West Hill Educare

Special purchase for the one who always talks about sugar bugs!

Time to deadhead the lilacs…
oh they were SO lovely and delicious this year! 💜

Modern childhood looks very different from what it did just a few decades ago. Many children now spend more time indoors, have greater access to highly processed foods, and are surrounded by digital devices that compete for their attention every minute of the day.

Scientists continue to study how lifestyle factors influence a child's developing brain. Regular physical activity helps support attention, mood, sleep quality, and overall health. Time spent outdoors can encourage movement, social interaction, and exposure to natural light, which plays an important role in maintaining healthy sleep and daily rhythms. At the same time, nutrition provides the building blocks that growing brains and bodies need to function properly.

Research also suggests that constant stimulation from fast-paced digital content may affect attention patterns in some children. This does not mean that screens are automatically harmful or that every child will experience difficulties. However, experts often encourage balance. Opportunities for free play, exercise, reading, creativity, and quiet time remain important parts of healthy development.

The conversation is not about blaming parents or expecting perfection. Every family faces different challenges and circumstances. Instead, it is a reminder that children's behavior is influenced by many factors beyond simple discipline. When healthy habits such as movement, nutritious meals, outdoor play, good sleep, and reasonable screen limits are supported together, children are often given a stronger foundation for learning, focus, and emotional well-being as they grow.

A Norwegian neuroscientist named Audrey van der Meer has spent the better part of 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways that typing physically cannot.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the study that essentially closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is significant enough that, in a sane world, it should have already changed every classroom on the planet.

For the experiment, she recruited 36 university students and fitted each one with a cap of 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity in real time. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote each word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full 5 seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had been ignoring for years, which is how the different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and talking to itself.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern more or less collapsed. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier simply weren't there anymore on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion, it's a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, your wrist, your vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws almost all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has very little to integrate and almost no problem to solve. As van der Meer put it in her interviews, pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way.

She also pointed out that children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like B and D apart, because they have never physically felt with their own bodies what it actually takes to produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at exactly the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments. Half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled, half took notes by hand, and then everyone was tested on what they actually understood from the lectures they had just watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing far more total content but processing almost none of it as they went.

The handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Ultimately, handwriting makes the brain work, and typing lets it coast.

Interestingly, this is a story about embodiment, and about how much of what we call "thinking" is actually a whole-body act that we have been quietly outsourcing to screens for years now. I teach this in my Embodied Sensemaking work.

The brain is not a computer, but part of a living system that includes your hands, your eyes, your nervous system, and the felt sense of moving through space. Every time we replace an embodied act with a frictionless digital one, we get a little more efficient at the surface level and a little more disconnected from the depth that actually makes a piece of information stick, or a feeling get processed, or a decision get integrated. This, to me, is also training us to think less in terms of systems and complexity, and more in terms of cheap takes and surface level talking points.

The nice part of this, there is a fix... write more with your hand.

Recall

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Between 3 and 9, your child’s brain is learning what happens when people get angry.

He talks back to you. You yell back.

He does it again the next day. You yell again.

The week ends. The yelling has shown up six more times. The slammed doors. The attitude. The power struggles. The shouting matches.

You tell yourself you are doing your best.

You are tired. You are overstimulated. You are frustrated.

You tell yourself he is the reason you are yelling.

He isn’t.

You are giving the brain six clean reps of what happens when people get angry.

Between 3 and 9, your child’s brain is building the rules for what happens during conflict. The brain is not deciding whether yelling is good or bad. It is deciding whether yelling is normal.

Every time frustration becomes shouting, the wiring strengthens.

Every time anger becomes louder than the lesson, the wiring strengthens.

Every time a disagreement turns into a battle, the wiring strengthens.

By age 10, those patterns are mostly set.

Brains repeat what they experience.

This is not a parenting failure.

This is a wiring window.

Now imagine you catch it the first time.

You feel the anger rise and you slow the reaction.

You stop focusing on changing your child and start focusing on changing the pattern.

You do not tell yourself you’ll work on it tomorrow.

Because your child is learning from this moment.

Not the next one.

And this time, you respond differently.

Within a few weeks, the fights get shorter.

The tension breaks faster.

Your child starts coming to you instead of avoiding you.

The hard moments do not disappear.

But the fear around them starts to disappear.

None of this happens because your child became a different child.

It happens because the pattern finally changed.

And you changed it.

If promising yourself you were going to stop yelling was enough, you would have stopped by now.

Most parents do not need more guilt.

They need better tools.

Comment CHANGE and I’ll send you the link to Control Your Anger™. 💛

Box for a summer afternoon:
• a phone (flower stone)
• a camera (the block)
• a tickler ball
• a stick (of course!)
• some other important stuff!

For the first time, the 2026 KIDS COUNT® Data Book includes a child well-being score in addition to state rankings. This 0-to-1,000 score makes it easier to see how outcomes for kids are changing over time.

The latest data show a mixed picture across the country. Overall child well-being declined nationally between 2019 and 2024, with education showing the largest decline. At the same time, there are signs of progress: Teen births fell 24%, and the share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods decreased by 22%.

Learn more in this year’s Data Book: http://aecf.org/databook