The amazing world of Starfall

[Website Review] The web is full of wonderful activities for children. My children have been well introduced to them; so much so that when asked one day what Spiderman did my daughter replied that "he made websites."

For parents, websites are more reliable than pre-loaded computer software. They are far less likely to crash and have other surprises. But it is the potential educational value that I have been most impressed by.

For our family, no website has proven more educational and fun than Starfall (www.starfall.com). As usual, I found this be accident looking for a site that would help children learn to read. The site was started by those seemingly with a passion to use the net to good ends. Here is the blurb:

At age 9, young Stephen Schutz was still struggling to read. What came easily for some children required many more hours of Stephen's work, and he was consistently towards the bottom of his class in reading. Now with a PhD in physics and a successful publisher and artist, Dr. Schutz wanted to make sure that children in his situation today have a resource that can help them. He turned to the Internet and conceived a program that would be available on-line across the world for free to all children who are learning to read.

The Polis-Schutz family is dedicated to education. Stephen's wife, the renowned poet Susan Polis Schutz was a teacher in New Jersey and New York City in the 1960s. Their son Jared Schutz Polis currently serves on the Colorado State Board of Education. The Polis-Schutz family is pursuing their educational goals by proudly presenting www.starfall.com as a free on-line service to help children learn to read.

Stephen Schutz and his wife Susan Polis Schutz founded Blue Mountain Arts publishing company in 1970, and with their son Jared Schutz Polis they created the popular electronic greeting card site bluemountain.com in 1996. The Polis-Schutz family is passionate about making the world a better place, and is thrilled to have the opportunity to use the Internet to help children learn to read.

And it looks as though it worked out. The site progresses in four stages: (1) ABCs, (2) Learn to Read; (3) It's fun to read; and (4) I'm reading. All this will interest children from 1 to about 8. And the breadth of materials is impressive.

But the real draw is the superb usual of visual imagery to link letters, sounds and words in both verbal and written form. To get a flavour, start at the beginning, the letter 'A' in ABCs. It links A with its sound and then with its place in words.

Later exercises then allow children to have books read to them with syllables highlighted as we go along. Even later still, the idea is to read the book and then click on words you don't know. As we progress the reading material gets more informative and interesting. There are songs that would be the envy of Sesame Street of old and games as much fun as Blues Clues.

But what is best, is it is all free. You can contribute some money by buying some of the print books that relate to the web materials but, in my opinion, 'contribute' is the right word because you don't need that stuff to help your children learn to read. Learning to read without books, who would have thunk it?

As for results, it has had a steady impact on our children but with our 5 year old son, it was one of the biggest factors in making him an early reader. It taught him far better than we could have (even had we tried, which we didn't). This alone is a reason to let your children near the web.

Formula Pixar

[Cross posted at economics.com.au]

It only happens once a year or so, but this weekend saw the release of a new movie from Pixar, Cars. With high expectations we went along and those expectations were not disappointed. I left with the same feeling of money well spent as I had for all previous Pixar experiences in recent times including The Incredibles, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. I also knew that I would be spending more as our DVD collection expanded later this year.

Pixar movies are formulaic but not in the way that ‘formula’ gives movies a bad name. Pixar’s formula is ‘higher level’ but simple: “write a movie with a plot and characters for adults and then work out how to make it appealing to kids.” And there are two general plot themes: personal growth and societal revolution. Most Pixar movies have both but with an emphasis on one or the other depending on the movie.

Before going into this, it is worth remarking how most recent animated family features try to copy the Pixar success. After all, if you can make a movie that parents and children love to see, you will rake in the dollars. According to BoxOfficeMojo, Pixar movies occupy the 11, 26, 39, 46, 96 and 99th places on the worldwide all time box office hits. As there have been only 6 movies, that is a remarkable effort. But the copy-cats, take for example, Chicken Little, get it wrong. They have a plot for kids and then put in a few 'in' jokes and famous voices to appeal to parents. [This is not to say that other studios can't achieve something. Dreamworks has its own formula going as Wallace and Grommit, Madagascar and the Shrek movies attest; but their formula is different -- something I will comment on more after next week's viewing of Over the Hedge. Also, the first 10 minutes of Robots was superb even though the rest of the movie left alot to be desired].

