Stepfathers: Three Factors Contribute to Closeness

Although one-third of American children live in a step-family during part of their childhood, little is known about the development of the relationship between stepfathers and stepchildren.

New research from Brigham Young University fills that gap with a study that identified three factors that significantly contribute to closeness in stepfamilies:

• The couple keeps arguments to a minimum
• Mothers help children feel comfortable sharing their frustrations. 
• The stepfather and mother agree on how to parent

Kevin Shafer

BYU professor Kevin Shafer's research on step-families appears in the academic journal Social Work.

"Family roles can be negotiated and there is going to be some bumpiness," said Shafer, who teaches and researches in BYU's School of Social Work.

"The notion that couples should put the couple first and everything else will fall into place is false."

Shafer and BYU grad student Todd Jensen analyzed data from a nationally representative sample of 1,088 children in step-families.

From the children's perspective, frustrations occur when the new dad assumes too much parental authority or when he disrupts the family's normal way of doing things.

"Moms need to let their children know that it's ok to talk if they have a problem with their stepfather because everybody is still trying to figure out this new family dynamic," Shafer said.

And the lack of history between step-fathers and children amplifies the detrimental effects of parental conflict. "Full-blown arguments set up step-families for failure," Shafer said.

Couples typically make one of two mistakes in the transition.

• The first type involves the couple acting as though nothing major has changed. that the new father is a replacement instead of an addition. 
• The second type of mistake is for mom to take upon herself all of the parenting.

The common thread in both scenarios is that the children's voices are missing.

"If you have teenagers, they should be a pretty active participant in discussions of what the family is going to look like and how the family is going to function," Shafer said.

The study contains one pleasant surprise:

Communicating openly and avoiding arguments contributes to closeness regardless of family income or education level.

"It really is the interpersonal dynamic that predicts family closeness," Shafer said. "You can build these bonds in spite of financial challenges."

Autism: Communication and Language Development - Talkbox

Talkbox is a conceptual communication system targeted at autistic children with severe speech impairment.

Unlike popular communication systems that are predominantly text/voice based. talk box aims at creating a evolving and personalised visual language for children with autism.

At the core of Talkbox, lies an intelligent speech processing engine working in tandem with an object detection and identifying system.

Talkbox has a single arcade style button that can be used by the child or his/her parents, to take pictures of objects and people in the setting that the child inhabits.

These images can then be printed out on specifically formatted paper by the talk box and segregated by the parents according to the time/place.

The images on the left panel consists of people the child might need to contact and these can also vary based on time/place.

To create a message, the child taps on the button to release the lid and place the characters in the creation zone.

As soon as the child keeps the first message on the surface the camera begins recording.

The child taps on the image of the person he/she wants to message and tap the button to send the message.

The recipient can respond to the message using touch based smart phones by accessing the child's visual vocabulary online and using the same visuals the child knows.

For one to one communication the child can just use the visuals from his Talkbox and can physically construct the stories for communicating with others.

Elements of the child's vocabulary and messages can also be posted by the parents in a closed online community to create a richer vocabulary and examples for parents new to the system.

Talkbox is a personalisable communication system that enables a child with autism to communicate with his/her loved ones using a language he/she knows and lives in.

It takes advantage of the repetitive behavior that autistic children have to create an uncluttered time/place based vocabulary and connection list.

Children, not chimps, prefer collaboration and working together

Recent studies have shown that chimpanzees possess many of the cognitive prerequisites necessary for humanlike collaboration. Cognitive abilities, however, might not be all that differs between chimpanzees and humans when it comes to cooperation.

Researchers from the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen have now discovered that when all else is equal, human children prefer to work together in solving a problem, rather than solve it on their own.

Chimpanzees, on the other hand, show no such preference according to a study of 3-year-old German kindergarteners and semi-free ranging chimpanzees, in which the children and chimps could choose between a collaborative and a non-collaboration problem-solving approach.

The research team presented 3-year-old German children and chimpanzees living in a Congo Republic sanctuary with a task that they could perform on their own or with a partner.

Specifically, they could either pull two ends of a rope themselves in order to get a food reward or they could pull one end while a companion pulled the other.

The task was carefully controlled to ensure there were no obvious incentives for the children or chimpanzees to choose one strategy over the other. "In such a highly controlled situation, children showed a preference to cooperate; chimpanzees did not," Haun points out.

The children cooperated more than 78 percent of the time compared to about 58 percent for the chimpanzees.

These statistics show that the children actively chose to work together, while chimps appeared to choose between their two options randomly.

"Our findings suggest that behavioral differences between humans and other species might be rooted in apparently small motivational differences," says Haun.

Children, not chimps, prefer collaboration: Humans like to work together in solving tasks - chimps don't

Babies show sense of fairness, altruism as early as 15 months

In the preference phase (A), the infant chose one of the two toys - her preferred toy. 

In the request phase (B), an unfamiliar experimenter asked for a toy while looking directly at the infant.

Here, the infant shares her preferred toy, "altruistic sharing." (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Washington)

A new study presents the first evidence that a basic sense of fairness and altruism appears in infancy. Babies as young as 15 months perceived the difference between equal and unequal distribution of food, and their awareness of equal rations was linked to their willingness to share a toy.

"Our findings show that these norms of fairness and altruism are more rapidly acquired than we thought," said Jessica Sommerville, a University of Washington associate professor of psychology who led the study.

"These results also show a connection between fairness and altruism in infants, such that babies who were more sensitive to the fair distribution of food were also more likely to share their preferred toy," she said.

