Seussian Software

By J. D. BIERSDORFER

Published: May 10, 2013

Judging by the frequent sight of youngsters grabbing for Mom’s smartphone at the table and toting Dad’s tablet on car trips, it’s a safe assumption that touch screens have captured the attention of many children. But for parents (or grandparents) overwhelmed by the abundance of age-appropriate software, it helps to look for familiar faces in the crowd. Several internationally popular 20th-century children’s book characters have expanded beyond the confines of the printed page into the world of apps.

Enlarge This Image

"The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins"

Enlarge This Image

"Miffy's Garden"

Enlarge This Image

"The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My"

Originally published in 1938, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, by Dr. Seuss ($4.99) celebrates its 75th anniversary with a touch-friendly interactive picture book. Intended for children ages 6 to 12, the app is available for iOS and Android devices, and for the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook color tablets.

The plot remains the same: A young boy tries to take off his hat to honor the king, only to have a new one appear repeatedly on his head. While some children’s apps tend to pile on visual stimulation and ­techno-bells-and-whistles at the expense of storytelling, the digital version of “500 Hats” uses the original Seuss artwork as a solid foundation and then layers on simple touches that don’t distract from the reading experience. Sound effects — sheep at the Cubbins homestead, a trumpet fanfare, the shriek of the Yeoman of the Bowmen — and a gentle pan-and-zoom focus on the illustrations all accent the narrative as the reader finger-swipes through each page.

“500 Hats” offers three ways to follow Bartholomew’s misadventure. For younger children, the “Auto Play” feature automatically moves through the pages like a video, together with a narrated text. The “Read to Me” option provides audio narration at the child’s own pace and highlights each word as it is pronounced. The “Read It Myself” setting is basically a manual mode that lets the reader assume full control of the pages without audio prompting.

The “500 Hats” app is just one of dozens of Seussian software programs for phones and tablets, so those looking for the familiar stories of the Sneetches, the Grinch, the Lorax, the Cat in the Hat and a certain emerald-hued breakfast combo can find them all at www.oceanhousemedia.com. Book apps are for sale, as are games featuring the beloved characters.

Games are also available for fans of the Moomins, Tove Jansson’s wide-eyed hippopotamus-like creatures that first appeared in Sweden in 1945. “Moomin Party” and “Moomin Costume Party” are among the Moomin apps for Android and iOS in the Google Play and Apple App Store; both games are free to play at the basic levels. While the games offer a colorful diversionary slice of Moomin life, parents looking to introduce their children to Jansson’s original work may want to explore the interactive edition of her 1952 illustrated story The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My. The $2.99 app is designed for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch and rated for children age 4 and older.

Children can hear the book read aloud by the English actor Samuel West, or can test their own reading skills as they follow young Moomintroll’s quest to get home with a jug of milk through the forest (and past other obstacles like a large vacuum cleaner). The book’s text can be summoned or dismissed with a tap; temporarily hiding the words lets one appreciate Jansson’s artwork with its expressive characters and simple backgrounds that bring to mind Matisse’s paper cutouts.

Small bits of animation, like a lizard crawling up a tree or raindrops falling, keep this book of “Moomin” from feeling like a static adaptation of the printed edition. Tapping on various screen objects like an owl or the wormlike Hattifatteners brings a reaction, as does tilting the screen, but none of it pulls too much attention away from the story at hand.

Dick Bruna, the creator of Miffy the rabbit, has cautioned against adding too much digital whiz-bang to children’s book apps. “I wouldn’t want too much interactivity — something to do on every page for instance — as I think that would make it too complicated for a young child,” Bruna told The Guardian of London last year.

True to his vision, the app edition of Miffy’s Garden is fairly straightforward, but does offer a few on-screen activities interspersed between the pages — perhaps just enough to keep squirmy toddlers engaged. As Miffy digs and rakes her garden soil in preparation for her carrot crop, the young reader gets the chance to mimic her actions with fingers on an adjacent screen. Audio narration is provided in both Dutch and British-accented English. Still drawn in the same style, with thick outlines and bold primary colors, the animated Miffy (who first appeared in 1955) ambles between screens and wields her garden tools, but the app still feels like a book instead of a video.

So as not to interfere with reading, games are included as separate features. The iPad version sells for $3.99 and includes more games — and the ability to record your own voice reading the text — than does the $1.99 edition for iPhone/iPod Touch. Other Miffy apps are also available, all rated for children 4 years and older.

While the slick digitized edition of a longtime family favorite can’t really replace the comforting feel of a well-worn printed book being read in a warm lap, the app versions do provide additional opportunities for children who want to hone their reading skills on their own. And the classics never go out of style, no matter the format.

Opinion

Diagnosing the Wrong Deficit

Shannon Freshwater

By VATSAL G. THAKKAR

Published: April 27, 2013 222 Comments

IN the spring of 2010, a new patient came to see me to find out if he had attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. He had all the classic symptoms: procrastination, forgetfulness, a propensity to lose things and, of course, the inability to pay attention consistently. But one thing was unusual. His symptoms had started only two years earlier, when he was 31.

Though I treat a lot of adults for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, the presentation of this case was a violation of an important diagnostic criterion: symptoms must date back to childhood. It turned out he first started having these problems the month he began his most recent job, one that required him to rise at 5 a.m., despite the fact that he was a night owl.

The patient didn’t have A.D.H.D., I realized, but a chronic sleep deficit. I suggested some techniques to help him fall asleep at night, like relaxing for 90 minutes before getting in bed at 10 p.m. If necessary, he could take a small amount of melatonin. When he returned to see me two weeks later, his symptoms were almost gone. I suggested he call if they recurred. I never heard from him again.

Many theories are thrown around to explain the rise in the diagnosis and treatment of A.D.H.D. in children and adults. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 11 percent of school-age children have now received a diagnosis of the condition. I don’t doubt that many people do, in fact, have A.D.H.D.; I regularly diagnose and treat it in adults. But what if a substantial proportion of cases are really sleep disorders in disguise?

For some people — especially children — sleep deprivation does not necessarily cause lethargy; instead they become hyperactive and unfocused. Researchers and reporters are increasingly seeing connections between dysfunctional sleep and what looks like A.D.H.D., but those links are taking a long time to be understood by parents and doctors.

We all get less sleep than we used to. The number of adults who reported sleeping fewer than seven hours each night went from some 2 percent in 1960 to more than 35 percent in 2011. Sleep is even more crucial for children, who need delta sleep — the deep, rejuvenating, slow-wave kind — for proper growth and development. Yet today’s youngsters sleep more than an hour less than they did a hundred years ago. And for all ages, contemporary daytime activities — marked by nonstop 14-hour schedules and inescapable melatonin-inhibiting iDevices — often impair sleep. It might just be a coincidence, but this sleep-restricting lifestyle began getting more extreme in the 1990s, the decade with the explosion in A.D.H.D. diagnoses.

A number of studies have shown that a huge proportion of children with an A.D.H.D. diagnosis also have sleep-disordered breathing like apnea or snoring, restless leg syndrome or non-restorative sleep, in which delta sleep is frequently interrupted.

