The author of the study into children’s use of the internet and video games talks about why she took on the task - and what she hopes it will achieve

Yesterday, Dr Tanya Byron emerged from six months of intensive research on children’s use of the internet, to announce a package of measures, including clearer classification on video games, an awareness campaign and the setting up of a council for child internet safety.

Twelve hours earlier, she is sitting with me in a boardroom in the Department for Children, Schools and Families, looking tired but glamorous (“I’m 41 and I look about 106,” she says) and explaining how it came about. “It was a little surreal,” she admits. “My colleague rang me to say there had been an approach from Downing Street, and we thought it must be a hoax.

“But there I was, sitting in the back garden with the Prime Minister,” she says. “I met him the day that his eldest son was starting nursery and he spoke to me as a father, which was really lovely.

“There was a real personal feel to it. As a father of two young children, he recognised that this was a challenge. We talked a lot about it and, as a clinical psychologist who worked with kids, and as a mother of two children who use all these technologies, I thought it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

Her feeling of unreality continued when her husband, Bruce, a.k.a, D.C. Terry Perkins in The Bill, was learning a script about online child exploitation. “He asked my advice, and I said, you deal with the fantasy, I’m dealing with the reality.”

I’m not sure whether it was the Prime Minister’s idea to put Byron in charge of the review, but it was a stroke of genius. A plain-speaking parent, as well as a media-savvy clinical psychologist, bridging the gap between warring generations is her speciality, as any viewer of the BBC’s House of Tiny Tearaways will know. “Parents feel fear, and maybe I can talk to them in a way they trust,” she says.

And her calm, measured approach has a soothing effect; I arrived determined that my toddlers would never touch a video game, and left wondering if we should get a PlayStation.

Headlines about the effects of computer games are almost always negative, but Byron believes in what she calls a “balanced media diet”. “Let children play their video games, but then have a meal as a family, read a book, maybe go out for a walk together,” she advises.

She feels there are plenty of positives about video games as long as they are age-appropriate. “Play is very important and this is one form that children are very engaged with,” she says. “People have this idea that all video games are violent, but 50 per cent of the market is aimed at under-12s. These are brain-training, nurturing pet games, quiz games and role-playing games that rely on your imagination. Children with learning difficulties have learnt to spell or count through their console.”

Yes, but surely it must be better for a child to be playing outside? Byron grins. “When I started, my son said to me, you promise you won’t ban video games, Mum, because my friends will hate me forever’. And the day I started it, he fell out of a tree and broke his arm…”

She has recommended that the Government conducts research into the educational value of such games - “you can engage children’s imagination through this technology, so why not think creatively about how to educate them in ways they don’t engage with traditionally?” And, she says, playing video games can actually bring a family closer.

At home, Byron often sits over the role-play computer game The Sims with her 12-year-old daughter, Lily - “I have fascinating conversations with her about relationships when we are playing these games.” Moreover, she feels they can be an excellent way to bring marginalised fathers into the parenting front line. “Fathers do tend to get involved in the technological side and they’re more likely to be involved in setting up computer games,” she says. “My husband loves gaming and does it a lot with my son.”

And as a couple, the Byrons are partial to sociable games on the family Nintendo Wii. “We had friends round for dinner and we played mixed doubles, and I ended up punching my husband in the stomach by accident,” she recalls.

You sense that she is relieved that her six-month stint is over; once she has reported to a select committee, she plans to head off to a Center Parcs - “somewhere that my mobile doesn’t work”.

She put a lot of work into the report. “Somebody who works in Government said the other day you’ve changed the way reviews are done forever’,” she says with pride.

“It’s not going to be a 60-year-old judge who doesn’t talk to anyone and sits down to write an academic review. I think if you’re going to do a job, you do it properly, and if you are doing it about kids, you talk to kids.” She approached schools for advice and appeared on Newsround. More than 350 children, some as young as 5, responded to her call for evidence - “more than industry, charities, everyone else put together. What a lot of the kids are saying is, we know more about this than our parents, so we don’t have anywhere to go to ask for advice’. And some kids are saying, because my parents don’t know about this, they panic and stop me doing anything’.”

She also conducted 100 meetings with agencies, including police, children’s charities and the industry, flew to the US to consult internet providers, listened in on focus groups and held a conference.

