Who's the leader?

" Dylan, look here, look here, look at this cool red car! No, stop playing with the wrapping, look at the car!" Does that sound familiar? How often do you try to engage your little one in something that, in your eyes, is obviously exciting, but he just seems to be fascinated by something else altogether? Well, take heart. Every time you find yourself in such a conflict of interest, you might do well do abandon your own pet project (whatever it might be) and start talking about your child's current object of affection. A study done by M. Tomasello and M. Farrar showed that when 1.5 year olds are taught new words for objects, they learn better when an adult talks about and labels objects to which the kids are already attending, as compared to when the adult tries to redirect their attention away to another object and talk about that object instead.
And in case, you were wondering the objects used in the study were equated for their 'fun quotient'. This means that the researchers made sure that the toy that the child was attending to and the toy that the adult was trying to trying to draw his/her attention to were equally fun. This precaution rules out the possibility that in this study children learned better when the toy was more interesting (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986)
Bottomline: Try to 'follow-in' on what your child is attending to, as far as possible. Let him/her take the lead! Of course this makes most sense in your child's first two years, and might not apply later.

What this blog is about

This being my first post, let me begin by telling readers what they can expect to see on this blog. I'm a developmental psychologist. While pursuing my PhD at Cornell, I found myself surrounded by scores of diligent developmental scientists, each of us immersed in tons of exciting data that often revealed the most fascinating insights into the minds of children. Our young research participants ranged in age from the tiniest infants to chatty (and often sassy) preschoolers. We would publish (or more often than not, try to publish) our findings in prestigious academic journals, where they would be read by other diligent scientists, and that would be the end of it until an eager graduate student was inspired by our findings to launch a new study, in which case, his/her results in turn would follow the same fate.
And all through this process, I couldn't get rid of the nagging feeling that our exciting findings were never reaching the eyes and ears of real parents in the real world, for whom these cool insights might be truly useful!
Now that I have graduated with those three elusive letters, p h d, attached to my name, I've finally decided to do just that- somehow bring those research findings to those curious parents, who really want to know what goes on in the minds of their children.
So in this blog, you can expect to find the latest findings, big and small, in the area of child development, presented to you in the most accessible and relevant way possible.
And before I sign off, some of you might be wondering about the name 'wide open'. Well, those two words sum up for me the state of a child's mind from the moment she is born (and in fact, even before!). Those minds are wide open, ready to soak up all the experiences and sensations that will surround them, and most importantly, those minds are absolutely ready to learn from these sounds, images, smells, and yes, even the thoughts all around them.