What Makes People Tick?

Today's blog post is going back to the Early Days! Childcare, Education and some Developmental Theories thrown in! Brace yourselves! My cousin who's a working mother of two, sent me a link to a post by blogger Stephanie Metz. Her comment: "Finally someone says what I've been thinking!" This of course got me thinking, and got me curious to read the post. Blogger Stephanie Metz writes about her life as a working mother on her blog The Metz Family . The post I'm talking about is from October 2013 entitled " Why My Kids Are NOT the Center of My World " and as she cautions, it may be a controversial post to read.

Checking out my blog statistics lately, I couldn't help but notice that this blog has gotten quite a few hits. Even though I haven't written anything for months, people still keep on visiting. It makes me feel slightly guilty, to be honest. I had such high hopes for this blog and intended to 'do so much with it' and then never quite got around to doing it... I still have this vision of what this blog could be and what it could become and in light of that, here's a post about reaching your potential and being the best you can be! I found an amazing article at Zen Habits through Google Search. It's called 7 Essentials For Living Your Fullest Potential by Jonathan Mead who is also the author of website Illuminated Mind  - a website dedicated to helping you reach your fullest potential in life! The article is full of amazing tips, hints and ideas - I strongly encourage you to read it as I found it very illuminating. Below is a very abridged (and edited) versio...

Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917 - 2005) was a Russian American psychologist and professor known for developing the Ecological Systems Theory. He was generally regarded as one of the world's leading scholars in the field of developmental psychology. I learned about theorists such as Bronfenbrenner while studying towards my B.Ed. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory views the person as developing within a multi-layered system of relationships. Using the example of a child, the systems are: The Microsystem - One's family, classroom The Mesosystem - Two micro-systems in interaction (i.e. family and classroom) The Exosystem - External environments which indirectly influence development The Macrosystem - The larger socio-cultural context. Added later: The Chronosystem - The evolution of the external systems over time. Each system contains roles, norms and rules that can powerfully shape development. (Source: Wikipedia ) The Microsystem: The setting in which the indi...

I've been interested in "what makes people tick" for as long as I can remember. The way I see it, what makes people tick - what makes them think and act as they do, is a combination of two factors - Nature and Nurture. Nature being genetics and Nurture being our upbringing and environment. According to Wikipedia , "The nature versus nurture debates concern the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities ("nature", i.e. nativism, or innatism) versus personal experiences ("nurture", i.e. empiricism or behaviorism) in determining or causing individual differences in physical and behavioral traits." I'm no genetic scientist or evolutionary biologist or any other person with a fancy title like that, so will leave discussion of the Nature side of this debate to those qualified to do so. While I'd be very interested in finding out exactly how much like our parents, grandparents et al we all are, I'm very happy to let...