Foreign Perspectives

I was doing quite nicely pottering along with the child development course this last couple of months and keeping my one month lead-time on the official course calendar until now.

However, the next section of the course on the personal and social development of children has started off with a substantial jump in the quantity and complexity of the work involved. As noted earlier that, for me, has fallen at the same time as a dearth in the posts in the course forum which does seem to point to a likelihood of a substantial drop-out rate over the previous week.

Why the big jump though? Well, the first segment in the new section is on parenting and as all us parents know that’s not a simple topic. Secondly, the segment looks in considerable detail at the implementation of what’s called the “strange test” which is basically used as a means of identifying how and in what way a child is attached to, usually, their mother. It turns out that this is quite an important classification as it can determine how the child handles relationships in later life and therefore there have been ways developed of identifying that child attachment classification in adults. Net effect of this is that the methodology segment which is usually quite short seems to take up almost as much time as the rest of the segment which in turn means it’s gonna take me another couple of days to get through it.

On the plus side, it looks like the next segment is back to the normal workload though there is the “small” matter of the next assignment to think about too…