Kia ora te whānau.  What’s up?

This time of the year is achingly beautiful … clear, calm blue skies and leaves just beginning to colour.  But holy ravioli I feel the pressure to make good use of the masses of fruit and produce.  Corn, beets, peaches, apples, beans, tomatoes, pears, zucchini (aka courgettes).  All that.  I’m cooking and gifting and breathing deep.

The gorgeousness is tinged with the awareness that winter is gearing up, which makes these indoor jobs more difficult.  Office – as much as I love you, I just long to be pottering outside with the sun on my back!  Weeding, watering, hanging washing.  Whatever.

Soon enough, self.  Soon enough.

Meanwhile, let me throw some links your way.  See what speaks to you, where your head’s at.  Mine has been expanding – creaking and groaning as I ask it to perform new and different tasks.  After years perfecting speedy task-switching (tending to the interruptions of childhood and honing skills of responding to everchanging needs) I’ve been attempting to sit quietly and think deeply.  IT IS HAAAAAAARD.

So what a treat to end this posting moment with a flurry of quick thoughts (this is a comfy place!)

First up – I don’t think I’ve shared this yet.  It is excellent viewing, well worth your time.  It’s another webinar from the fine folk at the Children’s Screen Time Action Network, this one calling attention to the way that the burden of tech overuse seems to sit disproportionately on the shoulders of families at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.  OUCH.

Now an article from the Washington Post urging us to stop spreading Math Anxiety.  Speak your love numbers and all the dances they perform!

This is interesting, from MIT.  It’s an indepth look at language development and the researchers use brain scans to draw attention to the ways that interactional back-and-forth is the true gold, in terms of early development and trajectory setting, it’s not just the number of words a kid hears.  We’ve spent years admiring that important research re: word count, and this adds nicely to it.  Cool.

A little family of alarming tech things, now.  First, a piece from Richard Freed about the tech industry’s psychological war on kids, next an expansion on one of the ideas therein, about the science of persuasion in app design, and finally an article from Stuff to put it all in a real-life, actual-human context (thanks Stats Geek).

And I end with a massive gift – the coolest and most inspiring thing I’ve read in a while, about a longitudinal adult health study at Harvard.  “Good genes are nice, but joy is better”.  Oh, hell yes!!  x x x