The kiwi classroom of the future could look a little like this, if American educationalist Dr Leonard Sax has any influence.

A room is filled with 7-year-old boys, none of whom is sitting - in fact there are no chairs on offer.

There is noise, cooler light and the temperature has been turned down. This, says Sax, is the environment in which boys learn best.

The Maryland-based executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, is in New Zealand next month to speak at several single sex schools including Auckland’s St Cuthbert’s College and Dilworth School, and at Iona College, Lindisfarne College and Woodford House, Hawke’s Bay.

Citing research from Harvard Medical School, the US National Institute of Health and various European studies, Sax argues that no one-size-fits-all education programme can be successfully applied across the sex divide, that both girls and boys will flourish in environments tailored to their gender-specific requirements.

Traditional arguments for sex-segregated schools are often based broadly on the management of teenage hormones. The theory was there would be less distraction for everyone if the girls and boys were educated separately. But hormones have no part in today’s rationale for single-sex classes.

“There’s been a pretty fundamental shift in the way people think about single-sex education, at least in North America, over the last 20 years or so,” says Sax. “That’s what’s new: the idea that the single-sex format may be most beneficial for children who are 5, 6, 7 years old. This is the empirical finding.”

Of the 367 public schools in the US that have adopted the single-sex format in the past few years, Sax says that all but about 20 are primary schools.

“[I’m] not saying that there are not benefits at the high school level; there certainly are. But the benefits in the early primary years are much greater.”

He says advanced imaging techniques have offered neuroscientists fresh insights into brain development.

“When you compare a six-year-old girl with a six-year-old boy, you find quite staggering differences in the brain,” says Sax.

Regions of the brain develop in a different sequence in the genders, he says.

The areas of the brain associated with language and fine motor skills mature about six years earlier in girls than boys. The areas of the brain associated with maths and geometry mature about four years earlier in boys than girls. This finding may help explain why some girls find maths “hard”, he says, while some boys think poetry is for “sissies”.

According to Sax, understanding and exploiting these nuances allow educators to adapt lessons and classrooms to suit the all-girl or all-boy population.

One “very reliable difference” between 6-year-old boys and 6-year-old girls is in their ability to sit still and be quiet. The average girl can sit still for longer than the average boy, with implications for the duration of lessons and the structure of the day, says Sax. Girls can have longer, uninterrupted classes, but boys will do best with 20-minute lessons followed by a run around outside.

Some US schools have taken this finding a step further. At both Cunningham School for Excellence, Iowa, and Foley Intermediate, Alabama, sitting is optional in the all-boys classes. And Chicago’s Hardey Prep doesn’t even supply chairs to their 6 and 7-year-old boys.

“As one teacher said to me: when that boy sits down his brain shuts off,” says Sax. “So the boys stand for many of the classes.

“In the mixed classroom, every choice you make is going to advantage the girls at the expense of boys or advantage the boys at the expense of girls,” he says. “The lack of awareness of gender differences often has the unintended consequence of disadvantaging both the girls and the boys.”

But Sax’s theories relate not only to the type of lesson, but to the environment the students work best in.

He says studies of young people of normal weight have shown that the ideal room temperature for boys to learn is about 20C; for girls it’s about 3 degrees higher. With classroom thermostats typically set at somewhere between 21C and 22C, Sax says that both genders will be outside their ideal comfort zone.

Evidence that tailoring the learning experience rather than simply splitting up boys and girls enhances academic performance is mounting, with research showing improved grades and test results in both sexes.

Sax advocates the introduction of single-sex classes into co-ed schools as some New Zealand schools are already doing. In Auckland’s Mt Albert Grammar, most of the junior classes are gender segregated while Long Bay College in Auckland last year introduced single-sex classes.

Sax says he wasn’t always a devotee of single-sex education, believing that “we live in a co-ed world… schools should prepare kids for the real world”. And there are still many critics of the single-sex education model, notably the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organisation for Women, who see it as a discriminatory anachronism. Under the old model that prevailed in the US until around the 1960s, boys’ schools typically received the bulk of the resources while girls’ schools made do with their leftovers and hand-me-downs.

