Week 10

Learning about death this week was difficult. Its not something anyone wants to think about much less discuss. The book talks about the ways that we can plan for death and how important it is to make our wishes known to our loved ones ahead of time. These ways are a living will or a durable power of attorney for health care. A living will states your own intentions about life support and other treatments it also states your desires regarding a DNR or do not resucitate order. In a durable power of attorney for health care you appoint someone to make those health care decisions for you. It is important to make sure that your wishes are discussed with your power of attorney so that they may follow your wishes and make sure that this person is not only informed that you have chosen them but also where the paperwork is appointing them.I think this is a great practice and something that everyone should think about doing just in case the unthinkable should happen.

Week 9

I was interested in learning about Alzheimer's disease this week. I work in a specialized care unit taking care of patients with Alzheimer's dementia and so learning about this was helpful to me. The book states that the main symptoms of Alzheimer's disease are a gradual decline in memory, learning, attention and judgement, confusion to time and place, difficulties communicating and finding the right words, decline in personal hygiene and self-care skills, inappropriate social skills, and changes in personality. I see these every day in the people that I care for and it is heartbreaking to watch and yet amazing sometimes the things that stay with you. I have a particular person who no longer speaks but when we turn on religious music they will sing every word.

Week 8

I read "Is there love after Baby?" this week and wish I would have read it 8 years ago. I know for my own relationship that I did all that I could and it couldn't be saved with what we knew but in the early years this could have saved some strife. It is nice to know, even having other friends with kids, that other parents go through the same thing as we went through when we had our kids. Just hearing it from someone else that isn't involved makes it feel more true and having a whole study done on it is comforting. Mothers, or at least the ones that I have talked to, seem to all feel the same way that men either expect nothing to change in the partner/lover section or expect too much of the woman in the mother section and in the house work section which makes me think about the work-family conflict that we read about in the book this week. The book says that the work-family conflict is the feeling of being pulled in multiple directions by incompatible demands from one's job and one's family. With 60% of married couples with children being dual-earner households if both parents aren't pulling their weight and especially communicating with each other how they are feeling in a constructive way this can lead to resentment and additional stress making it seem like children are the root of the problems.

Week 7

This week I felt a strong connection to the article "Should you Stay together for the Children". I am a single parent to three amazing children and I know that I fall outside of her parameters as we were in a very bad situation. Their father and I didn't just argue he had severe anger problems that he is now dealing with through counseling. We were better off as a single parent family and now that he is receiving the help that he needs he can now be a positive influence in their life. Having said that I do see the problems that come from divorce in my children and have since we separated. It is hard on everyone and they need a way to express that which comes out in different ways for my kids because they were so young we had regressions and my son had to go into counseling as well to deal with the loss and the other issues that came from being in our situation. I still believe though that divorce should not be used just because you have itchy feet or are going through a rough patch. Marriage isn't something that should be taken lightly and shouldn't be given up on lightly either. I stayed in my marriage probably longer than I should have but at least I know in my heart that I did everything in my power to make our family work as a whole.

week 6

This week I was reading "Inside the Teen Brain" and was really interested in all of the changes that are happening in the brain especially in the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. The limbic system is in overdrive and the prefrontal cortex is not activating to help control that impulsivity that comes from the limbic system. I was already scared of becoming the mother of teenagers because of the hormones and the emotions and that was just with my girls. I didn't know what to expect with my son. Now I am gathering that I should expect a lot of risk taking. It made me wonder if boys and girls are equal in this risk taking or if it is more prevalent in one or the other. Maybe it is just how they take risks that differ. I could see my son being way more physically risky than I could with my daughters as he already seems to push the adreneline bounds with climbing trees and rocks and his choices in personal safety. I am constantly reminding him that he only has one body and it has to last his whole life so he needs to take care of it and he is only eight.

