“What do you want to do now?” I asked my three-year-old. “I want to write!” he responded, heading to his table to trace letters, numbers and shapes. Thankfully he enjoys writing because he could actually stand to improve this fine motor skill, as evidenced by his teacher’s encouragement to practice at home as well. I’m [...]
Category: learn and discover
Do you want one marshmallow now, or two in five minutes? That was the question Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel posed to several children back in 1972 in the now-famous marshmallow test that studied delayed gratification. He found that children who were able to forgo the instant reward of one marshmallow in lieu of waiting for [...]
My toddler stores his crayons in a wooden box with a sliding plastic cover—the kind of cover that seems all but impossible for a two-year-old to actually close. Doing so requires having to align the piece into the grooves of the box on both its sides. Suffice it to say, I often resorted to closing [...]
I don’t normally waver in parenting decisions: I’ll do my research, discuss with my husband and together come to a conclusion fairly easily. When it came to sending my toddler to preschool, however, I couldn’t come up with an easy answer. I would read an article about the benefits of preschool and feel convinced to [...]
When our little guy was a baby, my husband and I could easily spend hours in a day simply reading to him (it’s pretty easy reading to an infant when they don’t move around so much!). He knew how to turn pages at an early age, and was often easily entertained with the simplicity of [...]
My toddler was a late-talker, and, considering every possibility for this delay, I wondered whether his speaking more than one language was potentially hurting his verbal skills. “Bilingualism poses little to no problems with speech,” his pediatrician reassured me. “And should there even be a delay, it would only be by a month or so.” [...]