One study, published in 2004 in the journal Sleep, looked at 34 children with A.D.H.D. Every one of them showed a deficit of delta sleep, compared with only a handful of the 32 control subjects.

A 2006 study in the journal Pediatrics showed something similar, from the perspective of a surgery clinic. This study included 105 children between ages 5 and 12. Seventy-eight of them were scheduled to have their tonsils removed because they had problems breathing in their sleep, while 27 children scheduled for other operations served as a control group. Researchers measured the participants’ sleep patterns and tested for hyperactivity and inattentiveness, consistent with standard protocols for validating an A.D.H.D. diagnosis.

Of the 78 children getting the tonsillectomies, 28 percent were found to have A.D.H.D., compared with only 7 percent of the control group.  

Even more stunning was what the study’s authors found a year after the surgeries, when they followed up with the children. A full half of the original A.D.H.D. group who received tonsillectomies — 11 of 22 children — no longer met the criteria for the condition. In other words, what had appeared to be A.D.H.D. had been resolved by treating a sleeping problem.

But it’s also possible that A.D.H.D.-like symptoms can persist even after a sleeping problem is resolved. Consider a long-term study of more than 11,000 children in Britain published last year, also in Pediatrics. Mothers were asked about symptoms of sleep-disordered breathing in their infants when they were 6 months old. Then, when the children were 4 and 7 years old, the mothers completed a behavioral questionnaire to gauge their children’s levels of inattention, hyperactivity, anxiety, depression and problems with peers, conduct and social skills.

The study found that children who suffered from sleep-disordered breathing in infancy were more likely to have behavioral difficulties later in life — they were 20 to 60 percent more likely to have behavioral problems at age 4, and 40 to 100 percent more likely to have such problems at age 7. Interestingly, these problems occurred even if the disordered breathing had abated, implying that an infant breathing problem might cause some kind of potentially irreversible neurological injury.

CLEARLY there is more going on in the nocturnal lives of our children than any of us have realized. Typically, we see and diagnose only their downstream, daytime symptoms.

There has been less research into sleep and A.D.H.D. outside of childhood. But a team from Massachusetts General Hospital found, in one of the only studies of its kind, that sleep dysfunction in adults with A.D.H.D. closely mimics the sleep dysfunction in children with A.D.H.D.

There is also some promising research being done on sleep in adults, relating to focus, memory and cognitive performance. A study published in February in the journal Nature Neuroscience found that the amount of delta sleep in seniors correlates with performance on memory tests. And a study published three years ago in Sleep found that while subjects who were deprived of sleep didn’t necessarily report feeling sleepier, their cognitive performance declined in proportion to their sleep deprivation and continued to worsen over five nights of sleep restriction.

As it happens, “moves about excessively during sleep” was once listed as a symptom of attention-deficit disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. That version of the manual, published in 1980, was the first to name the disorder. When the term A.D.H.D., reflecting the addition of hyperactivity, appeared in 1987, the diagnostic criteria no longer included trouble sleeping. The authors said there was not enough evidence to support keeping it in.

But what if doctors, before diagnosing A.D.H.D. in their patients, did have to find evidence of a sleep disorder? Psychiatric researchers typically don’t have access to the equipment or expertise needed to evaluate sleep issues. It’s tricky to ask patients to keep sleep logs or to send them for expensive overnight sleep studies, which can involve complicated equipment like surface electrodes to measure brain and muscle activity; abdominal belts to record breathing; “pulse oximeters” to measure blood oxygen levels; even snore microphones. (And getting a sleep study approved by an insurance company is by no means guaranteed.) As it stands, A.D.H.D. can be diagnosed with only an office interview.

Sometimes my patients have resisted my referrals for sleep testing, since everything they have read (often through direct-to-consumer marketing by drug companies) identifies A.D.H.D. as the culprit. People don’t like to hear that they may have a different, stranger-sounding problem that can’t be fixed with a pill — though this often changes once patients see the results of their sleep studies.

Beyond my day job, I have a personal interest in A.D.H.D. and sleep disorders. Beginning in college and for nearly a decade, I struggled with profound cognitive lethargy and difficulty focusing, a daily nap habit and weekend sleep addiction. I got through my medical school exams only by the grace of good memorization skills and the fact that ephedra was still a legal supplement.

I was misdiagnosed with various maladies, including A.D.H.D. Then I underwent two sleep studies and, finally, was found to have an atypical form of narcolepsy. This was a shock to me, because I had never fallen asleep while eating or talking. But, it turned out, over 40 percent of my night was spent in REM sleep — or “dreaming sleep,” which normally occurs only intermittently throughout the night — while just 5 percent was spent in delta sleep, the rejuvenating kind. I was sleeping 8 to 10 hours a night, but I still had a profound delta sleep deficit.

It took some trial and error, but with the proper treatment, my cognitive problems came to an end. Today I eat well and respect my unique sleep needs instead of trying to suppress them. I also take two medications: a stimulant for narcolepsy and, at bedtime, an S.N.R.I. (or serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor) antidepressant — an off-label treatment that curtails REM sleep and helps increase delta sleep. Now I wake up without an alarm, and my daytime focus is remarkably improved. My recovery has been amazing (though my wife would argue that weekend mornings are still tough — she picks up the slack with our two kids).

Attention-deficit problems are far from the only reasons to take our lack of quality sleep seriously. Laboratory animals die when they are deprived of delta sleep. Chronic delta sleep deficits in humans are implicated in many diseases, including depression, heart disease, hypertension, obesity, chronic pain, diabetes and cancer, not to mention thousands of fatigue-related car accidents each year.

Sleep disorders are so prevalent that every internist, pediatrician and psychiatrist should routinely screen for them. And we need far more research into this issue. Every year billions of dollars are poured into researching cancer, depression and heart disease, but how much money goes into sleep?

The National Institutes of Health will spend only $240 million on sleep research this year. One of the problems is that the research establishment exists as mini-fiefdoms — money given to one sector, like cardiology or psychiatry, rarely makes it into another, like sleep medicine, even if they are intimately connected.

But we can’t wait any longer to pay attention to the connection between delta sleep and A.D.H.D. If you’re not already convinced, consider the drug clonidine. It started life as a hypertension treatment, but has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat A.D.H.D. Studies show that when it is taken only at bedtime, symptoms improve during the day. For psychiatrists, it is one of these “oh-we-don’t-know-how-it-works” drugs. But here is a little-known fact about clonidine: it can be a potent delta sleep enhancer.

Vatsal G. Thakkar is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine.

Cursive Benefits Go Beyond Writing

Suzanne Baruch Asherson is a occupational therapist at the Beverly Hills Unified School District in California and a national presenter for Handwriting Without Tears, an early childhood education company.

Putting pen to paper stimulates the brain like nothing else, even in this age of e-mails, texts and tweets. In fact, learning to write in cursive is shown to improve brain development in the areas of thinking, language and working memory. Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing.

