15 ms·

Fewer toys at once may help toddlers to focus better and play more creatively

468 points by antman 9y ago

marcofalcioni 9y ago
i.e. Montessori was right all along.
- jngreenlee 9y ago
  Came here to say this! My wife and I started a Montessori school together, and this is fundamental. ALSO, don't overly guide the child on 'how' to interact with a toy or object. Let them figure it out and they'll come up with uses you didn't think of.
  - AznHisoka 9y ago
    What's the difference between a Montessori school vs. a regular elementary school?
    - Groxx 9y ago
      Quite a bit. The top section of wikipedia outlines it pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
    - istorical 9y ago
      To give a more detailed answer, as someone who attended a Montessori school from preschool through 8th grade that was embedded in a public school and had class sizes of about ~30, the biggest differences from my student perspective compared to the traditional high school I attended afterwards: 1. Individual autonomy of the student in time management. To give an example, in 1st through 5th grade I wrote up a new contract at the beginning of the week with my teacher with a list of goals to accomplish by the end of the week, and then maybe half the day was pre-scheduled lessons from the teacher (some whole-class, some mini group, some individual), and then you could choose when you'd work on each lesson/goal at any given time. If you didn't want to do your math lesson until 3pm you didn't have to. You could do reading first then math later. Or vice versa. So in a sense you're learning time management and planning at a much earlier age and you're given freedom to make mistakes there, learn the perils of procrastination (or fail to learn them and develop bad habits from an early age which I saw to be quite common among my peers), and you feel like you're in less of a prison (after having autonomy up until 9th grade when I left Montessori you have no idea how much highschool felt like prison). In middle school (6th through 8th) they took that a step further, and you might be given a list of objectives that needed to be done in a number of weeks or even in a quarter, and it was up to you to spend the 8 hours a day effectively to accomplish them by the end. It was therefore quite common for students to slack and just chat with each other for large portions of time only to crunch at the end. You could theoretically have hardly any homework if you just worked all day at school or you could slack for weeks on weeks then work all night very night and weekends for a few weeks at the end. 2. Student autonomy of location and freedom of movement. You were not forced to sit at a desk all day, you could move around the large daycare-like classroom, sit on the floor with students over there, or work at a table over here, or use an abacus over there. In elementary there was an emphasis on hands on learning. Learning the letters by having the teacher guide you to trace them in sand. Learning multiplication and division using physical beads and blocks to give you an understanding of multiplication with a geometric, spatial analogy. So you might hae a lesson scheduled to play 'the banker's game' where the teacher would take you over to some blocks and have you add, subtract, multiply, or do division using beads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysIvxeErRp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysIvxeErRp0) There was less of that physical grounding in later elementary and practically none in middle school but you were free to move around and be wherever you wanted to be in the classroom, with whichever students you wanted to be with, or be alone. And to a certain extent you were allowed to waste time or socialize as well. 3. At times, freedom to determine the medium through which you would present or demonstrate your knowledge, and freedom to choose topics or subjects to study to a greater extent and at a much earlier age than is common in normal school. Montessori seems to place more emphasis on student-curiosity as the mechanism for choosing project subjects, medium of presentation (it's quite common for you to be able to choose to "learn" and then present some social studies subject through an essay, or a powerpoint, or a poster board, or a speech, or maybe even through a play. 4. Emphasis on student government and Socractic processes. My middle school program had us collectively run a community meeting for the class for about 20-60 minutes each day, the moderation/facilitation of the meeting rotated each week to a new group of 3-5 students, you had a portion of the meeting for acknowledgements (acknowledging someone else's accomplishment in the class), problem solving (raising issues or problems affecting the class community), which led into proposals (suggesting a proposal of a rule change, an action to be taken, etc. to solve the "problem" - example - purchase lockboxes with student funds to store scissors since people kept stealing/losing them -, then argument and debate, then proposal of any amendments or tabling the discussion, then a voting section to vote for, against, or abstain for those proposals. It was kind of a parliamentary system which was a little more complicated than that but that's the basic idea. And we had a lot of Socratic discussions as well, usually at the end of a meeting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning). Of and we had to write a class constitution via a constitutional convention and then our meetings followed that constitution. 5. Overall experimental learning methods. An example would be that in our 7th-8th combined classroom, all of the freedom meant that one quarter our class was being extremely lazy and not doing work so we were missing deadlines. The teachers decided to take the students who had missed deadlines and named them the 'structured' group and put them in one room where speaking was no longer allowed without raising your hand. And the students who didn't have any missed deadlines were allowed to be in the other room and still chit chat, freely speak with each other, and be mostly autonomous. Once you got caught up again and didn't have any past due projects, you could leave the 'structured' no talking room and rejoin the rest of the class. This motivated a lot of students who'd been slacking to get caught up. Of course, there were some who were stuck in the quiet room for weeks. The funniest part is that as barbaric and prison-like that 'silent' room seemed at the time to us, it turned out that normal highschool turned out to be almost exactly like that 'torture' room. Go figure. 6. Last, inequality of educational outcome. Many, many of my peers were exemplary students and the freedom allowed them to pursue their passions, become excellent students who were well beyond the normal curriculum in a specific subject that they were passionate about, and were excellent writers, speakers, collaborators, and had great time management skills. But other students took the freedom to chit chat and not work, hippy grading system, and other freedoms and just didn't do anything or wasted time. Many students in particular at my school district got a very poor grounding in math. So your mileage my vary.
      - artimaeis 9y ago
        This is a fascinating insight, and one I have not come across before. Thank you! I'm curious - what are your feelings on the strategy of spending so many years in the private school then switching to public for high school? I gather that it was a pretty big jump so far as personal freedoms - do you feel as though you were able to get more out of high school than those around you, or did you feel unnecessarily restrained?
        istorical 9y ago