Consensus is what she’s after. “What worked best when I was in child protection was not when someone came up with a fabulous new idea but when everyone worked together and respected each other’s point of view,” she says.

So how best to protect children online? “It’s not like watching television,” she says, “that’s a regulated space. The internet is more like going out to play. It’s amazing the experiences they can access, but more opportunity means more risk.”

Her recommendations include keeping the computer in a family room, using a timer and laying down rules about the sites children may access. She says: “It’s all common-sense. Just as you teach a child how to cross the road by holding his hand to begin with and then watching him do it on his own, you need to do the same online.” The idea is to teach children how to negotiate it safely, and put safeguards, such as content filters and timers, in place.

Good communication between parent and child, as always, is vital. With her own children, Byron adopts varying approaches. “I know my daughter will come to me if there are issues and, anyway, her internet use is more based around instant messaging. But we’re much more prescriptive with my son about the amount of time he can go on, when, and he knows I can check on his internet history to see the sites he’s been viewing. Now, I can be competent and confident about helping my kids. If managed well, the internet can be a really positive experience for a developing child. There are great benefits and opportunities; but parents should monitor it.”

Hers is a rare voice of reason in the debate between those who would like the internet closed down and those who view controls as censorship.

For Byron, both attitudes are naive. “The first isn’t realistic - the genie’s out of the bottle and there are really good things about the internet. And the second isn’t good enough when it comes to child safety. That is at the heart of a developed society for me.”

Source: Times Online, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article3633427.ece

In 2007, the British Prime Minister commissioned an independent review of how parents and children are being affected by the rise of new technology, such as increased access to the Internet and gaming consoles. Dr. Tanya Byron, a psychologist with experience in child behavior, led the review, and spent several months exploring the research literature and meeting with parents, children, and industry leaders. The results of the work have now been released in a report that makes comprehensive recommendations regarding the role the government can play in helping parents make technology a safe and effective part of their child’s development.

In places, the report is remarkably blunt in its analysis. Dr. Byron argues that unsupervised exploration and the pushing of boundaries are a natural and essential part of childhood. In her view, UK society has become increasingly risk-averse, which has resulted in parents that let kids explore the outdoors only through carefully supervised and structured activities. Left with few boundaries to push, children are turning to games and the Internet as the only locations they can undergo this form of development.

Byron suggests that parents should treat technology as they do more traditional areas of childhood development, and makes two informative comparisons: crossing the street and learning to swim. Each of these is associated with risks, but parents manage them in stages, with education, followed by supervised exploration that ultimately leads to allowing children to explore largely unsupervised. Technology largely presents a problem because it lacks the intuitive and widely understood aspects of education and risk. “There is a generational digital divide which means that parents do not necessarily feel equipped to help their children in this space,” Byron writes, “which can lead to fear and a sense of helplessness.”

The report contains extensive recommendations for eliminating the fear and helplessness aspects, divided between efforts targeted towards games and those focused on Internet use. In general, the recommendations focus on voluntary self-regulation by the relevant industries and educational programs that will help parents understand the challenges and benefits of the technology.

In terms of Internet use, Dr. Byron recommends pervasive access to parental control software. Retailers should provide this at the point of purchase, and ISPs should include the software as part of their service. Search companies should agree to provide a “safe search” option that’s easily accessed from the main search portal, and can be locked in on a given machine. Content providers should also agree to strict takedown times for potentially harmful content. All of these efforts would be coordinated by a governmental council that works with the relevant industry groups. Byron avoids recommending any new laws, but suggests that the council be charged with evaluating existing laws to determine how they could be modernized or clarified to cope with technological advances.

The existing research on gaming and childhood development, in Byron’s view, mostly indicates that factors beyond gaming content can be critical: “there is a strong body of ethnographic research which argues that context and the characteristics of each child will mediate the effects of playing video games.” This, ultimately, means that parents should determine what gaming content is appropriate for their children. To make parents’ job easier, the report calls for improvements in the existing game ratings system, along with improved enforcement of age limits.

Overall, the recommendations are refreshingly short on fear-mongering, and the report recognizes a number of things that many people seem reluctant to admit: each child is a unique, so one-size-fits-all rules are ineffective; parents need to educate themselves so that they can set intelligent limits; and risk can never be eliminated, so their role should include developing their child’s resilience. Given these realities, its recommendations appear to appropriately focus on how the government and industry can work to make a parent’s job easier.

