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In the film A Christmas Story, Ralphie desperately wants “an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200 shot range model air rifle.” His mom resists because she reckons it will damage his well-being. (“You’ll shoot your eye out!”) In the end, though, Ralphie gets the air rifle and deems it “the greatest Christmas gift I ever received, or would ever receive.”

This Christmas, why not give your friends and family the gift of well-being? Even removing an air rifle and the possibility of eye injury from the mix, that’s easier said than done.

Well-being is tough to pin down. It takes many forms. A college student, a middle-aged parent, and a spritely octogenarian might all lead very different lives and still have well-being. What’s more, you can’t wrap up well-being and tuck it under the tree. All you can do is give gifts that promote it. But what kind of gift promotes well-being?

One that establishes or strengthens the positive grooves that make up a good life. You have well-being when you’re stuck in a “positive groove” of:

• emotions (e.g., pleasure, contentment),
• attitudes (e.g., optimism, openness to new experiences),
• traits (e.g., extraversion, perseverance), and
• success (e.g., strong relationships, professional accomplishment, fulfilling projects, good health).

Your life is going well for you when you’re entangled in a success-breeds-success cycle comprised of states you find (mostly) valuable and pleasant.

Some gifts do this by producing what psychologists call flow. They immerse you in an activity you find rewarding. Flow gifts are easy to spot. They’re the ones, like Ralphie’s air rifle, that occupy you all day.

A flow gift promotes well-being by snaring you into a pleasure-mastery-success loop. A flow gift turns you inward, toward a specific activity and away from the rest of the world. It involves an activity that’s fun, that you get better at with practice, and that rewards you with success, even if that “success” is winning a video game car race.

Flow is important to a good life. It feels good, and it fosters excellence. It’s the difference between the piano-playing wiz and the kid (like me) who fizzled out. But there’s more to well-being than flow and excellence.

A bonding gift turns you outward, toward other people. A bonding gift shows how someone thinks and feels about you. In O. Henry’s short story The Gift of the Magi, a young couple, Jim and Della, sacrifice their “greatest treasures” to buy each other Christmas gifts. Della sells her luxurious long hair to buy a chain for Jim’s gold watch. And Jim sells his gold watch to buy the beautiful set of combs Della yearned for.

Bonding gifts change people’s relationships. The chain and the combs strengthen and deepen Jim and Della’s love, affection and commitment. This is why “of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.”

The bonds of love and friendship are not just emotional. They’re causal. We’re tangled up with the people we care about in self-sustaining cycles of positive feelings, attitudes, traits and accomplishments. Good relationships are shared, interpersonal positive grooves. This is why they make us better and happier people. Bonding gifts strengthen the positive groove you share with a person you care about.

You’re probably wondering whether you can find something that’s an effective bonding and flow gift. I must admit, I’ve never managed it. A tandem bike? Alas, no. Perhaps you can do better.

So this holiday season, why not give “groovy” gifts – gifts that “keep on giving” by ensnaring your loved ones in cascading cycles of pleasure and value.

Image credit: Stockphotography wrapping paper via Hubspot.

The post Giving the gift of well-being appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Reading – we all recognise it as a core skill. By ‘intelligent reading’, I mean reading with a level of comprehension commensurate with the child’s experience of the world they inhabit. Fortunately, reading to children is now encouraged  as being supportive of  reading literacy and as a sound foundation for future learning.

Not that long ago, children were seen as passive recipients of the eager parent’s input via the quality time spent in ‘read to me’ and ‘bedtime story’ sessions.

I always felt sure my children were taking in much more than the professional opinion allowed.

Recently, I borrowed a copy of Dr. Virginia Lowe’s very excellent book, “Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two children tell” (Routlege 2007) based on the record of her own two children’s responses to books from birth to adolescence. Dr. Lowe’s book vindicates what I felt all along as a parent! This book should be set reading for students of primary, early childhood and remedial teaching, child and family psychology and for anyone with an interest in literacy!

Her children had a smorgasbord of stories proffered continuously, both Dr Lowe and her husband being librarians who were passionate advocates of children’s literature.  The children’s reactions to and responses concerning elements of story and  illustrations provide a wonderfully insightful peek into the psyche of the child. Both Lowe children clearly had a blessed and privileged childhood, but being ‘read to’ is within the reach of most children. Public libraries and school libraries are accessible to most families. Even if parental work commitments make  a nightly ‘reading’ impossible, there are weekends and visits to grandparents when  a ‘storytelling’ session can be included in the agenda.

There are other options.

Storytelling sessions are held regularly in many public libraries and are ‘free’.

And online  resources such as “Ripple Reader” and “A Story Before Bed” provide a way for even absent grandparents and parents to read to their children. In the USA and Israel, ‘bedtime stories’ are part of official early education policy. Programmes like “Reach Out and Read” and “Read to Me” do a monumental job in promoting literacy and the power of  storytime to be a deeply meaningful and bonding time in families.

By Professor Jane Edwards

What does the baby have to learn in these first 12-18 months (before they can speak)? The list  includes what you do with your eyes when with another, how long to hold a mutual gaze, what turn-off head movements work, and with whom, how close you should let the other come to you… how to read body positions… how to enter into turn taking when vocalizing with another… how to joke around, negotiate escalate, back off… make friends, and so on.
Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality (OUP, 2010) p. 110-111

As a music therapy scholar, teacher, and practitioner for more than 20 years, I have been able to learn from many sources about the crucial role our early years play in our lives. The ability to reflect on challenges experienced in our adult lives by linking back to childhood experiences is an essential aspect of the way that many music therapists practice. Rather than using descriptions of family histories to apportion blame, the therapist tries to understand the current experience of the patient and their worldview through the lens of past experience, to see if there is some way to make sense of self-destructive behaviours, or difficulties experienced in creating meaningful and satisfying relationships with others.