That is not the Pixar way. Monsters Inc and A Bug’s Life were all about societal revolution. In the former, the basic idea was that current production methods could be changed for clear welfare gains (you know moving from a scare to a humour driven economy) and in the latter, a simple statement against grasshopper oppression. Each was about an individual questioning the basis of an economic system and eventually winning out through revolution. In contrast, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo and, of course, Toy Story are all about personal growth of the main character. In each case, the main character is stuck in a view of their own place in the world and how they live their life and is challenged to do something differently. As I will get to in a second, Cars falls well into this latter class.

It is only in Toy Story 2 where the plot is more kids-centric: an evil doer does something evil and people are saved by friendship. Nonetheless, it worked anyway because the characters were so well-developed in the previous movie. Also, it did not suffer from the traditional Disney approach: get rid of a parent (usually be initial or prior death), fight evil and make sure the child leaves the movie clutching adoringly their parent’s hand.

On to Cars. This is not a movie that appeals to adults because of a few in jokes (they are there and they are great but it is secondary). The main things are the plot and the characters. The characters have the usual Pixar appeal (snapshots of people we know and others with mental challenges; although not quite up to the forgetful Dory in Nemo). The plot follows that of many sporting movies: main character has a chance at the big time if they can just beat the traditional champion and the more ruthless competitors. In other movies, those characters are one in the same, but in Cars they are distinctly split into two. The personal growth for the main character, a car named ‘Lightning McQueen,’ is to eventually face a choice between being ‘legendary’ and winning.

And that, of course, is its adult appeal as it is that choice which is not often presented in other movies. I am not sure whether my children understood it but I was happy to have them see it. Usually, winning and legendary are one in the same and there is no questioning of this. Last year, I forked out money for two movies with exactly the same plot: Racing Stripes and Herbie Rides Again. In each, the main character was an underdog who had to convinced others that they had the right stuff even thought they weren’t sterotypical winners (one was a zebra and the other the VW bug; each of which physically could never win). And, of course, they had the right stuff. In Cars, it is more complicated than that with a Shakespearean edge and sudden flash of insight. No one will claim it is subtle but it wasn’t till the last minute that I realised what the plot was all about.

There is also a bit of societal revolution in Cars. Our main character gets stuck in an off the main road town, Radiator Springs, and eventually works out that the world that is passing it by doesn’t realise what it is missing.

The rest of Cars is to make this story appealing to kids. Let’s face it, this is quite shameless. We all know that a world full of humanised cars is going to do the trick. You can see the toys and merchandising woven into the animation. Nonetheless, it is enough to give us an excuse to get the family out and see the movie.

Cars passes the key adult test: would I want to see this movie even if I didn’t have kids? Yes, it does and having kids only complements the experience. I do recommend, however, that you do not leave until the curtains close. The movie continues right up to the very end of the closing credits and you will be disappointed if you rush out too early.

They have this?

Sometimes an article can get you thinking. Today there is one in Slate on the merits of sending 6 year olds to 'overnight camp.' Overnight camp is summer camp but where the kids don't come back in the evening. We had this when I was a child and my memories are not fond ones. It appears that fondness in one's own childhood are the main drivers as to whether parents send their own kids to overnight camp.

But I had forgotten there was such a thing and now that the article is there it is strangely alluring. For my birthday this year, we had a night free of the kids. It took my partner three months of planning but through a combination of sleep-overs and a sister-in-law enduring a night without us, we achieved it. Unfortunately, my partner threw her back out before the day but much better to have a sore back when the kids were not around than when they are.

It was nice; for me, just getting up on a Sunday morning, having breakfast and reading the newspaper without obligation was a surprising highlight. When the kids came home and we were asked whether we had a good time, our eldest said "well of course they did, they had got rid of us." Obviously, they feel our love.

Actually, they had a ball and when I count up the damage the only loser was my sister-in-law. A tip of my hat to you!

Toilet Training and Incentives: Child No.2 (Part II)

In my last post on this subject, I ended on a cliff-hanger. Child No.2 had been toilet trained by brute force but ...

... we were not done yet: incentives came back inforce when we moved on to night training. A much longer story for another time.

That time has come.

