Why do some children stop believing in Father Christmas?

I have to confess to a slight obsession with this subject - I suspect because of my own difficulty with the concept (my parents never set anything up to make me believe in Father Christmas) and also a slight scepticism about who, exactly, parents are doing it for - though many parents would admit they want their children to carry on believing for their own sake, not the children's sake.

A fascinating area of research has been following children's response to an invented fantasy character, the Candy Witch, who is kind, visits at Halloween, and gives you toys if you leave out some sweets for her. For younger children (4-5-ish) generally children tended to believe she was real - the more other make-believe figures they believed in, the more likely they were to believe. Children didn't need "backup" in the form of a parent-organised "visit" if they believed in a lot of other fantasy figures.

By the time children are 7 or 8 few of them believed in a lot of other fantasy figures (Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy etc.), but if they did, and they got a "visit", they were more likely to believe in the Candy Witch. It seems as if, should parents wish to keep the belief in fantasy figures alive in older children, they are going to need to put a lot more effort into it, and provide a lot more "evidence" that Father Christmas really exists.

Although some people (Richard Dawkins, I'm looking at you) think that children are really quite credible, and will believe more or less what their parents tell them, without any evidence, in fact children do seem to need evidence - they are not as credible as some people would like to think.

If you're interested:

Return of the Candy Witch

The book I wish I'd written

Or, no, I did not steal their title.

Recently this book landed on my desk for review. In fact I no longer pass books on for review, though this used to be part of my job, so I just kept it. I am pretty impressed (though already planning how I can persuade them to let me contribute to the next edition).

The chapters and topics span the whole of childhood, but majoring on infancy and adolescence, which is a fair reflection of both parents' concerns and the research that is out there. Most of the topics are related to behaviour, discipline, and social issues - my own research mainly concentrates on children's thinking and language so obviously I'd feel that was lacking - but I love the concept.

They begin by talking about the concept of evidence and why we need to look at more than just anecdotes in working out what works and what doesn't; there's a little history of child care advice and whether it's evidence-based or not (lots of crazy ideas out there in the past), which was interesting to me, at least.

The chapters that look like they might only be focussed on infancy (sleep, temperament, toilet training) also touch on related issues for older children - although I don't read most parenting books, I do get the impression that a lot of advice on some topics stops with infants - avoiding some quite distressing issues that mainly happen in older children. Soiling, for example, in an already-toilet-trained child can be really upsetting and hard to understand, though it's fairly easily dealt with.

I really appreciated the chapters that dealt with less-than-ideal circumstances though as the overall level of the book is pitched fairly high (probably because of where the authors are coming from) and the text is quite dense (yes, I know it's a book about children not for children but perhaps some graphics would have been nice), I'm not too sure how likely parents with desperate mental health issues are to read the book. But the sections on divorce and adoption are probably very good primers for well-educated parents in those situations, and there's also advice for those with child relatives and friends whose parents are struggling with depression, substance abuse, etc.

I think I may have either a British edition or the language has been tailored to be international (mentions of GPs etc.) but one section I felt didn't go far enough to reassure the very nervy subset of middle-class parents who are paranoid about vaccines - perhaps in the US the paranoia is not as great but here, it is really crazy (though thankfully calming down a bit). Some of these parents will never be reassured by anything professionals or researchers can say, but others might benefit from more calming statements and a clearer explanation than the fairly bald statements that "vaccines are safe". Or possibly just a direction to go and read Bad Science?

One in six children "have difficulty learning to speak"?

This statistic has been recently widely reported in the media, as well as by concerned charities (though one charity, I CAN, appears to have removed their press release from their website).

Can this really be true? Does it mean children's language is getting worse? Is it because of the 10% who were reported to have a TV in their room before the age of 1?

Well... probably not.

There are various serious problems with the Yougov poll. Firstly, although this wouldn't necessarily weight it in the direction of finding too many speech and language problems, it's an email poll. The researchers claim to have a 35-50% response rate and, although they don't say this, I'm assuming they told people before they started the poll that it was about children's language (well, they'd have to tell them it was about children under 7 as they only published responses from parents of children that age). So, from the start, parents who think their child might have language problems are biased to respond.

Secondly, the questionnaire asks: How old was your child when they said their first word?
The children being asked about are, at this point, aged up to 7 years. 71% of the children asked about were over 3. So the vast majority of these children said their first word more than a year ago.