The College Board found that students who wrote in cursive for the essay portion of the SAT scored slightly higher than those who printed.

As a result, the physical act of writing in cursive leads to increased comprehension and participation. Interestingly, a few years ago, the College Board found that students who wrote in cursive for the essay portion of the SAT scored slightly higher than those who printed, which experts believe is because the speed and efficiency of writing in cursive allowed the students to focus on the content of their essays.
Some argue that cursive is no longer relevant because it isn't included in the Common Core State Standards. But these standards only include those skills that are testable and measurable in the classroom; they don’t address basic foundation skills, like handwriting or even spelling. That said, the Common Core emphasizes the importance of expository writing to demonstrate understanding of key concepts, and fast, legible handwriting is the technology universally available to students to facilitate content development. Cursive, therefore, is vital to helping students master the standards of written expression and critical thinking, life skills that go well beyond the classroom.
With all this said, does cursive need to be fancy with slants, loops and curls? Absolutely not! The emphasis should be on simplicity and function when teaching children cursive.
Regardless of the age we are in or the technological resources at one’s disposal, success is measured by thought formation, and the speed and efficiency in which it is communicated. Because of this, students need a variety of technologies, including cursive handwriting, to succeed.

Wunderkinds 2013: Mary Grace Henry, 16

Founder, Reverse the Course

By Alyson Krueger // Photo by Darryl Estrine Published April 26, 2013 at 02:59 PM

In addition to playing two sports, completing her homework, thinking about college, and socializing with her friends, Mary Grace Henry, a 16-year-old high school sophomore who lives in Harrison, runs Reverse the Course (RTC), a successful international nonprofit organization that she founded in 2008. RTC sells reversible headbands to raise money to send girls living in impoverished countries to school.
From a young age, Henry was aware that girls in other countries did not have the same opportunities she did. Her school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Greenwich, Connecticut, had a sister school in Uganda that they raised money for through jump-rope competitions and penny wars. But she was not happy with just supporting one school; she wanted to find a way to send more girls to school so they “could be in control of their own lives” and “give back to their communities.”
After attending a headband-making class in 2008, Henry knew she had found her revenue source. She asked her parents for a sewing machine and quickly made 50 headbands to sell in her school’s bookstore. They sold out quickly, and she started selling more in boutiques, at sidewalk sales, and at craft fairs across Westchester. By 2010, she had raised enough money to send two girls to school in Uganda. Now, she has raised enough (more than $35,000) to send 32 girls in Uganda, Kenya, Paraguay, and Haiti to school for at least two years. (RTC also works with the girls individually to determine which institution they should attend.)
“It’s kind of shocking to think that I’ve lived on Earth for about 16 years, and I’ve sponsored 75 years” in tuition, she says.
Organizations such as Pencil for Hope, the Philanthropic Educational Organization, and the Girl Scouts have recognized Henry’s success and have asked her to speak at their events. She also received the Richard A. Berman Leadership Award for Human Rights from the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center. But Henry knows her work is far from over. Her short-term goal is to sponsor 100 girls, and, in the long term, she hopes to keep the organization up and running as she graduates high school and goes to college to study business or journalism.
“I think that for the rest of my life,” Henry says, “I will in some way be connected to this organization.”

Children's Spatial Skills Seen as Key to Math Learning

By Sarah D. Sparks

Arlington, Va.

Preschools and kindergartens long have taught children "task skills," such as cutting paper and coloring inside the lines. But new research suggests the spatial and fine-motor skills learned in kindergarten and preschool not only prepare students to write their mathematics homework neatly, but also prime them to learn math and abstract reasoning.
"We think of early-childhood classrooms as being really high in executive-function demands, but what children are being asked to exercise [executive function] on end up being visual-motor and fine-motor tasks," said Claire E. Cameron, a research scientist at the University of Virginia's Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, in Charlottesville. She spoke at a forum held here last week by the Needham, Mass.-based Learning and the Brain Society.
Put yourself in the mind of a 4- or 5-year-old, and copying a shape on the blackboard onto a piece of paper is a much more cognitively complex task than it is for an adult: Understanding the design, then holding that shape in your mind and deciding how to start copying, requires working memory, one of the brain's executive functions. Gripping the pencil properly, applying the right pressure to avoid tearing the paper, and keeping the paper oriented on the desk all need fine-motor skills that also, at such ages, require focus and self-control.
"Children learning to write have not automated these skills," Ms. Cameron said. "Even sitting up straight so you can face the paper can be difficult."
Children deemed "typically developing" can still show a wide range of visual-motor skills. In one test, children are asked to draw increasingly complex shapes.

Copying Patterns

As part of the Minds in Motion project at the University of Virginia, researchers test how well preschool and early-elementary children copy simple designs. The student drawings here were done by children without disabilities who were of the same age but different levels of development in executive-function and fine-motor skills.
Original Works

Students' Interpretations

SOURCE: Claire E. Cameron

"Some kids are actually seeing parts that aren't there," Ms. Cameron said, noting one attempt at a cross that looks more like an abstract animal.
"This is a normal developmental state," she said. "When we copy something, we have a mental image and we are manipulating it and coordinating what you see with your movements."
Other researchers at the University of Virginia center have found executive function, fine-motor skills, and general knowledge in kindergarten are better predictors of 8th grade reading and math achievement than early-literacy skills.
Moreover, the black-white achievement gap in elementary school also may have some of its roots in those foundational skills: Black children studied by the center entered kindergarten on average 9½ months developmentally younger than their white classmates in executive function and 8 months developmentally younger in visuo-spatial skills, though it's not yet known why.
Researchers led by David W. Grissmer, a research professor at the university, found 1st graders who had attended high-poverty preschools often had never built with construction paper, blocks, or modeling clay.

Precursor for Math

And, in a separate, ongoing study of nearly 500 preschoolers, Ms. Cameron found about a third tested high in both executive-function skills—such as following directions amid distractions—and visual-motor skills, such as cutting paper. Children who performed well in either or both executive-function and visual-motor skills achieved well in both math and reading achievement and class behavior later on in the early-elementary grades.
"It's the children who are low in both who are struggling," Ms. Cameron said. The more quickly children become automatic in mentally coordinating an action or repeating a design, the more they can free up working memory and organize their thinking for more abstract problems.
As part of a $1 million pilot project supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Mr. Grissmer and his team worked with after-school programs at three high-poverty, high-minority elementary schools in Charleston, S.C.
For 45 minutes a day, four days a week, for seven months in fall 2010 and spring 2011, groups of five to seven kindergartners and 1st graders played games that required them to copy designs and shapes. At the start of each class, the pupils took part in "calirobics"—handwriting and line-tracing exercises set to music. During the rest of the class they copied a pattern or picture in a variety of materials. Some days, students cut and pasted construction paper to make chains or built models out of clay or Lego blocks; other days, they used stencils, pattern blocks, or fusible plastic beads.

Related Blog

.

