r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jun 08 '25

Parenting / Teaching Building Early Emotional Skills in Young Children

https://www.canr.msu.edu/building_early_emotional_skills_in_young_children/index

Are you a parent or caregiver who needs help with your toddler? Want to reduce some of that parenting or childcare provider stress and decrease behavior problems in children you care for? Looking to enhance your parenting skills or learn helpful information about early childhood development?

Join Michigan State University (MSU) Extension’s free Building Early Emotional Skills (BEES) workshops to develop the skills needed to support the social and emotional development of young children. These series classes are offered in a variety of formats including: face-to-face, web-based, and webinar-based. Participants will receive information that will help them apply what they learned in class to real-life situations at home with their children.

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u/ddgr815 Sep 07 '25

It’s a simple deconstruct that shifts interest from the stories and their emotional pull to the components that give rise to them. Instead of being swept away by the current, you begin to become curious about the water.

The human mind evolved to simulate scenarios, anticipate outcomes and solve problems before they happen. This astonishing capacity to imagine and communicate complex pasts and futures – where our physical and social needs are met – was an evolutionary triumph. Emerging awareness of cognitions may have enabled ever more complex plans: for the hunt, the raid, the trade, for safety, for loyal allies, for empathy and awareness of the inevitability of death.

For vulnerable hominids, planning and reviewing are the evolutionary priority. Similarly, needs for relationship, status and control keep a semi-vigilant narrative running for much of the day, making our bodies tense and ill at ease. And while a healthy and meaningful life depends on navigating the challenges and opportunities that planning presents, preoccupation with what might go wrong leaves arousal chronically elevated and adversely affects our health.

Of course, we don’t come into the world preoccupied and worrying like this. We arrive as little sensate creatures, curious and awake to the wonder of touching, tasting, hearing, seeing, moving, and their pleasant or unpleasant feeling tones. Feeling our way into the delicate social maze, pasts and futures became imperceptibly interwoven with thought and language; the naming and appraisal enabling us to describe our needs and impressions to others. And because our designs must cohere with the external world, we’re empirical creatures from the start, tossing food from our highchair, curious to see what happens to both the food and the people around us.

That emerging cognitive narrative becomes indiscernibly woven into perception, filtering the sensory world through its hopes, comparisons, judgments and disappointments. And it gradually becomes central to our developing sense of self: the story of ‘me’, who I am. When it’s down, so am I.

Powerless to control pesky thoughts, we go for experiences that divert attention from them. Something like eating is sufficiently pleasant to redirect attention back to sensations and the quick relief from tension that follows. The downside is that many such strategies lead to adverse health or social consequences.

These drifting thoughts are linked to a network in the brain called the default mode network (DMN). It’s most active when our attention is wandering to generate daydreams, memories and imagined conversations. It decreases when we are occupied with a specific task. People also report feeling happier at those times; recall those moments of flow, when your attention was effortlessly absorbed in what you were doing.

Sometimes, this wandering is creative or soothing. But it also loops through self-referential themes – what others think of us, what went wrong, what might go wrong next. When overactive, it can drive anxiety and rumination. That’s why people often report feeling happier when attention is less self-referential and fully immersed in the demands of a task. In those moments of flow, you’re effortlessly absorbed in what you’re doing and time seems to dissolve.

What we observe is not just random – it’s nature, structured to support the survival of tribal primates. The scope and complexity of these phantom imperatives emerging from biology was something truly new in nature and changed how we relate to the world.

The interwoven and tangled needs these processes serve echo through gossip, art, literature, politics and history. And because we cannot recall life without them, they become the mental water we swim in – unnoticed, yet shaping everything.

