I Can’t Answer My Daughter’s Questions About COVID-19

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Parenting during pandemic.

Every morning the same routine. She asks if we can go to the playground. She asks if we can see our friends. She’s tired of being cooped up. I don’t blame her. I’m tired. Exhausted. We all are. She’s heard the word “die” more times in the past month than in her entire life. She kind of knows what it means. One of our cats died on the kitchen floor, heart attack, when she was barely a year old. She saw him and tried to pet him. “Kitty,” she said as my wife cried and tried to save Jim, the cat. Her favorite chicken, named after Princess Sophia, was eaten by a fox. I had to pick up the remains of the other two he killed. She knows death, but it’s hard to explain to a four-year-old that death comes from a virus.

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Kevin Koczwara — Esquire

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Do you need to go to parent school?

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A question every parent grapples with – are they doing it right?

All of this begs the question: which approach is best? Whereas many parenting trends reflect the opinions of a single psychoanalyst, paediatrician or nanny, CANparent’s providers claim to draw upon the latest scientific research about how children develop and say their strategies are “proven” to make a real, positive difference to families. Others, meanwhile, claim that such evidence-based parenting policies are based on distorted science and undermine parents’ confidence in their ability to raise their children.

“It transforms the meaning of family life,” says Jan Macvarish, who studies the impact of neuroscience on family policy at the University of Kent. “It says ‘we will be able to measure the quality of your family life by the intelligence or emotional intelligence of your child’.”

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Linda Geddes — Mosaic

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Parents in a Remote Amazon Village Barely Talk to Their Babies—and the Kids Are Fine

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Recently, I heard a podcast on two approaches to parenting – the gardener and the carpenter. Today’s needull looks at a society vastly different from the westernized rich society.

The researchers observed, anecdotally, that language development appears to be slightly delayed in the Tsimané—but this does not seem to matter. The children grow up to be fully functioning, communicative and productive members of the community. In fact, as interactions between Tsimané and other Bolivians increase, many of the children are becoming bilingual in Spanish as well at their native Tsimané language.

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Dana G. Smith — Scientific American

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