        Actually to be pedantic the Montessori school I attended was an opt-in program at a public school. For reference, a suburban middle class midwestern USA school district. At the elementary level, about half the school was Montessori and half was traditional. And at the middle school level, there were less than 100 students in the Montessori program out of a school of somewhere in the range of 1000-2000 (don't remember). Just wanted to throw that out as aspirational. There's truly nothing about a Montessori classroom that need be more expensive except for the training, the high cost of which is just a function of the lack of economies of scale. I don't know that I would say that I got more out of high school than those around me. I would say educational culture is the most important factor - in the sense of being in a classroom with students who respect their teachers and with parents at home who pay attention to they child's performance and behavior. And I was lucky enough to attend both Montessori and traditional schools at a middle to upper middle class school so we were able to take those things for granted. I would say that I had a much broader exposure to thinking outside of the box, of being self-led, and of taking initiative than most of the other students. But I also had more of an independent streak, a desire to be free, and a questioning of authority. I was a model student in high school for other personality and I-feel-need-to-prove-myself reasons that are separate from Montessori vs. traditional debate. So I can't judge how my prior education influenced my performance in high school. But I can say without a doubt that I felt like a dog locked in a cage. The biggest side effect perhaps of moving from a Montessori program to a traditional one was that I became an incredibly active participant in class just to ease the boredom. If you go from a program where you're free to spend half the day on whatever you want, speak to your friends, and be wherever you want to a program where you're locked to a seat the entire day and can't freely have conversations, you have to find other ways to get interaction and to be able to speak. So I just constantly wanted to answer questions or ask questions in class just cause sitting there doing literally nothing was unbearable. We should be asking ourselves what we're training our students to do when we have them sit and listen to an authority figure speak in a one sided conversation all day everyday. There's no two way conversation being had at schools. We're teaching our kids to sit down, shut up, and listen to what I think is right. Not to engage with the world.
  - nsxwolf 9y ago
    Why are they so damned expensive?
    - sevensor 9y ago
      Why are all the other preschool options so cheap? Even Montessori-trained preschool teachers are barely paid enough to scrape by, and it's not like the schools are taking in enough cash to pay them more.
      - nsxwolf 9y ago
        Tuition at the Montessori school by me is $15,000 per child, per year. That's crazy. Most families around here could never dream of affording that.
        0xfeba 9y ago
        Where does all that money go...
        sevensor 9y ago
        Say it's $15k per child per year, and we're talking about a preschool. That means state mandated teacher ratios, depending on the state. Let's say it's 1:10, and that's on the low side. Suppose you have two classrooms of 20 children each. That means you take in 300k in tuition and you have to pay four teachers plus at least one administrator. Knock off 100k for rent, overhead, insurance, certifications, capital expenses. That leaves you with 40k for each teacher's total compensation. How far does that go where you live? Realistically, most preschools charge even less and pay their teachers accordingly.
        hazza1 9y ago
        $15k * 40 is 600k which with your math means $100k per teacher
  - GuiA 9y ago
    How does one start a Montessori school? Would love to read about your experience :)
- goialoq 9y ago
  Partial Source about Montesorri philosophy on toys: http://www.mariamontessori.com/2010/08/29/toys-for-children-less-is-more/ http://www.mariamontessori.com/2010/08/29/toys-for-children-...
heisenbit 9y ago
I suspect this also applies to language features and API surfaces.
jansho 9y ago
As kids, we were notorious for wanting all the toys from Argos catalogue then play with the boxes only. I often fancied the idea of getting dolls. But Lego and papers were my true playmates. Yeah, kids - shiny outside, scruffy inside. Though toys from car boot sales were awesome. They were often damaged and you can break and chuck them around without parents getting too mad about it. Shame, these days car boot sales are literally mechanical bits and pieces and chipped crockeries...
40acres 9y ago
This makes total sense to me, I never had toys growing up. I used to use pens and pencils as action figures (to this day I have a weird habit of having a pen or pencil in my hand when doing mundane tasks at home) and also used to use the plastic ties that would tie store bought bread (red and blue plastic surrounding a thin wire that's pretty malleable) together as toys as well.
nitwit005 9y ago
I'm a little suspicious they created a situation with a lack of emotional attachment to the toys, because of a short duration. Many kids seem to glob onto one or two toys as their favorite, prompting complaints from parents that they don't play with the new toy they got them. A lot of kids seem to end up with an extremely dirty and damaged doll that they loved to death.
cdubzzz 9y ago
Full text available here: http://utdr.utoledo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1566&context=graduate-projects http://utdr.utoledo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1566&con...
jv22222 9y ago
Yes, so true! My wife is a Play Therapist with 2 masters degrees in the subject. The organization of a play space with limited and well chosen toys is key. Additionally if you give a child an electronic toy that lights up and makes a lot of noise and does a specific thing, the kid will usually play with it less, because they find their options are limited. Whereas, if you give a kid a wooden spoon and a pot to play with they can find a 1001 uses for it! She has a rule for herself to not have more toys than it would take to clean up in 10 minutes. Here is a talk she recently gave to parents at our pre-school. She talks about this issue at the 33 min mark. https://playla.co/talk/1 https://playla.co/talk/1
- jerf 9y ago
  Does your wife have a solution for convincing relatives to stop buying tons of electronic toys that light up and buzz for Christmas and birthdays?
  - jv22222 9y ago
    Ah, the grandma effect... no, we have not found a solution to that issue yet ;) Well, I guess we let the kids play with those presents for the holidays they were given in. Then, after the grandparents have departed, the toys slowly start "disappearing"... We put them in a special closet that the kids still have access to. Every once in a while the kids will dive into that closet and rediscover some of the louder flashier toys. But, mainly, it's just the simple stuff left out on the shelves for every day access.
  - thearn4 9y ago
    I've started a habit of sitting down with my son and taking them apart, screw by screw, piece by piece. He loves tools so he's into it 100%. The louder, brighter, and more annoying the y are, the more likely that they don't make it back together.
    - marpstar 9y ago
      This is an awesome idea. We have so many useless battery-powered chunks of plastic. My 7-year-old would LOVE deconstruction lessons.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
I noticed this about a year ago watching my youngest play and tried to stop getting out so much at once. Didn't figure it out in time for my oldest though :)