Night training is a particularly difficult business. Your child has the day down but, at night, they might be asleep or too drowsy to 'know the signs.' That means a period of time where they wear nappies or 'pull ups' at night. For parents, success occurs when it is dry in the morning and you are done when you get a week plus of success.

In relation to Child No.1, our philosophy was: what doesn't go in, doesn't go out. Her bed time was 6:30 so for two hours prior to that she was pretty much off fluids. This wasn't a conscious plan and we fell upon it by accident. But it worked and we achieved official night training. [Actually, it turns out that we were just lucky. Whatever chemical processes that needed to work, worked and the routine of before and after bed seemed to stick.]

We were not so lucky with Child No.2. For starters, he got thirsty and it is not really advisable to deny him water. But also it didn't quite click. He didn't seem too bothered about it all and we noticed that he would get up dry, claim he didn't need to go to the toilet and then go in his nappies, and later, pull-ups. This smelled (literally) of the basis of an incentive problem: his interests were not aligned with ours.

Pull-ups help here. They have little pictures that disappear if 'accidents' occur. This gave us a visible and external monitoring device. It was viewable both to us and our son. So that is the first thing we would check in the morning and a celebration would ensue if the pictures were there.

Celebrations only get you so far. We then moved to more tangible rewards. He was old enough to understand a 'points system' that would lead to rewards. So a dry night would get a point and 7 points would get you a reward -- usually, a book or toy. This was sufficient motivation and he was focused: "make sure the pictures don't go out and you get a point."

Well we had good nights and intermittent accidents. But then we had a week of dry pull-ups. Much rejoicing ensued including a bonus; no more pull-ups. Sadly, the next night there was an accident. Now you might say, these things happen. But it turns out that the problem was that these things hadn't happened.

Our son had a small rubbish bin in his room. Upon inspection, we found 5 full pull-ups. It turned out that our son was getting up in the morning, noticing the pictures gone and getting himself a new pull-up! There was nothing malicious in this. He just understood the rule as: "produce a pull-up with pictures." And so he worked out how to do just that.

This is just a reflection of the old adage; "you get what you pay for." We paid for dry pull-ups and that is what we got.

Now the response to this was to impose a new requirement: you have to have the same pull-up on in the morning as was put there last night. Easy to monitor and we did.

So we got a couple of nights of successes and the one morning I went into his room and found his bed wet. His pull-ups were dry. I asked him about this and he said "it just happened."

"But, how? It should have wet your pull-ups."

"No it wouldn't. I didn't have them on. They were on the night stand."

!!!!!

It turned out that he had been removing his pull-ups so as to ensure they were dry in the morning! I guess that worked. And we didn't notice because the relevant part of his body was concealed under the covers.

When it comes down to it, giving children incentives is a little like programming a computer. Unless you get the instructions just right, problems can ensue. It is like that time in Star Trek when Geordi programmed the holodeck for a game "that could defeat Data" (the android) and ended up creating a sentient program that almost destroyed the Enterprise.

So it was here. We focused on the pictures on the pull-up and that is where our son put his considerable creative energy on. What we needed was a 'program' that gave exactly what we wanted: no accidents. That is what we turned to after that night. It took some months but eventually we were successful only to be disrupted again following an operation. Nonetheless, since that time, we have moved focus away from the pull-up (although getting rid of them became a common incentive as he grew older) and on to the activity we cared about.

So the moral of this story, just like our story with Child No.1, is incentives can work but sometimes they can work too well. So much care and management is required.

Child No.3 is still too young but in the near future we will start this all over again. I am sure there will be yet another set of stories to tell.

Hard choices

In our household, we rarely give our children hard choices. Instead, when we given them choices we weight things to make it easy. For example, "come to dinner and wash your hands or you will miss out entirely." A fairly stark choice. Sometimes the alternative option is simply "or else" and we leave the else open to interpretation.

That is taking it a little far. For some choices that are relatively unimportant to both us and the children we can give real choice. Choosing breakfast cereal is one of these; although it is a constrained one -- "choose amongst the cereals that do not constitute a special treat and do it quickly." For these choices, there are no grave consequences.

The other day I had the opportunity to give our children a real choice over something they care about. As a reward for many weeks of good behaviour (using a complex points system to be described at another time), our two eldest children were allowed a special lunch. (See my earlier post about carrots at McDonalds). Usually, this is McDonalds but our daughter had experienced KFC and now believed strongly in it.

