Haere mai. Welcome. Thanks for coming to play. My name is Miriam and I am, indeed, a geek. Specialist geeky subject? Babies. Since 2009 this has been a destination for family enthusiasts, dorky teachers, geeky parents. We share ideas and info about children, science, families, and life. Come in. Enjoy. Stay a while.
This old website has been a shelter, a liferaft, and a circus. It’s been a teacher, a burden, and a delight. It’s due for an almighty overhaul, which has made me hesitate to update … but what the actual HECK, that has become like failing to clean a kitchen that is about to be renovated.
In fact, inspired by a friend from Japan, I cleaned my defunkt oven on the day it was removed from my house. Thank you for your service, oh Oven. Thanks for the birthday cakes, the crispy potatoes, the tofu scrambles.
So I thought I’d do a lovely link-share, but something is kaput and I cannot seem to highlight text in order to insert a link, rendering this whole process a bit hopeless. I hope we will find each other when the website moves. I hope we can keep the 15+ years’ of thoughts, links, ideas.
Change! It’s constant. That might be why we like the moon so very much 😉
Little Girl is still unwell – it’s day nine (?)… meanwhile, f you could see the number of open tabs that are squashed along the top of this screen, you would be worried for my state of mind. Rightly so.
There are several I’ll be able to put away if I first share them, here. I cannot promise to organise them thematically, which is what I’d usually do. My mind and laptop are in such a topsy turvy jumble that imma lay things on you in a flurry of no particular order … GIDDY UP
THIS is an alert from Zero to Three, about the US Surgeon General warning about how stressed out babies’ parents are. Knowing, as we do, how interrelated parental wellbeing is with the positive developmental trajectories of dem babies … this is a serious call for attention from the highest of offices in US Health. … … annnnnnd I bet it goes nowhere, cos this happens all the time.
Yesterday, the news was full of this story, concerned about the oral language skills of children arriving in New Zealand’s schools, aged five. Later in the day, speech language therapists joined in, confirming how worrying kids’ language is, and adding their own workforce shortages to the list of challenges.
The person interviewed on RNZ laid the blame at the feet of the pandemic and children’s screen time. Salient points, but no mention made of parents’ own screen use, yet again, despite it being associated with language learning, a reliable predictor of children’s habits and a factor measurably influencing maternal sensitivity & responsiveness. Oh, and maternal sensitivity has been shown to predict a secure attachment, which influences almost everything. Forever.
Parents need support, especially at the transition to parenthood. So many of them are feeling unsupported – my doctoral research has confirmed this to a heartbreaking extent. And as for the screen stuff, we all need more green time, less screen time, and new parents in particular are being set adrift in risky online spaces. Once I get that thesis online, you can have a look at how my research also highlights a real silence from the perinatal workforce about how to manage (in particular) smartphone use during caregiving. Without attention to this issue, there will continue to be children lacking the expected skills to thrive in the formal learning of primary school – no pandemic to blame.
(*PS I love this quote from a teacher at my local school in response to increased testing … oh, the school is rural, hence the farming metaphor: “Just because you weigh a pig more often, it doesn’t make the pig grow any faster”.)
It’s hard to wrap your arms around a person or a concept while holding a shield to ward off the threats to their wellbeing. But listen, some of what goes on is so very questionable, YOU GOTTA hold the shield. You gotta ask difficult questions.
Or this: the virtual baby at UC, which gives me indigestion. Just … why? Also: how expensive was it to develop this circus of infant disrespect? An infant sized doll would be a much better proxy. In the good old days of sane teacher training, we absolute beginners used to practice nappy changes on dolls, rehearsing respectful routines using lots of language and taking an unhurried approach … I saw that virtual baby in development and LORD I hope it has progressed further than the ghastly nightmare which I saw: a baby who could not respond to song, or touch, or gaze. The virtual baby could not be comforted by any of those biologically appropriate responses, but would only stop crying when laid on the ground and given a virtual rattle to play with. WHAT? And this would help train quality professionals …how? Just because something can be done (like a VR headset for teacher training!) does not mean it should be.