CalChris 9y ago
No! Multi-tasking should start in the crib. How else is your bundle of joy going to get into Harvard?
nkoren 9y ago
I wonder if/when they're going to make the connection between this and ADHD. My suspicion is nothing scientific, just based on anecdotal observation, but I've noticed that infants and toddlers who are surrounded by highly stimulating colours, sounds, and movements seem to be accustomed to having their attention TAKEN by whatever happens to be competing the most for it. As opposed to infants and toddlers playing with plain wooden blocks, who apparently become more accustomed to GIVING attention more intentionally. I can't help but believe that this has long-term developmental effects.
- grandalf 9y ago
  I think you could equivalently argue that the long-term effect is that the toddler learns to tune out all the noise and focus on one thing.
  - dhosek 9y ago
    Which, surprisingly, is an element of ADHD behavior. Seriously. Apparently a person with ADHD who in conversation is talking about A, if there's a digression will be sure to get back to A to finish their disquisition on the topic.
    - balabaster 9y ago
      Actually, having grown up with ADHD and having an ex and 2 daughters with ADHD I can tell you this: We can all hyper-focus on things of interest. But only things that interest us. Attempting to get us to focus on things that are meaningless to us, no matter how meaningful to you or the world at large, no matter how important for our coursework or work, if they don't mean anything to us, we have a much worse time than the average non-ADHD person focusing on it. I cannot say explicitly that all ADHD people have this trait, but having done a lot of reading and attended a lot of counselling sessions on it to learn to cope with children having it, it appears as though we're not alone in this. It's fairly common for ADHD kids to be able to hyper-focus on topics of interest. My topic of interest from an extremely young age was figuring out how things work, making them work and making them work better. It's no surprise therefore that I ended up as a programmer.
dorfsmay 9y ago
One thing we did with our kids is take the toys that are left laying around and put them in a cardboard box, away from them. After a few weeks, when they run out of toys, we pull one of the cardboard box, and it's like Christmas for them! Another advantage is that some toys never make it out of the cardboard box, you can donate/recycle them.
- james-skemp 9y ago
  My SO's mom did this with her and her brother. They didn't have a lot of money, so it helped in that regard as well. I think we're going to try it with our son too.
bdamm 9y ago
Isn't this just the pigeonhole problem in reverse? The four toy group kids played with individual toys longer perhaps because there were fewer toys to play with. So... why would we be surprised with this result? Also, how does it lead to the conclusion that this allows "better focus to explore and play more creatively"? I'm not willing to pay the $40 to find out, did anyone do so and can provide the magical answer for why the authors believe their result shows anything about creativity or attention?
- timthelion 9y ago
  http://sci-hub.bz/http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638317301613 http://sci-hub.bz/http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/artic...
- bunderbunder 9y ago
  Not quite. With 4 toys, kids could still switch toys just as frequently as with 16 toys. They would just be expected to return to a toy after setting it down in ~1/5 as much time under one possible null hypothesis. No, it's not a big bang result. That is a good thing. For a long time, psychology has had a real problem with studies whose reach exceed their grasp. This study appears to me to be an example of exactly the kind of sober, incrementalist work that we need to see more of in psychology. It takes a big hypothesis ("giving kids a lot of toys is harmful to their attention span in the long run"), picks a smaller sub-hypothesis off of it ("if kids have fewer toys, their individual sessions with each toy will be longer") and then tests just that bit. Like they suggest at the end of the abstract, this result indicates that it would be sensible to proceed to the next iteration. Call it "lean science" if a buzzword is necessary.
  - dopamean 9y ago
    > "if kids have fewer toys, their individual sessions with each toy will be longer" I must be missing something. Isn't this obvious? One hour of play time / 16 toys is less time per toy then one hour of play time / 4 toys.
    - 9y ago
thrownblown 9y ago
but can a child ever have enough legos?
- amelius 9y ago
  The scientists would probably consider those lego blocks a single toy :)
timthelion 9y ago
As much as the obvious reflex is to think that "oh we should move BACK to a more austere, toy-less environment." It is important to remember, that children that grow up in nature are surrounded by thousands of "toys". I remember camping by creaks as a child, and finding there far more "toys" than in my play box. Rocks, sticks, bushes, leaves, mud, bugs, animals. Somehow, I still managed to focus for hours trying to damn the creak. So I don't really believe that more toys = shorter attention span. It must be something about the nature of these artificially created toys that makes them less engaging.
- rosser 9y ago
  Maybe at least partly because you had to engage your imagination a bit to make that stick into a gun, or whatever? Toy guns are obviously guns; point 'em and say "Pew! Pew!" — if they don't already make the noise for you, too... Sticks, there's a visualization step or two somewhere in there, too. I'm not specifically aware of any research directly investigating the relationship between the degree or intensity of imaginative play and focus, but I wouldn't be at all surprised — read: fully expect — to find them strongly positively correlated.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  If you leave a stick alone for 30s it doesn't flash and play a tune to try [desperately?] to get you to play with it. I'd guess the issue is that the toys are designed to so that they will get picked up in a toy store. They have to get off the shelf and to the checkout, they don't have to entertain one jot beyond that ...
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  If your childhood was anything like mine, you were probably trying to dam the creek - no 'n'. Not that I'm judging you or there's anything wrong with a young and free imagination that seeks to condemn the naiads to eternal suffering.
  - timthelion 9y ago
    Oops. I was trying to dam it, not damn it.
segmondy 9y ago
Same things apply to adults. Less open tabs, less open windows, Less monitors, less projects tend to make one focus better.
postit 9y ago
I believe this is a behavior trait human beings will carry all along their lives. I'm not a kid anymore and the more programming languages I try to play with, leads to me the same state of lack of creativity and problem solving. I could say that about overloading one with books, games and movies as well.
- jjuel 9y ago
  I have this problem with most technologies. I was just getting somewhere with one of my personal projects. Then all of a sudden I decided I needed to try emacs. Now I am in a world of org and ledger and spacemacs. Trying to get everything configured. Of course I will probably get about half way through that and something new and shiny will catch my eye.
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  Can confirm, I jump from one language to another every couple of months or so without, the ability to concentrate on one. Ah Elm is so cool, but today ReasonML is getting interesting traction and support from Facebook... I should try that. But all of these are for web, doing low level systems programming is interesting, starting to read Rust book next week
