Essential Questions

In The Baby Book, the Sears state emphatically that:

“Like language development, interaction with caregivers can profoundly affect social development” (p449)

That sounds like a statement of the obvious; of course interaction affects social development. The underlying issue, however is that caregiver interaction must adjust to each stage of a child’s development in order to affect it positively. The parent who nurtures a three-year-old in the same way as a one-year-old will affect the three-year-old in harmful, not helpful, ways.

In order to adjust appropriately to the changing child, a parent must have healthy expectations of the child at each stage. Yet, as noted in a recent post, a “significant number of parents [have] unrealistic expectations about their baby’s development” across economic and educational lines. How can a parent develop realistic expectations, particularly with a first child? They need reliable, timely developmental information. What was reasonable to expect 3 months ago may not be reasonable anymore, because children change. For that reason, Tumblon’s child pages provide a simple, one-page overview of a child’s current development, integrated with developmentally appropriate activities, books and toys so that in 3 minutes parents can have ample ideas for how to interact appropriately with their children.

If you haven’t yet, now is the time to check it out.

When I taught the early elementary grades, there was one non-fiction book that I loved to read to my students throughout the year. The Story of Ruby Bridges was my happy introduction to Robert Coles, the author of this captivating picture book. I don’t think I ever read the story to my students without crying, so powerfully does Coles capture the story of Ruby’s ‘integration’ into a white school in Louisiana. Not only did the book have a significant personal impact on me (and my students), it gave me a thirst for really good children’s literature, and an understanding of how profoundly such literature can affect the character and conscience of teachers and students.

Dr. Coles (whom I have subsequently discovered to be a prolific author), in The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, captures clearly the dynamic of literature:

“Novels and stories are renderings of life; they can not only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course. They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisers - offer us other eyes through which we might see, other ears with which we might make soundings” (pp 159-160).

I experienced how his book, The Story of Ruby Bridges, admonished, directed and encouraged me and my students. Through his stories and wisdom, Dr. Coles has played a powerful role in shaping the design of tumblon to recommend developmentally appropriate literature so that parents and their children may be challenged and encouraged by the likes of Ruby Bridges. We trust that our recommendations, keyed to a child’s development, will inspire an early love for great books.

Do your children tug on your sleeve and ask for unhealthy food? If so, you’re likely not alone. According to The Kaiser Family Foundation report:

Children ages 2–7 see an average of 12 food ads a day on TV. Over the course of a year, this translates into an average of more than 4,400 food ads—nearly 30 hours (29:31 hr) of food advertising.

The content of those food ads is telling:

34% are for candy and snacks, 28% are for cereal, and 10% are for fast food.
4% are for dairy products, 1% are for fruit juices, and none are for fruits or vegetables.

If you haven’t already intuited it, there’s something you can do: turn off the television. (Beth Bader at Eco Child’s Play gives further helpful support for this approach, based on the findings of the Kaiser report.)

But turning off the television begs the question: What are you going to do instead? Check out your child’s profile on tumblon, and in less than 2 minutes you can see what skills your child is developing. Click through one of the milestone links, and you’ll have interactive resources at your fingertips, including books, toys and activities that support your child’s current development. You’ll enjoy interacting with your child - and indirectly you are shaping her food choices!

A paper presented at the Pediatric Academy Society meeting in Honolulu this week reported parents’ need for quality, timely child development information. Reuters reports:

Nearly a third of U.S. parents know surprisingly little about typical infant development, and this lack of understanding can rob their babies of much-needed mental stimulation, researchers said on Sunday. . . .

Even when the researchers controlled for factors like the mother’s age, education, income and mental state, they still found a significant number of parents with unrealistic expectations about their baby’s development.

And that had a negative impact on the parent-child relationship. “Parents who had less knowledge had less quality interaction with their kids,” [said researcher, Dr. Heather Paradis].

The bottom line is that having realistic expectation of children improves the parent-child relationship through quality interaction. That is precisely the need that tumblon addresses. By presenting parents with a simple, interactive snapshot of their child’s current developmental and literacy milestones, we provide a service unavailable anywhere else. Our mission is to change those statistics in the years to come by equipping parents across social, educational and economic strata with the right information at the right time.

William Carlos Williams, doctor and poet, counseled Robert Coles, then only a medical student, on how to interact with his patients:

“Their story, yours, mine - it’s what we carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.” (The Call of Stories p30)

His observation carries weight for parents in the art of parenting. Truly listening to children’s stories, and preserving them for the future, is a powerful way of respecting and learning from our stories. Tumblon makes recording, preserving and sharing those stories simple and fun so families can enjoy and learn from those stories for years to come.

When I was a third-grade teacher, I read The Story of Ruby Bridges to my students as often as I could, and every time it reduced me to tears. I was aware that in this story there was something precious and beautiful that touched the depths of who I am, and could do the same with my young students. This story affected me in those ways because through stories we recognize, construct, and communicate meaning.

Young children are no exception; they tell stories, although it is not uncommon to see parents tune them out or shut them down because the stories seem nonsensical. However, these children, like their parents, are simply seeking a story that makes sense of their experiences. These early stories can be as profoundly insightful as they are simple, if we will listen attentively. For children are continually constructing meaning, and the most natural way do it is through stories.

Parents are even more involved in story-telling. Whether we invent original stories or poems, watch them on television or in a theater, recite oral family histories, or read to our children, we are constantly communicating meaning. We are expressing a story about the way things really are. This is the very nature of literature, of art, and of life: to construct and express meaning. The quality of those stories we hear and tell, both in form and content, inevitably shapes the form and content of our children’s stories. They learn (or fail to learn) the art of story-telling, and the vision of what is good, true and beautiful by listening to stories.

The stories that children and parents tell, in turn, shape the stories that they create. In the life of a family, shared experiences become part of the family’s shared story - which can reach far beyond the family. For example, Ruby Bridges’ family told and embodied stories that enabled Ruby, at 6 years old, to be an instrumental figure in the history of the United States when she became the first black child to attend a white elementary school. That is the role that stories play in shaping families, society and history.

For all of these reasons, stories are the unifying thread of tumblon:

• We recommend great children’s literature to parents.
• We encourage parents to record their children’s memorable words and stories.
• We enable parents to preserve family stories in words and photos (and soon video too).
• We facilitate sharing those those stories safely with family and friends around the world.

We believe that through this service we can enrich the stories families enjoy, tell and create so that their family stories may influence the wider society like the Bridges family did.