The children were not taught any math, and the teachers did not draw any links between the art projects and math skills, but by spring, the 1st graders showed significant improvement in both math and executive-function skills.
At the start of the program, the students had tested at the 30th percentile nationwide in numeracy and "applied problems" on a standardized test of early math knowledge; by the end of the program, they had moved to the 47th percentile in those areas. The participating students showed similarly large improvements in looking, listening, attention, and executive-function skills.
The development of fine-motor coordination and executive function may be more critical than subject content for early-childhood classrooms, Mr. Grissmer said.
"We start kids too early on math and reading when they don't have these foundational skills," he said. In the earliest grades, he said, "you can't just teach reading and math to get higher reading and math skills."

A Child’s Wild Kingdom

By JON MOOALLEM

Published: May 4, 2013 58 Comments

IN a couple of weeks, my daughter will turn into a dolphin. Right now, she’s a fox. Last year, she was a cricket.

Souther Salazar

That’s just how it works at the Montessori school where she goes. Instead of “4-year-olds” and “5-year-olds,” or even “preschoolers” and “kindergartners,” each class is given an animal name and, at the end of every school year, the children graduate into being a different species entirely, shape-shifting like spirits in an aboriginal legend.

It can be a little alarming to step back and realize just how animal-centric the typical American preschool classroom is. Maybe the kids sing songs about baby belugas, or construction-paper songbirds fly across the walls. Maybe newborn ducklings nuzzle in an incubator in the corner. But the truth is, my daughter’s world has overflowed with wild animals since it first came into focus. They’ve been plush and whittled; knitted, batiked and bean-stuffed; embroidered into the ankles of her socks or foraging on the pages of every storybook.

Most parents won’t be surprised to learn that when a Purdue University child psychologist pulled a random sample of 100 children’s books, she found only 11 that did not have animals in them.

But what’s baffled me most nights at bedtime is how rarely the animals in these books even have anything to do with nature. Usually, they’re just arbitrary stand-ins for people, like the ungainly pig that yearns to be a figure skater, or the family of raccoons that bakes hamantaschen for the family of beavers at Purim. And once I tuned in to that — into the startling strangeness of how insistently our culture connects kids and wild creatures — all the animal paraphernalia in our house started to feel slightly insane. As Kieran Suckling, the executive director of the conservation group Center for Biological Diversity, pointed out to me, “Right when someone is learning to be human, we surround them with nonhumans.”

SCIENCE has some explanations to offer. Almost from birth, children seem drawn to other creatures all on their own. In studies, babies as young as 6 months try to get closer to, and provoke more physical contact with, actual dogs and cats than they do with battery-operated imitations.

Infants will smile more at a living rabbit than at a toy rabbit. Even 2-day-old babies have been shown to pay closer attention to “a dozen spotlights representing the joints and contours of a walking hen” than to a similar, randomly generated pattern of lights.

It all provides evidence for what the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson calls “biophilia” — his theory that human beings are inherently attuned to other life-forms. It’s as though we have a deep well of attention set aside for animals, a powerful but uncategorized interest waiting to be channeled into more cogent feelings, like fascination or fear.

Young children have been shown to acquire fears of spiders and snakes more quickly than fears of guns and other human-manufactured dangers. And in this case, the researchers Judith H. Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians offer one logical, evolutionary explanation: if you are an infant or toddler spending a lot of time on the ground, it pays to learn quickly to fear snakes and spiders. Fear of big predators like bears and wolves, on the other hand, doesn’t kick in until after age 4, around when the first human children would have begun roaming outside of their camps.

Children also fixate on animals in their imaginative lives. In her book “Why the Wild Things Are,” Gail F. Melson, a psychologist at Purdue, reports that kids see animals in the inkblots of the Rorschach test twice as often as adults do, and that, when a Tufts University psychologist went into a New Haven preschool decades ago and asked kids to tell her a story that they’d made up on the spot, between 65 and 80 percent of them told her a story about animals. (The heartbreaking minimalism of one of these stories, by a boy named Bart, still haunts me: “Once there was a lion. He ate everybody up. He ate himself up.”)

• 1
• 2

Next Page »

Using Books to Build a Ladder Out of Poverty

By CALVIN YANG

Published: April 29, 2013

HONG KONG — John J. Wood is the founder of Room to Read, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to improving literacy in developing countries, particularly in Asia and Africa.

He left his job at Microsoft in 1999 to found the charity, which has opened 15,000 libraries and 1,600 schools and published more than 850 original children’s books. It has also enrolled 20,000 girls in a program just for girls’ education. Room to Read is now the size of a corporation itself, with 10,000 volunteers in 53 cities.

Q. Where did the idea come from?

A. The seed for Room to Read was planted in 1998 when I took a much-needed vacation from my rewarding but challenging job at Microsoft to trek in the Himalayas in Nepal.

Completely by chance, I met a Nepalese education officer while hiking one day, and he invited me to visit a school in a neighboring village. While at the school, I was introduced to the headmaster, who offered a tour. After visiting the classrooms, he showed me the library, which was just an empty room with a selection of books so scarce and precious they had to be locked away in a cabinet.

The books were backpacker castoffs, completely inaccessible both physically and intellectually to the children they were intended for. There were about 450 students at the school but no children’s books. That seemed like a real lost opportunity to me, so I vowed to help the school set up a real, functioning library.

One year later, I returned to the school with 3,000 books on the backs of six rented donkeys.

Q. How does education fit in with development?

A. Education is one issue that has a ripple effect. Educated people work their way out of poverty, and educated people have much more stable societies. So if you get education right, you get every other issue right. The problems in developing countries get worse by the day, and every day we lose a day we don’t get back.

If you can give these kids at a young age a school with great teachers, a library with great books and great librarians who encourage them to read, you are going to fire their imagination.

Q. What are some pitfalls charities fall into when they work far from home?

A. I think so much of international charity is really badly done because people go in and they just dump a bunch of food or used T-shirts or subsidized grains in the markets, and that just treats the local people as passive aid recipients.

Q. What’s the alternative?

A. The community involvement in our projects is important. Room to Read is not about well-meaning foreigners going into a community to build a school or a library. Everything is based on a self-help model. The local communities contribute land, labor, teachers and librarians.

Things get done because the local people are investing in their own solution, and that is going to make the projects more sustainable over the long run because it wasn’t a free gift from overseas.

Q. What response do you get when you fund-raise in more affluent Asian cities?

A. Four of our biggest chapters are actually here in Asia — Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo. Room to Read’s Hong Kong chapter has been the No. 1 fund-raising chapter for seven consecutive years.

I think people in Hong Kong, I think they realized that we all got lucky being born where we were born and being in a society where the government has enough money to educate us.

So many people in Hong Kong have traveled in Laos, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India. The lack of opportunities for children is not a foreign concept for somebody who has traveled to the poorer parts of Asia.

Q. How do you get rich kids involved?

A. We have a program called Students Helping Students, where schools in Hong Kong and Singapore raise money for Room to Read.

Schools have done what they called a “sponsored silence,” where the kids go home at night and they tell their parents, for a hundred Hong Kong dollars an hour, they will stay quiet and they will raise money that way. They are tying in with other stuff that is considered desirable by the parents. Read-a-thons are a good example. Kids put down their iPhones and they stop playing Angry Birds, and they pick books up. These kids are getting smarter, but then they are also helping kids in the developing world.

