Organic-Ally

On Tuesday I heard a BBC programme in the afternoon (hands on the sewing machine, ears to the radio, that's multi-tasking?) which made me feel completely vindicated about not letting my son watch TV for the first two years of his life. Well, not all TV, but children's TV. He was allowed to watch sport and news. The psychologist (Arik Sigmund) on the programme confirmed my hunch that children's TV is bad for the developing baby/toddler brain. According to scientific studies children who watched 'educational DVDs' were not any better in their comprehension and vocabulary when compared to those who watched The Simpsons and Oprah Winfrey. The only group with superior ability were "those who watched none of those but simply incidentally hear background conversation of their parents with others". He concluded that listening which forces us to 'paint pictures in our mind' is better at fostering cognitive development. Well, there! I remember feeding my bab...

Last night I watched a taped programme of 'Child Genius'. Let's just say I felt really uneasy -- perhaps 'disturbed' is a more accurate description -- after that. There is a three-year-old girl who fell asleep while being tested for her IQ (at 152) and was re-tested. Her IQ was found to be so high they could not properly score her, so 'suka-suka' as we say in Malay/Hokkien or 'chin-chai-la' (in Cantonese), they call it 170. Girl's mother wanted her tested to prove she had 'special needs' so she could go to a good state school. She was devastated (the mother) to find that the school had rejected her. Well, obviously the mother is not very intelligent, because which state school would want a child with an IQ of 170? She will be no end of trouble. The school will have to pay for extra resources just to keep her occupied, etc, etc. The mother should have played down her intelligence and left it at 152-maybe. So she is NOT A PUSHY PARENT -- c...

Last week I agonised over a nine-year-old in the UK here . The news over the weekend is still about a certain Maths genius who has adopted my surname (yes!) and is making a rather tidy sum (taxed or untaxed, who knows?) being a high class 'social escort'. My husband pointed me to the article: Pushy parents: the naked truth . As we've been told that our son is highly gifted, any article about geniuses (genuii?) is of great interest to us. Anyway, said genius's pictures are plastered all over the media, helping to sell newspapers, no doubt, and thousands of column inches and blog posts must have been written. I add my own. There are dysfunctional families amongst the illiterate and lowly-educated, and there are dysfunctional families amongst the highly-educated. And the media already well know there are dysfunctional families amongst the most well-heeled and well-educated. Genius's mum has also started a blog, further muddying the waters. There have been claims and co...

Our six-year-old son told us early this morning what he had been mulling over overnight: "There is no right in doing wrong and there is no wrong in doing right." We don’t know how he comes up with thoughts like this, but he did. It appears that he was pondering the relationship between right and wrong and he came up with this new (to us at least) ‘thought for the day’. His thought (maxim?) reminds me of Pascal’s wager : You may believe in God, and if God exists, you go to heaven: your gain is infinite. You may believe in God, and if God doesn't exist, your loss is finite and therefore negligible. Or: You may not believe in God, and if God doesn't exist, your gain is finite and therefore negligible. You may not believe in God, and if God exists, you will go to hell: your loss is infinite. Likewise I could apply son’s formulation to the environment. Some people still insist: show me proof that my gas-guzzling habits (eg) are having a negative impact and I would start do...