Source: Ars Technica, MA
http://tinyurl.com/249xmq

The day after Barack Obama won in Iowa, I tried to engage my nine-year-old daughters in a conversation about what had the feel of a historic moment. “Oh yeah,” one replied. “I’ve seen him on Presidential Paintball.” I looked bemused, and she promptly Googled up a game in which players could adopt the persona of White House hopefuls, blasting away at each other with green goo.

It was one of those moments that make you love the internet. Kids who would otherwise have no interest in US politics could now reel off the field of candidates as if it were the Arsenal team. But such moments are far outnumbered by the paralysing kind: the porn site stumbled on in a search for pets; the latest supposed web suicide pact; some fresh warning about grooming on social networking sites.

So Tanya Byron’s study into children’s computer use is a timely response to a widespread sense of anxiety. Any day on the talk boards of Mumsnet.com you’ll find parents asking each other how to protect their kids from the perils of the virtual world (this week’s scare story is Miss Bimbo, the online game tempting teenagers with plastic surgery and diet pills). The big bad world that once started beyond the front door is now in our sitting rooms or, worse, behind the closed doors of our children’s bedrooms. There’s a sense that nothing we do can thwart them if they’re determined to break the boundaries.

But whether grooming (the No 1 fear for parents) and bullying (the No 1 fear for kids) are widespread or not, many of Byron’s proposals - about laws on assisted suicide, child internet safety, and the classification system for video games - make good sense. Codes of practice for social networking sites are sensible, if only to flag up the need for caution about what children post.

But the moment YouTube, say, cleaned up its act, you can bet another site would pop up in its place. And that other site would inevitably be cooler, so children would flock there. Similarly, giving a video game a 15 rating just makes it a must-see for 12-year-olds.

Far more useful than an industry code of practice is a parental code of practice. Even if we accept that it’s impossible to change the nature of the web, we parents are not powerless.

Parents should draw up house rules that stipulate how many hours a child can be online; this recognises that video games and networking sites can be addictive and that children need help to control any addiction (adults too, for that matter). Children also need a list of sites they can access without permission; they must promise to tell parents if they come across material they find disturbing; and make a commitment not to give out any personal details, or to post photos online without permission.

There are some parental filters out there that are easy to implement and operate. But we have to accept that even the best controls are never going to be foolproof, and even the clearest set of rules may not be followed. One parent recently posted: “It turns out my 14-year-old has been accessing some pretty hardcore porn. We put in all measures to clamp down on his previously liberal net access. He seemed apologetic, remorseful and embarrassed. But first thing he did? He tested the parental controls with attempted access to the same sites. Now he has PC [parental control] access while I ponder his future.”

What’s more, while you might impose a strict regime at home, your children will not always be on the home computer. Many abuses occur outside the home - at friends’ houses or school.

Though these worries often seem very different from those of the real world, we are not in fact talking about dangers that weren’t there before. The single most important thing that parents can do is to bring up their children to be sensible and savvy - these are precisely the qualities that they need in order to know right from wrong (and scary situations from safe situations) when they are online. The good news is that in doing what we have always done - being good parents to our children - we are helping to keep them safe.

Parenting may well have got harder with the internet - but at least the basic rules haven’t changed.

Source: Guardian, UK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/28/internet.children

Alice has moved on. Today’s child has access to a world more perplexing than the universe Lewis Carroll’s heroine found beneath the rabbit hole. The modern version of the story of a pre-teenager lost in a fantasy realm could be entitled Alice in Cyberspace.

Earlier this week, research by the Institute of Public Policy Research warned Britons are “being raised online”. Youngsters spend more than 20 hours a week in a virtual life, chiefly on social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

Dr Tanya Byron, a child psychologist and television presenter, will launch her much-anticipated report. Byron, commissioned by Gordon Brown to review online risks and video games, wants a “national strategy for child internet safety”, in which Government undertakes both to teach parents about computer literacy and to issue tough rules to industry.

“Web 2.0″, or social networking sites, should, in Byron’s view, be compelled to apply rigorous security measures, such as privacy standards, and be tightly regulated. The classification of computer games must be overhauled. Ministers have already conceded privately they will do exactly what Byron asks. Although she emphasises the benefits of the internet, the risks she identifies will inflame existing fears of a cyber-domain containing horrors undreamed of by Carroll’s heroine.