Weel 5

I am a single mom of three kids with the oldest being a boy. I thought that part this week about how divorce affects children and how it affects children was very interesting. I know from experience how hard it is to work through missing activities for children because someone has to bring in a pay check and pay the bills. You feel so much guilt, or at least I do, because I feel like I am missing their whole childhood. I miss all of the field trips, often I miss practices for activities such as basketball, and sometimes I even miss the games. My children are very lucky though in that their father and I still get along very well for their sake. We have a better co-parenting relationship now that we are divorced than we ever did when we were married. It was interesting to see that boys with their mothers tend to have the highest chance of falling in to a negative reinforcement trap since that doesn't happen with my boy but sometimes happens with my youngest girl.

week 4

I was reading about effective teaching and learning especially regarding writing and it got me thinking about my son. He has been getting lower scores in writing this year due to his desire to do it perfectly and if it can't be done to his standards then he gets frustrated and refuses to complete the assignment. He and I have spent all year trying to find a strategy for writing that would work for him. He has been an excellent student receiving above average grades until this year and it has been discouraging to watch him struggle. When I read about the strategy to use POW+TREE it made sense to me and since he is a lot like me I hope it will make sense to him too. As a parent it is encouraging to find so many resources to help my child succeed as a student. I think that it is so important to help support our children and to set high yet attainable goals for our children. For my children we always break it down into smaller goals so that the big goals feel easier.

Week 3

I know most of this week was on Boys vs Girls and how they differ in development but I was really interested in Piaget's theory specifically the preoperational stage of development. The first characteristic of preoperational children is egocentrism which is difficulty seeing the world from someone else's point of view. I used to teach preschoolers and know this to be very true but what I found really interesting was the second characteristic of centration or tunnel vision in preoperational children. I was very interested in the conservation experiments that Piaget used to demonstrate centration such as using two glasses of water that contain the same amount of water in the exact same glasses and asking the child if they have the same amount of water and then taking the water from one of the glasses and pouring it into a shorter wider glass so that it is the same amount of water it just appears different and asking the child again. I kind of thought that this test could be an exaggeration and so I tried it and the penny test on my children who are 5, 6, and 8 and all three of them told me that in the water test the first glasses had the same amount and the second glasses had different amounts even though I poured the water right in front of them. On the penny test my younger two thought that that the top row of the second set of pennies had more but my eight year old was able to recognize that they had the same amount. Piaget stated that this stage lasts from 2-7 years old so it was interesting to see that my son is still switching over from the preoperational stage to the concrete operational period. The final characteristic of preoperational thinking was appearance as reality or that the object's appearance tells the object's reality for example if a piece of rubber is shaped like play food it must actually be food and they will try to eat it.

Week 2

I thought that the synaptic pruning that was touched on this week was interesting. I knew that the brain grows and learns the most in the first 5 years or so of life but I never really thought about the information actually being weeded out. It makes me wonder what things that are learned during that time could actually be useful later on in life. I know that it says that things are pruned based on the activity of the neural connections and that those connections that are lost are thought to represent learning but I think it would be interesting to see a map of the skills that are let go of due to pruning. What if one of the skills that our brain decided wasn't as useful as another one and so it was cut actually was what we needed to master a higher level of thinking or of physical performance. What if that synapse wasn't active during the time that pruning was occurring in that section of the brain but it was lying dormant waiting for the other skills to develop so that this higher level could be achieved. Having said that I can't imagine trying to use our brains if they didn't do some pruning there would simply be too much going on in my head and I think I would have a constant headache from the increased brain processes.

Week 1

I was really interested in reading about the continuity vs. discontinuity this week. As a child I was always very outgoing and friendly talking to everyone but as I entered the middle of my teenage years I became more reserved and introverted. I really only interacted with a few people and have remained that way through my twenties. In fact after graduating from high school my social circle greatly diminished. To be fair I didn't go to college and I have never been one to make friends with people that I work with; at least not the kind of friendst hat you spend time with outside of work. I never knew there was a theory surrounding it I just assumed that it was just something that happened as I grew up. I thought it was something that happened to everyone as they grew up. To read that shifts in life circumstances can be the trigger in that makes a lot of sense because I had a lot of changes the year that I really noticed it happening or at least when I'm looking back when I realized that it was happening. I was also interested in Brofenbrenner's theory about the 4 levels of a person's environment and how they influence development. Using myself as an example still when my personality changed it wasn't as though my microsystem had changed but my mesosystem had changed drastically I formed new friendships by starting a new school and had to reform who I thought I was because I had always thought that I was basically who my friends were. Not the healthiest view but that was how I saw things. Overall I found this chapter interesting in how all the theories are similar but the important but small differences between them all. There are so many little differences in theories like the differences between information-processing theory and Vygotsky's theory. Vygotsky builds on the basic theory that children's thinking becomes more sophisticated as they develop but then adds in how the sociocultural aspects influence development because as the text states," children's thinking does not develop in a vacuum." .