igorgue 9y ago
The fact that I don't remember my mom ever buying us toys (dad was absent) I can say that it does make you creative. I remember getting a few broken GI Joe from my cousin, with those, I used a screwdriver to pick up the good parts of them, and make good toys with weird arms and legs. These were supposed to be garbage but as usually having less stuff makes you more creative and I ended up with a few toys that nobody else had!
api 9y ago
This works for engineers too.
cpfohl 9y ago
I can confirm this is 100% true for my children. So much so that when I can control the number of toys available to them (during quiet time in their rooms, for example) I generally go with a small stack of books and one or two toys (typically a Lego or Lincoln log type toy, and a puzzle). I love when a study affirms something I'm doing...parenting usually feels like educated guessing...
grigjd3 9y ago
I wonder if the newness of the situation matters. At Christmas, my daughter will open and play with all her gifts. Two months later, she'll play with some toys more than others. I wonder if kids have a desire to try all the available options when they haven't had a chance to experience them previously. EDIT: or without regular availability.
eighthnate 9y ago
Isn't this just tautological nonsense? This applies to everything. If you have 1 friend rather than 5, you can focus and be more creative with that 1 friend than 5. If you have 1 sibling rather than 5, the same thing. If you have 1 book rather than 5, you can focus and read that one book. Maybe we should have less schools and less "research" because so much of it seems like useless busy body work to justify academics' salaries. And of course, such topics like these are great because it latches onto the simple-minded people's anecdotes as the comments here reflect.
gpmcadam 9y ago
This study is a little questionable. A comment from /r/science: > Toddlers were taken to a room they had never been to > before and were given at most 30 minutes to play with > the toys. They switched toys more often when there > were 16 vs. 4 toys and played with more toys overall. > Duration of play will naturally be an inverse of that > - and if the kids wanted to check out all the toys > first before deciding to which one to use, which you > would expect them to do in a new environment, that's > naturally going to skew the statistics. The conclusion > that they were more distracted by other toys in the 16 > toy condition is unsurprising since all the toys were > novel. But it would seem rare that toddlers would be > given 16 new toys all at once and it's certainly > possible that if all the toys were familiar, they might > engage for longer and more in-depth types of play with > certain toys regardless of how many were present. And also apparently the sample size was around 11 participants. Wouldn't jump to the conclusion the headline of this article seems to draw just yet, without further evidence.
- jedberg 9y ago
  Yeah my anecdata backs this up. My kid has a ton of toys, but she only plays with one or two a day, for quite a long time. But when we go to her cousin's houses, she has to play with every toy for five minutes. Same with when they come to our house.
  - rco8786 9y ago
    I’m on mobile so can’t link right now, but there’s actually a plethora of research on this topic in he Montessori world of teaching that all comes to the same conclusion.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  Studies with less than 200 participants should just be banned by default by major journals. Or at the very least people should have to supply their predicted outcomes at the outset to stop the constant p hacking that's been going on.
deevolution 9y ago
Lego ftw! Anecdotaly, Legos were the only toy that managed to hold my attention because theres sn infinite number of things i could do with them.
prawn 9y ago
My son attends an excellent preschool. Almost every day this year, the room has been set out with activity tables that vary without repeat. Drawing, painting, fossils, construction toys, etc. I cannot imagine the repository they pull from to continuously provide such unique options. At home, my children have more than enough toys, to the point that when presented with the full set, they loll about listlessly and overwhelmed by choice. I've tried to follow the preschool's lead and select a few that are out at any one time. I think it helps, and also makes for a quicker clean up. We have a lot of incidental toys that are essentially rubbish; they get pulled out and scattered around each play time without actually being played with.
dansman 9y ago
Not only toddlers
MilnerRoute 9y ago
I have a friend who does "12 days of Christmas." The idea being, why not have something fun for almost two weeks, instead of just one massive dump of gifts on the 25th. Each to his own.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jsemrau 9y ago
Boredom is one of the drivers of creative thought. I guess no surprises here.
MechEStudent 9y ago
My 2 year old wanted just one Christmas present. I think that if I had not been a "dumb American" and if I had played with her and the toy instead of urging her to open another present, she would have been happy with one toy for Christmas for years. Deeply satisfied, and blessed full.
peterjlee 9y ago
Trying to build what I wanted with the limited Lego parts I had always forced me to be more creative.
jaequery 9y ago
I'm pretty sure this applies to websites as well!
amelius 9y ago
Just in time for Christmas! :)
zoom6628 9y ago
AFter decades of success science is backing up what Montessori has been doing. I had 2 kids thru Montessory pre-school and gave them a big step up when entering first year - and no i did not do any other math learning with them outside of class. They both got assessed at being 2yrs ahead of standard on math. if you have kids i cannot recommend Montessori enough.
gumby 9y ago
On the electronic-vs-non-electronic toy front: I think it'e better to characterize it as "toys that the child plays with" vs "toys that play with the child". There's a lot more exploration and, frankly, fun in the former. But let's not forget, the child is not the toy manufacturer's customer: the parent, grandparent, or parent of the birthday-party-invitee is the customer. Toys are designed to appeal to them.
saulrh 9y ago
This is an obvious exploration/exploitation optimization strategy. The child doesn't have infinite time and has the same distribution for available time in both cases. A larger estimated state space therefore dictates more aggressive exploration, which means faster switching and slower settling. In more intuitive terms, the child is trying to maximize their chance of getting to play with everything, and while they don't know how much time they have, they have no reason to assume it's enough, so they move faster to cover more toys. Whether you think that this adaptation is a reasonable one, or whether these are useful observations for a child to use to inform their expectations about the world, I'm not sure I can say. But this is the rational strategy under straightforward assumptions about the utility function that our adaptations approximate. Furthermore, I expect that I would observe identical behavior in adults - for example, consider your takings at a buffet as a function of the number of options and your familiarity with them - and in fact that a non-negligible part of HN often exercises this same strategy consciously and rationally.
valetinaramir 9y ago
me encanta la pagina
valetinaramir 9y ago
excellente la accion

