Making and Keeping Friends Is More than Child's Play

    When 6-year­-old Rachel returned to school on a recent Monday morning, her eyes immediately scanned the playground for her friend Abbie. “Though they were only separated by a weekend, the girls ran right into each other's arms and hugged,” recalls Rachel's mother Kathryn Willis of Gilbert. “It was like a scene from a movie.”

    Most parents instinctively (本能地) know that having friends is good for their child. Experts agree that friendship isnot simply child's play, but a powerful predictor of social adjustment throughout life.

A Skill for Life

  “Childhood friendships serve as a very important training ground for adulthood,” says Dr. Robbie Adler­Tapia, psychologist with the Center for Children's Health & Life Development at the East Valley Family Resource Center.

    Researcher William Hartup states,“Peerrelations contribute significantly to both social and cognitive (认知的) development.” Hartup concludes that the single best childhood predictor of adult social adaptation is not school grades or classroom behavior, butrather, how well a child gets along with other children.

    The work of Arizona State University professor of Developmental Psychology Gary Ladd proves that just as being ableto make and keep friends is beneficial to kids while the lack of friends is detrimental.

Good Friendships Don't Just Happen

    Experts agree that it is essential forchildren to establish high­quality friendships. But, researchers warn, these friendships don't necessarily just happen. Often, a good friendship begins with involvedparents.

    Psychologist Dr. Lynne Kenney Markan believes kids should be taught social skills in much the same way they are taught math and reading.

Bad Company

Many parents worry about the quality aswell as the quantity of their child's friendships. “When she was in 1st grade, her supposed ‘best friend' began calling her names and threatening to hurt her,”says Mindy Miller. “My daughter wasn't allowed to talk to or even look at other girls in her class. It really crushed her spirit. I told my daughter she didn't need a ‘friend' like that.”

    “I'll bend over backwards(拼命) to help my son get together with a friend I think is good for him,” Adler­ Tapiasays. “I don't look at it as manipulation (操纵)，just positive parental involvement.”

    In the fall of 1985, I was a bright-eyed girl heading off to Howard University to study law, aiming at a legal career and dreaming of sitting on a Supreme Court bench somewhere. Twenty-one years later I am still a bright-eyed dreamer and one with quite a different tale to tell.

    My grandma, an amazing woman, graduated from college at the age of 65. She was the first in our family to reach that goal. But one year after I started college, she developed cancer. I made the choice to withdraw from college to care for her. It meant that school and my personal dream would have to wait.

    Then I got married with another dream: building my family with a combination of adopt and biological children. In 1999, we adopted our first son. To lay eyes on him was fantastic and very emotional. A year later came our second adopted boy. Then followed son No.3. In 2003, I gave birth to another boy.

    You can imagine how busy I became, raising four boys under the age of 8. Our home was a complete zoo--a joyous zoo. Not surprisingly, I never did make it back to college full-time. But I never gave up on the dream either. I had only one choice: to find a way. That meant taking as few as one class each semester.

    The hardest part was feeling guilty about the time I spent away from the boys. They often wanted me to stay home with them. There certainly were times I wanted to quit, but I knew I should set an example for them to follow through the rest of their lives.

    In 2007, I graduated from the University of North Carolina. It took me over 21 years to get my college degree!

    I am not special, just single-minded. It always struck me that when you're looking at a big challenge from the outside it looks huge, but when you're in the midst of it, it just seems normal. Everything you want won't arrive in your life on one day. It's a process. Remember: little steps add up to big dreams.

    Have you ever run out of coffee or tea? Found no eggs in the fridge? No bread for the sandwich and the nearest shop is too far away? Well, all that can change in the future.

    If all goes well, the intelligent future kitchen will soon help solve all your problems. In the future, all kitchen units will be connected to the Internet. The intelligent future kitchen will give wise advice on planning your menu for the day. Worried about your weight? — It will tell you the right diet and what is good for your health. It will even keep in mind your likes and dislikes!

    Designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this smart kitchen promises to pay attention to all your needs. The computer's system will help keep an “eye” on the fridge. If the fridge is empty, the kitchen will automatically call and place an order at the local supermarket. So you don't have to worry about it at all.

    You get home late, and don't know what to make from the collection of ingredients (原料) in your fridge. A while back you might have ordered a take-out but now, instead of worrying about eating a collection of this and that, you're excited. You can pull out each vegetable, and pass each one in front of a web camera next to your fridge. A few moments later, a screen on your fridge would display a tasty recipe.

    After dinner, you take your plates to a box next to the sink. You don't have to clean them, your machine does. It produces new plates every time you need to eat. Later in the evening, you phone your other half, who is on a business trip half-way around the world. As you drink your cup of hot coffee, it makes your other half's cup change color on the other side of the world, another special way to keep in touch.

    I often dreamed about Pisa when I was a boy. I read about the famous building called the Leaning Towers of Pisa(比萨斜塔）. But when I read the word Pisa, I was thinking of pizza. I thought this tower must be the best place to buy pizza in the world.

    Many years later, I finally saw the Leaning Tower. I knew then that it was Pisa and no pizza and that the tower got its name because it really did lean to one side. Some people want to try to fix it. They are afraid that it may fall over and they don't want it to lean over the city.

    I don't think it a good idea to try to fix it. The tower probably will not fall down. It's 600 years old. Why should anything happen to it now? And, if you ask me, I like what it looks like. It seems to say nothing is perfect. Imperfect things may be more interesting. Why is it so famous? There are many other older, more beautiful towers in Italy but Pisa tower is the most famous.

    When I lived in Spain, some Spanish friends of mine The family you have chosen decided to visit England by car. Before they left, they asked me for advice about how to find accommodation. I suggested that they should stay at 'bed and breakfast' houses, because this kind of accommodation gives a foreign visitor a good chance to speak English with the family. My friends listened to my advice, but they came back with some funny stories.

"We didn't stay at bed and breakfast houses," they said, "because we found that most families were away on holiday."

I thought this was strange. Finally I understood what had happened. My friends spoke little English, and they thought 'VACANCIES' meant 'holidays', because the Spanish word for 'holidays" is 'vacancies'. So they did not go to house where the sign outside said 'VACANCIES', which in English means there are free rooms. Then my friends went to house where the sign said 'NO VACANCLES', because they thought this meant the people who owned the house were not away on holiday. But they found that these houses were all full. As a result, they stayed at hotels!

We laughed about this and about mistakes my friends made in reading other signs. In Spanish, the word 'DIVERSION' means fun. In English, it means that workmen are repairing the road, and that you must take a different road. When my friends saw the word 'DIVERSION' on a road sign, they thought they were going to have fun. Instead, the road ended in a large hole.

English people have problems too when they learn foreign languages. Once in Paris, when someone offered me some more coffee, I said "Thank you" in French. I meant that I would like some more. However, to my surprise the coffee pot was taken away! Later I found out that "Thank you" in French means "No, thank you."

    Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Perhaps they were busy talking, testing or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new "species" of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name — phubbers (低头族).

    Recently, a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes selfie(自拍照) in front of a car accident site and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events eventually leads to the destruction of the world.

    Although the ending sounds overstated, the damage phubbing can bring is real. Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. "Constantly bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck," Guangming Daily quoted doctors as saying. "The neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching." Also, staring at cell phones for long periods of time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

    But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. At reunions with family or friends, many people tend to stick to their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

    It can also cost you your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.