Where Old Alice had merely to cope with a Mad Hatter, New Alice may be negotiating the Miss Bimbo website, on which pre-pubescent girls are encouraged to keep their virtual characters “waif thin” with diet pills and buy them breast implant surgery. For violence, Old Alice saw the Queen of Hearts screeching for blood. Her modern equivalent can watch real-life happy slappings on YouTube. One recent scene of brutality, entitled “Girl Beat Up In Street”, had 1,300,000 hits.

No wonder the suspicion is growing that the internet is the lonely, threatening habitat of bullies and predators. The modern Wonderland stands accused by many of inciting narcissism, idleness, obesity and even suicide. While Byron argues children are also being “empowered”, doom-mongers are unlikely to be so sanguine.

Cultural pessimists, however, have often been wrong. For example, the warning by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan that new technology would kill off books ushered in a publishing boom in which Virginia Wolf has not been wholly supplanted by the literary oeuvres of football WAGS. Serious subjects, such as history, also make bestsellers.

Far from being dumbed down by the information age, we are smartening up. Jim Flynn, a New Zealand professor, has charted year-on-year rises in IQ scores across the world, and tests show that Britons’ average IQ has risen 27 points since 1942. True, school leavers might know nothing of Clement Attlee or the nine-times table, but that’s the fault of our education system. The cognitive labour demanded by games and assimilating detail is linked to better mental dexterity. Our brains have been reprogrammed.

But the internet also causes problems the Government failed to foresee when it first embraced the “knowledge economy” and the educational benefits of computers. As Kay Withers’s IPPR report recalls, £6 million was invested to ensure schools got broadband and so escaped “the technological dark ages”.

There was no mention then of parenting classes in new technology, or of forcing unscrupulous operators to stop selling vile computer games to small children. Though any suggestion that screen brutality triggers violence in children is unproved, as Byron allows, most people would agree that the internet has scope to alter vulnerable minds.

If the Government is reaping what it sowed, then parents are also in line for blame. As well as being a must-have learning tool, computers have become a diversion from the perilous outdoors. The street-corner paedophile, mostly a figment of over-anxious adult imagination, has mutated into the more pernicious web-stalker. Some children, far from being passive recipients of violence, are posting scenes of thuggery online. Others, by flaunting their identity, or posting drunken portraits on MySpace, are courting dangers peculiar to the online world. In our safety-obsessed society, risk has come home to roost.

Children are supposedly culprits, too. “Frankenkinder”, spoilt, undisciplined brats bribed with games consoles, are the latest social curse to cross the Atlantic. Fear of “bad” children, and the monsters that beset them, is as old as fairytales. Even so, something odd is happening.

This is a century in which the gap between adults and children has, supposedly, been wiped out by the “kidult”; the Botoxed adult with hip-hop on the iPod and eternal youth in mind. Yet, at a time when adults have little or no knowledge of what their children do in cyberspace, the chasm between old and young has rarely been so wide. Previous gulfs between generations, such as views on sex and music, have been replaced by the digital divide.

Byron, who will personally deliver her report to Gordon Brown, is calling for a “social marketing campaign”. Though no one is going to argue with a plea for more awareness and better safety, the limited power of the state to influence behaviour runs particularly thin in cyberspace.

Let us, by all means, have a clampdown on a dodgy industry and computer classes for grown-ups. Even if we cannot persuade our children to take up jigsaw puzzles, we will be better at ordering our Tesco shopping online. But equipping children to thrive on the internet cannot be learned from any social rulebook or state-sponsored seminars in geekishness.

Online security is best taught in the offline universe. That means giving children, of whom one in 10 has never been read a bedtime story, more parental time. It means teaching them that gratuitous cruelty is as insupportable in the virtual as in the real world. It means stopping sapping children’s happiness by plying them with alcohol and junk food, or testing them to destruction in schools that too often offer a shameful education. But it also means crushing some adult myths of lost innocence.

As Robin Alexander, who is heading the Primary Review of education, hinted last week, we don’t have a crisis of childhood. We have a crisis of alarmism. There is a risk that the Byron report, however sensible, will unleash that panic.