But Sax has no intention of returning to what he describes as “the bad old days”. He was educated in an era when “they pushed girls and boys into pink and blue cubby holes” - boys had compulsory woodwork, girls had home economics. The new world order he favours aims to “expand educational horizons, to get more girls excited about computer science and physics and engineering - and to get more boys excited about art and poetry and creative writing and foreign languages“.

“The irony is that we’ve had roughly three decades throughout the English-speaking world of ignoring gender, pretending that gender doesn’t matter,” he says.

“There are substantially fewer young women studying computer science, physics and engineering than there were 20 years ago - and fewer men who regard creative writing, or writing at all, as something that boys do. So we’ve ignored gender and the result of ignoring gender has been not to eliminate gender stereotypes; it has been a hardening of gender stereotypes.”

New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=35&objectid=10505122

Teachers at Quail Creek Elementary now use a math wall that features the days of the week and the value of money, in an attempt to lay the foundation for math as early as possible.

Instructors also have started introducing the fundamentals of science during prekindergarten.

Since the advent of federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind and the prevalence of computers in classrooms, curriculums have changed nationwide as well as here in Oklahoma. Schools that once used the pre-K years primarily to socialize children are now making use of those early years to lay the foundation for not only reading, but math and science, as well.

“I think the value is coming through. We don’t want our children to be behind, no matter what school it is. And in today’s society, the community expects our children to excel in those areas,” said Quail Creek Elementary Principal Jan Matthews.

“Every child deserves the best education, whether they are at Quail Creek or any other institution. That is a belief that we all share.”

In terms of math and science, communities have clearly begun to correlate success in those areas with success in high school and life in general.

“Math is so accelerated now, if we don’t set the foundation for them, they are not going to be ready for the higher math in high school and college,” Matthews said.

“The requirement has come down the line, and we have accepted the challenge that we have to do our part.”

‘Learning windows’

The National Science Teachers Association advocates that educators understand how and why young children learn. It also says schools must identify programs and learning experiences that apply this understanding of early childhood learning to effectively meet those needs.

“Brain development is much more vulnerable to environmental influence than previously suspected and early environmental influence on brain development is long lasting,” according to research from the Carnegie Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children. That report was published in 1994. In 1996, more neurological research on the early childhood learning was made available.

The above research has pointed to the importance of “learning windows” — optimal times for learning at particular developmental stages.

Since then, curriculums have responded and integrated numerous academic principles regarding math and science at younger ages.

“The current national redirection of science and math teaching is grounded in this theory, which stresses the use of a teaching/learning cycle and explorations through the manipulation of objects and materials,” a representative for the association said.

Schools also rely more heavily lately on statistical analysis to evaluate teaching methods and student success, Matthews said.

“We use benchmarks. The district has the pass objectives divided into each quarter … and we have this new software that has benchmarks that evaluates each specific skill within math. So it lets the teachers know how many students didn’t grasp a certain concept,” Matthews said.

“Data analysis is very important now in all instruction. Our district has been very, very thorough in training the teachers in how to interpret the data.

“A lot of this stems from No Child Left Behind. Research has told us that we have to know where the child is and then build on that. Then if there are gaps, if the child has moved around from various districts or has had excessive absences then we can see that. And that’s where the intervention comes in,” she added.

Source: NewsOK.com, OK
http://www.newsok.com/article/3229908/

A 13-year-old schoolgirl in southern Austria celebrated the start of her spring break with a bottle of schnapps.

She ended up in intensive care.

In other countries across Europe, adolescents are making similar headlines for drinking themselves into a stupor, often passing out in the process.

And they’re getting younger: A June 2006 European Union-commissioned report says nearly all 15-to 16-year-old European students have had alcohol at some point in their lives and, on average, now start when they’re just 12 1/2 years old.

The data comes from a 2003 survey by the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs.

