Children Act...Every Child Matters

A couple of pictures to help us remember!!...

Dale farm saga continues!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2061909/Dale-Farm-Just-hours-18m-eviction-complete-travellers-queue-RETURN-site.html

Article in the daily mail!! They have spent £18million to evict them and they are already moving back!

Mary Ainsworth

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00f8n6q

This link is a really informative Radio 4 program talking about Mary Ainswaorths Strange Situation work.

Much research in psychology has focused on how forms of attachment differ between infants. For example, Schaffer and Emerson (1964) discovered what appeared to be innate differences in sociability in babies; some babies preferred cuddling more than others, from very early on, before much interaction had occurred to cause such differences.

However, it was Mary Ainsworth provided the most famous body of research offering explanations of individual differences in attachment.

It’s easy enough to know when you are attached to someone because you know how you feel when you are apart from that person, and, being an adult, you can put your feelings into words and describe how it feels.

However, most attachment research is carried out using infants and young children, so psychologists have to devise subtle ways of researching attachment, using involving the observational method.

Mary Ainsworth devised an assessment technique called the Strange Situation Classification (SSC) in order to investigate how attachments might vary between children. The video below also demonstrates the situation. (Think it is the same one we watched last week but just a good memory jogger!)

My Transsexual Summer

My Transsexual Summer on tonight channel 4 10pm!
New series following 7 transgender men & women through various stages of gender reassignment.

Jacques Lacan

The video above is a brief overview of Lancan's Mirror stages - It is not academic in any way (naughty words included be warned!!) However it gives you a 'lighter' version than whats below!!


Jacques Lacan (1901-81) tried to give Freud a contemporary intellectual significance, extricating his thought from the gloss of later commentators, and extending it in ways suggested but not achieved by Freud himself.
The unconscious was not Freud's great contribution to European thought, but his discovery that the unconscious had a structure. That structure, continued Lacan, is a discourse that operates across the unconscious-conscious divide.
Lacan's terminology is fluid, not to say elusive, but he adopts Freud's trinity of id, ego and superego. But Lacan argues that our continual attempt to fashion a stable, ideal ego throughout our adult lives is self-defeating.
Lacan's unconscious is structured like a language, which gives language a key role in construction our picture of the world, but also allows the unconscious to enter into that understanding and dissolve essential distinctions between fantasy and reality. As do other psychoanalysts, Lacan sees mental illness as a product of early childhood difficulties (notably imbalance between the Imaginary and the Symbolic) but children progressively gain a self-identity by passing through pre-mirror, mirror and post-mirror stages of development.
Lacan also had a trinity of his own: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

•The Real is the unnameable, the outside of language.

•The Imaginary is the undifferentiated early state of the child, a combination of subject and parent, which remains latent in adult life, manifesting when we falsely identify with others.

•The Symbolic is the demarcated world of the adult with its enforced distinctions and repressions. The unconscious is not simply reflected in the language we use, but is equally controlled by it.

Discourse, including social, public language, shapes and enters into the structure of the unconscious, and is inextricably mixed with the unsatisfied sexual desire that emerges disguised in dreams, jokes and art.
Lacan replaced Freud's postulated oral, anal and genital stages of child development with his own pre-mirror, mirror and post-mirror stages.

Pre Mirror - During its first six months of existence, the child gradually fills the gap between bodily sensations and its perceptions of the outside world with symbols: fantasies with which its consciousness is merged.

Mirror - Then, over the next year or so, the child begins to recognize the outside as an extension or mirror of its own bodily image, absorbing at the same time an awareness of outside language.

Post Mirror - But in the next, post-mirror stage, when the child begins to speak for itself, these traces of meaning are repressed because they represent something from the child has separated. But desire remains, hedged about by prohibitions and compromises, into adulthood, and provides the Id with its own logic, language and intentionality.

From this early stage too comes any neurosis or psychosis that the adult may subsequently suffer from, these resulting from imbalances between the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real.

Criticisms of Lancan
•Lacan was a perplexity, even to his own profession.
•The mirror stage is pure supposition.
•Speech, according to Freud, appears with the Oedipus complex, and thus much later than Lacan's model would allow.
•The unconscious is not structured like a language, not on the evidence to date.
•There is no room in Lacan for individual experience, and documentation by case history is very poor.

