I am sure that most of us have noticed that children now a days are much more open minded then before. I also have noticed that when a child is new born they are much more awake and much more aware than before. They are born sucking their thumbs looking around everywhere. When you look at them you could almost swear they are not new borns. Not only that, but most of the small children now a days will suprise you with what they already know. There have been times where a small child will totally impress me by what they know and i stop and ask myself, how does this child already know that?

My question is why? Could it be that maybe parents now a days give much more attention to their children than before? Or could it have something to
do with that prenatal care and nutrition during pregnancy is taken much more serious then before? (for example: folic acid is seriously being introduced in a pregnant womans diet). I dont know, it is just something that came to mind.


Titana.

I think a combination of things. Better early nutrition and early child care (as well as better prenatal care) probably have something to do with it. I think there is a higher standard expectation now too. When I was little, any kind of advanced early learning was mostly by accident or circumstance. Enrollment in a serious preschool was not the norm at all and usually an indicator of at least an upper middle class status. Seems now that just about every community has Montessori and Sylvan and others.

Parent involvement also seems to have ratcheted up quite a bit too. When I wanted to do things, it was "There's your bicycle, go ahead and play Little League" (or join the band, or Scouts or whatever). Kids are now so much more connected, and the parents are expected to chaffeur them around to as many activities as possible, and then some.

I think on average, all expectations are higher now; however, there is still the full range of actual experience out there; like mom's that get no prenatal care and kids that enter school with absolutely no reading ability at all. When my younger daughter 1st entered Kindergarten I was floored by the lack of ability of the lower functioning kids. (I don't mean special ed, I mean the bottom quarter of the class in general).

If anything, the trend seems to be like so many other things in society today, widening gaps and increased stratification.

__________________
Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Are they? I have 5 "younger" cousins, between 5 and 10 years of age, and only one them displays any kind of above average mental capacity, and even then it's in the specific area of football information. Even when they were really young I never noticed anything beyond the typical curiousness nearly every infant has.

As to the thumb-sucking, it's actually a perfectly natural thing for newborns to do. They can even be seen sucking their thumb in ultrasound scans, if you're lucky.

Alot has to do with how they are raised. My granson is 2 and a half, we are raising him. Since he was a newborn, we speak to him in a normal voice, no baby talk. When he was little, I even read astronomy stories off the net when he would sit in my lap at the pc. People have often commented on how well he speaks compaired to other toddlers his age.

Of course you may expect that of an ameature astronomer's kid. My daughter was sent home from the 4th grade once. She called her teacher a moron, because she couldn't convince him that the Andromeda Nebula was actually a galaxy.

__________________
I'm not a scientist, but I play one on the internet.
http://www.rrac.org

The level of information overload is certainly higher. Kids are exposed to media much more readily than before. My neice was operating a VCR on her own at the tender age of 3, her older brother wasn't much older than that before he was at it. The woman who runs the World of Warcraft guild that I'm a part of has a 7 year old who's allowed to play under modest supervision who's grasped the fairly complicated concepts of MMORPGs enough to actually progress his character through several levels alone.

Computers, TVs, DVDs and console gaming systems are the new Barbies and GI Joes for the current generation. Games and media aimed at younger kids do actually tend towards the educational, so those earliest years when the mind is absorbing information at its highest rate is now finally being fed information at a rate that makes fuller use of its potential.

Kids under the age of 10 these days are quite impressive in their ability to grasp concepts that were beyond most of the kids I grew up with. The tragedy that I've seen is, this impressive potential is often lost and squandered by the time their hormones kick in.

I dont know. If you mean intelligence is the ability to know many things. I think all the media (TV, internet, ads) gives children a lot of information. I would be impressed if a 4 year old child can understand the concept of square/ cube roots.

__________________
And so it was, however late . . .

Ok, lets say that maybe not all children, but definitely could have to do with what farmerjumperdon mentioned:

There are still parents that dont take their children into much consideration usually do to their life style, like working all the time or many other reasons.
And there are still woman who dont recieve good prenatal care or just dont consider it as something important.



Titana.

Great posts, and probably like any other parent on this board, I could go on forever on the topic. And kudos to the non-parents for their level of interest, you'll get to put it all to practice eventually.

I think a lot of the lost potential has to do with a child's place in the home. Granted, I'd like to see the schools put more emphasis on how to think instead of what to think; but the home is where it starts, especially since so many attributes of character are well formed up by age 6. So future parents - don't wait until your kids are about to enter school. Study up so you are ready before they are born.

My observation is that most homes treat their children as 2nd class residents. Not out of lack of love or concern, it's just the standard model most practiced. It galls me when I enter someone's home and if you don't go to the kids room, you might not guess kids lived there.

