I am not a parent, but I am fascinated with early childhood development, and nature v. nurture studies. Yesterday, on my way work I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR, and there were two stories that really caught my attention.
The first was a story about an experiment where researches allowed children to pick from a menu their choice of lunch. Researchers found that many children in the study were able to regulate their own calorie in-take. In another experiment, kids were given a meal, followed by a snack free-for-all, and in that study researchers found that "the kids who had mothers who were more restricted, when the mother wasn't present or wasn't putting restrictions on and the kid was exposed to snack foods, like cookies for example, that child ate significantly more cookies when the control was not applied . . . ." The following link is to the article on NPR's homepage, where you can read about this study.
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133629227/to-win-toddler-food-battles-take-a-softer-approach
The second story was about the proposed effects of not learning self control as children. The article states that researchers followed children from the pre-school years through age 32, and discovered that the same children that did not show self-control as children were more likely to be in jail, be single parents, or living below the poverty line. You can read the full article here:
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133629477/for-kids-self-control-factors-into-future-success
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."
No comments:
Post a Comment