Tag Archives: child of mind

About Child of Mind

Family pic

About Us

Hi, my name is Isabela Granic. My husband (Marc Lewis) and I wrote Bed Timing: The “when-to” guide to helping your child to sleep. We both got our PhDs in developmental psychology — he’s a Professor at University of Toronto and I’m a research scientist at the Hosptial for Sick Children in Toronto. We’re also parents of 3-year old twin boys.  We wrote Bed Timing while trying to figure out the ins and outs of our own children’s sleep habits and how to ultimately change those crazy habits so that we could regain our sanity. This blog was first developed as a place to talk about the issues raised in Bed Timing, to highlight particular research findings that form the basis of the book and, most importantly, to provide readers a space to ask questions and trouble-shoot through their own sleep-training highs and lows. We’ve been on several call-in radio shows as part of the book promotion tour and my favorite part of this process has been connecting with real moms who are in the trenches, trying to solve their own young children’s sleep problems. I was hoping to do more of that through this blog.

After about 6 months of focusing on sleep issues in babies and toddlers, I decided to broaden the topics of the blog to any developmental questions and concerns that parents may have about their children. So… this “new and improved” blog is meant to cover almost any developmental topic: discipline, potty training, cognitive milestones, early friendships, literacy, aggression, early fears, school-readiness, separation distress and so on and so on.

Tracy's pic And I have a comrade in arms now to help me write and keep up with comments. Her name is Tracy Solomon. She too has a PhD in developmental psychology. Whereas my expertise are generally in social and emotional development, hers are in cognitive development. Read more about her here. Tracy has a 5-year-old son. He is a child of passionate interests and
some unusual abilities that really keep her on her toes. Tracy’s key
interests are in symbolic reasoning (for example, how children learn to understand different forms of media, from t.v., to videos and so on) and spatial reasoning (how children learn to navigate)
and also at the intersection of these; children’s comprehension of
maps, scale models, graphs, rulers etc. All of this is, of course,
related to more formal learning which is how she came to her current
research in early mathematics education. On top of all that, she’s basically incredibly knowledgeable about just about anything that’s related to how children think and how that thinking changes over time.

We’d like this online space to serve several functions:

(1) To provide a Q & A forum in which readers can send their parenting questions or questions about development that simply interest them. We’ll try to provide some advice, based on our developmental training (and some personal experience!).  Please, feel free to email us any questions you may have; we’ll try to get to as many as possible as quickly as possible. If you’re worried about something, there’s sure to be many, many other parents in the same boat. We’ll post questions and answers several times per week. 

(2) To highlight the latest research findings about children’s development on all sorts of topics — the latest neurscience studies, the latest work on school-readiness, and so on. Between the two of us, Tracy and I have tons and tons of research that we’ve compiled, summarized, and critiqued. We’d like to post relevant studies, articles, and new research findings on a weekly basis and have you comment about the usefulness and relevance of that material.

(3) To develop a supportive community for parents and caregivers that can help parents help each other through some of the most harrowing developmental challenges. The extent to which this goal will be realized is all about you.