More than one in six have “binged” - had five or more drinks on a single occasion - three or more times in the last month, said the report by the London-based Institute of Alcohol Studies. It excluded EU newcomers Bulgaria and Romania.

In contrast to the United States or Canada, where even adults are often asked to prove their age when buying beer and other alcoholic drinks, laws in Europe are more lax and the drinking age generally hovers around 16 or 18.

Supermarkets sell alcohol and, unlike in the U.S., bottles and cans are seldom stashed away in areas that are off-limits to underage customers. Carding is uncommon.

In Austria - where binge drinking is known as “Komatrinken,” or “coma drinking” - a new law prohibits the sale of alcohol to anyone under either 16 or 18, depending on the region, and requires cashiers and establishments to card customers if they have any doubt about their age. Failure to do so can result in fines of up to $5,610 and loss of a liquor licence.

“When it comes to coma drinking among young people, we’re dealing with a phenomenon that needs to be battled to the best of our abilities,” Economics Minister Martin Bartenstein said.

Authorities and experts alike acknowledge the issue isn’t going away.

The WHO estimates there are 76.3 million people with alcohol use disorders worldwide.

The experts warn that some barely pubescent juveniles are starting to reach for the bottle sooner.

“We’ve seen a whole series of new trends over the past five to 10 years,” said Michael Musalek, director of the Anton Proksch Institute, a renowned Austrian detox center that claims to be Europe’s largest.

“For one, the age of alcohol beginners keeps declining. Today, 11-, 12-, 13-year-olds are already drinking - some on a regular basis,” he said.

Hospital officials notice the same trend.

At Vienna’s General Hospital, up to three teens are admitted each weekend after drinking escapades escalate, often leaving them so intoxicated they become unconscious, pediatrician Zsolt Szepfalusi said. More cases are common during special events, such as the city’s annual Danube Island Fest in the summer, he said.

“The numbers aren’t really up - but we’re seeing a decrease in age,” Szepfalusi said. “Some of our patients are as young as 12.”

It’s not just a big-city problem. Robert Birnbacher, head of pediatrics at a public hospital in the southern Austrian town of Villach, said his clinic sees about one to two cases of young “coma drinkers” every weekend.

“The patients are getting younger and there are more girls among them,” he said.

Vladimir Poznyak, coordinator of the team working on the management of substance abuse in the World Health Organization’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, confirmed a general decline in age for initial contact with alcohol worldwide.

“It’s definitely happening and reflects general cultural changes,” Poznyak said.

The risks of starting to drink early include developing a dependence on alcohol and hampering brain development, he said.

In Germany, where beer is a big part of local culture, authorities are calling on adults to counsel their children to put off their first experiences with alcohol.

In October, the government’s “drug czar,” Sabine Baetzing, said every fourth teenager gets drunk off five or more alcoholic drinks at least once a month. The number of teenagers who ended up hospitalized with alcohol poisoning doubled from 9,500 in 2000 to 19,400 in 2005, she said.

But one expert, while welcoming action to fight alcohol abuse among Austria’s young, cautions against blowing the problem out of proportion.

Alfred Uhl, senior scientist at the Vienna-based Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Addiction Research, said alcohol consumption in Austria peaked around 1970 and has declined ever since - despite the fact that prices have nose-dived. He warned that hospital statistics may be misleading because alcohol-related diagnoses were made less frequently in the past than they are now.

“Generally speaking, Europe’s youngsters are growing up faster than they used to and in countries such as Austria where alcohol is a part of the going out culture, it would be strange if they didn’t consume alcohol as well,” he said.

On the streets of the Austrian capital, teenagers dispute they drink heavily - but acknowledge alcohol has a presence in their lives.

“I started when I was 15 and like beer and tequila,” said 16-year-old Patrick Settinger, smoking a cigarette on his way home from school.

Source: The Canadian Press, Austria
http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5g3fB9g7BnwevWxz-erjPnU3VdYGQ

There’s nothing like a conversation with a behaviour specialist to make a you second-guess how to discipline your children.

