Clouds of Resources

With no great want to reinvent the wheel, one of the places that we have been starting is looking at readily available resources for caregivers on the topic of child development. There are hundreds of condensed lists available for parents on a wide range of topics. So to start with, let’s look at some of the biggest and most public: CDC (Center for Disease Control), AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics), and Zero to Three. To get a feeling for the messaging and tone of each, I picked a page or publication from each that focused on skills and habits they wanted to promote in parents, and made a word cloud from it.

What started as a simple and fun exercise turned out to be fairly informative. While all the information is correct in all of these examples, they do carry different messages and have different agendas. Even just looking at the tone, there are some sites I am already pulled deeper into, and others that I’m starting to write off. Being a children’s museum we will aim for a very open and welcoming environment. One of our advisor’s has said many times that, “Milestones can be millstones.” It can be very easy to get caught up in developmental milestones, but there is so much more to the life of a child than marking the exact moment of a first step or when vocabulary has reached 50-100 words. And as mentioned in a previous post, we hope to convey more practices and fewer indicators.

So, let’s start with the CDC. The CDC is a HUGE organization and it has a publication or resource available for just about anything dealing with health or wellness. The document that I pulled text from was their “Positive Parenting Tips.”

Being involved with every single public initiative on health, this is a different lens than just about anyone else. Although these are “positive” tips for parents, it is hard not to notice the “death,” “smoke,” and “shake” in the background. This is important information, but is likely to not be our focus or tone.

If you have young children, the AAP is what you hear regularly referenced at doctor appointments. One of their recommendations that we reference regularly at the museum is about screen time and young children. Which just in case you were curious, “… young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens.”

This one is getting much closer to our thinking which keeps coming back to the word “relationships.” Although the proximity of words in the word cloud is random and not associated to how they are placed in the original document, several strings of words really stand out. Starting in the middle and going down there is, “early, caregivers, parents, health, community.” Right above this from left to right there is, “child, relationships, parenting, vital.” And my favorite two words together on the left side are, “purposeful, childhood.” These two words almost sum up our mission; that the importance of play, the necessity of nature, the need to ask questions, and the time to explore, help construct a purposeful childhood.

Finally, Zero to Three is a national nonprofit focused on making content available to caregivers about the development of their young child. I reference them regularly for compelling and digestible infographics.

My favorite pairing of words in this word cloud are “help, play.” I think this may be our primary goal for the space, and we need to design experiences that demonstrate replicable practices that help reach this goal. To think about parents who struggle interacting with their young children because they have limited vocabulary or motor skills, what they really need is support to help play. It also reminds that play gets better in practice and that many adults have been out of practice for a long time. Adults will need help learning how to play, especially if they are going to teach their children how to play.

And if you were unsure, I do love word clouds and this will not be the last time I reference them. For the sake of curiosity I looked at the content of this blog.

So far I see a lot of introduction but not much content. We are still exploring the questions and yet to get to the goals and substance of the work. This makes sense given where we are in the project, but hopefully the needle will start to move as we progress in the work. My favorite 2 word pairing (which are small and down and left of the middle) is “accessible, brain.” How do we take hundreds of articles on early brain development and make them easily accessible through the design of the room and experiences? Good question, I have no idea, but challenge accepted.