity -- they think that if you pour 2 L into a 5 L bottle, it does not look like the same 2 L as in a 2 L bottle. Then from 7 to 12 you get "what if"s. And the why age is from 2 to 7 (especially 5 to 7). Can you exhaust a children with answer to their "why" questions?

Lev Vygotsky - Sociocultural theory

- Russian psychologist, development of intellectual functioning (similiar to Piaget, but no stages). Nurture, gradual growth (continuity), internalization (develop from the outside in). Observation and interaction with environment - mentors, parents, teachers & peers. Zone of proximal development -- range of problem solving from working alone to having assistance. Best to work at upper limit of capacity (stretch); when child can do it alone, then reset ZPD with this as floor. They are introduced as novices, they have help in mastering it, and once they have demonstrated mastery then let them go back and master it on their own, and then they become a novice at something new. The challenge should always be just harder than what you are already able to do. Always reaching forward, always growing, This is kind of Lamarckian ... if you stretch your neck enough, your neck will be fundamentally altered.

Morality is a system of personal values and judgments about right and wrong. Kohlberg. Three levels, and six stages. You must know these.
How does somebody start to form their moral system? He says that in a preconventional stage, there's the "me and whats". There is not a thought of "wrong" when children takes toys from others. Society starts to teach them, and they are set up on punishment orientation (spanking, yelling, ...), and when they hit stage 2 they are on reward orientation (if you ask nicely, you get it -- interaction with people). This is mostly protocol learning, really. They need to learn to "read the documentation", but there is no documentation necessarily. Stage 5 - "the rights of others" are agreed upon. Stage 4 - "I do things because the law tells me to" -- some exterior influence. Almost everybody is in preconventional/conventional, and only 25% of people make it to postconventional, and it may sound like Maslow, but this is sociocultural. Level 3 means "social contracts" and "rights/wrong" and the "bigger picture" and at stage 6 it's the universal ethics and big picture ideas where it's "universally agreed-upon standards guide moral".

Carol Gilligan was a critic of Kohlberg. You can't make a study on human development and only study western males, and Gilligan found that these studies did not apply to the other cultures around the world such as in the east. She found that women operate on a "morality of care" and men operate on a "morality of justice". Women are asked in our society to check themselves as to whether they are caring against the other person. We should be focusing on ways to study individual brains so that we can deal with the different specializations. The "norm" is not something worth studying since we'd be chasing a fantasy-brain/fantasy-mind. This is not at all useful.. And so morals are sociocultural, not biopsychodevelopmental.

Erik Erikson - Holmburger (but changed because he was Jewish). He believed that people came to a challenge point and when they resolve the challenge, whether with a positive or negative development, then move on to the next stage. Challenge and a resolution. So are they saying that the body makes its own crisis for the mind to solve and overcome? I doubt it. This is probably talking about the results of various crises that do not necessarily always exist, but just what might happen. But then this would mean that Erikson would think that parents should set up specific challenges for children to overcome. Hm.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: death & dying. There are five stages of dying: denial and isolation, anger (at god, envy, projected on environment (doctors, the system)), bargaining (if only, i'll be good), depression - mourning for losses past and future, acceptance - surrender and possibly hope. This is cultural, westerns, but common, most people go through these stages. Criticism of Ross. Some people are able to go through them in order, and some can go in order.

Television is not good for children. We have enough research to say this without reservation. Every minute of watching TV is "educational" -- so if they watch violence, they will be more violent. The amount of TV that you watch will directly influence the brain's development. You can cause destruction. 70% of children grow up on television, even daycares. Your virtual cortex and motor cortex does not develop in front of the TV. Even the interactive screens. Better to take them outside, have them build with blocks, anything without TV. Even the Baby Einstein stuff -- that's bad. There's a correlation with autism. You have to limit televison to 2 hours per week, says the Academy of Pediatrics. Children under 2 should have no screen time - their visual cortex will not develop properly. The type of TV helps (the content), maybe.

If they are active while watching television, that really, really helps -- that's why these shows are more helpful. Your metabolic rate cuts down, your brain activity rate shuts down below that of meditation, you don't process what you're watching, so if they are running around and making stuff and not just meditating, that's great. Reading on a flat screen on a computer is bad - the screen itself hinders the intellectual development. Screen time is just as bad.