Something very interesting is happening in Minnesota. A group of educators and parents have formed a “Say Yes to No” Coalition. They are hoping to stomp out what they refer to as “Deficit Discipline Disorder” - symptoms of which are “gimmes” and a “me first” attitude among their children. The coalition’s goal is to get a newly published book by psychologist David Walsh, NO: Why Kids–of All Ages–Need to Hear It and Ways Parents Can Say It, into the hands of parents everywhere.

I am sure kids have resisted being told “no” since time began. That resistance and the inevitable scenes that follow can be unpleasant (or downright ugly) for most families. It can ruin the atmosphere of a mealtime, car ride, playgroup or family outing…

… These days, coming up against a child’s natural desire to have things their way seems more difficult than ever. Walsh says it’s because this eternal parent-child struggle “is exacerbated by 45 hours or so of screen time each week that plug ‘more, easy, fast and fun,’ and by harried working parents’ craving for harmony when they’re home.” Many parents fear that if they say “no” to unsupervised parties or violent video games, their kids will turn against them. For their kid’s sake, parents must resist giving into that fear.

Parenting never was, and cannot be, for the faint of heart.

According to Walsh, when parents refuse unreasonable demands good things happen to the kids. They learn to say “no” to themselves, learning patience, self control and the acceptance that things won’t always go as they want.

It is not just about using the word NO more frequently. (In fact, you don’t ever have to actually say “no” to do as Walsh recommends). It is about standing firm against undue requests or unreasonable demands. Parenting is a process and when times get tough, keeping the “end in mind” - the kind of adult you want your child to be - can help you weather the daily storms of your child’s temporary unhappiness…

Source: Bradenton Herald, United States
http://www.bradenton.com/health/story/175121.html

As parents invest in the latest academic software and teachers consider how to weave the internet into lesson plans, it is a good moment to reflect upon the changing world in which youth is being educated.

In a word, it is digital, with computer notebooks displacing spiraled notebooks, and blogs, articles, and emails shaping how we read and communicate.

Parents, teachers and scholars are beginning to question how our immersion in this increasingly digital world will shape the next generation’s relationship to reading, learning and to knowledge itself.

As a cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading, I am particularly concerned with the plight of the reading brain as it encounters this technologically rich society…

How many children today are becoming Socrates’ nightmare, decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their Googled universes?

Will they become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought?

Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multitask, integrate and prioritise vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more valuable, skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life and collective wisdom as a species?

There is surprisingly little research that directly confronts these questions, but knowledge from the neurosciences about how the brain learns to read and how it learns to think about what it reads can aid our efforts…

Using neuroimaging to scan the brains of novice readers allows us to observe how a new neural circuitry is fashioned from some of its original structures.

In the process, that brain is transformed in ways we are only now beginning to fully appreciate…

Neuroscience shows us the profound miracle of an expert reading brain that uses untold areas across all four lobes and both hemispheres to comprehend sophisticated text and to think new thoughts that go beyond the text.

Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading…

Source: NEWS.com.au, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22618330-5007146,00.html

No cold medicine for patients under 6, they advise FDA

Cold and cough medicines should not be given to children younger than 6 because they don’t help them and aren’t safe, pediatricians seeking to curb their use told government health advisers yesterday. Such a prohibition would go beyond last week’s move by drug makers to eliminate sales of the nonprescription drugs targeted at children under 2.

The doctors petitioned the Food and Drug Administration advisers seeking, in part, a government statement saying the medications shouldn’t be used in children under age 6 either. The advisers began a two-day meeting to consider the issue…

The medicines have been marketed for use in children for decades, with drug companies spending $50 million a year on heart-tugging ads in parenting magazines and elsewhere. Still, it has long been acknowledged there is little data from studies in the very young to show the medicines are safe and work. Some studies suggest they are no better than placebos in treating cold and cough symptoms in young children, the petitioners said.

“When a treatment is ineffective, its risks - if not zero - always will exceed its benefits,” said Dr. Michael Shannon, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston and a Harvard Medical School professor who was one of the petitioners…

Solurce: Boston Globe, United States
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/10/19/pediatricians_warn_on_drugs/

At one Tokyo public high school, three students who became pregnant over the past year decided they wanted to keep their babies. They were allowed to remain students at the school, though the births deeply embarrassed schoolteachers and officials, who wagged an accusatory finger at the influence of TV–in particular, a hit TV drama series last autumn that centered around a 14-year-old middle school student who has a baby.

“Partly because of the TV drama’s influence, female students who would probably have chosen abortion in the past now tend to choose to keep the baby,” one school official said, adding that parents who would mostly have opposed keeping the babies in the past now tend to be more accepting when girls decide against having an abortion…

The doctor commented, “I feel the students were sexually mature, but lacked the knowledge they need to protect their bodies.”

This school’s case is not unique. Though an increasing number of teenagers are sexually active, many are ill-informed about sex, particularly with regard to birth control–as shown by the number of middle and high school girls who become pregnant or catch sexually transmitted diseases.

