children
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2009I suddenly remember a few times when I was mean to girls when I was fourteen. I feel really bad thinking about it now. Being mean and bullying was particularly ugly for one such as myself who had just barely reached the end of his years as an object of bullying. But I see a pattern there that wasn't visible to me at the time. It doesn't excuse my behaviour in the least, but it sort of explains it.
H was thin as a rake and had a highly strung personality. She didn't seem to expect to be liked, and I believe few did like her much. Yet she wasn't the sort to fade into the background: she was…
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2009
Skiing Break was action packed for the kids. Monday museum, Tuesday playland, Wednesday skiing with grampa, Thursday swimming, Friday museum & puppet theatre and a museum-organised LAN party for the 10-y-o.
Yesterday's museum was the Public Transport Museum which shares an entrance and a ticket with the Toy Museum. Lots of buses and trams, including one bus standing on a service pit where you can descend and check out the under side of the vehicle. Juniorette and I made a pink train carriage in the children's workshop.
One thing that caught my eye was a mothballed experimental hybrid bus…
aardvarchaeology | February 24, 2009I never thought I'd be writing about Iron Age political geography at a place called Andy's Playland.
It's Skiing Break, and because of preparations for our recent move my wife and I never got round to booking accommodations up north as we often have in recent years. This week, instead we take turns with the old folks at minding the children while they're on break. Yesterday, having been tipped off by Ãsa of Ting & Tankar, my wife took our daughter to the Museum of Nordic Culture where she had a blast in the kids' room. Today, she wanted me to take her to Andy's over at the old Sickla…
edyong | February 17, 2009Babies can say volume without saying a single word. They can wave good-bye, point at things to indicate an interest or shake their heads to mean "No". These gestures may be very simple, but they are a sign of things to come. Year-old toddlers who use more gestures tend to have more expansive vocabularies several years later. And this link between early gesturing and future linguistic ability may partially explain by children from poorer families tend to have smaller vocabularies than those from richer ones.
Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child's academic success, so it's striking…
edyong | February 15, 2009
A child in the womb is not just some hapless creature waiting to be born into a world of experience. It is preparing. Through its mother, it senses the conditions of the world outside and its body plans its growth accordingly.
There is strong evidence that people who are under-nourished as embryos grow up to have higher risks of heart disease and other chronic illnesses. For example, people born to women during the Dutch Famine of 1945 had higher risks of coronary heart disease as adults.
We might nod our heads at this as if it were expected news, but it's actually quite a strange result…
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2008
I accompanied my son's new class to the Stockholm Museum of Technology today. An investment -- it's good for me to get to know everybody, and it's good for Junior that everybody knows me as a present and available dad.
At the museum, just about the first thing I saw was the XO laptop, about which I've heard so much on Digital Planet. This is the machine developed by the One Laptop Per Child project, known as the "$100 laptop" (though it hasn't quite come down to that yet). Having lugged all 3.6 kilos of my four-year-old Dell Inspiron 6000 through the streets of Lund and Linköping for two…
aardvarchaeology | October 3, 2008
I bought two wooden model kits in Beijing last October. The kids and I finished the Imperial Dragon in late August. Since then, my daughter and I have worked on the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests (ç¥å¹´æ®¿) which forms part of the 15th century Temple of Heaven complex in Beijing. Now it's completed, and I shudder to think of what we're gonna do with it when we move house.
grrlscientist | September 13, 2008tags: bipolar disorder, manic-depression, mental health, mental illness, behavior
Image: Gerald Slota, The New York Times Magazine.
A couple days ago, I heard an interview with Jennifer Egan on WNYC about her upcoming article in tomorrow's New York Magazine about bipolar disorder, often known as manic-depressive illness, "The Bi | Polar Puzzle." It's long but well-written and definitely worth reading. In this touching and informative piece, Egan primarily addresses several questions; whether bipolar disorder exists in children, what it looks like and whether children with undiagnosed/…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2008A memory.
A lot of Swedish middle-class kids get sent to confirmation camp when they're 14. It's basically a crash course in Christianity and ends with first communion. My brother went through his course and then refused the wafer & wine. This actually endeared him to the priest, as it showed him to have taken the issue seriously.
But I went through with it all. I was basically agnostic at the time, but one of the camp counselors imparted a piece of non-standard theology that tipped the scales for me. His name was Roland, and he said "It's the world's best deal. Accept communion and get…
aardvarchaeology | August 25, 2008
Back in October I picked up a couple of wooden model kits in a mall near the Drum Tower in Beijing. Yesterday my daughter and I finished the first one, an Imperial Chinese dragon (count the toes), brought to life by a talented but uncredited kitmaker. I built one of these kits, an apatosaurus, when I was a teen. And now a grand-daughter of the Empire is eager to start building our second kit, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests at the Temple of Heaven.