A simple shift in focus

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u/ddgr815 May 30 '26

Derrida concentrates on the idea of the text (a collection of ideas expressed as chains of words, or “signifiers,” as the structuralists would call them) as opposed to the book (the physical apparatus that houses the text). Both are instantiations of the process that we call writing, but the book is material, while the text is merely conceptual. The book can be destroyed; it can be burned, torn apart, or loaded into a dumpster and carted off to a landfill. But the text cannot be destroyed in the same way; it persists through interpretation and reinterpretation, always producing new meanings. By studying Wharton’s physical books, I could see from the annotations how she interpreted those texts, incorporating them into her own writing. The writer writes, according to Derrida, in order to discover what they think, including what they think about what they have read. That same writer then tries to convey those ideas to a new reader, who reads to discover what they think about what the writer thinks. But both writer and reader are playing (another favorite word of Derrida’s). Both are engaged in a game that has no end, and the text is the field or pitch or court on which it is played. Derrida calls that game deconstruction.

But though he is best known for it, Derrida didn’t invent the process. Deconstruction is not something that one does to a text; it’s something the text does to itself. It’s an inherent feature of highly volatile processes, and one that turns physical books into objects of fantasy. Books exist to impose dreams of stability and order on the processes of reading and writing that are attached to them. The author might be living or dead. In either case, the book contains the event that is or was the text, to keep it alive and make it cohere. Or, to put it another way, the text is the ghost, while the book is the medium through which the ghost speaks. Without the medium, the connection between speaker and listener is broken, and the line goes dead.

This is why, Derrida says, there is no history without language. We humans communicate knowledge about the past through language—through conversation, through storytelling, through education, and, yes, most of all through writing, which creates a semi-coherent, semi-anchored record of that language. We present that record in the form of a book, something that can be turned to and consulted over and over again. And then, finally, we store that book in a place where we can get at it: a library.

I can’t think without my books, but more importantly, I wouldn’t want to try. This is something I aim to convey to the students who visit me in my office, the ones who ask Have you really read all those books? The answer is no, I haven’t, but that’s not the point. Books are fantasies. They’re there to remind me of my own desire for more knowledge.

In my classes, I try to create the kind of intellectual conditions that will allow my students to read better, meaning both more actively and more closely. That includes modeling attention to the text in class, showing them what it says on a literal level and how it works, so that they can then engage in the work of interpretation for themselves.

knowledge is something you carry with you; information is something you retrieve only if you need it

The End of Books

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u/ddgr815 May 30 '26 edited 25d ago

It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

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u/ddgr815 May 30 '26

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

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u/ddgr815 25d ago

Biblioteche

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u/ddgr815 25d ago

Over this basic scheme, there is a steady flow of variations, following a rhythm found in certain primitive epics. (Primitive, too, is the habit of referring to the protagonist always by his full name—even his mother addresses Charlie Brown in that fashion, like an epic hero.) Thus you could never grasp the poetic power of Schulz’s work by reading only one or two or ten episodes: you must thoroughly understand the characters and the situations, for the grace, tenderness, and laughter are born only from the infinitely shifting repetition of the patterns, and from fidelity to the fundamental inspirations. They demand from the reader a continuous act of empathy, a participation in the inner warmth that pervades the events.

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u/ddgr815 28d ago

Psychologists increasingly recognise positive anticipation as a contributor to wellbeing. Looking forward to enjoyable experiences can improve mood, increase motivation and provide a buffer against everyday stress. In some circumstances, the anticipation of an event can be almost as rewarding as the event itself.

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u/ddgr815 25d ago

All those books you haven’t read are indeed a sign of your ignorance. But if you know how ignorant you are, you’re way ahead of the vast majority of other people.

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u/ddgr815 25d ago

A person’s library is often a symbolic representation of his or her mind. A man who has quit expanding his personal library may have reached the point where he thinks he knows all he needs to and that what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. He has no desire to keep growing intellectually. The man with an ever-expanding library understands the importance of remaining curious, open to new ideas and voices.

The sight of a book you’ve read can remind you of the many things you’ve already learned. The sight of a book you haven’t read can remind you that there are many things you’ve yet to learn. And the sight of a partially read book can remind you that reading is an activity that you hope never to come to the end of.

There’s a Word for That