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Early Learning
Are there good TV shows for children?
Screen time is part of life for most families. But how much is too much and is there such a thing as quality television? Television can be part of a healthy lifestyle and gives you the chance to model a healthy and balanced approach to screen use.
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Early Learning
Quality programs for birth to threes
Many parents are anxious about sending very young children to a long-day-care centre. Professor of Early Childhood Sheila Degotardi answers the questions: Should parents be worried? What does research tell us about the impact on very young children?
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Early Learning
Giving children the best start in life
Research shows one in five Australian children are starting school developmentally vulnerable. The Australian Research Alliance for Children & Youth is leading a project to ensure every child starts school ready to learn, engage and face challenges.
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Early Learning
Why play is more than just good fun
The verdict is in. Play is more than just fun. There’s a growing evidence base that play is critically important in promoting safe, stable and nurturing relationships and in encouraging development of children’s future executive functioning skills.
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Early Learning
Child development: the first 1000 days
Fascinating research suggests that starting from conception, a foetus responds to changes in environment, using cues provided by the mother’s physical and mental state to ‘predict’ the kind of world they'll be born into and altering their bodily structures.
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Early Learning
Why you need to talk to your baby
Through the random noises of the outside world and the beating heart and growling stomach of their mothers, babies are distinguishing the muffled sound of their mother’s voice. From the third trimester children naturally develop speech and language.
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Early Learning
Baby talk: Learn how to talk to your baby
While we cringe at “coochy coo” baby talk, research shows that it is not just the simplified words and frequent repetition that makes baby talk attractive to babies, but rather the sounds and its characteristic structure, rhythm and use of emotion.
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Early Learning
Building better brains with bilingualism
As adults, we fail to wrap our tongue around unfamiliar nasal vowels, guttural sounds or the nuances of tonal languages, while children slip effortlessly between languages. Until the age of seven, children are geniuses at acquiring a second language.
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