Children have always been seen as prey, at the mercy of any demon invented by adults. Just as the wolf did not kill Red Riding Hood, the big bad internet will not swallow up our babies. Some of its risks are avoidable and unacceptable. But children, resourceful and resilient, have always sought a private world, free from adult scrutiny. When playing fields are concreted over, playgrounds deemed out-of-bounds and youngsters plagued either by failure or the pressure to succeed, it’s not surprising they retreat into a techno-Narnia

Parents and politicians cannot make this world wholly safe. Maybe the best they can offer, for all the talk of education and crackdowns, is to equip children better to deal with hazards placed in their way by adults. Byron’s findings sound moderate and balanced. That may not defuse a media firestorm about the (largely unproved) evils of the internet. As the Queen shouted across the courtroom where Alice sat: “Sentence first - verdict afterwards.”

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/03/27/do2702.xml

Larry Rosen, professor of psychology at California State University-Dominguez Hills, has long studied “the Net generation,” the first to have grown up with the Internet, not to mention cellphones. In Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation (Palgrave Macmillan), he helps parents understand social networks. His advice: Talk to your kids, learn the technology and don’t panic. USA TODAY’s Janet Kornblum spoke with the author.

Q: Why did you write this book?

A: For kids — what I’m calling the Net generation, anybody born after 1980 — technology is not a tool. It just is. It’s part of their life. They think of it differently.

Q: How has technology influenced this generation?

A: They do things in a more abbreviated fashion. They IM (instant-message) with multiple people at the same time. They can’t uni-task. They do everything on their own. They’re very self-motivated.

Q: How does it specifically affect their relationships?

A: They make commitments to people online they don’t even know. But their strongest commitment is to their family. They see more of the world as a social world. So social problems are very important to them.

Q: Do you think the Internet is fundamentally changing kids?

A: This world encourages us to multitask. I think it encourages kids to be much less patient. More terse.

Q: Why are social networks so popular?

A: When I grew up (a baby boomer), our social life was outside. We hung out. The next generation spent time at the mall. This generation spends time at home — connected. Kids have to be social. It’s all part of the preteen and teen years and young adult years. MySpace happened to come around at the right time when you had a whole generation of kids who needed a place to be social.

Q: Weigh the positives and the negatives of social networking.

A: Because they have a combination of people they know face-to-face in the real world and people they don’t, (those of the Net generation) get a lot of chances to bounce ideas and to test out things on a social network that they probably wouldn’t do face-to-face.

I hear that a lot from kids — that they feel much more comfortable saying things online than they ever would off-line. That’s a real positive because they get to test out their world. They get to figure out who they are.

Q: So how should parents think about social networks?

A: You can certainly use your parenting skills to help them get the most out of MySpace — to not be addicted, to not be bullied and to know what to do when you’re bullied. But taking (MySpace) away from them is really like restricting going to the mall with their friends or going to school and talking to their friends. It’s tantamount to making them a pariah.

Q: Can you give some solid parenting tips?

A: Talk to your kids. If the computer is in their rooms — which is not a good idea — walk in and ask them what they are doing. Ask them what’s new, what they like about it — don’t be judgmental. Tell them you want to learn. Kids love rules, believe it or not. Kids need limits.

They’re defining a new generational attitude. But they’re not new teenagers. We know what adolescents do.

You have to learn what potential problems there might be, and then, like a good, authoritative parent, you discuss those with your kids. You know there might be sexual predators out there. And you have to know: ‘Well, does anyone say anything nasty to you? How do you handle that?’

Q: Compare the Internet and social networking to television.

A: Every waking minute of every day, they are interacting with some sort of technological medium, except perhaps when they’re in school, and even then, kids are texting from their pockets. They’re wearing iPods all day. It’s just a different world for them. The impact of television on society took years and years and years. And we had a chance to adapt to it.

The kinds of tools these kids are using are vast. Nobody heard of MySpace five years ago. Nobody heard of an iPod five years ago. Nobody heard of instant messaging.

This is a rapidly changing technological world and the kids are the first ones to adapt technology.

Q: Are parents keeping up?

A: Parents have a total misconception about what their kids are doing online.

They don’t know how much time they’re spending. They don’t have the breadth of what’s happening to the kids online. They think the kids are being attacked by predators all the time. They are way over-concerned about the technology that the kids are using.

Everything is so different from year to year. No wonder the parents are afraid.