The way Ronald Morrish sees it, parents should be second-guessing.

The author of Secrets of Discipline and With All Due Respect says the parents of today need to give their heads a shake. Our discipline methods are turning our children into manipulative, defiant monsters. The trouble, he says, is that we have adopted a parenting culture of rewards and consequences.

“I think it’s a world full of shortcuts. People don’t want to supervise their children, they don’t want to train their children,” Morrish says during a recent phone interview from his home in Ontario’s Niagara region.

“It always comes back to the basics of putting in the time.”

He says today’s popular discipline puts choice in the hands of children. Parents should be guiding their children to do the right thing, he argues, not punishing them for doing the wrong thing.

I like his message, though I may not agree with everything he says. It’s a commonsense approach that speaks to me as a parent. I have had my share of difficult parenting moments that left me feeling infuriated and helpless. I struggle with different approaches to discipline. And I often rely on rewards and consequences. But they don’t always work and I am willing to try something that will.

Judging from Morrish’s packed schedule of speaking engagements across North America every year, many parents are craving a new approach.

“It might surprise you, but the first step is to change your view from thinking discipline is what you do when children do things wrong to what you do so children do things right.”

He says many parents and educators approach discipline negatively, reacting when a child misbehaves instead of assuring that they behave properly.

One thing parents can do, he says, is to limit the child’s choices to the ones that are appropriate.

He says “If” - “then” statements are tricky: “If you do that again, you’re going to your room.” That statement tells the child that they can continue the bad behaviour if they don’t mind going to their room. It gives them a choice they shouldn’t have. A better approach, he says, is to say: “We don’t speak that way in our home, now start over.”

The idea is to correct the child so he does it right, not give him consequences for doing it wrong.

Much of what Morrish talks about requires parents to change the language they use. I can’t count how many times I have used “If”¦ then” statements with poor results. You really have to pay attention to what you say and how you say it. Morrish is a believer in using firm, authoritative language that leaves no room for debate, an approach some critics find harsh or even old-fashioned.

The father of two adults and two teenagers, Morrish, 59, wrote Secrets of Discipline 10 years ago because he thought society had moved away from practical parenting. One symptom, he says, are parents who pay their children to do chores. Children are supposed to help from their heart, not because there’s money in it for them.

“That’s one of the lowest levels of moral development of human beings, where the only reason you do something is because it’s advantageous, not because it’s right. And that’s really pathetic.”

Stop taking shortcuts and start doing the real work, he says. When children are misbehaving, don’t just sit and yell at them and expect results.

“In this business you don’t move your voice, you move your feet,” he says. “You go where your children are and you lower your voice and become firm.”

“Bedtime as an event is half an hour to an hour. Bedtime as a routine is five to 10 minutes with no arguing.”

Morrish acknowledges that parents and teachers face tough challenges and lots of questions. He jokes that he will never be out of work. He hears from many parents who are desperate for answers about how to raise their children. The challenges start early.

“You’re a servant the first year and a half of a child’s life,” he says. “And when you shift to being a parent, you flip the child’s world upside down from where we do what the child demands to where they have to learn to do what we demand. And they spend the next year and a half trying to put the world back the way it was.”

When you listen to what Morrish says, you hear a mix of frustration and hope in his voice. He keeps travelling (something he hates) and working with teachers and parents (something he loves) because he sees the difference it makes. And he knows the last thing parents want are manipulative and defiant children.

“You can always count on parents to love their children and want great children.”

Source: Telegraph-Journal, Canada
http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/magazine/article/271332

Q: My almost 5-year-old daughter occasionally does a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing, sweet and cooperative, then terrible and tantruming.

If I, my son or husband don’t tell a story just right, don’t understand what she’s saying, or we simply can’t hear her, she will scrunch her face in disgust, stomp her feet and say, “I hate you,” “Go away” or “You’re stupid.”

I’m not sure how to react. If I tell her to go to her room she freaks out — usually screams and fights further. Usually I just walk away and let her cry and get over it. But I feel like I’m “allowing” her to say these horrible things. Any ideas?