Our home accomodates for little people almost as equally as adults. This is accomplished with lots of little stools, benches, and tables. There are kid size furniture and learning stations in every room in our house except our bedroom. They are allowed to use almost all tools and appliances. And anything that is too valuable to take a chance on - put it away for a couple years - it won't hurt much. You can bring the artwork back out after the kids have grown a bit. The house and as much of it's contents as possible should be accessible and useable by the kids.

If anyone is curious, do an observation session in a Montessori classroom that meets AMI standards (which would probably be any school that has hired AMI Guides). Even that word is not just a matter of semantics. There is a very big difference between a guide and a teacher.

__________________
Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Personally, I think kids are getting dumber if anything. You'd think they'd be more savvy with computers, but my little sister (12 years old now) has been using one her whole life. I got my first computer at age 10. I could write database programs, understood different file systems, and diagnose system problems by age 12. She doesn't understand how to find the files in c:\music to put on her mp3 player. And it's not just her: all of her friends, my cousins, everyone that age is like that.

I doubt it has anything to do with birth. It's more what you learn out of necessity. I learned to program because I started with the Commodore 64, where you pretty much *had* to know BASIC in order to use the machine. With MS Windows, you don't need to know anything to use your machine (except, perhaps, how to pay someone at Staples a ludicrous amount of money to "service" it, which apparently involves running scandisk, doing a defrag, and somehow justifying the charges so the employees can sleep at night).

And I recognize that I lack a lot of the knowledge that the generation before me had. I had to go out of my way to learn glassblowing, even though my parents did it in first year chemistry. I didn't learn to do square roots by hand until I was 20, because I always had a calculator. I have no idea how to hitch a horse to a plough, or how to milk a cow, or what kind of maintenance an outhouse needs.

Also, with smaller families these days, the child gets more attention than they would otherwise get in a largers family. Sometimes not always a good thing.

__________________
I'm not a scientist, but I play one on the internet.
http://www.rrac.org

Too true. A friend of mine was wanting to find a file to send to me, so I told her to open Windows Explorer/ She responded with: "Do you mean Internet Explorer?"

A few months earlier, the same friend called me and asked me how to set up "the blue thig and the purple thing" for her family's cable internet. Gah. Try deciphering that over the phone.

This just shows that the Computer has become Yet Another Appliance.
Current civilization seems to be driven by the urge to expand the number of tasks that can be done without any though going into them and the PC is getting there.

__________________
And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

I think some of you are confusing 'computers' with 'Windows' -

My kids grew up around computers too... since I worked on one at home in the early stages of getting my company off the ground. It's still widely held (according to the pediatrician at the time) that eye-hand coordination - specifically the ability to associate a hand motion >here< having an effect on something >there< (in this case, mouse/cursor) doesn't show until about 18 months.

Each kid was happily mousing away and playing (very simple) games by the time they were 10 months old (I love my IIGS). They both have taken the darn things apart and built their own machines (the older is 13).

The difference between them and snarkophilus is that they don't need to program to do what they want to do. We've already done that... and they've not reached the stage where they need to write tools to do things more easily.

LOL - you'd love my house. Kid stuff all *over* the place. In fact, it generally looks like hell.

The kids, when they were VERY young (see first paragraph) spent a lot of tim e on my lap 'helping' me work. I have a photo, somewhere, of my older boy sitting on my shoulders while I ran invoices... I rather like that photo.

I do think there's too MUCH involvement by parents in many kid's lives. You have to be able to draw the line between running their lives and showing support for what they want to do, and encouraging them to try new things and think for themselves. That does not mean forcing them to play some random musical instrument or play pee-wee football.

Kind of hard to answer why when I'm not sure your observation is correct. What do you mean by "now a days"? In other words compared to when?

I would say there was a definite shift in open mindedness socially in the 60s. At least in the USA there was and I believe much of Europe as well. But from then to now, it'd be pretty hard to show that given the activities of teenagers today. And it'd be real hard to tell how open minded a young child was. At that age they still pretty much mimic their parents values and may or may not have developed into a curious little person.

__________________
The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/

Open minded? I think they´re pretty conservative (they want to marry and stuff like that...). I miss the D,S,R&R mindset of my times.

__________________
If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

__________________
All words, phrases, definitions and theories provided in the above post are, unless otherwise stated, the property of Champion Munch © 2005.

Sign up to sue the Sun

I love a home that looks lived in; it's a home, not a museum. My wife tends to want to make the place look "perfect" before we have visitors. I tell her she's not fooling anybody - they know we have kids. She's starting to relax a little about it.

My credo - why pick up 10 times a day when you can do it once a day?

__________________
Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

I hate when someone tries to make some order in my place. Come on, I know where everything is and that's what matters, I don't need it neat and tidy and everything grouped alphabetically.

__________________
Tyranids might be unpleasant to look, but believe me, you don't want to let them out of your sight