Slate spotlights investment-banker-turned-photographer Anna Ream’s Comfort Objects series, documenting children’s favorite possessions.
Also see photographic tours of children’s favorite toys, their bedrooms, their classrooms, and their breakfasts.
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We — now more than ever, it seems — have a profound civilizational anxiety about being alone. And the seed for it is increasingly planted in childhood — in an age when play is increasingly equated with screens and interfaces, being alone with a screen is not quite being alone at all, so the art of taking joy in one’s own company slips further and further out of reach.
After the launch of her book, Miracles Now, a reader asked Gabrielle Bernstein about the best way to get kids hooked on meditation. This is her answer. Also see Sam Harris on the paradox of meditation.
(via Swiss Miss)
New study looks at what children’s drawings at age 4 reveal about their future thinking skills:
Researchers from King’s College London enlisted 7,700 pairs of 4-year-old identical and fraternal twins in England to draw pictures of a child. The researchers scored each drawing on a scale of 0 to 12, based on how many body parts were included. All the kids also took verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests at 4 and 14.
Kids with higher drawing scores tended to do better on the intelligence tests, though the two were only moderately linked.
Of course, one major limitation is that the study seems to conflate accuracy with intelligence, an approach that reflects our culture’s persistently narrow definition of intelligence and a failure to account for all the other realms of ability in Howard Gardner’s pioneering Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Perhaps kids who are less accurate but display a higher degree of abstract thought would end up more gifted in fields rely on symbolism and metaphorical thinking, from writing to painting.
Granted, the researchers seem to be aware of this shortcoming. NPR reports:
[The researchers] are trying to figure out whether judging the children’s art in some other way (maybe based on creativity instead of accuracy) would reveal something different about their intelligence.
One family’s impossibly moving story raising a transgender kid – the most poignant such perspective since this one.
Stay with it through the end – you won’t regret it.
Winners of NASA’s 2014 space art contest for K-12 students. Oh, and they are all girls.
Bonus points to fourth grader Emma Krooner, who didn’t win but was the only one to forgo expected depictions of planets, spacesuits, and rockets to celebrate the Curiosity Rover instead.
Unbeknownst to many, NASA has supported the arts for half a century with its NASA Art Program for adult artists, commissioning such icons as Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, and Norman Rockwell. See more of it here.
Dear Judy,
I am a girl in seventh grade and I have a funny feeling about one of my teachers. I am afraid I might be in love with her or something. My friend says she feels that way about her cousin. I’ll bet a lot of girls — and boys — feel this way. Could you please write a book about it?
Thank you.
P.S. You don’t have to. Maybe it is only me who feels this way.
Children’s disarming and poignant letters to Judy Blume about being gay, and her advice
What an amazing story: Beloved children’s book illustrator Eric Carle spent his life fascinated by a photograph of him at age 3, embracing a little girl whose name he never found out. His most recent book, Friends, was inspired by that enchanting and mysterious photograph. Now, 82 years later, Carl and his little friend were reunited.
On Easter Sunday, almost 82 years after the photograph was taken, Eric Carle learned his friend was not only alive. She was ready for his call. Her name is Florence Ciani Trovato; at 85, she’s a few months older than Eric, and shares his vibrancy.
Read the full story here, and treat yourself to his wonderful Friends.
Give a kid a book, and you change the world. In a way, even the universe.
In the third episode of his Cosmos series, Neil deGrasse Tyson echoes Carl Sagan even down to the timeless sentiment about books.
For good measure, complement with Maurice Sendak’s little-known and lovely posters on the joy of reading.
Adorable and moving photos of children from around the world with their favorite toys by Gabriele Galimberti, revealing how profoundly cultural influence shapes a child’s preferences. (Note, especially, the Ukrainian boy and his guns.)
Let Books Be Books – a heartening and culturally necessary campaign asking publishers to stop the gender-priming by taking the “for boys” and “for girls” labels off of children’s books.
For some brilliant and prescient meta-commentary on the cultural problem in question, see a New Yorker cartoonist’s vintage gem I’m Glad I’m A Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl!
Lego began in 1916, in the modest carpentry shop of Ole Kirk Christiansen, who built ladders, stools, and ironing boards for the farming community of Billund, Denmark. He turned to more affordable wooden toys during the Depression, selling his abacuses, pull-along ducks, and building blocks door to door. Kids, he noted, kept clamouring for construction toys that would enable them to build taller, more complex structures.
[…]
In 1946, [Christiansen] became the first toymaker in Denmark to buy an injection moulding machine, and began experimenting with cellulose acetate construction blocks. (Around the same time, California furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames were creating their moulded plastic and plywood chairs as low-cost alternatives to traditional wooden furniture.) Christiansen’s son Godtfred Kirk simplified his father’s brick design, perfecting its signature clutch power and switching plastics to the even more durable acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. For his colour palette, he looked to Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian’s Composition series: bright yellow, red, blue, and white. He patented the brick on January 28, 1958.
[…]
When the poet Ezra Pound famously exhorted a generation to “make it new,” he did not mean only once. Rather, modernists set out to shape ever-new artistic forms and styles, pursuing the avant-garde as a way of asserting their autonomy over the established order. Likewise, making it new (over and over and over again) is an inextricable part of Lego’s DNA: just six two-by-four-studded pieces can be configured in 915 million ways. The Christiansens did not just revolutionize the toy world; they invented a physical lingua franca for modernism
Over at The Walrus, Carl Carsten Wyatt explores how Lego pieced together modernism. Also see how Lego became a global cult.
(via The Dish)
This PSA from the Internet Advertising Bureau, created by illustrator Dominic Owen and animator Will Samuel, is an essential form of modern literacy: A kid’s guide to how internet ads work.
Then again, the very necessity for such warnings demonstrates that the concept of ad-supported media isn’t, at the end of the day, in the public interest. As soon as we deem something a "necessary evil" perilous enough to warrant a PSA for our children, we also implicitly acknowledge the “evil” part.
(via swissmiss)
PSA: If your child has this tragicomic response to getting books as gifts, perhaps you should up your game and introduce him or her to the best children’s books around. Should that fail, you can always fall back on literary action figures and sob quietly in your bedroom.
50 Years 50 Toys – designer Abby Ryan looks back at the most popular games of the past half-century. Pair with MoMA’s essential design history of childhood.
(HT FastCo Design)