A: Parents today seem to be raising children who speak freely, expressing their ideas and feelings. The “seen but not heard” generation disappeared long ago. Kids today are seen and heard, sometimes over and above their parents. Some children like yours are able to control the emotional thermometer in the family. If they’re mad, sad, happy or frustrated, the entire household feels it.

While it’s fine for children to express their ideas and feelings, parents hope that their children will learn to do so in a way that’s respectful. Your task is to teach your child to manage her emotions and refine her language skills.

So when you are telling a story and to your daughter’s mind you’re not telling it just right, and she gets emotional, yelling “I hate you,” say what would be appropriate in this situation and include a line about her emotions, “You’re frustrated that I forgot the part of the story about the dog barking.” By doing so you’re providing her with words to communicate respectfully her feelings about not hearing the story as she expected.

You can also add, “You’re angry that I forgot the part about the barking dog, but I know that you don’t hate me. It’s not OK to say ‘hate.’ ”

If your daughter says “go away” when you don’t understand her, again say what would be appropriate in that situation. Something like, “You’re frustrated when I can’t understand you. Please say what you said again.” Therefore, in time, your daughter will learn to say, “I get frustrated when you don’t understand me.”

It’s also important to include, “It’s not OK to tell me to go away. I know that you really don’t want me to leave.”

If you can’t hear what your daughter says and she screams and stomps while saying “You’re stupid,” say for her what would be appropriate: “You’re frustrated because I can’t hear you.” In time she’ll be able to say, “I get so frustrated when people can’t hear me.”

It’s also important to add, “I’m not stupid, and it’s not OK to say so to me or anyone.”

Here are additional lines that parents can use when children speak disrespectfully:

A final note: When children are emotional, isolating them often makes the child’s emotional state escalate. Therefore, stay near your child when she is distraught with emotion.

Source: Seattle Times, United States
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/parenting/2004358863_faull19.html

Kevin Rudd credits the research of Nobel laureate James Heckman for steering him to his 2020 vision for all children under five to have access to a one-stop health, childcare and education centre.

The Prime Minister yesterday played down suggestions he pilfered the proposal from the Blair government’s 1999 Sure Start program, but conceded the idea was not all his.

“I don’t think any of these ideas are necessarily completely original,” Mr Rudd said yesterday. “I mean, the world of ideas is kicking around out there. Who owns parentage of all of this?”

The Prime Minister said his personal interest in the area was piqued 18 months ago.

“I read parts of a book by a guy called Heckman about the impact of early childhood development in various childcare centres around the world,” he said.

“If you invest early in a young child’s development, then the yield long-term in terms of the productivity of that person’s life is huge.”

The Government’s early childhood policy for last year’s election made much of the work of Professor Heckman, a Nobel laureate in economic sciences who says a child’s learning capability, which starts before school begins and is most active in the first few years, can set the course for life.

The policy, Labor’s Plan for Early Childhood, says: “Heckman argues that even by school age, it may be too late to intervene to influence a child’s learning and motivation if bad learning practice habits are already entrenched.”

Beyond health, education and socialisation benefits, the Government’s policy also notes research pointing to the potential economic payoff of investing in child development programs.

“The Brookings Institution in the United States projects that a high-quality universal preschool policy would boost the size of the US economy by $US270 billion by 2050,” it says.

It also refers to cost-benefit analyses of US early-intervention programs, concluding that for every dollar spent on young children, there was a big return on investment from savings in areas such as welfare payments and justice.

“The (High/Scope) Perry Preschool Project returned $7.16 in public benefits and $8.74 in total benefits for every dollar invested,” it found. The most recent analysis of this project put the benefit at $17 per dollar invested.

Early-childhood experts are concerned the Government is placing too much stock on brain development data from overseas studies that focus on very disadvantaged children.

They say that intervention and formal programs might be necessary for preschool children in troubled families, but those in well-functioning families receive lots of rich experiences at home that give them resilience.