[More blog entries about china, dragons, modelbuilding; kina, drakar, modellbygge.
aardvarchaeology | August 10, 2008
Scrabble was first published in 1948. Shortly thereafter, it was ripped off for the Swedish market by a firm named Lemeco, under the tell-tale Anglophone title Criss Cross. The main difference between the ripoff and the original is that individual letters don't have point values in Criss Cross: instead you get five points per vowel and ten per consonant.
Criss Cross does not bear a printing year. I date it at about 1950, because my copy still contains the notebook where my dad and his kid sister recorded their games. A signature of my dad's in the notebook looks like the handwriting of a…
aardvarchaeology | July 28, 2008Yesterday my glorious daughter turned 5. Today my radiant son turned 10. In the maternity ward five years ago I quipped to the nurses, "The kids being born one day apart, I suppose I'm only fertile for one week each year".
Replied one of them, "I think you're probably only romantic for one week each year."
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2008I write this sitting in a rental car near the Cathedral of Montalcino, a small Medieval fortified hilltop town in the heart of Tuscany's brunello wine district. Sweat is running freely down my forehead and nose, no matter that the windows are open and the car is in a shaded alley. Wife and children are shopping for groceries while I have saved our vehicle from a parking ticket.
Montalcino is a maze of terracotta masonry and grey stucco, steep narrow streets, and glimpses of amazing vistas across the vineyards and valleys far below. A guide leaflet in Babelfish English informs me that the…
aardvarchaeology | June 19, 2008
Back in February I showed you some pix of abandoned tree houses at Djurhamn. One of them had a computer, just like my son once reported visiting a tree house with a typewriter.
I've spent the past three days metal detecting in the same area, falsifying our working hypothesis that there would be easily accessible 16th and 17th century stuff there. But I did find more tree house ruins. And one had an interesting piece of furniture: a gynaecologist's examination chair!? Turned out that the tree house was built on the margin of a dump area where all kinds of strange stuff was sitting, and…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2008Good news from Egypt: the country's parliament has passed a new child protection law that, among other wise measures, criminalises female genital mutilation and raises the legal age of marriage to 18 for both men and women. Daily News of Egypt has a long article on the subject (from back when it was still a bill with an uncertain future).
Bayoumi ... says that beating hurts children physically and emotionally. The Prophet Mohamed, he added, called for a kind of reprimand that does not inflict harm or cause psychological damage.
In agreement, Refaat El Saied said that some would say they will…
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2008Me and Junior just got home from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. First we were shown the portrait collection and the main meeting room where a lot of Nobel prizes have been decided. Then, under the joint auspices of the Academy and the Swedish Skeptics Society, we heard an hour's lecture by one of the Society's long-time members: astronaut Christer Fuglesang.
It was a good talk in plain Swedish, ranging from abstruse physics to everyday practicalities of life in space. (If you lose something small inside a space station, just wait a day or two and then look for it near the intake of…
aardvarchaeology | May 10, 2008
My kid's spacy English writing assignment makes me so proud! He's nine, he's only been once for a few days to an Anglophone country, and we rarely speak English at home. Yet he seems to have picked the language up from on-line gaming, and he's long been able to read e.g. the Harry Potter books in English. With his permission, here are his ideas about space colonies.
I think that in the future those who want to will be able to move onto another planet, or into a space station. People will breathe using space suits, and at home they will have air inside their houses. They will get food by…
aardvarchaeology | May 2, 2008
Now and then I like to play board games: mostly Blokus, Drakborgen (a.k.a. Dungeonquest), Scrabble and Roborally. The latter is an award-winning 1994 game where each player programs a robot to move through a treacherous obstacle course and tag a series of numbered flags. More often than not, your robot ends up a smoking laser-riddled wreck or disappears down a bottomless hole.
On the box, Roborally is recommended from age 12 up. I am proud to be able to tell you that the game works just fine with (bright, geeky) 9-year-olds as well. Yesterday after lunch I took Junior and his pal geocaching…
edyong | April 1, 2008You could argue that life is all about cheating death and having enough sex to pass on your genes to the next generation, as many times as possible. From this dispassionate viewpoint, human reproduction is very perplexing for our reproductive potential has an early expiry date. At an average age of 38, women start becoming rapidly less fertile only to permanently lose the ability to have children some 10 years later during menopause.
From an evolutionary point of view, this decline is bizarre. Other long-lived animals stay fertile until close to the end of their lives, with elephants…
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2008
Childcare is a context where people from different class backgrounds come into intimate contact. Indeed, for as long as there has been childcare, this work has been done largely by working class women, even when the kids in question have been middle- or upper-class. There's a common literary trope where an upper-class young man has a warm "natural" relationship to his working-class nanny and a cold distant one to his blood mother.
I've blogged before about how academic middle-class ideals of gender homogenisation clash with more traditional views among working-class daycare ladies. And…