Q. Are there plans to expand past the 10 countries where you currently work?

A. We have our sights set on Indonesia, and we really want to expand our programs into the region as we see great opportunities to raise communities up through education. If we can raise seed funding this year, then we will be ready to start opening schools and libraries in Indonesia next year. We are also keeping a very close eye on Myanmar, and we plan to go to South America and Central America at some point.

Q. Do you miss corporate life?

A. In the early days, I missed the financial security, having a regular paycheck and having a status in a leading technology company. But the journey has been incredible so far. I have met some amazing people along the way, and lives are being changed by education.

I don’t think I will ever go back to a for-profit world.

Q. How did you set your goal of helping 10 million children by 2015?

A. We set a goal of benefiting 10 million children when we first started Room to Read because we wanted to put a stake in the ground and commit to scaling our impact.

The statistics are too large to ignore — 200 million kids woke up this morning in the developing world and didn’t go to school, and nearly 800 million people are illiterate. We have to “go big or go home” on this issue.

We originally aspired to reach 10 million children by 2020, and now we are going to reach that goal five years early.

Q. What’s next?

A. The big goal for us once we reach 10 million kids is to not stop there but to be part of a global movement. We believe when the history of this century is written, there will be a chapter that was all about reversing the notion that any child will ever be told that they were born in the wrong place and at the wrong time, to the wrong parents, and they therefore do not get educated. We think that that idea belongs to the scrap heap of human history.

And the solution is not expensive. Two hundred and fifty dollars puts a girl in school for a year; $5,000 opens a library serving 400 children. These are immediately deployable solutions to transform children’s lives through education, so shame on us if we don’t think big.

A Musical Message for Children on Healthy Eating

By JANE E. BRODY

• F

Personal Health

Jane Brody on health and aging.

For all her talent and determination to help children eat better, Michelle Obama could still pick up a few pointers from Helen Butleroff-Leahy, a 66-year-old former Rockette turned registered dietitian.
Ms. Butleroff-Leahy devotes her time to teaching children in disadvantaged neighborhoods about eating healthfully and exercising regularly. Her lessons take the form of musical productions, rehearsed in classrooms and on the stages of 52 New York City public schools so far. Children from each school do gymnastics and dance to a rap-based script by Roumel Reaux that entertains while explaining the essentials of good nutrition. The 45-minute production by Ms. Butleroff-Leahy is called “My Plate: The New Food Guide Musical.”
Truth be told, Ms. Butleroff-Leahy’s lessons, both nutritional and dramatic, could benefit American children in every socioeconomic group, for none are immune to the foods laden with sugar, salt and calories that pervade our society, both within and outside schools. I had the opportunity to watch her in action last month at P. S. 81 in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where enthusiastic 8-year-olds from four second-grade classes joined four professionals to proclaim the virtues of “eating for the health of it.”
Tramaine Montell Ford, a dancer who performed in the movie “Hairspray,” portrayed an angelic “bad habit breaker” intent on reforming two junk-food junkies. The actors demonstrated the stultifying effects of poor nutrition, followed by Mr. Ford’s energizing message:

You are what you eat.
You got the power, you got the might
To eat right and keep it light.

The action then focused on food groups that foster good health: grains (whole, please) for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks; vegetables (especially dark-green and orange) and fruits (all colors are nutritious and delicious) for myriad health essentials; protein (meats, beans and nuts) for the strength to get up and go; and dairy (light or skim) for strong bones.
To celebrate vegetables, for example, green-shirted youngsters danced to “Rock Around the Clock,” did cartwheels and jumping jacks and spun hula hoops, while other children in red and yellow shirts did break-dancing to Mr. Ford’s rap about 20 different vegetables, which he called “one of nature’s greatest wonders.”
Ms. Butleroff-Leahy spends three hours a week for 10 weeks in each school, devoting half an hour in each of three classes to hands-on nutrition lessons and the remaining half-hour to learning and rehearsing the musical. The school then tries to incorporate nutrition information into other lessons and lunchroom offerings. Cheryl Ault-Barker, the principal of P.S. 81, said a salad bar now competes successfully with the usual school lunch fare at her school.
Still dancer-lean with a cheerleader’s energy, Ms. Butleroff-Leahy said her mission was to help counter the city’s rising rates of childhood obesity and its sooner-or-later consequences, including Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. “Children learn best through active participation and repetition, both in the classroom and on the stage,” Ms. Butleroff-Leahy said.
The youngsters’ teachers and parents, many with their own significant weight issues, learn alongside the children, who bring their classroom lessons home. One mother at P.S. 81 proudly reported that she’d switched from whole milk to 1 percent, and one of the boys said he now has whole-wheat bread and oat cereal for breakfast.
The project is underwritten by the Ficalora Family Foundation in association with Ms. Butleroff-Leahy’s nonprofit company, the Nutrition and Fitness Education Initiative Inc., and is supplemented by small grants from New York State and the city’s Department of Education, which contributes $1,500 to the school. Each production, start to final applause, costs about $4,000.
Ms. Butleroff-Leahy she said she hoped to be able to bring her musical message about healthy eating and exercise to many more schools throughout the country.
Of course, hers is but one of many philanthropic projects, local and national, aimed at countering the often atrocious eating habits of children by arming them with the information and enthusiasm they need to make better food choices.
The Children’s Aid Society, for example, has a Go!Healthy initiative that sponsors an “Iron Go!Chef” competition to teach wellness with nutrition and healthy cooking programs for young children. The initiative includes a 24-week nutrition and fitness curriculum for schools and a six-week wellness program for parents that emphasizes movement, stress reduction and healthy cooking.
The Agriculture Department, which oversees school-based food programs, has recently updated the nutrition standards for school meals and is considering guidelines to ensure that the snacks and drinks available in schools also support good health.
New menus or school breakfasts and lunches became effective at the start of the current school year. They include more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and are designed to provide nutrient-dense meals from a variety of foods in amounts that support healthy weights for children of different ages.
Students must select at least half a cup of fruit or vegetables at both lunch and breakfast. There are graduated reductions in salt and limits on saturated fats and fruit juices; milk can be only unflavored low-fat, or flavored and unflavored fat-free. Within two years, all grains served must be “whole grain-rich.”
School meals provide up to half the calories children consume, and foods that support good nutrition improve children’s behavior, performance and overall cognitive development, according to the Alliance for a Healthier Generation.
The alliance, which maintains that “schools are powerful places to shape the health, education and well-being of our children,” helps more than 15,000 schools across the country create environments that encourage healthy eating and physical activity.
But however hard schools may try, their efforts can be easily undermined by pervasive societal influences. For example, while Nickelodeon has made some improvements in the kinds of foods advertised during its television programs for children, a new analysis of food ads during 28 hours of programs by the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that “nearly 70 percent are for junk.”
“Nickelodeon congratulates itself for running the occasional public service announcement promoting physical activity, but for each of those messages it’s running 30 ads for junk food,” said Margo G. Wooten, the center’s director for nutrition policy.
The network has made improvements. In 2005, an analysis by the center found that 88 percent of food ads on Nickelodeon were for unhealthy foods, but a similar sampling in 2012 showed a decline to 69 percent, which may reflect growing pressure on the food industry to reduce marketing to children. Nickelodeon could take a lesson from junk-food-free Qubo, a block of programming for children on the ION Television network.
Or perhaps Nickelodeon’s advertising executives should sit in on one of Ms. Butleroff-Leahy’s school productions.