At Victoria Gardens (a shopping mall in Melbourne), they have a food court with McDonalds and KFC side-by-side. This was an opportunity to present the choice starkly to my daughter, in particular, and see if her head would explode. The idea that she would have to choose to give up one or the other is something, I believe, would be unfathomable in her experience. It would be a hard choice.

Turned out I was wrong. She was a true believer in KFC and made the choice easily. The 11 secret herbs and spices were too much of a draw. So much for my fun! Our son, on the other hand, found himself in a dilemma. Go with KFC on his sister's recommendation or go to McDonalds where the Happy Meal had a 'Cars' toy rather than a dinosaur. He made his choice on the toy and went to McDonalds; saving me $1 by the way. Obviously, those licensing fees to Disney are worth every penny.

When it came down to it, it turned out that I faced the hardest choice. Get either McDonalds or KFC or stand in a third line. One chicken fillet burger and chips later I found that time was the decisive dimension for me.

The Hard Line on Sleep

Two reviews appeared in Slate today on the new and revised edition of Richard Ferber's Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems. (You can read them here and here).

Now I haven't read this book and happily fall into the class of parents that doesn't need to. But in reading the reviews it occurred to me that we had pretty much taken the Ferber line with our babies anyway. That line is this: let them cry. The book is then about various strategies for parents to use to achieve this. As one reviewer, Emily Bazelon, wrote: "his parenting book is read and reread in our house, because we rely on Ferber for backbone." She goes on:

Ferber's method rests upon the sensible idea that children have to learn to go to sleep by themselves. To do that, they need a set of "sleep associations" that don't require your presence, which means at bedtime no nursing, rocking, back rubbing, or singing to your baby. Ferber provides a vivid analogy for adults: "Think again about having to sleep without your pillow," he writes. "You would no doubt curse your bad back and your doctor vehemently. … The only way you would learn to fall asleep without your pillow would be to actually practice doing so." So it also goes for a baby who since birth has been nursed to sleep and is now going off the boob. She needs to practice and that means some crying—and not crying followed by a guilt-ridden rush to make the wailing stop. When parents cave, "their child only learns that he must cry longer to get what he wants." According to Ferber, your impulse to give unconditional comfort is misguided, and maybe you'll even be able to conquer it. "Once you understand that your child's need is simply to learn a new way to fall asleep (whether it is what he wants or not) it is easier for you to see that this need is met," Ferber says.

This highlights the issue. The theory is simple: if you make a big deal about bedtime and associate it with things that require your attention then that is what will happen. Bedtime is a first hit at independence and, of course, it is a rare baby that doesn't react to that very fact. After all, from their perspective they are the centre of the universe and everything else about their lives at the time is reinforcing that belief.

It is implementation that is hard. This is especially the case for first time parents. And what you need to do it is support.

That is what happened to us. Our first child spent the first six weeks of her life not sleeping. We were getting four hour breaks at best. I was hallicinating. (I saw a horse running on the freeway and still remember it vividly!) We took her over to a friend's place. They had more children. We put her down and they stopped us from going in. 30 minutes later she was asleep.

That night we implemented the hard line. Through the baby monitor was screaming. My partner said that she "couldn't stand listening to it any more." So I went to the monitor and turned it off. "Problem solved." 10 minutes later we determined with our ears to the door she was asleep. 4 hours later we didn't get her. She screamed and then went back to sleep. 8 hours later we woke up, panicked, ran to her room and she was lying there happily smiling at us.

We never had another problem night from her again. And when I say never, I mean never. She would go down at 6:30 and stay there until 6:30am. 12 hours per night without fail. Now it wasn't just the hard line that allowed this but also the fact that we made sure she wasn't hungry by engaging in a 'feeding frenzy' between 4pm and 6pm. But with that mix we definitely got results.

So how did all this knowledge translate to our second child. There, it was a hard line pretty much from the start. And the result was 8+ hours sleeps at night at 4 weeks. Alas, however, our cockiness stuffed it up again when we put him on solids at 4 months (that was the recommended date way back then in 2001) and got over-enthusiastic about it. He had stomach cramps, had to be taken off food and didn't sleep through properly again until 10 months.