Alarmed by this situation, many bodies and groups across the nation are trying to help teenagers make informed choices about life and sex…

“Many teenagers don’t have basic knowledge about, for example, the menstrual cycle and how women become pregnant. Young Japanese are very vulnerable compared with their counterparts in other industrialized countries,” Sekiguchi said…

Source: The Daily Yomiuri, Japan
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20071020TDY04302.htm

Not long ago the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a report that contained the following “shocking” information: Annual spending per high school student in Israel is $6,066 compared with an international average of $7,276. Spending on preschool and elementary school students is also lower. And yes, Israeli classrooms are among the most crowded in the world - with an average of 27 students versus 22 in other developed countries. The crowding in middle schools is even worse, and given the forecast for construction, there is no chance of improvement in the near future.

Israel’s teachers do their best to function in this wretched reality, while earning lower pay than their colleagues in other countries. Now it has been confirmed; even those who didn’t know, who insisted on not knowing, can no longer plead ignorance. And when we say “lower,” we mean significantly lower: $25,131 for the Israeli teacher at the highest level of promotion, compared with an average of $45,666 in the OECD countries.

The disseminators of the lies will never apologize, never right their wrongs, never ask forgiveness, never support the teachers in their unavoidable strike. They’re not about to be distracted by any findings.

Nor will the lie stop at higher education. Members of the Shochat Committee spoke about a growing trend around the world to raise tuition at universities and colleges, and their recommendations fit this trend. They didn’t bother to say that in most of the countries surveyed, tuition has not yet risen, and certainly hasn’t doubled as they tried to argue. In the Czech Republic, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Germany and other countries, university students don’t pay any tuition. In Belgium and France they pay $500, in Italy $1,100, in New Zealand and Holland $1,500, in England $1,800 and in Israel $3,000 - before the tuition hike…

Source: Ha’aretz, Israel
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/914855.html

Gov. Janet Napolitano told educators on Friday that Arizona students need to learn more about math and science to compete in the global business arena.

She called for supporting efforts already under way to increase high-school math and science requirements to better prepare graduates for the state’s biotechnology industry.

“No state in the country has a greater rate of growth in this area than the state of Arizona,” Napolitano said at the Arizona Science Teachers Association conference in Mesa.

The drumbeat has gotten louder for shoring up math and science education in Arizona…

For the first time this school year, Arizona students in Grades 4, 8 and 10 will be tested on state science standards, which will be added to the reading, writing and math tests of the Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards, or AIMS. High-school students are not required to pass the science test to graduate…

Source: Arizona Republic, AZ
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/1020sciencetalk1020.html

Children aged 5 years old who are poor readers and show a poor understanding of language are more likely to experience disadvantage than children who are more literate by age 10. As adults they are more likely to have been unemploymed, to earn less, have fewer qualifications and other aspects of poor social well-being.

New research from the Institute of Education and Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh for Channel 4’s Dispatches which used data from the 1970 British Cohort Study shows that positive intervention during primary school can make children better readers and significantly improve their life chances.

Professor John Bynner at the Institute of Education told us: “I think one message that I always give from this kind of work is that it’s never too late to intervene, it’s never too early and the earlier the better. To break the cycle of deprivation, then it is a matter for families fundamentally. You start where it begins in the early years of life to provide the maximum support for parents so they can help their children… having the preparation for acquiring the basic skills.” …

Source: Channel 4 News, UK
http://tinyurl.com/2volym

Parents are being advised to read more to their children after figures showed only half of five-year-olds in Leicester recognise the most basic words.

Assessments of youngsters in reception classes this year revealed that 47 per cent did not reach the level in language development the Government expects - meaning they cannot recognise words including “dog”, “pen” and “red”.

Teachers assess children’s “early learning goals”, such as how well they play with others, how they express their needs and feelings and whether they recognise the letters of the alphabet.

Now education bosses hope a series of different strategies, such as showing parents the importance of reading to and playing with their children, will lead to an improvement.

The figures, released by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, show that only 27 per cent of five-year-olds in Leicester have all the skills they should, far behind the national level of 45 per cent.

The city council’s education spokeswoman, Coun Vi Dempster, said the building of children’s centres would raise attainment “over time”.

She said: “Language is key. We have to make sure the rest of their school careers are built on an early, solid foundation.

“Parents need to be having conversations with their children. We’re advising them to tell them a story, take them to the park and make use of libraries and children’s centres which are being built across the city, which provide services such as toy libraries and speech therapists.”

Just under a quarter of Leicester’s five-year-olds were well below the language goal, meaning they could not say the letters of the alphabet.

Sara McAdam, acting-head of Willowbrook Primary School, in Thurnby Lodge, said children’s abilities at the age of five depended to a large extent on what they experienced before they started school…

Source: Leicester Mercury, UK
http://tinyurl.com/2s8ong

Having kids today has turned into a full-time job and career killer, especially for mothers.

Snack.