468 points by antman 9y ago

marcofalcioni 9y ago

i.e. Montessori was right all along.

jngreenlee 9y ago
Came here to say this! My wife and I started a Montessori school together, and this is fundamental. ALSO, don't overly guide the child on 'how' to interact with a toy or object. Let them figure it out and they'll come up with uses you didn't think of.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  What's the difference between a Montessori school vs. a regular elementary school?
  - Groxx 9y ago
    Quite a bit. The top section of wikipedia outlines it pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
  - istorical 9y ago
    To give a more detailed answer, as someone who attended a Montessori school from preschool through 8th grade that was embedded in a public school and had class sizes of about ~30, the biggest differences from my student perspective compared to the traditional high school I attended afterwards: 1. Individual autonomy of the student in time management. To give an example, in 1st through 5th grade I wrote up a new contract at the beginning of the week with my teacher with a list of goals to accomplish by the end of the week, and then maybe half the day was pre-scheduled lessons from the teacher (some whole-class, some mini group, some individual), and then you could choose when you'd work on each lesson/goal at any given time. If you didn't want to do your math lesson until 3pm you didn't have to. You could do reading first then math later. Or vice versa. So in a sense you're learning time management and planning at a much earlier age and you're given freedom to make mistakes there, learn the perils of procrastination (or fail to learn them and develop bad habits from an early age which I saw to be quite common among my peers), and you feel like you're in less of a prison (after having autonomy up until 9th grade when I left Montessori you have no idea how much highschool felt like prison). In middle school (6th through 8th) they took that a step further, and you might be given a list of objectives that needed to be done in a number of weeks or even in a quarter, and it was up to you to spend the 8 hours a day effectively to accomplish them by the end. It was therefore quite common for students to slack and just chat with each other for large portions of time only to crunch at the end. You could theoretically have hardly any homework if you just worked all day at school or you could slack for weeks on weeks then work all night very night and weekends for a few weeks at the end. 2. Student autonomy of location and freedom of movement. You were not forced to sit at a desk all day, you could move around the large daycare-like classroom, sit on the floor with students over there, or work at a table over here, or use an abacus over there. In elementary there was an emphasis on hands on learning. Learning the letters by having the teacher guide you to trace them in sand. Learning multiplication and division using physical beads and blocks to give you an understanding of multiplication with a geometric, spatial analogy. So you might hae a lesson scheduled to play 'the banker's game' where the teacher would take you over to some blocks and have you add, subtract, multiply, or do division using beads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysIvxeErRp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysIvxeErRp0) There was less of that physical grounding in later elementary and practically none in middle school but you were free to move around and be wherever you wanted to be in the classroom, with whichever students you wanted to be with, or be alone. And to a certain extent you were allowed to waste time or socialize as well. 3. At times, freedom to determine the medium through which you would present or demonstrate your knowledge, and freedom to choose topics or subjects to study to a greater extent and at a much earlier age than is common in normal school. Montessori seems to place more emphasis on student-curiosity as the mechanism for choosing project subjects, medium of presentation (it's quite common for you to be able to choose to "learn" and then present some social studies subject through an essay, or a powerpoint, or a poster board, or a speech, or maybe even through a play. 4. Emphasis on student government and Socractic processes. My middle school program had us collectively run a community meeting for the class for about 20-60 minutes each day, the moderation/facilitation of the meeting rotated each week to a new group of 3-5 students, you had a portion of the meeting for acknowledgements (acknowledging someone else's accomplishment in the class), problem solving (raising issues or problems affecting the class community), which led into proposals (suggesting a proposal of a rule change, an action to be taken, etc. to solve the "problem" - example - purchase lockboxes with student funds to store scissors since people kept stealing/losing them -, then argument and debate, then proposal of any amendments or tabling the discussion, then a voting section to vote for, against, or abstain for those proposals. It was kind of a parliamentary system which was a little more complicated than that but that's the basic idea. And we had a lot of Socratic discussions as well, usually at the end of a meeting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning). Of and we had to write a class constitution via a constitutional convention and then our meetings followed that constitution. 5. Overall experimental learning methods. An example would be that in our 7th-8th combined classroom, all of the freedom meant that one quarter our class was being extremely lazy and not doing work so we were missing deadlines. The teachers decided to take the students who had missed deadlines and named them the 'structured' group and put them in one room where speaking was no longer allowed without raising your hand. And the students who didn't have any missed deadlines were allowed to be in the other room and still chit chat, freely speak with each other, and be mostly autonomous. Once you got caught up again and didn't have any past due projects, you could leave the 'structured' no talking room and rejoin the rest of the class. This motivated a lot of students who'd been slacking to get caught up. Of course, there were some who were stuck in the quiet room for weeks. The funniest part is that as barbaric and prison-like that 'silent' room seemed at the time to us, it turned out that normal highschool turned out to be almost exactly like that 'torture' room. Go figure. 6. Last, inequality of educational outcome. Many, many of my peers were exemplary students and the freedom allowed them to pursue their passions, become excellent students who were well beyond the normal curriculum in a specific subject that they were passionate about, and were excellent writers, speakers, collaborators, and had great time management skills. But other students took the freedom to chit chat and not work, hippy grading system, and other freedoms and just didn't do anything or wasted time. Many students in particular at my school district got a very poor grounding in math. So your mileage my vary.
    - artimaeis 9y ago
      This is a fascinating insight, and one I have not come across before. Thank you! I'm curious - what are your feelings on the strategy of spending so many years in the private school then switching to public for high school? I gather that it was a pretty big jump so far as personal freedoms - do you feel as though you were able to get more out of high school than those around you, or did you feel unnecessarily restrained?
      - istorical 9y ago
        Actually to be pedantic the Montessori school I attended was an opt-in program at a public school. For reference, a suburban middle class midwestern USA school district. At the elementary level, about half the school was Montessori and half was traditional. And at the middle school level, there were less than 100 students in the Montessori program out of a school of somewhere in the range of 1000-2000 (don't remember). Just wanted to throw that out as aspirational. There's truly nothing about a Montessori classroom that need be more expensive except for the training, the high cost of which is just a function of the lack of economies of scale. I don't know that I would say that I got more out of high school than those around me. I would say educational culture is the most important factor - in the sense of being in a classroom with students who respect their teachers and with parents at home who pay attention to they child's performance and behavior. And I was lucky enough to attend both Montessori and traditional schools at a middle to upper middle class school so we were able to take those things for granted. I would say that I had a much broader exposure to thinking outside of the box, of being self-led, and of taking initiative than most of the other students. But I also had more of an independent streak, a desire to be free, and a questioning of authority. I was a model student in high school for other personality and I-feel-need-to-prove-myself reasons that are separate from Montessori vs. traditional debate. So I can't judge how my prior education influenced my performance in high school. But I can say without a doubt that I felt like a dog locked in a cage. The biggest side effect perhaps of moving from a Montessori program to a traditional one was that I became an incredibly active participant in class just to ease the boredom. If you go from a program where you're free to spend half the day on whatever you want, speak to your friends, and be wherever you want to a program where you're locked to a seat the entire day and can't freely have conversations, you have to find other ways to get interaction and to be able to speak. So I just constantly wanted to answer questions or ask questions in class just cause sitting there doing literally nothing was unbearable. We should be asking ourselves what we're training our students to do when we have them sit and listen to an authority figure speak in a one sided conversation all day everyday. There's no two way conversation being had at schools. We're teaching our kids to sit down, shut up, and listen to what I think is right. Not to engage with the world.
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  Why are they so damned expensive?
  - sevensor 9y ago
    Why are all the other preschool options so cheap? Even Montessori-trained preschool teachers are barely paid enough to scrape by, and it's not like the schools are taking in enough cash to pay them more.
    - nsxwolf 9y ago
      Tuition at the Montessori school by me is $15,000 per child, per year. That's crazy. Most families around here could never dream of affording that.
      - 0xfeba 9y ago
        Where does all that money go...
        sevensor 9y ago
        Say it's $15k per child per year, and we're talking about a preschool. That means state mandated teacher ratios, depending on the state. Let's say it's 1:10, and that's on the low side. Suppose you have two classrooms of 20 children each. That means you take in 300k in tuition and you have to pay four teachers plus at least one administrator. Knock off 100k for rent, overhead, insurance, certifications, capital expenses. That leaves you with 40k for each teacher's total compensation. How far does that go where you live? Realistically, most preschools charge even less and pay their teachers accordingly.
        hazza1 9y ago
        $15k * 40 is 600k which with your math means $100k per teacher
- GuiA 9y ago
  How does one start a Montessori school? Would love to read about your experience :)
goialoq 9y ago
Partial Source about Montesorri philosophy on toys: http://www.mariamontessori.com/2010/08/29/toys-for-children-less-is-more/ http://www.mariamontessori.com/2010/08/29/toys-for-children-...