Sleep performance does to a large extent depend upon the child. Child No.1 was well suited to it. She ate like a big that meant she could eat enough before bed. She also is a great sleeper. To this day (she is now 7) we can move her around in her sleep without her noticing.

On the other hand, Child No.2 would throw up feeds all the time and was a light sleeper. He also doesn't need as much sleep. To this day, he bounds up out of bed at 5am ready to go. He is the ultimate in morning people even before it is officially morning! Compared with Child No.1 who thinks that morning is an afront to her rights and grumps for a good hour, our son is disturbingly happy and cheery at sunrise.

Finally, on to Child No.3. We had a hard line from the start (partly because we didn't realise the old baby monitor wasn't working too well and so we got our 'spine' for free; we didn't know she was crying!). But nothing we would count as sleeping through until 10 months. This is because our daughter reached a compromise solution. She wanted 5 minutes of our time sometime between midnight and 2am for a feed and that was it. We hardly felt it and when it comes down to it we effectly got 90% of the Ferber-type independence anyway.

Nowadays when she wakes up at the crack of dawn she is greeted first by our son who, let's face it, is the right person for the job. That buys us extra sleep time.

In conclusion, the Ferber approach has lots of merits but it is implementation that you have to concentrate on. Absent that the defective baby monitor will work wonders.

Toilet Training and Incentives: Child No.2 (Part I)

In my last post on toilet training (over three years ago) on our experiences with incentives on our first child, I ended with the following hope:

... the management process was painful and it is unclear whether this wouldn't have all happened of its own accord anyway. Next time around we will wait a little longer, check for signs of readiness and go for a big bang behavioural change. Let's see how that goes.

It is time to report just how it went. The answer, very very mixed.

Our son proved to be a very different ball game from our first daughter and not for gender differences. Our daughter possessed several qualities that lent her to the useful application of incentives. First, she was highly strategic and easily understood what rewards meant. Second, she had some basic motives -- most notably food -- that made it easy to give her high motive rewards.

Our son possessed neither of these qualities. He was not strategic and hardly had a self-interested bone in his body. He didn't care about much that was material. For him, toilet training was something that was going to please us and for that reason he was interested. Read him a book and he will stay on the potty. The attention would do.

Nonetheless, despite this, very little has happening. So we decided to implement our more explicit incentive system that had worked well with Child No.1. But there was a twist: Child No.1 was around and in many ways we need her help. So Child No.2 would receive a sweet reward -- one or two jelly babies as the case may be. But also where he was successful, Child No.1 would receive the same. We viewed all this as a team effort and Child No.1 was part of the team. To align her incentives we gave her a share of the pie.

That part worked swimmingly. She encouraged our son to sit on the potty and spent time showing her books. It seemed that we may have efficiently outsourced this activity: something valuable in our time strapped lives.

Alas, it was not quite to be. We had to put a stop to it all when we discovered Child No.1 feeding Child No.2 copious amounts of water to help the process along! (By the way, in case you are wondering Child No.1 was 4 years old at the time).

Nothing seemed to work with Child No.2 and a deadline was looming. He was turning 3 and could go to pre-school so long as he was toilet trained. We were three weeks away and desperate (Not just for us but for him. Pre-school was much more fun than child care).

So we established Toilet Training Boot Camp. The nappies were confiscated. The rug was removed from our wood floors and we would do this as long as it took. He understood the basics but just needed intensive experience and so that is what we provided.

Now you may think that this seems somewhat cruel. Well, I did some research and this was nothing compared with a book tantilizingly entitled, Toilet Training in Less Than a Day by Nathan Azrin. This book is ranked in the top 1000 of books sold even today. But if you read the reviews the results are definitely mixed and even those who liked it said it took many more days than one. I didn't buy the book and we persisted with our methods.

The first week was tough: he definitely wanted his nappie back and we had to buy more cleaner. The second week had more successes and we were getting close: 100% results on number 2 but still problems with number 1. But in the final week he got it.

We turned up to school and announced our success. They then told us pull-ups would have been just fine. So much for rules. Sigh.

In the end, it was the attention and intensive experience that did it but all indicating a message: it will happen when it will happen.

But we were not done yet: incentives came back inforce when we moved on to night training. A much longer story for another time.