"You'll Never Learn!"

You’ll Never Learn!

Students can’t resist multitasking, and it’s impairing their memory.

By Annie Murphy Paul|

Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people Photo by Louisa Goulimaki/AFP/Getty Images

Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers.

For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.

Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

Advertisement

“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”

Concern about young people’s use of technology is nothing new, of course. But Rosen’s study, published in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior, is part of a growing body of research focused on a very particular use of technology: media multitasking while learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way.

But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts. So detrimental is this practice that some researchers are proposing that a new prerequisite for academic and even professional success—the new marshmallow test of self-discipline—is the ability to resist a blinking inbox or a buzzing phone.

The media multitasking habit starts early. In “Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in 2010, almost a third of those surveyed said that when they were doing homework, “most of the time” they were also watching TV, texting, listening to music, or using some other medium. The lead author of the study was Victoria Rideout, then a vice president at Kaiser and now an independent research and policy consultant. Although the study looked at all aspects of kids’ media use, Rideout told me she was particularly troubled by its findings regarding media multitasking while doing schoolwork.

“This is a concern we should have distinct from worrying about how much kids are online or how much kids are media multitasking overall. It’s multitasking while learning that has the biggest potential downside,” she says. “I don’t care if a kid wants to tweet while she’s watching American Idol, or have music on while he plays a video game. But when students are doing serious work with their minds, they have to have focus.”

For older students, the media multitasking habit extends into the classroom. While most middle and high school students don’t have the opportunity to text, email, and surf the Internet during class, studies show the practice is nearly universal among students in college and professional school. One large survey found that 80 percent of college students admit to texting during class; 15 percent say they send 11 or more texts in a single class period.

During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of calling on a student who is busy with his phone. “I ask him, ‘What was on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.” Other professors have taken a more surreptitious approach, installing electronic spyware or planting human observers to record whether students are taking notes on their laptops or using them for other, unauthorized purposes.

Such steps may seem excessive, even paranoid: After all, isn’t technology increasingly becoming an intentional part of classroom activities and homework assignments? Educators are using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as social sites created just for schools, such as Edmodo, to communicate with students, take class polls, assign homework, and have students collaborate on projects. But researchers are concerned about the use of laptops, tablets, cellphones, and other technology for purposes quite apart from schoolwork. Now that these devices have been admitted into classrooms and study spaces, it has proven difficult to police the line between their approved and illicit uses by students.

SINGLE PAGE

Page: 1 | 2 | 3

Does Class Size Count?

By SARA MOSLE

Schooling: Sara Mosle on students, teaching and schools, from within and beyond the classroom.

As states cut education budgets in response to the nation’s continuing economic woes, student-to-teacher ratios are again on the rise after decades of decline. This resurrects an age-old debate in American education: does class size really matter?
To many educators, the answer seems obvious: Teachers who have fewer students can give each child more attention and tailored instruction. And parents agree. For years, annual surveys conducted by the New York City Department of Education have shown that the top priority of school parents is reducing class size, far outpacing “more effective leadership,” “more teacher training,” “more or better art programs,” “more challenging courses” and both “more preparation for state tests” and “less preparation for state tests.”
But the data on class size is not conclusive, if only because, in the last quarter-century, there’s been just one proper randomized, controlled study in the United States to measure, at sufficient scale, the effect of smaller and larger classes on student achievement. Known as Project STAR, it found that smaller classes do produce lasting gains, especially for economically disadvantaged and minority-group students.
Hiring more teachers, however, is expensive, and some researchers and policy makers insist that reducing class size is not cost-effective, compared with other possible reforms, and has been oversold to schools. They point to states like California and Florida that have spent billions of taxpayer dollars to reduce pupil-to-teacher ratios without, they argue, a commensurate increase in student performance.

Jonathan Alcorn for The New York Times John Marshall High School students study in a crowded World History class in Los Angeles.

Diverse figures including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Bill Gates have coalesced around a new idea: why not increase class sizes for the best teachers and use the resulting budgetary savings to pay these best teachers more and to help train educators who need improvement? Yes, each class might be bigger on average but at least each child would stand a better chance of having a great teacher, which would-be reformers say is more important.
The proposal is intriguing, and some teachers may be on board. Matthew Chingos, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, has cited a national survey by the journal Education Next and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance that found that 42 percent of teachers would gladly accept a $10,000 raise to forgo a three-student reduction in class size. Yet perhaps more striking, 47 percent of teachers said they would turn down this substantial pay increase to have just three students fewer in class. It’s unclear if the teachers who want the extra money are the same ones schools hope to retain and reward. But the bigger problem is that class size is already increasing while there still isn’t a mechanism to identify top-flight teachers and offer them more students for more pay; nor is there any assurance that parents, given a choice, would embrace these larger classes for their children.
In addition, while the idea is conceivable at the elementary level, where a single teacher typically teaches all subjects and most schools have several teachers per grade, it’s harder to picture in many junior high or high schools, which may have only one chemistry or American history teacher. Also, how would distinctions between average and exceptional teachers affect collaboration, and how frequently would these ratings be revised? Upending salaries and teachers’ schedules every year could destabilize schools.
Once you start to think about how the plan would play out, it begins to seem fantastical. Certainly, any widespread implementation is years away. Meanwhile, students will continue to languish in ever larger classes.
So here’s a proposal for getting past this familiar stalemate: Secretary Duncan, Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Gates and other teacher-quality advocates should agree to fight — hard — to keep class sizes small for a limited population of at-risk students. That way economically disadvantaged and minority-group students, who Project STAR undeniably proved can benefit most from low student-to-teacher ratios, won’t have to suffer through larger classes while waiting for better teachers.
In return, advocates of reducing class size agree to support pilot programs for creating more-students-for-more-pay classrooms to see if the plan has any takers among everyday teachers and parents and whether this theory actually works and is cost-effective in the real world.
I don’t think either side is likely to be satisfied with this compromise, but both might have something to gain. Secretary Duncan, Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Gates need to develop more grass-roots support among parents who distrust many of their reform ideas and who continue to believe that class size counts. Parents would most likely find it reassuring if reformers demonstrated a willingness to phase in such changes only after test districts have demonstrated their effectiveness.
At the same time, education budgets are contracting, and the number of students per teacher is probably going up nationwide no matter what. Organizations like Parents Across America, which has lobbied for indiscriminate and far more costly across-the-board reductions in class size, might help preserve smaller classes for those children who most need them and would demonstrate their willingness to experiment with innovation. One class size need not fit all.