It is very difficult to get parents to give accurate information about their child's concurrent language (at the same time you are asking). The best way to do it is to give them a checklist from which they can recognise words that their child understands or says. People are much better at recognition than recall. And they are much better at concurrent report than past report. But this survey uses recall (it asks the parents to tell them, without prompts, the first word their child said) and it uses past report.

Now, some researchers have successfully used past report. For example, a team working on children with autism and looking back at their milestones used prompts like "can you remember where you were staying, what you were doing, around your child's first birthday/first Christmas. Now, can you remember what kinds of play and toys your child liked then, and what they were doing. Can you remember if your chlid could do A, B, C at that time?". That study used home video of events like birthdays and Christmas to verify some of the things parents reported their children could do, but still couldn't verify them all.

Finally, the Yougov poll relies on parents' judgment about what constitutes "experiencing difficulty learning to talk or understanding speech". Parents reported that mainly they decided this by comparing their child to another child the same age or to their other children. Children's speech and language development varies hugely within a wide normal range. To know your child is in the bottom 5% of children learning to talk (usually the cut-off for clinical difficulties) you'd have to compare them to 19 other children who would all have to be better than your child. It's probably true that slightly more than 5% of children have difficulties learning to talk (probably because there are many reasons a child can have difficulties) but even so, parents do not usually have 19 other children to compare their child to (either "another", implying one, or siblings!).

Parents' judgments about whether their child is experiencing difficulties are hugely confounded by expectations and knowledge about typical language development. Parents expect boys to have difficulty learning to speak - and more parents reported their boys did have difficulty. 31% did report that they knew their child wasn't reaching milestones. Sadly, milestones reported in cheery helpful baby books and on cheery helpful baby websites are usually average. Surprise, surprise, half of children are below average. Being below average isn't "experiencing difficulty".

And parents don't all know very much about children's language development. Current theories suggest that providing a correct model when children make mistakes in language is the best way to help them. Thankfully most parents do know this. But 14% thought the best response was to correct them - research shows this rarely works. Even more worryingly, and flying in the face of evidence that shows children flourish when bilingual, and do better in a wide range of cognitive and language skills, most parents thought that when parents' first language wasn't English, they should still speak English to their child at home if they live in the UK. One wonders how many Welsh-speaking parents they asked. Thankfully far fewer of the parents who didn't speak English as a first language thought using English at home was a good strategy.

So we've seen that parents whose child has a problem are more likely to answer this poll, most parents were recalling their child's language a really long time ago, probably inaccurately, and a worryingly large proportion of parents failed to give an answer that would support their child's language development when asked about best practice in the home.

In fact, the actual ages reported for first words - apart from a few children whose parents said they have a disability - are almost all within the range of "don't panic". Just 4% of children spoke their first words, as recalled by parents, past 24 months (and a few of the 11% whose first words were 18-24 months may have been in the "let's have a look at it" category). And nearly 69% reported their child put two words together before 18 months (in fact, the middle of the age range for this is probably about 21 months - so, erm, talkative middle class kids whose parents have email, much?)

But one part of this survey rings a little true - some parents who thought their child had a speech problem felt unsupported. But again, perhaps given the figures this isn't a cause for concern. Only 23% thought their child didn't get any help - so, as 17% thought their child had a difficulty, 13% of parents thought their child had a difficulty but did receive some help. Since really only about 5-7% of children actually have a difficulty, this is pretty good - possibly another 8% of children are receiving help for a difficulty they don't have!

*Gernsbacher, M. A., Sauer, E. A., Geye, H. M., Schweigert, E. K., & Hill Goldsmith, H. (2008). Infant and toddler oral- and manual-motor skills predict later speech fluency in autism. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry & Allied Disciplines, 49(1), 43-50.

(Note: if you fancy downloading the raw data, it's here - an excel file)

Why does everything always have to be the blimmin' same?

A lot of parents of toddlers and preschoolers will have had the very frustrating experience of their child insisting on everything being done in exactly the same way again and again. Vegetables must be on the top of the plate, shoes must be put on before coat, teeth brushed after bath, bedtime story must be read in exactly the same way - no changing the voices - the same bowl for breakfast and one cup for juice, a different one for milk, and woe betide anyone who tries to change this.

Well, you'll be reassured to know it IS just a phase - it's a very common phase - and there may be some explanation for it.