How the government plan to tackle Child Poverty

This report is the Government’s first national Child Poverty Strategy, it sets out a new approach to tackling poverty from now right up until 2020. Its main priorities are strengthening families, encouraging responsibility, promoting work, guaranteeing fairness and providing support to the most vulnerable.

It is set alongside the Child Poverty Act 2010, which established income targets for 2020 and a duty to minimise socio-economic disadvantage. This strategy meets the requirement to set out the proposed measures to make progress between 2011 and 2014. It is also in line with the recent spending Review that placed a very high priority on improving the life chances of children and the protection of vulnerable families, while also making crucial progress in reducing the nation’s debt.

The following strategy has been put together across government and covers the period 2011-14, capturing the breadth of flagship policies and reform programmes put in place to tackle poverty.

The full report is 79 pages...very long but the summary at least is worth a read! (link is below - the download is free!)

https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationDetail/Page1/CM%208061

Piaget & Vygotsky in 90 seconds

Essential information in 90 seconds love it!!

Cognitive & Language acquisition in typical and aided language learning

http://0-clt.sagepub.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/content/25/1/31.abstract

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is something that has seen many developments in recent years as a result of the technology world that we live in today. This article looks at how language development is changing from previous theories such as Skinner's due to the technology we have avalible today. It also looks at how individuals with 'learning difficulties' can develop language skills in different ways with the help of new technology.
However after reading all 30 pages of the article there is still no concrete evidence to say that technology is the reason for childrens development when it comes to language or if it is just an added bonus!
It does raise some interesting points and is a good basis however a great deal more research is needed before we can say that technology does have an impact on language development in children.

Overview: The child in the family

This article was on the Unicef website it picks up on some really interesting points about the relation to children & childhood and the importance of family. It also has some other links about gender etc. A really interesting website

http://www.unicef.org/childfamily/index.html


Bobby x

History of Childhood

Here is what I found relating to the history of Childhood...

Additional Reading

Barbara A. Hanawalt.(1995) Growing up in medieval London: the experience of Childhood in history. Oxford University Press.

James Walvin (1982) A child's world : a social history of English childhood, 1800-1914. London: Penguin

Grant, Julia The Journal of the history of and Childhood and Youth: Entering into the Fray: Historians of Childhood and Public Policy. Volume 3, Number 1  p107-126

Related Websites

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/childhood/

http://open2.net/theinventionofchildhood/childhood_inventions.html

http://www.pineforge.com/newman6study/resources/childhood.htm

The BBC website is about the Invention of Childhood which accompanies the audio book/CD that Lin encouraged us to listen to. It looks at childhood through the ages beginning in the 11^th Century right up until the present day. It covers a vast range of subjects and areas that have affected British Childhood from the Arrival of Christianity, Black Death, Rousseau, Welfare State and much more in-between! The website has some good information on and links to other websites and programmes of interest however the CD is definitely worth a listen!

Theres more on TV than X Factor!

Hi All

I just thought I would share a few things that are on the TV over the next week (apart from Strictly and X Factor!)

Mixed Race Britain - Saturday 8th October 9pm BBC2 How the world got so mixed up the story of how throughout history the races of the world's empires have mixed together.

Twincredibles - Monday 10th October 9pm BBC2 Documentary following 5 sets of twins and looking at nature v nurture.

Mixed Britannia - Thursday 13th October 9pm BBC2 (3 part series) started this week but I have put a link to the first episode below to Iplayer, looking at mixed race community in Britain.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b015qms8/

Thought they might be worth a little watch, a few things to do with history, ethnicity and nature nurture.
Happy Viewing xx

Child of our time!

Hi All

I don't know if anyone else watched the BBC series 'Child Of Our Time' Prof Robert Winston (love that guy!) has followed the development of 25 children from different ethnic, social and geographical backgrounds born in the year 2000 and how factors such as personality are different.

The website is really good with some links to other great websites on.

If you haven't seen it you can watch a lot of past episodes on the website but you can get more on you tube too!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0072bk8

Happy Viewing x

Right then here goes...

Well this is my first of many (hopefully!) blogs...I am new to the world of blogging so forgive me if I ramble.

I am very excited about starting my degree and finally feel like I'm on the right road to where I want to be.

I am well aware of the challenges and hard work ahead but I'm ready for it...bring it on!!

I have been busy searching the web and have found so many interesting things, its amazing whats out there! I will share more along the way (when I work out how to that is!) I look forward to working with the amazing people I have met over the past week and making sure we all survive this journey together!!

Farewell for now fellow bloggers!x