They don’t have to know everything, but they’ve got to see what MySpace is about. They’ve got to understand this whole thing of kids text-messaging all day long. They have to understand what it means to have kids plugged into their iPod all day long.

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2008-03-26-larry-rosen_N.htm

Every parent faces the day when their children are no longer children. They must make their way in the world as adults. Some are off to college, others to travel, others the military, and many straight off to work. Whatever their direction, they are no longer kids. We may think they still need guidance, but they will move into adulthood without looking back. If we haven’t prepared them for this move by now, the parents in their lives have little to say anymore about the life paths they will choose.

In a family-owned business, preparing children for entering into adult life is different in some ways than for other families. In addition to teaching life skills, parents assist their children to integrate independence and confidence. They are preparing their children to fly freely and strongly when they leave the nest.

But in a family business the assumption may be that the child will stay in the nest; that they are being groomed to take over the family business when the parents retire. There is an inherent conflict in grooming your child for independence and yet holding that independence in suspension until the parents retire from the business.

Preparing children for taking over the family business requires that parents selflessly attend to preparing their children for healthy independent adulthood first. A child who has grown into a self-sufficient, wise and autonomous individual is in a much better position to assume the role of leader. A child who remains subordinate to the parent into his or her 40s can hardly be practiced at autonomy or leadership.

Therefore, parents with family businesses who plan ahead for succession require a more thoughtful approach to emancipating their children. Having young children work in the family enterprise teaches them skills they could not learn otherwise. They not only become familiar with the product and style of the business, but they acquire confidence. They are participating in taking care of the family - an important value to instill.

As children get older they can be given more responsibility, even management duties. However, their progress up the ladder should not be based upon the fact that they are the son or daughter of the owner. They need to be evaluated, as would any other employee. This teaches the child to do the hard work of improving themselves.

The risk, of course, is that once out of the nest the child will never return, that they will find another life that suits them better than working in the family business. But then isn’t that what parenting is about? The business will be much more successful being managed by strong capable leaders who want to be there and by a leader who has proven his or her talent in more than one arena.

It is important for families in business to be open about their planning for business succession. Children should be advised early about who is being considered for leadership. But there should also be flexibility about this decision. Over time another child may prove to be the better successor. Or perhaps the chosen one chooses another direction.

If parents keep in mind that their job is to raise healthy autonomous children, then they are a success no matter which direction their child chooses. Whether the child chooses to return to the family business or not, they can always be a contributing member of the family.

Source: American Chronicle, CA
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/56570

Young people can be just a little bit soft in the head. The reason is simple: Their brains aren’t wired right yet, so their craniums are rarely fully in gear before their mouths or bodies kick into action.

Why, then, are we so surprised that they make stupid decisions – drinking wildly, getting into punch-ups and doing really crazy things?

Why do we shake our heads and ponder why, why, why when they make crazy, short-sighted choices? They do these things because they are not all there; their brains are sometimes spongy and the important information sometimes fails to drip on through to where it is needed.

Consider this: Young people resist wearing bike helmets because the device which has been proved to be likely to save their lives in a bingle flattens their designer-messy hair. They bake in the sun like Sunday roasts when they have learnt about the perils of sun exposure since they were small and they know it will have a detrimental effect on their beautiful, young skin. They smoke when they know it kills. They drink until they cannot stand up and fight like their lives depend on it.

It’s crazy stuff and it’s not all because they think they will live for ever or because they are vain. Behaving like this makes absolutely no sense because these people have brains that are not yet fully formed.

A study two years ago at University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience found the area of the brain associated with risk-taking, higher-level thinking, empathy and guilt is underused by teenagers. Adults consider what they should do given how they and those around them feel. Teenagers just consider what they should do, the researchers found.

Ongoing research there and at the National Institute of Mental Health in the US and McGill University in Canada has found that teenagers endure not only massive hormonal surges but also physical changes in fits and starts to their nervous system and the reasoning and rationalising part of the brain. Their heads can be a mess – on and off – right up until they are about 25.

Why, then, do we allow them to buy alcohol legally when they are still a work in progress? Why do we allow them behind the wheel of a giant metal missile, any negotiation of which requires split-second decision-making and great use of the bit of their brain that is under construction?