heisenbit 9y ago

I suspect this also applies to language features and API surfaces.

jansho 9y ago

As kids, we were notorious for wanting all the toys from Argos catalogue then play with the boxes only. I often fancied the idea of getting dolls. But Lego and papers were my true playmates. Yeah, kids - shiny outside, scruffy inside. Though toys from car boot sales were awesome. They were often damaged and you can break and chuck them around without parents getting too mad about it. Shame, these days car boot sales are literally mechanical bits and pieces and chipped crockeries...

40acres 9y ago

This makes total sense to me, I never had toys growing up. I used to use pens and pencils as action figures (to this day I have a weird habit of having a pen or pencil in my hand when doing mundane tasks at home) and also used to use the plastic ties that would tie store bought bread (red and blue plastic surrounding a thin wire that's pretty malleable) together as toys as well.

nitwit005 9y ago

I'm a little suspicious they created a situation with a lack of emotional attachment to the toys, because of a short duration. Many kids seem to glob onto one or two toys as their favorite, prompting complaints from parents that they don't play with the new toy they got them. A lot of kids seem to end up with an extremely dirty and damaged doll that they loved to death.

cdubzzz 9y ago

Full text available here: http://utdr.utoledo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1566&context=graduate-projects http://utdr.utoledo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1566&con...

jv22222 9y ago

Yes, so true! My wife is a Play Therapist with 2 masters degrees in the subject. The organization of a play space with limited and well chosen toys is key. Additionally if you give a child an electronic toy that lights up and makes a lot of noise and does a specific thing, the kid will usually play with it less, because they find their options are limited. Whereas, if you give a kid a wooden spoon and a pot to play with they can find a 1001 uses for it! She has a rule for herself to not have more toys than it would take to clean up in 10 minutes. Here is a talk she recently gave to parents at our pre-school. She talks about this issue at the 33 min mark. https://playla.co/talk/1 https://playla.co/talk/1

jerf 9y ago
Does your wife have a solution for convincing relatives to stop buying tons of electronic toys that light up and buzz for Christmas and birthdays?
- jv22222 9y ago
  Ah, the grandma effect... no, we have not found a solution to that issue yet ;) Well, I guess we let the kids play with those presents for the holidays they were given in. Then, after the grandparents have departed, the toys slowly start "disappearing"... We put them in a special closet that the kids still have access to. Every once in a while the kids will dive into that closet and rediscover some of the louder flashier toys. But, mainly, it's just the simple stuff left out on the shelves for every day access.
- thearn4 9y ago
  I've started a habit of sitting down with my son and taking them apart, screw by screw, piece by piece. He loves tools so he's into it 100%. The louder, brighter, and more annoying the y are, the more likely that they don't make it back together.
  - marpstar 9y ago
    This is an awesome idea. We have so many useless battery-powered chunks of plastic. My 7-year-old would LOVE deconstruction lessons.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

I noticed this about a year ago watching my youngest play and tried to stop getting out so much at once. Didn't figure it out in time for my oldest though :)

CalChris 9y ago

No! Multi-tasking should start in the crib. How else is your bundle of joy going to get into Harvard?