Even this: my latest article for my pals at OHbaby! magazine, which is a cautionary tale about baby tracking apps. Can we be FOR responding to babies’ cues? Not without defending against the latest threat to that, first! Gah!
We need some positivity to end this post, or we will all wind up with a bad case of the blues. OK, so … howzabout the Joy Workout from the NY Times? That’s fun.
Speaking of summaries, I am in my office today to begin work on my research summary. I gotta transform a 350+ page document into a 1-2 page lay summary. Like an abstract, but nicer to read! This is not an easy task and I’ll admit to being a bit bamboozled by it.
But needs must, friends, so I will hop to it. Wishing you all blessings, love, joy – and the courage to question and defend, when required!
so … um … yesterday at about 2pm I submitted my PhD thesis. I have decided this is like winning a quarterfinal – worthy of a little celebration, a wonderful milestone, but TEAM we ain’t done. Still needing to be examined and defended … but we are getting there.
You’d have thought it was a fab time for champagne popping, but a) I didn’t want to drink a whole bottle, b) I didn’t want to waste any, and c) I had an appointment for jabs in the afternoon, which made day-drinking pretty unappealing. So I’m as-yet-unchampagned!
I promised myself I’d have June off for resting and knitting, but sheesh it’s gonna be a process, getting used to not chipping away at the huge PhD goal.
Can I tell you a bit about what a long road? I am the first in family to graduate from a tertiary institution – got my Diploma of Teaching in Early Childhood straight outta high school in the early 90’s.
My lil’ Dip T and I punched above our weight for years, enjoying the BEST JOB EVER at the Tennessee Early Childhood Training Alliance housed at Tennessee Tech University at the turn of the century (go Golden Eagles!), and when I was a new mum in the early aughts I slowly clawed my way to the BTchLn upgrade, one distance paper at a time, finishing in 2006.
I guess it was a couple of years later I started trying to convert that into some postgraduate quals, and my path to the PGDip was interrupted by the collapse of the city, the need to provide care to my dear mum, followed by my next (precious) pregnancy.
Eventually I finished the PGDipHSci in 2018, by which time my sweet mother had died, so she never knew about my successful completion of a Master’s degree by research in 2020, or this gargantuan mountain I’ve been climbing since.
A PhD is not for the faint hearted, and I am just beyond grateful for the support of my exceptional supervision team, my beautiful family, and the Child Wellbeing Research Institute at the University of Canterbury. We are on track to finish ‘er up midyear.
So here comes enforced rest! Weird. I started yesterday with cleaning out slime from the nooks and crannies of my washing machine. Unbeknownst to me, there is a world of cleaning videos out there, and I am so jazzed by the notion of having some time to indulge in a bit of oikology! All the jobs I’ve been walking past and ignoring for YEARS … here we come …
So I’ve employed my dad’s excellent life advice to wait till you’ve had two sleeps after a difficult situation, in order to decide whether to succumb to despair, or not.
Two days ago I attended a fraught public meeting in my community, surrounded by neighbours and facing off against a villainous bunch of corporate bad guys. I was reminded of Mr Burns from the Simpsons (in vibe, not in looks). I feel like I am living inside a Disney movie. The health of our river is under threat, and I cannot be dispassionate about it.
here’s me by the river in question, a couple of years ago before I let all my silver tinsel hair grow in 😉
So yeah, I got a little sassy at the meeting. My best, highest self found it difficult to engage, and with the hindsight of two sleeps and my knowledge of neurobiology and homeostasis, I say “no wonder” – it was really hot in the sun without shade, it was rolling on to dinner time and my blood sugar was dangerously low, and the neurosequential model will remind you that the effective functioning of our prefrontal cortex is at risk when our limbic systems are raging. Which they’ll do when our homes and happiness are under threat!
All this to say, I have forgiven myself for my public display of imperfection and I acknowledge that I would not be the person I am if I was unwilling to call out nonsense when I see it and hear it. It’s one of my best qualities, I think, so I stand by it. In fact, I call on that trait right now as I share links with y’all
“The narrative in the media now is tending to be all about how tech can be good and bad, implying a balance. However, the evidence—whether from our study or the US Surgeon General’s review [9]—increasingly supports the idea that the harms seem to outweigh the positives.”