Why do we expect them to make decisions about their careers and the important bits of life when science tells us their synapses and electrical parts are not fixed in place yet?

The harsh truth is that they may look like adults, sound like adults and study just as hard at school as any adult working in a high-pressure job, but they are far from it.

Of course the legal consumption of alcohol should be lifted to the age of 21. At least then, young risk-takers might start doing it at home at 18 instead of 14 or 15. It would still be a bit rebellious, but at least young brains might have a few more years to grow without alcohol to complicate things.

We know that once they hit the legal age – when no one can legally tell them not to – young people hit the bottle pretty hard. Research commissioned by the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation in Canberra and released last year found at least one third of 18- to 24-year-old male and female Australians consider themselves binge drinkers.

Underage drinkers are not far behind. A report released last month from the Australian National Council on Drugs found that a fifth of 16-year-olds are drinking to harmful levels in any given week.

In the US, under the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, states must not sell alcohol to people under the age of 21. If they do, they get less federal funds for their highways (an odd swap – roads for minds – but it seems to work).

There have been proportionately fewer young drink-driver deaths in the US since 1984.

Conversely, there have been more young New Zealand drivers killed with alcohol in their systems since that country dropped the legal drinking age from 20 to 18 in 1999.

The key to any reform is the support plan. It’s not enough to put the clamps on young people being served alcohol in public places – the crackdown has to be enforced and without a well of community support, this kind of legislative change will fail.

Changing attitudes is harder, particularly among young people, but it is the only way the culture of binge drinking at home and private parties is going to shift. Like anyone slightly addled in the head, teens are likely to put up a fight for their cultural right to drink when they are 16 or 17, no matter what science or sensibility tells them.

If the government is brave enough to act on this, look out: Rough times always follow for anyone who tries to un-ring the bell.

Source: Courier Mail, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23434400-27197,00.html

Punishing a child, even with the mild `naughty step’, may suppress bad behaviour, but probably won’t stop it happening again, according to a man heralded as America’s `most eminent living child psychologist’.

However, he insists: “The book isn’t about disparaging the advice in other books; what it’s about is what you do before behaviour, and then how you praise it afterwards. If you do it this special way, the results are unbelievable.”

To illustrate his method, Kazdin uses the example of a child having a tantrum - although he stresses that the time for the child to learn the `positive opposite’ of their behaviour is when they have calmed down afterwards.

The parent should tell the child they’re going to play a game, with the same scenario that caused the tantrum. But in the game he/she can’t get angry and if he/she manages that, he/she can have a star which will ultimately lead to a reward.

If the child does this, says Dr Kazdin, the praise should be effusive, and the parent should touch him/her. The `game’ should then be practised four or five times a week for a few weeks - by which time the positive behaviour should be the child’s automatic response.

“The child has to know what he can get ahead of time. The process changes the brain and it will lock it in as a habit.”

He points out that humans are `hard-wired’ to pick up negative behaviour. “Don’t focus on what the child shouldn’t do - turn it around, and look at the child’s positive behaviours. If you punish, it won’t suppress the behaviour, except at that moment.”

He stresses that his method doesn’t need to be used long-term, pointing out: “The intention is that you build the frame of the method around your child’s changing behaviour, but that once the desired behaviour takes deeper root you quickly scale down the frame and then take it down entirely.”

Dr Kazdin claims his method also improves life for parents.

“It’s about getting parents to act in a different way. Once they practise alternatives to punishment, they get results from their child. Parental stress and depression go down, family relationships improve and home life is made much less stressful,” he said.

Source: Manchester Evening News, UK
http://tinyurl.com/2o9ga2

Parents with aggressive kids need to be involved in early prevention and intervention, study says

Childhood bullies frequently fight with their parents, feel they can’t count on them and aren’t closely supervised, a Toronto-based study shows.

That means bullies not only require counselling on how to relate to peers, but also parents – and their parents need to take part, says lead author Debra Pepler, a York University professor and scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children, considered one of the country’s leading experts in the field.

“Focusing on the child alone is not enough,” she said. “You can’t just provide support at school and hope that the behaviour changes or that the learning transfers to other contexts. These are problems parents need to deal with.”

Technology, too, has added a twist because “adults aren’t in that space, they don’t understand what’s going on.”

The seven-year study of 871 Toronto students from age 10 onwards, is published in the March/April edition of the journal Child Development.

