Experimenting With Babies

Babies can be a joy—and hard work. Now, they can also be a 50-in-1 science project kit! This fascinating and hands-on guide shows you how to re-create landmark scientific studies on cognitive, motor, language, and behavioral development—using your own bundle of joy as the research subject. Simple, engaging, and fun for both baby and parent, each project sheds light on how your baby is acquiring new skills—everything from recognizing faces, voices, and shapes to understanding new words, learning to walk, and even distinguishing between right and wrong. Whether your little research subject is a newborn, a few months old, or a toddler, these simple, surprising projects will help you see the world through your baby’s eyes—and discover ways to strengthen newly acquired skills during your everyday interactions.

Babies can be a joy—and hard work. Now, they can also be a 50-in-1 science project kit! This fascinating and hands-on guide shows you how to re-create landmark scientific studies on cognitive, motor, language, and behavioral development—using your own bundle of joy as the research subject. Simple, engaging, and fun for both baby and parent, each project sheds light on how your baby is acquiring new skills—everything from recognizing faces, voices, and shapes to understanding new words, learning to walk, and even distinguishing between right and wrong. Whether your little research subject is a newborn, a few months old, or a toddler, these simple, surprising projects will help you see the world through your baby’s eyes—and discover ways to strengthen newly acquired skills during your everyday interactions.

Raising a baby is joyful, amazing . . . and ridiculously difficult. But with some insight into what's actually going on inside your little one's head, your job as a parent can become a little bit easier—and a lot more fun. In Think Like a Baby, coauthors Amber and Andy Ankowski—The Doctor and the Dad—show parents how to re-create classic child development experiments using common household items. These simple step-by-step experiments apply from the third trimester through age seven and beyond and help parents understand their children's physical, cognitive, language, and social development. Amazed parents won't just read about how their kids are behaving, changing, and thinking at various stages, they'll actually see it for themselves while interacting and having fun with them at the same time. Each experiment is followed by a discussion of its practical implications for parents, such as why to always bring more than one toy to a restaurant, which baby gadgets to buy (and which ones to avoid), how to get kids to be perfectly happy eating just half of their dessert, and much more.

Transform your child into a science project with these fun, simple experiments. Re-create landmark studies in child development in your own home and watch your little one achieve developmental milestones in real time with this fascinating hands-on guide. Whether your child is just beginning to speak in sentences or is on their way to kindergarten, these easy and surprising projects will help you to see the world through your child's eyes--and also give you the tools to help them master new skills as they grow. Covering ages two through five, the experiments reveal research-backed insights about different areas of mental, physical, and social growth. Some examples include: Understanding language syntax Learning to pick up the rules of a game without being told Developing the impulse to lie Testing memory For any parent who looks at their young child and thinks, "What on earth is going on in there?" this book will help you find out!

"Babies and toddlers are natural-born scientists. Whether rolling a ball down a slope, stacking blocks and knocking them over, placing toys in a container, group and matching objects into categories, stacking rings according to size, stringing large beads, or throwing their stuffies, STEM Babies are always experimenting with something new. This adorable board book introduces little scientists to the foundations of engineering and encourages young ones to play and be curious about the world around them. With full-color photographs of babies and toddlers playing, discovering, and inventing, STEM Baby: Engineering encourages curious young scientists and their parents to tinker and explore the world like an engineer!"--

A playful high-contrast board book from the University of Tokyo “Baby Lab”—scientifically proven to hold baby’s attention “Full of delicious colors and . . . real charm.”—The Wall Street Journal What are moimoi? Playful moimoi have bold stripes and big, bright eyes. Babies find them captivating and will even stop crying to look. Parents in Japan swear by moimoi and have purchased over 500,000 books! How do you say it? “Moi” (??) is a fun nonsense word that rhymes with “koi.” You can change how you say it to match what the moimoi are doing—as they dance, grow, and even sing . . . Where do they come from? At the University of Tokyo “Baby Lab,” Dr. Kazuo Hiraki tested many different high-contrast designs. Babies looked at moimoi for twice as long as the competition. Your newborn or toddler will love moimoi, too!

Join Bartholomew Cubbins in Dr. Seuss’s Caldecott Honor–winning picture book about a king’s magical mishap! Bored with rain, sunshine, fog, and snow, King Derwin of Didd summons his royal magicians to create something new and exciting to fall from the sky. What he gets is a storm of sticky green goo called Oobleck—which soon wreaks havock all over his kingdom! But with the assistance of the wise page boy Bartholomew, the king (along with young readers) learns that the simplest words can sometimes solve the stickiest problems.

A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. From John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates. Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society—and especially parents—to transform them from little sociopaths into civilized beings. In Just Babies, Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. Drawing on groundbreaking research at Yale, Bloom demonstrates that, even before they can speak or walk, babies judge the goodness and badness of others’ actions; feel empathy and compassion; act to soothe those in distress; and have a rudimentary sense of justice. Still, this innate morality is limited, sometimes tragically. We are naturally hostile to strangers, prone to parochialism and bigotry. Bringing together insights from psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Bloom explores how we have come to surpass these limitations. Along the way, he examines the morality of chimpanzees, violent psychopaths, religious extremists, and Ivy League professors, and explores our often puzzling moral feelings about sex, politics, religion, and race. In his analysis of the morality of children and adults, Bloom rejects the fashionable view that our moral decisions are driven mainly by gut feelings and unconscious biases. Just as reason has driven our great scientific discoveries, he argues, it is reason and deliberation that makes possible our moral discoveries, such as the wrongness of slavery. Ultimately, it is through our imagination, our compassion, and our uniquely human capacity for rational thought that we can transcend the primitive sense of morality we were born with, becoming more than just babies. Paul Bloom has a gift for bringing abstract ideas to life, moving seamlessly from Darwin, Herodotus, and Adam Smith to The Princess Bride, Hannibal Lecter, and Louis C.K. Vivid, witty, and intellectually probing, Just Babies offers a radical new perspective on our moral lives.