Just one little word, but it was enough to jolt me up at 4 a.m. and send me racing to the kitchen in a cold sweat. I had forgotten — how could I have forgotten? — that I had volunteered to bring snack food for 30 children to my daughter’s preschool at 8:30 a.m. And not just any snack food. It had to consist of fruit and/or vegetable plus protein and/or complex carbohydrate and be prepared in individual, child-sized servings.

Frantic, I searched the cupboards. Pasta, cereal — who was I kidding?

Bad parent.

It’s a feeling I suspect most parents — particularly mothers — get a lot these days.

Having kids is the simplest biological imperative there is. But, somehow, we let “having kids” get turned into “parenting,” which is more or less a full-time job, with logistical challenges that would bring a CEO to his knees.

Modern parenting is wildly labor-intensive from Day 1. Modern babies, we’re told, won’t even sleep unless their parents camp out on the floor and stagger up blearily to provide reassurance every few hours. Then there’s the infant feeding mantra “breast is best,” which requires someone-who-just-happens-to-be-female to be physically attached either to a baby or to a milk-pumping machine every couple of hours for, oh . . . a year or so per child. Hey, no problem! It’s not like you wanted to get any work done, right, ladies?

From there, we move smoothly (or not) to infant swim classes and play groups (miss those crucial early skills-building opportunities and your child may never catch up). Then there’s preschool and the making of complex snacks and lunches. Next, there’s soccer and ballet and tutoring and the endless chauffeuring of children to activities, a process that pretty much eliminates parental free time on the weekends, in addition to eliminating children’s time for free, unstructured play.

But this doesn’t matter because modern parenting also mandates nonstop paranoia, which means that a good parent must never, ever permit children to play freely and without adult supervision anyway. Leave children alone and they might drown in a half-full bucket of water, find and eat a poisonous plant, get hit by a car or wander off with the neighborhood pedophile. So you have to drive them to school and accompany them to the playground, and . . . and . . . and. …

All this, of course, is insane.

We know it too. Just ask any of the exhausted parents hovering limply around their third soccer game of the weekend.

Intensive parenting is a relatively recent American invention, and the evidence suggests that it’s not one of our better contributions to humanity. That mad swirl of activities? You get burned-out kids incapable of entertaining themselves. That homework you and your first-grader struggle through? It has zero educational benefit. That superhuman effort you make to protect your kids from every conceivable danger? It’s not necessarily helpful if it means they never learn how to evaluate dangers for themselves. Someday, our kids will have to function without us.

And, um, how about us grown-ups?

It’s not a coincidence that the emergence of the modern ideology of intensive parenting directly tracks the large-scale entry of women — especially mothers — into the workplace. In 1975, 39% of women with children under 6 worked. By 2000, 65.3% of them did.

Decades ago, when most mothers didn’t work outside the home, there was far less cultural anxiety about child development, safety and “parenting skills.” Stay-at-home moms of the 1960s cheerfully sent the kids outside for hours of unsupervised neighborhood play while they did housework (or maybe just had a stiff drink). Only when large numbers of mothers did the unthinkable — found paid work — did Americans suddenly “discover” that truly effective “parenting” requires at least one adult to be focused 24/7 on the children and their “needs.” Surprise!

Of course, it’s virtually impossible for parents to hold down two full-time paying jobs and also manage the full-time job of modern intensive parenting. Something has to give — and much of the time, it’s still the woman’s free time, or even her career, that goes. Since 2000, more women with young children have begun to give up on the workplace, reversing the 20th century’s trend. By 2004, the percentage of women with children under 6 who worked was down to 62.2%.

What to do? In the long run, the workplace needs to be more flexible to accommodate parents — both women and men — who value the making of families as well as the making of money. But that will take decades.

In the short run, we can all do our bit to restore sanity — to change “parenting” back into “having kids.” Intensive parenting? Resist it! It’s not so hard. Cut the soccer. Tell the kids to go out to play for a little while. And, of course . . . just say no to snack.

Source: Los Angeles Times, CA
http://tinyurl.com/2m9q9y

Dothan City Schools are joining forces with the Alfred Saliba Family Services Center to offer a tool to parents.

The program is geared toward preschool children ages 2 to 4 years old.

The free program helps prepare children for kindergarten so they do better in school. It is also proven to help curb discipline problems early on.

Program Coordinator Brenda Sikes says, “So many children aren’t prepared for kindergarten and so [there are more] discipline problems, [and the] success rate goes down and HIPPY will make a difference.”

The new program called HIPPY or Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters, takes just 15 minutes a day of undivided one-on-one attention and teaches children basic skills they need to succeed in kindergarten.

“Since parents don’t have to know about [how] to teach their children at home, we have a step by step program so they can teach children the basics,” said Clarissa Horn.

The program is in place in 19 other areas in Alabama and has been proven to make a difference in children’s achievement levels.

“Research shows parents involvement in education determines their success in education and life,” said Sikes…

Source: WTVY, AL
http://www.wtvynews4.com/news/headlines/10616267.html