April 23, 2013, 12:45 pm 

Reading a Bedtime Story Together from Afar

By WARREN BUCKLEITNER

 

 

A screenshot of Kindoma Storytime, an app that combines books and video chatting.

Kindoma Storytime combines e-books with video sharing features. So now you can share a bedtime story with your child or grandchild from anywhere, if you both have iPads, good Wi-Fi, and have downloaded the free app from iTunes.
Originally a research initiative at Nokia, the project has been spun off as an independent company with the project leader, Tico Ballagas. According to Mr. Ballagas, the iPad was not around when the project was conceived, but has become the ideal device for delivering synchronous storytimes.
If the app is free, what’s the catch? Mr. Ballagas said that he hopes to build the user base with the current library of 26 books, and then sell additional titles.
The story-sharing requires both parties have the app started on the iPad and have previously sent a friend request to each other by e-mail. The book and webcam images of both people appear on the screen, and either one can turn the page (although the actual page-turning can be slow).
I was able to share a New Jersey kindergarten teacher’s reading of “Peter Rabbit” with a group of educators in Utah. Not only could we see each one anothers’ faces, we could easily converse. The best part was that we could see a ghost image of the teacher’s hand when he was pointing at a picture or getting ready to turn a page.

Read more (and see the video) ... http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/reading-a-bedtime-story-together-from-afar/

Minimalist Parenting, ‘Manimalist’ Style

By ANDY HINDS

 

My wife is leaving for a conference tomorrow. The next five days will be the longest stretch of time I’ve spent taking care of our twin, almost-4-year-old daughters without any backup.
If you’re picturing my wife typing out lists of instructions for the care and feeding of our children, drilling me on the days and times of all their activities, and stocking the freezer with elaborate meals to sustain them through her absence, you’re thinking about a different family. I do the bulk of the child care in our home, and I like to keep it so simple that even if I screwed it up, no one would really notice. To say that my stripped-down parenting style is because of my gender would be an oversimplification. But after reading a new book about improving the quality of family life by dialing down parental intensity, I’m inclined to think that it does play a role.
I’ve been a stay-at-home (mostly) dad since my wife went back to work when the girls were 4 months old. In the first year, I read a few books about child development, sleep training and parenting styles, but as the girls grew up happy and healthy, and as I got the hang of things, I stopped reading. Nowadays, I stick to parenting blogs and articles that celebrate the unleashing of a child’s imagination by providing plenty of unstructured playtime, and roll my eyes at photo spreads of extravagant parties and toys and the humblebrags of parents who are exhausted and stressed from shuttling their children to various “enrichment” activities.
Despite my dwindling interest in parenting manuals, I couldn’t resist a new release with a title that I felt encapsulated my child-rearing philosophy. Like most people, I enjoy reading books that support my own beliefs, and that’s why I stayed up late to greedily devour “Minimalist Parenting” by Christine Koh and Asha Dornfest, frequently nodding in agreement and exclaiming “Exactly!” to my dog (who seemed indifferent to the whole business). There’s nothing like being told that you’re doing it right.
The theoretical foundation of “Minimalist Parenting” is what I would refer to as “my way”:

Living a joyous life that’s in line with your values (instead of some manufactured version of “successful” modern parenthood) will give your kids room to grow into the strong, unique people they are meant to be. More important, this way of being will provide a model that shows your kids how to trust their instincts as they move toward independence and adulthood.

There is quite a bit of preaching (to the choir, in my case) the gospel of rejecting the shame, guilt and stress that many parents develop in trying to provide the latest and “best” of everything for their children. What’s more important than keeping up with parenting trends, Ms. Koh and Ms. Dornfest argue, is to “edit” or “minimalize” your schedule, adjust your expectations, roll with the punches, and create space in your family’s life for joy and fun.
For me, this book was not merely a gratifying confirmation of my own parenting instincts. In addition to the philosophical content, “Minimalist Parenting” offers a wealth of practical suggestions on how to achieve (or approach, anyway) this state of enlightened parenting. They don’t sugarcoat it either: there is work involved.
As disappointed as I was to learn that I couldn’t just cruise through the rest of my tenure as a father by being laid-back and scoffing at those who over-parent, I eventually found comfort in reading some of the tips on how to get the work done so there’s more time for fun. There are scores of strategies laid out in the book, covering everything from family finances, to clutter mitigation and birthday parties, but it was their advice on lunchboxes and leftovers that proved balm to my soul: my girls’ wonderful preschool provides all their food on the two days a week they spend there, but soon they’ll be big, brown-bagging kindergarteners, and I needed to hear that the new task could fit into our old routines.
While reading “Minimalist Parenting,” I (perhaps subconsciously) appreciated that it used inclusive language when addressing or referring to its audience. I’m so used to “Mom” being the default term for the primary caregiver that I hardly notice it anymore. It was refreshing to note that Ms. Koh and Ms. Dornfest mostly use the words “parent” and “partner” instead of “Mom” and “husband” when discussing family dynamics. Nonetheless, when they described the binds that parents get themselves and their children into when they try to be “perfect,” I didn’t picture any of my dad friends.
Through blogging and simply being a mostly stay-at-home dad, I am in contact with lots of fathers (and mothers) who are very involved in their children’s care. I do know a number of overzealous dads and free-range moms, but they are in the minority. I thought of my dad friends while reading the chapters that Ms. Koh and Ms. Dornfest dedicate to simplifying mealtimes and celebrations. “Simplified” is just the way most of us roll.
A quick meal of raw vegetables, pasta, simply cooked meats or other protein? Done. Don’t worry about themed holiday classroom celebrations? Never been a problem. Simplified birthdays? Last year, for my girls, I planned a transportation-themed birthday adventure. We took the trolley downtown (San Diego, that is), hopped on a ferry to the town of Coronado, ate lunch, rode around in a pedal-powered surrey, and then ferried and trolleyed back home, stopping for cupcakes on the way. The expense was negligible compared to a party, the planning took about half an hour, the children had a blast, and Mom and Dad were happy and relaxed. Just the kind of thing you might read about in “Minimalist Parenting.”
In the final chapter of the book, “YOU, Minimalist You!,” the gender neutrality dissolved. Suddenly, “motherhood” replaced “parenthood” as in, “there are real cultural associations between motherhood and martyrdom,” and the chapter went on to offer advice on topics like yoga pants and makeup. I don’t need that advice, but its appearance underlined the way the book read like a cheering section for me and my “manimalist” style but probably reads as the advice it’s intended to be for others.
Men are socialized toward minimalist parenting (and nearly everything else). Women are more likely to struggle to shed the burdens of the “cultural associations” that compel them to pursue unattainable parenting standards. “Minimalist Parenting” is a pushback against parenting expectations for women and maybe a push toward the more relaxed standards that exist for men. And to me, as far as gender roles are concerned, movement toward the middle is progress.

Leaving the Picture Books on the Shelves

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

KJ Dell’Antonia One bookshelf of many.