As children grow older, they become better at behaviours called "executive functions". This set of behaviours particularly helps children to be more flexible and less focussed on the here and now. So one classic test of executive function asks children to sort cards that have different coloured shapes first by the colour that is on them - and then to switch to sorting by the shape that is on them. Younger children tend to stick to the same sorting method; they are very driven by what they are already doing. Children in this stage find it really difficult to play games like Simon Says - they can't switch from "do what I say" to "don't do what I say", and they find resisting tempting behaviours really hard - put a sweet in front of them and ask them to wait for permission to eat it, and it will be gone before you blink. They respond to what they see, and find it hard to control their own behaviour to respond in a different way.

It's been found that these types of executive functioning are quite closely related to the ritualised behaviours that toddlers and preschool children are so good at. It seems as if as children get older and have more control over their own behaviour, ritualised behaviours decrease - a great relief to parents. Recent research suggests that this is broadly true, but with a slight difference as children get older. Younger children showed some relationship between ritualised behaviours and executive function but in older children this was even stronger - although it's not possible to tell from this study, this could be because if older children (especially those of young to mid-primary school age) have these ritualised behaviours, it's definitely because of somewhat poorer executive functioning, but in younger children all of the children have these behaviours to some extent.

We do know that executive functions improve with practice, though. So it's not necessarily a case of just waiting it out until your child, and their brain, are mature enough to live without the ritualised behaviours. Although no-one's done any studies linking this directly to ritualised behaviours, another study trained 4 to 5 year old children using a stop-go game in which they had to sometimes respond and sometimes hold themselves back. Training on different games - such as the card sorting game - helped children to stop themselves from responding inappropriately on the stop-go game.

So although waiting it out should mean you can put away that essential Iggle Piggle plate eventually, helping children to think more flexibly by practicing games and behaviours where they have to exercise self-control will at least give them the skills they seem to need to grow out of the rituals.

Should I correct their spelling when they are just beginning to write?

When children are just beginning to read and write, they can come out with the most adorable spellings:

Mummys e z de eg (easter egg)
livin rom
cichn
jragon
sdik
luv

Usually these bear some relationship to the word the child is aiming at. Often they have the sounds of the word (phonology) but not the spelling conventions (orthography). For example, in "livin rom" and "cichn" all of the sounds in the words CAN spell those sounds but don't usually in those particular contexts. So C can sound like /k/ or /s/ but usually sounds like /s/ before an I. CH is a very commmon spelling of the /ch/ sound but just happens not to be how it's spelled in the word "kitchen".

Some of the spellings are more guesses at how to spell a particular sound. So, although some children will pronounce "living" as "livin'", many more will spell it that way - the /ng/ and /n/ sounds are really close and it's easy, if you can't quite hear the difference, or can't quite work out what the difference is really, to go "oh, whatever" and put down the one you know how to spell.

Other spellings represent children's concepts of the sounds of words that are actually, in some cases, more accurate than adults'. The word "stick", most adults will tell you, has a /t/ sound after the /s/. In fact, it's not a /t/ but is a sound somewhere between a /d/ and a /t/ - it's not found on its own in English, though if you are a Hindi speaker you will have this as a separate sound. In English it only exists after /s/. So children who spell "stick" as SDIK are actually very cleverly working out what the second sound is in the word. Likewise "dragon" doesn't begin with the same /d/ as in, say, "dam" but in a slightly different sound, somewhere towards /j/. In fact, when you ask children who can't quite read or write yet about the sounds of words sometimes they are more right than adults.

So, if your child makes this kind of mistake in their spelling, should you correct them? Probably not. They will probably be learning phonic patterns for simple spellings in school, and each pattern they learn will help them to get another set of spellings right - so, when they have learned that there are lots of words ending in -TCH but very few beginning TCH-, they will start spelling words with /ch/ in the middle or at the end with TCH and those with /ch/ at the beginning with CH. But the evidence is that just inventing the spellings themselves can help them with sounding out words and working out what sounds there are in words - essential skills for beginning reading and spelling. Personally, I'd just leave them to it, and have a quick giggle or an "awww" at their productions.

If you're interested in reading more, here's a representative article:

Joseph K. Torgesen, Charlotte Davis, Individual Difference Variables That Predict Response to Training in Phonological Awareness, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Volume 63, Issue 1, October 1996, Pages 1-21

What is evidence-based parenting?