The study has implications for nurturing human egalitarianism and cooperation. The journal PLoS ONE published the findings online Oct. 7, 2011. Co-author is Marco Schmidt, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Previous studies reveal that 2-year-old children can help others -- considered a measure of altruism -- and that around age 6 or 7 they display a sense of fairness. Sommerville, an expert in early childhood development, suspected that these qualities could be apparent at even younger ages.

Babies around 15 months old begin to show cooperative behaviors, such as spontaneously helping others. "We suspected that fairness and altruism might also be apparent then, which could indicate the earliest emergence of fairness," Sommerville said.

During the experiment, a 15-month old baby sat on his or her parent's lap and watched two short videos of experimenters acting out a sharing task. In one video an experimenter holding a bowl of crackers distributed the food between two other experimenters.

They did the food allocation twice, once with an equal allotment of crackers and the other with one recipient getting more crackers.

The second movie had the same plot, but the experimenters used a pitcher of milk instead of crackers.

Then the experimenters measured as the babies, 47 in all who were tested individually, looked at the food distributions. According to a phenomenon called "violation of expectancy," babies pay more attention when they are surprised.

Similarly, the researchers found that babies spent more time looking if one recipient got more food than the other.

"The infants expected an equal and fair distribution of food, and they were surprised to see one person given more crackers or milk than the other," Sommerville said.

Read more here

Will Google+ Be a Real Benefit to Teachers?

If you’re a teacher or in the US parliance, an 'educator' and you haven’t yet started experimenting with Google+ you may be missing out on a useful tool.

Google+ is being promoted as the next best and the most amazing, awesome collaboration tool. To be more moderate, it may help you promote your classes in a better way.

There are some good ways to think about this and how you get started. Possibly the best function of Google+ is it's availability and the savings on promotional overheads. The tool is open to anyone with a Google Gmail account and is free to users.

Setup an Account

First connect to Google+ at www.google.com and establish an account using your existing Gmail account or follow the online instructions to make a new account.

Making a Class Circle

Let's look at one of the basic functions that may assist teachers i.e. building a class environment and populating this with like minded and motivated students /people.

After you’ve set up your account and published your profile, go to your Circles page and start adding people in your class to the circle.



When you have it all populated, share it with the people in that circle, so they can all add each other to the same circle.

Do this by clicking “share this circle” in the upper right hand side of your screen. (If you have any questions, leave them in the comments section and Google+ promise to sort you out.)

Sharing your Lesson Plans

You can post your lesson plans to your circle without sharing them to the outside world. Simply click the X on other circles and sharing options like “public” and “extended circles” until your special class circle is all that’s remaining, and you have your privacy.


Now, post lesson plans, share YouTube videos, photos, and more via links. You can even do location-related homework by having people post location check-ins to the circle as a response to your plans.

Conclusion
I hope this posting has been of some assistance to you and wish you and your students great success for the future.

Sharing the lessons from an autistic child

Sharing the lessons from an autistic child

When Jordan Soriano was just over a year old, he seemed to shut down.

"His mother had him on video, smiling and playing with trucks," said Colleen Buccieri, Jordan's godmother. "Then all the sudden, boom. He just went into his own world. For about six months, we thought he was deaf because he would not respond to anything. We even rang a big cowbell behind his head, and he did not even flinch."

It would be another four years before Jordan, now 10, would officially receive an autism diagnosis, and help through the public schools.

"As time went on and we learned more about autism, we kept saying, 'If only we'd known this a year ago, or known that two years ago,'" said Buccieri, also a longtime friend of Jordan's mother, Yvonne.

Buccieri and the Sorianos do not want other youngsters with autism to go years without the treatment they need. So they have founded Face Autism, a local group devoted to providing early autism screenings for children ages 18 months to four years, and to helping families through small grants for things like medical appointments and gluten-free food.

"If you can identify these children early and get them the resources they need, that's not only going to help the family, it's going to help the community," Buccieri said. "I see so many adults now going, 'What do I do with my child who has autism who didn't get any services earlier?'"

Read the full article here

Why Mothers are not fully engaged by TV shows - a media concern

A TV media company recently conducted an interesting research with over 400 mothers who have children under the age of 12 living in their homes.

They found that:

• 75% of respondents watch certain TV shows with their children.
• 50% of respondents indicated that they’re likely to be doing other things while watching television with their children. (This could mean that although they are watching the program, they aren’t really engaging in it.)
• Women with very small children indicated that it was “impossible for anyone to watch anything on the TV when the kids are up.”
• Women with older children experienced phases of “family TV viewing” where they watched shows targeted to their kids’ age group between ages 4-7. (Shows selected by the children or chosen to entertain the children)
• Interestingly, as the kids get older, women become more engaged in the programming as they come to share favourite shows with their kids, such as “American Idol” and “Survivor.”
• The respondents indicated that ultimately they can only truly engage in what’s on the television when their children aren’t present. (This was a consistent response among all respondents regardless of the age of the children.)
• 81% of our survey respondents stated that they have “their shows” that they watch during what they deem to be their “me time.” This offers them an “escape” from the daily pressures of work and family.
• Women are also prone to “time-shifting” their preferred programming by recording their favourite shows or by visiting On Demand network websites, to re-watch shows or catch episodes they’ve missed.

What does this mean?

According to the research, if mothers are watching TV with their children they are not probably not engaging with the programs that their children are enjoying.

I think its easy to conclude that if they aren’t engaging with the programs, they are definitely not engaging with the commercials, which is more of a concern for the media ad sales people than the mothers.

My greatest concern in all this is that mothers, fathers and family members are not engaging with each other or their children, even if they appear to be sharing the experience of coming together, to form an 'audience' to watch a specific TV show.