nkoren 9y ago

I wonder if/when they're going to make the connection between this and ADHD. My suspicion is nothing scientific, just based on anecdotal observation, but I've noticed that infants and toddlers who are surrounded by highly stimulating colours, sounds, and movements seem to be accustomed to having their attention TAKEN by whatever happens to be competing the most for it. As opposed to infants and toddlers playing with plain wooden blocks, who apparently become more accustomed to GIVING attention more intentionally. I can't help but believe that this has long-term developmental effects.

grandalf 9y ago
I think you could equivalently argue that the long-term effect is that the toddler learns to tune out all the noise and focus on one thing.
- dhosek 9y ago
  Which, surprisingly, is an element of ADHD behavior. Seriously. Apparently a person with ADHD who in conversation is talking about A, if there's a digression will be sure to get back to A to finish their disquisition on the topic.
  - balabaster 9y ago
    Actually, having grown up with ADHD and having an ex and 2 daughters with ADHD I can tell you this: We can all hyper-focus on things of interest. But only things that interest us. Attempting to get us to focus on things that are meaningless to us, no matter how meaningful to you or the world at large, no matter how important for our coursework or work, if they don't mean anything to us, we have a much worse time than the average non-ADHD person focusing on it. I cannot say explicitly that all ADHD people have this trait, but having done a lot of reading and attended a lot of counselling sessions on it to learn to cope with children having it, it appears as though we're not alone in this. It's fairly common for ADHD kids to be able to hyper-focus on topics of interest. My topic of interest from an extremely young age was figuring out how things work, making them work and making them work better. It's no surprise therefore that I ended up as a programmer.

dorfsmay 9y ago

One thing we did with our kids is take the toys that are left laying around and put them in a cardboard box, away from them. After a few weeks, when they run out of toys, we pull one of the cardboard box, and it's like Christmas for them! Another advantage is that some toys never make it out of the cardboard box, you can donate/recycle them.

james-skemp 9y ago
My SO's mom did this with her and her brother. They didn't have a lot of money, so it helped in that regard as well. I think we're going to try it with our son too.

bdamm 9y ago

Isn't this just the pigeonhole problem in reverse? The four toy group kids played with individual toys longer perhaps because there were fewer toys to play with. So... why would we be surprised with this result? Also, how does it lead to the conclusion that this allows "better focus to explore and play more creatively"? I'm not willing to pay the $40 to find out, did anyone do so and can provide the magical answer for why the authors believe their result shows anything about creativity or attention?

timthelion 9y ago
http://sci-hub.bz/http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638317301613 http://sci-hub.bz/http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/artic...
bunderbunder 9y ago
Not quite. With 4 toys, kids could still switch toys just as frequently as with 16 toys. They would just be expected to return to a toy after setting it down in ~1/5 as much time under one possible null hypothesis. No, it's not a big bang result. That is a good thing. For a long time, psychology has had a real problem with studies whose reach exceed their grasp. This study appears to me to be an example of exactly the kind of sober, incrementalist work that we need to see more of in psychology. It takes a big hypothesis ("giving kids a lot of toys is harmful to their attention span in the long run"), picks a smaller sub-hypothesis off of it ("if kids have fewer toys, their individual sessions with each toy will be longer") and then tests just that bit. Like they suggest at the end of the abstract, this result indicates that it would be sensible to proceed to the next iteration. Call it "lean science" if a buzzword is necessary.
- dopamean 9y ago
  > "if kids have fewer toys, their individual sessions with each toy will be longer" I must be missing something. Isn't this obvious? One hour of play time / 16 toys is less time per toy then one hour of play time / 4 toys.
  - 9y ago

thrownblown 9y ago

but can a child ever have enough legos?

amelius 9y ago
The scientists would probably consider those lego blocks a single toy :)

timthelion 9y ago

As much as the obvious reflex is to think that "oh we should move BACK to a more austere, toy-less environment." It is important to remember, that children that grow up in nature are surrounded by thousands of "toys". I remember camping by creaks as a child, and finding there far more "toys" than in my play box. Rocks, sticks, bushes, leaves, mud, bugs, animals. Somehow, I still managed to focus for hours trying to damn the creak. So I don't really believe that more toys = shorter attention span. It must be something about the nature of these artificially created toys that makes them less engaging.

rosser 9y ago
Maybe at least partly because you had to engage your imagination a bit to make that stick into a gun, or whatever? Toy guns are obviously guns; point 'em and say "Pew! Pew!" — if they don't already make the noise for you, too... Sticks, there's a visualization step or two somewhere in there, too. I'm not specifically aware of any research directly investigating the relationship between the degree or intensity of imaginative play and focus, but I wouldn't be at all surprised — read: fully expect — to find them strongly positively correlated.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
If you leave a stick alone for 30s it doesn't flash and play a tune to try [desperately?] to get you to play with it. I'd guess the issue is that the toys are designed to so that they will get picked up in a toy store. They have to get off the shelf and to the checkout, they don't have to entertain one jot beyond that ...
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
If your childhood was anything like mine, you were probably trying to dam the creek - no 'n'. Not that I'm judging you or there's anything wrong with a young and free imagination that seeks to condemn the naiads to eternal suffering.
- timthelion 9y ago
  Oops. I was trying to dam it, not damn it.

segmondy 9y ago

Same things apply to adults. Less open tabs, less open windows, Less monitors, less projects tend to make one focus better.

postit 9y ago

I believe this is a behavior trait human beings will carry all along their lives. I'm not a kid anymore and the more programming languages I try to play with, leads to me the same state of lack of creativity and problem solving. I could say that about overloading one with books, games and movies as well.

jjuel 9y ago
I have this problem with most technologies. I was just getting somewhere with one of my personal projects. Then all of a sudden I decided I needed to try emacs. Now I am in a world of org and ledger and spacemacs. Trying to get everything configured. Of course I will probably get about half way through that and something new and shiny will catch my eye.
myth_drannon 9y ago
Can confirm, I jump from one language to another every couple of months or so without, the ability to concentrate on one. Ah Elm is so cool, but today ReasonML is getting interesting traction and support from Facebook... I should try that. But all of these are for web, doing low level systems programming is interesting, starting to read Rust book next week

igorgue 9y ago

The fact that I don't remember my mom ever buying us toys (dad was absent) I can say that it does make you creative. I remember getting a few broken GI Joe from my cousin, with those, I used a screwdriver to pick up the good parts of them, and make good toys with weird arms and legs. These were supposed to be garbage but as usually having less stuff makes you more creative and I ended up with a few toys that nobody else had!