In essence I have made this title up, analogous to "evidence-based practice", "evidence-based medicine" and the like. The principle is that we should be able to learn what parenting practices have the most effective outcome for children by looking at research.

"But my child is special!" I hear you cry. "What suits him isn't going to suit other children!". Well, perhaps true. However, let me tell you a little bit about how we can study child development scientifically. These are general principles of scientific study but I'm nicking them shamelessly from the lovely Professor Regan.

First we are looking for studies that have some kind of control. So, we all know children grow and that they develop. It's no good saying "We gave all these children spinach, and look, they all grew, and now, five years later, they can all write! Must have been the spinach!" As you can probably guess they probably would have grown, and learned to write, for different reasons. We want studies that have some children treated in one way but some in another.

In some cases it's perfectly fine to do this (spinach versus cabbage). In others it would be very wrong (spinach versus locking in a cupboard - well, as a spinach disliker, perhaps not so very wrong - let's say vegetables versus locking in a cupboard). In this circumstance we must look for sad cases where locking in a cupboard (or no vegetables ever) happens by accident, or is overlooked by accident. We need to be extra cautious in such cases that the children who had no vegetables were not different in other ways to the children who had vegetables. We don't want children who have vegetables to also have had lots of foreign holidays and a French nanny, otherwise we will wrongly conclude that having no vegetables makes you rubbish at learning French.

Second we want the studies to come out with statistically significant results - and preferably for the size of the results to be meaningful. If the vegetable-eating group is a small group and has very variable French skills, and the no-vegetable group is also a small group with very variable French skills, then even if the vegetable group is better at French, this could happen because children's French skills vary naturally. After all, in each group the French skills vary naturally. So, we need the difference to be big enough to be reliable. This is usually reported when a study is written up for a scientific journal. It is also helpful for the journal to report how meaningful the results are - you wouldn't give all children 9 servings of vegetables every day if it helped them to learn one extra French word in 3 years. This aspect of results (called effect size) should be reported in journals these days, but isn't always, and often wasn't in the past.

To go back to your own very special child, if you read a study that said that eating vegetables made no difference to French learning ability, but you were still convinced it did and wanted your child to eat 9 servings of vegetables a day simply for that purpose, consider this: If for children in general the vegetables do not affect French learning ability, this could mean that for some children it did and some it didn't. However, to get a zero average, it has to mean not that some children are positively affected and some are not affected, but that some are positively affected and some are negatively affected. Do you want your child in the latter group? Thought not.

Where the outcome doesn't matter that much - does it really matter that a child walks a week or two early? probably not - and the intervention is minor - a nursery-rhyme a day isn't going to hurt anyone - then if it's fun and doesn't drive you mad, go for it. Where the outcome does matter - particularly with children with disabilities, often the stakes are high - or where the intervention is costly for parent or child - again, some of the disability interventions are time-consuming and/or expensive and/or wearing for parent and child - then it's helpful to look at evidence before committing yourself and your child.

Third we want to see the studies in a peer-reviewed journal. As a scientist, I love to hate the peer review process. On Facebook I am a member of a tongue-in-cheek group called "Down with Reviewer 2!". Peer reviewers are anonymous (in many cases they don't know the author's name either) and can occasionally verge on vindictive. However, good peer reviews spot the flaws in your study's design, suggest really interesting reanalyses, and point out articles you haven't read. In an ideal world, you thank them profusely and include their comments, and your article comes out in the journal whereupon all your friends ring you up and congratulate you on a job well done. In practice, your article goes to 3 or 4 journals and looks nothing like it did at the start when it finally comes out. However, this does mean that you know when you read an article in a peer-reviewed journal, some of your colleagues have judged its quality. Scientists will still read these articles and criticize the science and the writing, but they know they are not the first to do this.

Finally, a bit about myself. I'm a lecturer at a British university in developmental psychology, and specialise in not making up my mind about what I want to study. Some of the things I'm particularly interested in are learning disability, language and literacy, and children in unusual circumstances (carried round in a cradleboard for the first year? Ooh shiny!). This post which was meant to be an introduction to my blog, which was also meant to be a regular slot, has sat in the cupboard (along with the spinach-haters) for quite some time due to an unfortunate accident suffered by my arm over the summer. Better late than never, eh?