Category: Human development
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How I stopped smoking…
I managed to inveigle my first pack of cigarettes when I was twelve years old from my Grandfather. During the summer months prior to Eisenhower’s first term for the presidency, “Eisenhower for President” and “Stevenson for President” cigarette packs in colors of red, white, and blue could be purchased at tobacconists. I told my grandfather…
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The Limits of Choices We Make
What do you choose? An illusion fostered by education and current culture is that you determine your life outcome by your goals and choices. Set your goals and make your choices. Your choices are where the “rubber hits the road” and presumably determine your success. But, all you really “control” are your choices, and not…
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What Helps a Child toward Adult Achievement
Children are socialized from the earliest ages to language, culture, movement, attention, perception, emotional expression, expectations, values and motivations. The idea that vocation and what the child chooses to pursue is somehow external to the process of socialization is not in accord with everything that we know about the critical nature of early life experience.…
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Some Guidelines for Infant Feeding During the First Year of Life
The best food for babies is mother’s milk. This wonderful food is specially designed for babies. Human milk contains immune protective factors, a balance of amino acids, not found in other milks, fatty acids, lactoferrin for biotic health, and other enzymes and micronutrients not remotely duplicated in formula. Human milk changes in its constituents as…
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Phases of Early Adulthood
Early Adulthood Phase One occurs with establishment of a job or career. A job or career impacts upon the subject’s definitions, frameworks, and working methods of adaptation. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, military and police officers, priests, monks, and reverends, psychologists, professors, plumbers, carpenters, farmers, ranchers, contractors, salespersons, and business owners really think differently. Concordance of thought among occupations…
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The Enduring Effect of Home Economics Research
The “discipline” of Home Economics is a curiosity of American culture, a discipline, as American as apple pie –and like apple pie it occupies a hindmost position to more substantive food. Departments and Schools of Home Economics and more recent incarnations, such as colleges of “Health and Human Development” and “Family and Consumer Sciences”, are ubiquitous…
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Maturity and Adaptation for the Post-Modern Adult
Like the branches of interconnecting trees in a forest, the adult mind is interwoven with ideas and associations. The mind’s network is buttressed by behavior and habitat that support intention. The progress toward maturity is marked by a process of accumulation of ideas, skills and habits, relationships and responsibilities, and things. Wisely selected and articulated,…
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Got to Get Your Motion Quotient
After years existing in the happy land of child development theory, as new parents, my wife and I have had the opportunity to bridge theory with practice. As an aside, we much prefer the eloquence, clarity, and cleanliness of theory to the nastiness of practice. Nevertheless, practice we must, since our baby, First Born, does…