NOTICES/FLYERS/HANDOUTS
Brain Development-How physical activity builds your child's mental abilities
Baby Journal
Songs
Things to Do with the Kids
Is Your Toddler Getting Enough?
Ages & Stages
Potty Training
Preschools
10 Things Not to Say to Kids
Toy Jungle
Think More Consume Less
How Parents Can Make the Holidays Less Stressful
Simplify Your Holidays
Recipes
Toy Guide
Media Use Suggestions for Parents
THINGS TO DO
1. Kids Space Museum – Pasadena
2. Aquarium of the Pacific – Long Beach
3. CA Science Center - Near USC
www.californiasciencecenter.org
4. Natural History Museum - Near USC
5. Pretend City – Irvine
6. Tanaka Farms (Organic) – Irvine
7. Lomita Train Museum
8. Santa Barbara Zoo
9. Santa Ana Zoo
10. South Coast Botanical Garden - Palos Verdes
www.southcoastbotanicgarden.org
11. Skirball Center - Noah's Ark - 1st Thursday of the Month (need reservation)
12. Virginia Ave Park - Santa Monica
2200 Virginia Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90404-4808(310) 458-8688
13. Ocean Park - Near Santa Monica Airport
14. Trump Golf Course - Public Access
www.trumpnationallosangeles.com
15. Acacia Park and Pool - in El Segundo
600 Block of W. Acacia Avenue
(310) 524-2738
16. Holly Glen Park Tot Lot – Hawthorne
http://www.cityofhawthorne.com/depts/publicworks/commservices/park_locations/holly_glen.asp
Gender Differences
Communication
Who's harder? First boys, then girls
From birth, a girl baby tends to be more interested in looking at colors and textures, like those on the human face, while a boy baby is drawn more to movement, like a whirling mobile, says Dr. Sax. (These differences play out in the way kids draw: Girls tend to use a rainbow of hues to draw nouns, while boys lean toward blue, black, and silver for their more verblike pictures of vehicles crashing and wars.) In a nutshell, girls are rigged to be people-oriented, boys to be action-oriented. Because girls study faces so intently, they're better at reading nonverbal signals, such as expression and tone of voice. Boys not only learn to talk later than girls and use more limited vocabularies, they also have more trouble connecting feelings with words.
"While most girls share their feelings and details of events, my three sons honestly don't see that as important. I spend my days asking, 'What happened then?' or 'What did he say after you said that?'" O'Donnell says.
Important note: Because boys hold eye contact for shorter periods than girls, parents may worry about autism, since this can be a red flag. "It's a relief for moms to know that this is normal and comes from the way the brains are set up," Gurian says.
As girls get to be 8 or so, things can get harder: The flip side of being so adept at communicating is that girls exert a lot of energy on it. There can be a great deal of drama around who's mad at whom, who said what and why, and more. Start when your daughter's a toddler to establish an open communication, so she learns she can come to you for advice.
School
Who's harder? Mostly boys
Boys and modern education are not an idyllic match. An indoor-based day and an early emphasis on academics and visual-auditory (as opposed to hands-on) learning ask a lot of a group that arrives at school less mature. In their early years, most boys lag behind girls in developing attentiveness, self-control, and language and fine motor skills.
The relatively recent acceleration of the pre-K and kindergarten curricula has occurred without awareness that the brain develops at different sequences in girls and boys, Dr. Sax says. Music, clay work, finger painting, and physical exercise -- early-ed activities that once helped lively kids acclimate to school -- are vanishing. Few teachers are trained in handling the problems that result.
One area where girls do less well in school concerns spatial learning, such as geometry. Girls may use different parts of their brains to process space perceptions. The key is for parents to present both boys and girls with plenty of no-pressure opportunities to try out the areas that are challenging.
The bottom line? On balance, the general consensus seems to be that boys are more of a handful early on, and girls more challenging beginning in the preteen years. Which means that, as the mom of daughters who are 12, 9, and 7, I have the next ten years cut out for me!
Discipline
Who's harder? Boys
Why don't boys seem to listen? Turns out their hearing is not as good as girls' right from birth, and this difference only gets greater as kids get older. Girls' hearing is more sensitive in the frequency range critical to speech discrimination, and the verbal centers in their brains develop more quickly. That means a girl is likely to respond better to discipline strategies such as praise or warnings like "Don't do that" or "Use your words." "Boys tend to be more tactile -- they may need to be picked up and plunked in a time-out chair," Gurian says. They're also less verbal and more impulsive, he adds, which is especially evident in the toddler and preschool years.
These developmental differences contribute to the mislabeling of normal behavior as problematic, a growing number of observers say. Five boys for every one girl are diagnosed with a "disorder" (including conduct disorder, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, sensory integration disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder), says Stein, also the author of Unraveling the ADD/ADHD Fiasco. Some kids -- most often boys -- may simply fall on the more robust end of normal. They need more opportunities to expend energy and aggression, as well as firmer limits.
