Conscious Mom

I hadn't intended to go so long without posting anything. But writing about what I've been doing would involve writing about work, which I tend to avoid doing these days. I've been very vague about my employment on this blog. Some of you may know that I am, or was, or might be in the future, a Biology teacher. But I'm not teaching much at the moment, and in case a former student or future employer reads this, the less said about why, the better. (Note to future employer: I'm deeply devoted to caring for my daughter, thus I cannot leave the house for 50 hours a week. That's the only reason I haven't taught full time in 16 months. ...

For the past three years I have sponsored a girl in Andra Pradesh, India through Plan USA. We pay $24 per month and get yearly updates about how she, her family, and village are doing. The money doesn't go directly to her; it would cause a lot of village conflict if one family received the Indian equivalent of $24 per month while the rest remained impoverished. Plan uses the money to improve education, providing books, teacher training, and health education programs for the village. My sponsor daughter, Balakoteswaramma, and I correspond. At first she couldn't write well so she drew me an elaborate picture of a face, possibly her own. As she's gotten older she has been writing letters ...

You know those baby videos, the ones that claim to help a child learn faster? Apparently they do exactly the opposite. Researchers in Washington state compared language development in babies who watched those videos to those that don't. They found that babies who watched the videos knew substantially fewer words than babies who didn't. This concurs with what child development specialists (and aware parents) have known all along: babies learn through interaction with real live humans, not screens, no matter how bright and colorful those screens may be. The full article is here, and another one is here. And it turns out that something else we've suspected all along has further proof. Young children who watch ads for fast ...