api 9y ago

This works for engineers too.

cpfohl 9y ago

I can confirm this is 100% true for my children. So much so that when I can control the number of toys available to them (during quiet time in their rooms, for example) I generally go with a small stack of books and one or two toys (typically a Lego or Lincoln log type toy, and a puzzle). I love when a study affirms something I'm doing...parenting usually feels like educated guessing...

grigjd3 9y ago

I wonder if the newness of the situation matters. At Christmas, my daughter will open and play with all her gifts. Two months later, she'll play with some toys more than others. I wonder if kids have a desire to try all the available options when they haven't had a chance to experience them previously. EDIT: or without regular availability.

eighthnate 9y ago

Isn't this just tautological nonsense? This applies to everything. If you have 1 friend rather than 5, you can focus and be more creative with that 1 friend than 5. If you have 1 sibling rather than 5, the same thing. If you have 1 book rather than 5, you can focus and read that one book. Maybe we should have less schools and less "research" because so much of it seems like useless busy body work to justify academics' salaries. And of course, such topics like these are great because it latches onto the simple-minded people's anecdotes as the comments here reflect.

gpmcadam 9y ago

This study is a little questionable. A comment from /r/science: > Toddlers were taken to a room they had never been to > before and were given at most 30 minutes to play with > the toys. They switched toys more often when there > were 16 vs. 4 toys and played with more toys overall. > Duration of play will naturally be an inverse of that > - and if the kids wanted to check out all the toys > first before deciding to which one to use, which you > would expect them to do in a new environment, that's > naturally going to skew the statistics. The conclusion > that they were more distracted by other toys in the 16 > toy condition is unsurprising since all the toys were > novel. But it would seem rare that toddlers would be > given 16 new toys all at once and it's certainly > possible that if all the toys were familiar, they might > engage for longer and more in-depth types of play with > certain toys regardless of how many were present. And also apparently the sample size was around 11 participants. Wouldn't jump to the conclusion the headline of this article seems to draw just yet, without further evidence.

jedberg 9y ago
Yeah my anecdata backs this up. My kid has a ton of toys, but she only plays with one or two a day, for quite a long time. But when we go to her cousin's houses, she has to play with every toy for five minutes. Same with when they come to our house.
- rco8786 9y ago
  I’m on mobile so can’t link right now, but there’s actually a plethora of research on this topic in he Montessori world of teaching that all comes to the same conclusion.
3pt14159 9y ago
Studies with less than 200 participants should just be banned by default by major journals. Or at the very least people should have to supply their predicted outcomes at the outset to stop the constant p hacking that's been going on.

deevolution 9y ago

Lego ftw! Anecdotaly, Legos were the only toy that managed to hold my attention because theres sn infinite number of things i could do with them.

prawn 9y ago

My son attends an excellent preschool. Almost every day this year, the room has been set out with activity tables that vary without repeat. Drawing, painting, fossils, construction toys, etc. I cannot imagine the repository they pull from to continuously provide such unique options. At home, my children have more than enough toys, to the point that when presented with the full set, they loll about listlessly and overwhelmed by choice. I've tried to follow the preschool's lead and select a few that are out at any one time. I think it helps, and also makes for a quicker clean up. We have a lot of incidental toys that are essentially rubbish; they get pulled out and scattered around each play time without actually being played with.

dansman 9y ago

Not only toddlers

MilnerRoute 9y ago

I have a friend who does "12 days of Christmas." The idea being, why not have something fun for almost two weeks, instead of just one massive dump of gifts on the 25th. Each to his own.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jsemrau 9y ago

Boredom is one of the drivers of creative thought. I guess no surprises here.

MechEStudent 9y ago

My 2 year old wanted just one Christmas present. I think that if I had not been a "dumb American" and if I had played with her and the toy instead of urging her to open another present, she would have been happy with one toy for Christmas for years. Deeply satisfied, and blessed full.

peterjlee 9y ago

Trying to build what I wanted with the limited Lego parts I had always forced me to be more creative.

jaequery 9y ago

I'm pretty sure this applies to websites as well!

amelius 9y ago

Just in time for Christmas! :)

zoom6628 9y ago

AFter decades of success science is backing up what Montessori has been doing. I had 2 kids thru Montessory pre-school and gave them a big step up when entering first year - and no i did not do any other math learning with them outside of class. They both got assessed at being 2yrs ahead of standard on math. if you have kids i cannot recommend Montessori enough.

gumby 9y ago

On the electronic-vs-non-electronic toy front: I think it'e better to characterize it as "toys that the child plays with" vs "toys that play with the child". There's a lot more exploration and, frankly, fun in the former. But let's not forget, the child is not the toy manufacturer's customer: the parent, grandparent, or parent of the birthday-party-invitee is the customer. Toys are designed to appeal to them.

saulrh 9y ago

This is an obvious exploration/exploitation optimization strategy. The child doesn't have infinite time and has the same distribution for available time in both cases. A larger estimated state space therefore dictates more aggressive exploration, which means faster switching and slower settling. In more intuitive terms, the child is trying to maximize their chance of getting to play with everything, and while they don't know how much time they have, they have no reason to assume it's enough, so they move faster to cover more toys. Whether you think that this adaptation is a reasonable one, or whether these are useful observations for a child to use to inform their expectations about the world, I'm not sure I can say. But this is the rational strategy under straightforward assumptions about the utility function that our adaptations approximate. Furthermore, I expect that I would observe identical behavior in adults - for example, consider your takings at a buffet as a function of the number of options and your familiarity with them - and in fact that a non-negligible part of HN often exercises this same strategy consciously and rationally.

valetinaramir 9y ago

me encanta la pagina

valetinaramir 9y ago

excellente la accion