The busy is a bit much at the moment. In my life, the hurtling will be somewhat inevitable till we put the thesis to bed, in about 7-8 months. Hurtling. Data collection is complete, analyses mostly done and the descriptive chapter will burst into life in forthcoming weeks.
It’s a weird wee patch, where I’m having to pause and see it through, even as I can see what needs to happen next.
As ever, it’s hard to put my attention too squarely on the ol’ work during school holidays. The (not so) small person is now eleven, and I gotta keep finding ways to focus on her and be super productive in the moments that surround intentional interactions. That link is a funny gag, btw. I will be working my bum off at every available moment! It’s the only way!
Time is precious, we know that.
Time is the thing we can’t make more of. We can’t forget that.
And sheesh, may I hold my hand to my heart and whisper sadly about the passing of a beautiful and beloved early childhood kaumatua, who I have acknowledged here in the old bloggity many times, and I’ve quoted her liberally in work for OHbaby! and others. Darlings, Pennie Brownlee has died. My go-to book for gifting to new parents has always been “Dance with me in the Heart” and many of you will also know “Magic spaces“, both of which were written by Pennie.
Yeah.
Exhale.
Life is short and precious and there is heaps to do.
The things which Pennie wrote so well about were the truly important bits that make child development magical and wonderful and make the most of the exuberant synaptogenesis of brain growth that rockets along in those early years.
Relationships. Play.
That’s it, y’all. that’s what makes children thrive. and both those things are disrupted by by-God tech!
Anyway.
Walking in the woods is good for us, says Harvard, and this is the website of Diana Suskind, whose work I was reminded of by a lovely colleague last week. Cool rock play. Love. Here is a fab new post from our friends @ Sensible Screen Use, about the need to think more critically about our tech use in classrooms. OH! And ECE centres, brothers and sisters. It is most unsatisfactory what seems to be going on all over the show. May I remind us all that what’s ‘normal’ and what’s ‘healthy’ are not always the same thing!!
I’m doing that broken record thing again, so I’ll send so much love and go put a load of washing on. x x x
Honestly … the tenacity and ferocity of their advocacy meant that my work was featured in TWO national newspapers in Ireland – the Irish Times and the Irish Examiner … and I just did a radio interview for a nationwide station, TodayFM (although my voice held a nervous wobble, and apparently they don’t say “judder bar” in Ireland!)
What a privilege to share a play with Otis and pals 🙂
Kia ora friends
When I lived in the USA, they used to talk about the weather in terms of June gloom, and I thought “not in North Canterbury, where the winter nights are frosty and the winter days are shiny”. But this last wee patch has been rather gloomy, so much so that I heard a gentleman say, at the recycling centre over the weekend: “this is like England in November!”.
The other reason for the gloom in my heart is a rough 1-2 combo of death-a-versary and new loss. Processing sadness even as trying to support others … not easy. But important stuff often isn’t.
Anyway, I need to do the important work of sharing links on this blog … I will start with a shout out to Canterbury Playcentre and their fine “Babies Can Play” project, which I was lucky enough to gatecrash a couple of weeks back, with my li’l buddy Otis (and thanks to his fam for allowing me to share the above pic).
That thought may segue nicely into sharing this paper, which was thrust into my hands by one of my mentors, and deals with infant voice and subjective experience. YES! Preach. Vital, and all too often absent from the research realm.
Here is an English translation of a position paper written by the German Association for Infant Mental Health, it’s about things digital in the lives of babies & families, and this is a press release from Canterbury Uni (whoop, whoop!) about screen use in early childhood. Guess what? Limits are a good idea.
Well, crikey. Blame the workload (helloooooo data collection!), blame the family, heck – blame me if you like. It’s been a long-ass time since I posted, but the good news that accompanies this is that I have a backlog of fascination for you to peruse.
