5 Cognitive Frames Worth Keeping Alive for Our Kids’ Benefit |
Understanding Child Development
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Failing is good because, despite the negatives, it also provides valuable learning.
Patience is something we develop, typically, in light of opportunities to practice it.
Accepting, at a young age, that life isn’t fair may be a good way of chipping away any sense of entitlement.
While food shopping last week, "Happy Together"—the Turtles’ 1967 song—played over the shop’s speakers. I nodded along with the beat. My daughter noticed and asked if I knew the song. Of course, have you not heard it before?
But why would she? I don’t think it’s necessarily an age thing. I heard it often, even though it predates me by almost two decades, because Mom used to drive us around Long Island with the oldies station on constantly. We don’t have an oldies station, as such, in Ireland, so my daughter doesn’t really have access to that kind of music—she hears what’s on Mommy’s Spotify or Daddy’s CDs in the car (yeah, whatever) and that’s pretty much it, because that’s what she has available to her.
Then I think about other things she similarly has little access to: Saturday morning cartoons are extinct; there are no circulars for toy stores in the newspapers coming up to Christmas; there's no pottering about a shopping mall on a Sunday. That’s just to name a few. The internet—from which you’re reading this right now—has made many such things redundant.
Things change. I get that—and even though I don’t think things are necessarily worse, such changes often have knock-on effects. Conversations with similarly-aged dads highlight some of these, which might be useful to consider for the sake of the next generation’s cognitive........