Dwight Garner, longtime book critic for The New York Times, has packed up his picture book shelves — his children’s picture book shelves, that is.

This is an overdue task. They’re 13 and 15 now and we haven’t read aloud to them in years. We’ve kept this final stack at hand out of undiluted nostalgia. Moving it into the attic shouldn’t be a big deal. But it is.

That day will be a big deal for me when it comes, too (and I imagine it is for many parents). But instead of packing up our picture books to put away, my family packed up ours last weekend to move, to a new house just a few minutes away.
My children are 11, 8, 7 and 7, and I don’t yet need to consider packing up the picture books for good, not even the board books, nearly all of which still find their way into the hands of some child or another pretty regularly. We’re certainly not done with what Mr. Garner calls the “bedtime book club” (although it waxes and wanes with homework levels and parental patience). And even if we weren’t reading the picture books aloud some nights (some nights we read a chapter book; we’re currently in “Winter Holiday” from the Swallows and Amazons series), my youngest children read these familiar books to themselves to strengthen their reading skills and, I think, strengthen their memories and connection to their short pasts.
Even if we didn’t still have active picture book readers, our family wouldn’t be ready to set these books aside.

Picture books, especially the most loved ones, stay relevant on the shelves for a long time after you’d think a child would have put away “Officer Buckle and Gloria” for the last time. At 8, 9, 10, 11, my oldest (and now my second oldest) would pick up a favorite and get lost. Sometimes a child just needs a picture book reading session. And the presence of the books on the shelves offers that connection for children who are changing fast: just a few years ago, hearing “Little Pea” read aloud could rescue a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, and now — well, really, it still can. And maybe the sight of it will bring a smile to a sulky teenage face at some point.
We did cull some titles. Word books, board books that never reached the beloved and tattered status (it’s an irony of book sorting that the shiny ones with uncracked spines are the first to go) and picture books that never captured our hearts remain at the old house in to-donate piles. I, too, have been a book reviewer (and my book, “Reading With Babies, Toddlers and Twos,” co-written with my friends and book experts Susan Straub and Rachel Payne, will be reissued with all new book lists and much updated content on everything from e-books to iPads, in May). We buy books in bookstores, but my children also think of them as things that arrive regularly in brown paper envelopes containing offerings of wildly varying quality. There were plenty of things around that we could let go.
But most books were coming along for the move, which means we stacked them, tried not to make the boxes too heavy (and failed, in at least one noisy and destructive-to-box-and-toes incident) and drove them down one driveway and up another, where we sorted and reshelved. When we unpacked, my children proved my point: it took us forever, because no one could stop dipping into the pages, holding things up and rediscovering lost friends.
Mr. Garner, taping up boxes, offered a list of the titles he packed with the most care: “Someday my kids will open these boxes, gasp with delight, and eagerly read them to their own.” I know our picture books will seem like nostalgic clutter in a few years, but meanwhile, here’s a list of some of the books that took pride of place on our new shelves.
Which picture books will endure at your house?
Our Family Favorites
BONNY BECKER AND KADY MACDONALD DENTON “A Visitor for Bear”
LAUREN CHILD “I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato”
JULES FEIFFER “Bark, George”
LOIS LENSKI “Pilot Small”
JOHN PERRY AND MARK FEARING “The Book that Eats People”
PEGGY RATHMAN “Officer Buckle and Gloria”
AMY KROUSE ROSENTHAL AND JEN CORACE “Little Pea”
CYNTHIA RYLANT AND MARK TEAGUE “The Great Gracie Chase”
MO WILLEMS “The Pigeon Wants a Puppy”

School Vote Stirs Debate on Girls as Leaders

Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., began admitting girls in 1973. More Photos »

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Published: April 11, 2013

ANDOVER, Mass. — When the elite Phillips Academy here went coed in 1973, some worried that women would quickly take over this venerable institution, the alma mater of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Morse and Humphrey Bogart, not to mention both Presidents George Bush.

Multimedia

Slide Show

Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

Clark Perkins, 17, left, and Junius Onome Williams, 16, won the vote. More Photos »

In short order, the number of girls in the student ranks did roughly equal the number of boys. The faculty today is more than half female. And until her retirement last summer, the head of school was a woman, for nearly two decades.

And yet some of the young women — and men —   at the 235-year-old prep school feel that Andover, as it is commonly called, has yet to achieve true gender equality. They expressed this concern several weeks ago in a letter to the student newspaper, The Phillipian, and like a match to dry tinder, it set off a raging debate that engulfed the campus.

The proximate cause of concern was the election, held Wednesday, for the top student position, called school president. Since 1973, only four girls have been elected, most recently in 2003. (The other top student position, that of editor in chief of the newspaper, has had nine girls and 33 boys.)

The letter writers said this was an embarrassment, especially at a school considered so progressive. The paucity of girls in high-profile positions, they said, leaves younger students with few role models and discourages them from even trying for the top.

But the broader concern involved age-old questions of whether men and women could ever achieve equality, the nature of sexism and the nature of a meritocracy, which Andover very much purports to be.

“Right off the bat, it’s not a meritocracy for girls,” said Maia Hirschler, 19, a senior from New York City. “They’re starting behind because we don’t associate leadership qualities with them.”

John G. Palfrey Jr., the headmaster, said in an interview that Andover was only a reflection of other schools and society at large as it grappled with these issues. “We do not live in a post-gender, post-race, post-class society,” he said. “Girls have not had equal access to top leadership positions.”

In an attempt to improve the chances of electing a girl president this year, the school dropped the single presidency in favor of two co-presidents.

Many more girls did enter the race, all with boy partners. Other teams were made up of two boys. Over the last several weeks, the finalists were winnowed down to one girl/boy team and one all-boy team.

Both teams said the race became ugly in ways they had not expected. Clark Perkins, 17, from Fairfield, Conn., and Junius Onome Williams, 16, from Newark, said they felt attacked for simply being boys.

“We had to grapple with this on a political level but also a moral and personal level,” said Mr. Williams, who said he aspires to become secretary general of the United Nations. “We had to ask ourselves, ‘Am I doing an injustice to the female members of this school?’ ”

They decided they were not and said they would “not apologize for not filling a gender-balance quota.” Mr. Williams, who is black, noted that gender was only one demographic category. “Since 1973 there have been only four females, but African-Americans have been admitted since 1865, and we’ve had only three black presidents,” he said.

Mr. Williams and Mr. Perkins faced Farris Peale, 17, of Seattle, and Ben Yi, 18, of South Korea

Ms. Peale said that she had been Mr. Williams’ campaign manager — until he chose to run with Mr. Perkins. “He picked a boy and I got mad, so I decided to run myself,” she said. “Junius picked Clark because he thought he would appeal most to girls who think he’s cute, and to jocks.”

Mr. Perkins took offense at this suggestion, saying that he and Mr. Williams ran together based on their previous student council experience and leadership qualities.

After the votes were counted Wednesday night, the boys won (the tally was not made public). Mr. Perkins said they hoped to heal the rift in the student body.

• 1
• 2

Next Page »