While most children experiment with bullying at some point, about 10 per cent become “persistent bullies,” it found.

Pepler said the study is among the first “to confirm that children who use power and aggression in their relationships have relationship problems and need relationship solutions.

“Let’s not have them sit on a bench for an hour to teach them not to bully. An hour on the bench is not going to teach them how to relate better next time.”

Stu Auty of the Canadian Safe School Network said many bullying issues stem from a child’s home life, and the strategy should always be “early prevention and intervention.”

Involving parents “is a good idea, and not done nearly enough,” he said. “But often you can’t get the parent to agree – that’s part of the problem.”

One of the network’s programs, used by the Toronto District School Board, educates children from junior kindergarten to Grade 2 on honesty, integrity and sharing, using animated characters. Parents can have access to the program and use it as a resource at home to discuss bullying.

“The sooner you get at this issue, the fewer concerns there are down the road,” Auty said. “If it’s anything schools can provide, it’s a focus on character education, on values, the difference between right and wrong.

“So for whatever reason, if they don’t get it at home, they are going to pick it up in school – although sometimes it feels like we have our fingers in the dike here.”

The study found that 9.9 per cent of students were chronic bullies from elementary to high school; about 35 per cent were moderate bullies; 13.4 per cent began as moderate bullies but ceased bullying by high school; 41.6 per cent reported “almost never bullying.”

Youth in the first three categories tended to lack “the protective processes of supportive family relationships (e.g. those with low parent trust, poor parental monitoring) and peer relationships (e.g. those associating with peers who bullied, high susceptibility to peer pressure),” the study found.

Past research has indicated children who bully tend to come from homes with “harsh and punitive” parenting, but it’s not an area that has been looked at in depth, Pepler said.

In her study, almost three-quarters lived at home with both parents; the rest with single parents or in blended families. Most of the children’s mothers had graduated from university or college, making it a “relatively advantaged” sample.

Pepler said while bullying might start in the home, it can also “start in the peer group – youth get a lot of power by victimizing each other. That’s one of the ways of increasing their status.”

Source: Toronto Star, Canada
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/350367

Some classic games help limit anti-social behavior

Other work has shown that measures of executive control can predict future success in school at least as well as IQ tests, which gauge only a limited range of mental abilities. Improving executive function could be a promising way of getting kids ready for the real world, said Adele Diamond, a co-author of the study that appeared last November in the journal Science.

Many applications

“You need these kinds of skills in all facets of your life,” said Diamond, a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.

Scientists believe executive control comes from an area of the brain called the pre-frontal cortex, which underlies much of our ability to make conscious, deliberate choices.

It’s also one of the last brain areas to reach maturity in children, and that shows in the often impulsive behavior of young kids. When young children see someone else with a toy they want, they simply take it. When they want food, they grab it. Executive control includes the power to think twice and avoid such missteps.

Many researchers believe another key aspect of executive function is what’s called “working memory,” the small store of memory that people keep in mind while doing a task such as solving a math problem or spelling a word. Improving working memory also could aid self-control, said Philip David Zelazo, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development.

“Working memory is important for executive function because you have to keep something in mind while ignoring various distractions in the environment,” Zelazo said.

Diamond’s work suggests that schools can teach young children better executive control, just as they now teach skills in math and reading.

Her team had teachers of low-income children use a curriculum called “Tools of the Mind,” which emphasizes having children do planned imaginative play in which they act out specific roles for an extended period.

The theory is that such play helps children develop executive control by forcing them to inhibit actions that are inconsistent with their role and to stick with the plan instead of simply reaching for an alluring toy. Teachers also focused on activities that forced children to take turns rather than have someone else tell them what to do.

Fighting an impulse

To see whether the approach improved the children’s self-control, the researchers administered several formal tests of executive function. In one, children were given a piece of paper with a heart or flower on one side, and they were told to press on the side that does not have an image. Because a natural tendency is to point at the image, having children go against that instinct is considered a good test of their ability to inhibit their first impulse.

The children who received the special play curriculum performed significantly better on such tests than children on an ordinary preschool curriculum, the researchers found.

“Those are great games that kids used to play a lot more than they do now,” Diamond said. “And they played them for a very good reason.”

Source: Chicago Tribune, United States
http://tinyurl.com/yscglh