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Why do the majority of parents think their child is advanced for their age.
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My sister keeps saying her baby is so advanced for his age as he is walking at 11 months, why do almost all parents think their kids are advanced when clearly the vast majority are just average.
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"Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon
Could be worse.
bragging rights don't last long for sprogs though :cool:
"yeah, me boy is in Pentonville doing a stretch for burglary, but he could smile when he was a month old though"
I agree. I don't like it when people talk down their children, except very gently and humorously. I really used to cringe in my standing-at-the-school-gates days when people would say things like, "My daughter is such a bitch!"
A LITTLE bit of bragging is all right as long as you don't get a daily update. Everything our children do is a miracle, and it is natural to want to share it.
its not a miracle though is it?
turning water into wine is though.
Preferably not on Facebook.
these little "miracle" workers you would think would know how to eat a bar of chocolate without doing an impression of Al Jolson :cool:
Jeremy Hardy explained it on the News Quiz ...
https://audioboo.fm/boos/751466-jeremy-hardy-s-news-quiz-buddha-rant
Because they're not very advanced for their age?
So when nanna watches the child try to operate an ipad, or rewind the CBeebies on Sky plus to a favourite song, granny tells everyone "she's so forward" - it's comparative to previous generations - in dexterity and comprehension.
In the 1950s/60s "bubbies in prams" with set routines was the norm and they stayed babies for a long time. Little had changed in 50 years.
Things moved on a leap in the 80s/90s but the real jump is in many of the babies born now.
My granddaughter -18 months - has motor, techno and language skills that greatly surpass those of her supposedly advanced father when he was the same age. In 1960 this would have been an extreme rarity, now I see lots like that.
There are still bubby-style babies being born, slower to walk, talk and making no attempts to operate mobile phones at a year old, but they will catch up in their own time. Goodness knows what the children of the current "advanced" tots will achieve.
I think a lot of things need to be taken into consideration;
-time flies- It's only just dawned on me that my baby isn't a newborn, so even though he's nearly a year it does feel like only yesterday he was born, so it feels like he's doing a ton of stuff which is advanced for his age, whereas he's actually just bang on average.
-interpretation- we have a poster of the Beatles on the wall and little man points at it all the time saying "dada", which we find funny because for years my husband has been told he looks like Paul Mccartney and his hair does look like Pauls in the Beatlemania days. To us, its a sign of a baby genius, but in reality he just has a very limited vocabulary and points at everything, and is drawn to the picture because its black and white....
-Bias- I love babies and children, but I'm still in total awe that my body produced a human, it is amazing when you think about it, so in my tiny housewife brain my baby is always going to be cuter and smarter than everyone elses.
and also I think babies learn things quicker than adults, and as you're with your baby all the time you notice it more. Could be talking out of my arse though.
BiB - I think that's more a case of Nanna being a bit dim, than the child being bright!
Previous generations didn't have iPads and Sky Plus, so how can "Nanna" possibly make such a comparison? I think it's more likely to be the case that "nanna" isn't au fait with an iPad so thinks that anyone who can operate one must be "clever"!!
Each generation of children will respond to their surroundings and mimic the bahaviour of their parents. The fact that we now have more technological "toys" is irrelevant. Learning that if you stand a spinning-top up and pull a piece of string, you can make a top spin is no less "intelligent" than learning that if you press a button on a plastic "thingy", the pictures on a screen will repeat.
What I'm saying is that IT IS mostly a perception that babies are brighter, but that in some areas of human experience they actually are, as they are the children of the digital generation.
Technology isn't related to intelligence. It doesn't matter whether it's the clockwork age, the industrial age or the digital age.
A child will mimic the behaviour of an adult and observe the result. If the result pleases them, they'll repeat it ... and then experiment. Just because the end result is "cleverer" because of the technology available ... eg. making moving pictures appear, instead of (for example) making a clown's face on a piece of card pop up ... doesn't make the child cleverer. The process is the same. It requires the same learning skills.
The next generation of babies will learn using the same process. If they end up pressing a button and a fully-cooked chicken risotto appears out of thin air, that won't make the child cleverer.
Not really. Every child that was ever born learns from what he or she sees around him or her.
Doesn't mean today's children are substantially brighter than the previous generations or that they are thicker than their own children.