At what stage is the is the 43rd President at?
Here is an article From the Scotsman ( a National Newspaper of Scotland)
on Human behavior. for your consideration.
[ print close
Fri 2 Apr 2004
Dial back 20,000 years if you want to talk to your children
Hilary E MacGregor
IT'S A beautiful spring morning, and Dr Harvey Karp, dressed in a waistcoat and a blue polka-dot tie, steps into a park, like a stealthy predator.
"Come into my time machine," he says, as he crosses from a world of cars and coffee into a world of seesaws, slides and sandpits. "Dial back 20,000 years."
Dr Karp is taking a curious adult on a tour of an ancient jungle world, speaking a primitive tongue with its playground natives. He points to a 13-month-old boy standing uncertainly in the sand by a slide. "There's one, in the red pants," he says. "His cerebellum is not fully developed. He has a wide stance; his hands are up. He is more chimpanzee. Chimps walk for 15 feet, then get back down on all fours." Which the boy does.
Then Dr Karp zooms in on a three-year-old girl in a pink sun hat by the picnic table, who fills her small backpack with toys.
"This girl's a villager," he says. "She is very methodical. She understands sequencing."
She is also willing to share and barter, he says; she is co-operative and aware of social hierarchies. And in the sandpit, Dr Karp spots a "Neanderthal", who is able to whack with precision and use primitive tools (such as a plastic shovel).
Dr Karp became something of a cult figure with new parents two years ago with his book The Happiest Baby on the Block, which sold 200,000 copies.
Now the professor of paediatrics in Santa Monica, California, has a new book, The Happiest Toddler on the Block, released this month by Bantam Books.
It counsels parents on how to get through the terrible twos and deals much more broadly with toddlers and how to communicate with them. Dr Karp suggests that toddlers are cavemen and we should think of a child as a "chimpanzee" (12-18 months), a "Neanderthal" (18-24 months), a "cave-k
id" (24-36 months) or a "villager" (36-48 months).
So if you really want to communicate with toddlers, forget talking to your child as if he or she is a small adult. Instead, squat down to the child's level like a monkey and start grunting and shouting.
It's as if you are an ambassador from the 21st century and you have to travel back to a prehistoric time, learning the inhabitants' language. (Dr Karp calls it "toddlerese".) If you do, your chimp child will become co-operative, tantrums will cease, and a new connection between you and your child will be forged.
Indeed, Dr Karp claims that toddlerese can cut tantrums by 50-90 per cent. Toddlers in mid-meltdown, he says, are incapable of hearing reasoning, reassurance or warnings until they are sure you understand what they are saying.
The best way to talk to an out-of-control toddler, he says, is to repeat back what he wants before you tell him what you want. (He calls this the Fast Food Rule: When you order fast food, the counter assistant repeats back your order.) This requires short phrases and repetition, as well as exaggerated facial expressions and a passionate tone of voice.
Dr Kyle D Pruett, professor of child psychiatry and nursing at Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut and the author of Fatherneed, says that Dr Karp has broken new ground with his ideas on how to handle toddlers.
"It is an idea that a lot of us have used in teaching medical students how to understand young children," said Dr Pruett. "But it has not been used this way with parents. I think that is creative and original.
"When you try to use the toddlers' language to legitimise what they are feeling, they feel very reassured. They think, ?'My God. I'm not in a foreign country. They understand me.'"
Dr Karp, 52, has a beard and intense, lively blue eyes. He excels at coining catchy phrases and isn't afraid to use the media to spread his message. But beneath his salesmanship lies a true passion for revolutionising the way we view small children.
He's already tutoring some parents in toddlerese. Miriam Bookey has two boys, Leo, 1½, and Jack, 3½. They were throwing tantrums, beating each other, pulling hair and biting. Sometimes Leo would arch his back and bang his head against the floor in out-of-control anger.
Dr Karp spent several weeks coaching Ms Bookey. Once she incorporated toddlerese, she said, there was an immediate change.
"At first my son was in shock," she said. "I was in his face on my knees, talking like a Neanderthal. Then he stared, and there was this understanding that I was connecting."
Back in the park, Dr Karp spots two boys, maybe two and four, playing on a drawbridge suspended above the sand. Suddenly, he sheds his doctor persona, grabs a rope and starts climbing up the slide towards them like a wild animal. He yells short, repetitive phrases in a strange, loud, childlike voice: "How did you do it? How did you do it?" It gets the boys' attention instantly. They stare but don't respond.
Dr Karp shrugs, jumps back down and turns back into a "grownling" (as in grown-up, another Karpism). "It's a tribal thing," he says. "Don't talk to strangers." He picks out a three-year-old "villager". He crouches down in the sand and picks up a tiny pebble. "Is this a car?" he asks in the same strange voice. He gives it to the boy. "Give me! Give me!"
He starts shouting, making weird facial expressions, clenching his fists. The boy gives it to him. "Uh-oh! Uh-oh!" Dr Karp squeals, like some crazy clown.
To an adult, Dr Karp sounds like a madman, but the boy is delighted. "Mine! Mine! Mine!" Karp yells. Then he puts his hands to his mouth like paws and laughs like a wild animal, yelping: "Yow! Yow! Yow!" The boy does not want this to end.
Dr Karp moves through this jungle of primitives with ease.
The he steps out of the sand, shakes out his shoes and straightens his tie. "It's hard being a toddler," he explains. "You are smaller than everybody, weaker than everybody. I am speaking in a more primitive language because he doesn't speak my language."
But can toddlerese be taught? Dr Karp insists it can. Parents who have learned it say it works - and, yes, it is embarrassing.
"You look really silly," said Ms Bookey. "You have to have no shame ... You can't be self-conscious when you are speaking toddlerese."
The Happiest Toddler on the Block, by Dr Harvey Karp, is published by Bantam Books (ISBN 0553802569), price £12.59.
This article:
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=375092004
QUOTE]
The present President's Agenda appears to go in 360 degrees except whe he is giving our money away to to the people who need it the least.
This entry is based on the Maureen Dowd essay style.
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