I began my early music therapy practice in mental health services and in nursing homes, working with people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease or other types of dementia. Many people, whether in group or individual music therapy programmes, offered reflections on their early life, and described aspects of their parents’ availability or unavailability; referring to the quality of these first relationships in ways that helped me to understand something of what might have been unresolved or unsatisfying for them. Eventually I found myself very keen to work with people much earlier in life to see whether music therapy could ameliorate some of the issues my older patients were facing.

Although I worked in paediatric music therapy for seven years at a children’s hospital, it was only when I was writing the first proposal to found the (now) international parent-infant support programme Sing & Grow that I had the chance to bring all of my past experience to bear: to make a case for the importance of promoting loving, playful, and nurturing interactions between parents and infants where vulnerability was in evidence. Through my work in this field, I have become increasingly aware of an unrecognised field of practice in music therapy: parent-infant work. This involves the referral of vulnerable parents to a music therapy service. Parents usually attend with their infants and the music therapist provides a safe and accepting space in which the parent and infant pair or group can be encouraged to play and interact in supportive and mutually satisfying ways. This is not always ‘music’ as it might be generally understood; rather it is a musical way of interacting that the therapist encourages.

When adults speak to infants we use particular ways of interaction that seem to be the same across the world. But we should ask why do we use such an exaggerated, playful, and musical way of speaking to infants? The obvious answer is because the infants like it — they raise their eyebrows, fix their gaze on the speaker’s face, and sometimes smile quite quickly on hearing us say ‘ooohhh whooo is my little baaaby?’ This is especially true if the speaker is a family member but it also can occur in new encounters when the conversational partner knows and can offer this communication in a playful and experimental way.  However, there are many more powerful scientific and theoretical findings that indicate how this type of interaction builds the bonds of trust and love between parents and infants.

Work by psychobiologist Colwyn Trevarthen, the ethologist Ellen Dissanayake, and researcher Sandra Trehub and her team at the University of Toronto, has paved the way in showing how the functions of this interaction have less to do with entertaining and engaging the baby and are more aligned with the infant’s ability to evoke and interpret these signals from adults and their siblings within weeks of birth. For me, and for the researchers mentioned above, these interactions are easily identified as musical. Observations of the nature of these interactions between parents and infants led Stephen Malloch to coin the term ‘Communicative Musicality’, to capture the unique pitch and rhythmic structures that communicative partners use.

This type of interaction is, as the quote from Stern at the opening attests, playful, rich, and highly involved. It teaches the many skills we need in being able to be with people successfully in intimate relationships, in relationships involving teachers and students, and in work groups. When we do not have adequately rich and supported experiences of attachment in infancy there can be lifelong consequences. Therefore, offering support to parents and infants in difficulty can provide long term benefits. Music therapy is uniquely poised to make a useful contribution to this work as infants are receptive to musical and music-like interactions from sensitive and responsive adults.

Professor Jane Edwards is an Associate Professor at the University of Limerick where she directs the Music & Health Research Group and is co-ordinator of the MA in Music Therapy in the Irish World Academy of Music & Dance. She was formerly a guest professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin (2004-2011). She is President of the International Association for Music & Medicine. She has published extensively in the field of music therapy including Music Therapy and Parent-Infant Bonding (OUP, 2011), and is sole editor for the first Oxford Handbook of Music Therapy (forthcoming).

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Image credit: ‘Mother Kissing Baby’ By Vera Kratochvil (public domain via Wikimedia Commons).

Author Meg Rosoff has come up with another thoughtful YA novel, "What I Was." Generally, boys are not known for intensity of emotional relationships with other boys, without becoming the story of an overtly gay, perhaps one-sided or not, relationship. "What I Was" never commits to identifying the protagonist Hilary's attraction to the mysterious boy, Finn, as gay, neither in Hilary's mind, nor in their experiences. But it is an underlying tension in the plot and keeps the reader wondering throughout, even into the epilogue, where Hilary reminisces as an old, never-married bachelor on his experiences as a boy at St. Oswald's.

Rosoff chooses an intriguing setting for her story, St. Oswald's School on the southeast coast of England, one of the austere, ancient boarding schools that seem to dot the country, and it contributes to the mood and dynamics that propel the story along. Finn, about fourteen, lives alone in a fishing shack along the periodically almost submerged headlands, and it is his grace, simple lifestyle and taciturn manner that intrigues Hilary, about sixteen, son of a wealthy family, who has been expelled from several boarding schools before St. Oswald's. Hilary is one of those boys who are recognized as 'different' by other boys, and his roommates delight in tormenting him. Meeting Finn, who does not go to school but has somehow escaped the notice of any authorities, makes life more tolerable, even interesting, for Hilary, who cuts school as often as he can to spend time with Finn. Finn becomes alarmingly ill at one point, and the story makes a revelation that adds a layer of complexity to what the reader may think about the nature of the special relationship that has been so cherished by Hilary. It is perhaps fundamentally unknowable, but invites some thought.

This episode of Just One More Book! is part of our showcase coverage of the International Reading Association’s 52nd annual conference.

Mark speaks with Hip Hop M.C. and curriculum developer Gabriel Benn about H.E.L.P., the Hip-Hop Educational Literacy Program –- a creative reading program that combines the power of Hip-Hop with proven reading instruction — and gives a short performance.

Participate in the conversation by leaving a comment on this interview, or send an email to [email protected].