Concerns are also raised that developmental problems don’t all neatly occur in the preschool years, with many occurring in middle-school years when children are aged between 9 and 12.

Source: The Australian, Australia
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23563368-5013871,00.html

Children are more than twice as likely to be injured falling out of bed as they are tumbling out of a tree, figures have revealed.

Seven years ago the chances were about equal. But as the lives of “the Xbox generation” have become dominated by sedentary activities, the likelihood of them having an outdoor accident has plummeted.

The statistics from accident and emergency departments in England demonstrate just how differently youngsters play these days.

In 2006/07 - the latest year for which data is available - 1,067 children under 15 needed medical assistance for tree falls. In 1999/00 the figure was 1,823.

Meanwhile, the number of youngsters under 15 admitted to A&E after bed falls in 2006/07 was 2,531, up from 2,226 in 1999/2000.

The figures lend weight to the Government’s campaign to get more children away from computer games and into the great outdoors.

Ministers are giving councils £235million over three years to develop up to 3,500 play areas.

Unfortunately, when Children’s Secretary Ed Balls and Culture Secretary Andy Burnham tried to swing on ropes in a London park at the strategy’s launch earlier this month, they ended up colliding in a twisted mess of limbs.

Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent, and author of Paranoid Parenting, said: “One of the things I have noticed is that trees seem to attract less children than in the past.

“Parents and family members would have encouraged their children to climb trees years ago but now they’re becoming no-go areas.

“It’s important to remember that climbing trees and having the odd accident is part of a wonderful childhood experience. It teaches us how to manage risk and how to handle ourselves in unexpected circumstances.”

He added, however, that promoting play strategies in parks is the wrong kind of focus.

“A lot of kids want to work out for themselves how they want to play.”

A spokesman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said: “Climbing trees allows kids to get out and about, be active, experience the world around them and interact with nature.

“We’ve got nothing against climbing trees, it can be a great way of kids learning to deal with risks.

“We have asked ourselves whether it’s better to break a wrist falling from a tree than developing Repetitive Strain Injury from playing computer games.”

The number of children under 15 arriving at A&E after falls from playground equipment has risen slightly from 6,581 in 1999/2000 to 6,617 in 2006/07, according to the Hospital Episode Statistics.

But the rise in accidents could be due to a growing number of parents installing apparatus such as climbing frames, slides and trampolines in their back gardens.

Source: Daily Mail, UK
http://tinyurl.com/5hq6ph

Every time I hear the fatal lines “I’m my daughter’s best friend,” I think: Oh, grow up, you silly woman.

The fashionable phenomenon of the mother-asbestfriend, identified as an increasing menace by U.S. family psychologist Dr Stephan Poulter in his book The Mother Factor, is startlingly common.

You’re out shopping and you see two blondes from behind, long hair swinging, both in high heels, toting enormous WAG-bags, then they turn. One is 18, the other in her 40s.

Another mother-and-daughter pair who yearn to be taken for sisters - at least the mother does. The daughter, if she has any sense, ought to be dying inside with embarrassment.

Now don’t get me wrong. I can understand the heady attraction from the mother’s point of view.

Not long ago, admittedly in a very darkened car park, the attendant thought I was my daughter’s sister. I was over the moon. Until I caught sight of my daughter’s face.

Much as she loves me I could see the look of horror mixed with pity that I wanted to be taken for my 19-year-old’s sister. Did I need that kind of pathetic reassurance?

It made me remember how one of my friends at primary school had a glam mother who dressed incredibly well and flirted with all the fathers. The rest of us were consumed with jealousy.

Except that when you looked closely, it was clearly awful for my friend to have a mother who cared more about being desirable than for her daughter’s happiness.

In fact, I remember feeling deeply grateful that my own mother looked like a mum, slightly overweight, rather dowdily dressed in clothes she’d had run up by a dressmaker to save money for our school fees, and who was obviously a mum.

And yet, no way did my mother lack authority. She had bags of it.

And, being trained as a doctor, she knew that it was important for the psyche that parents lay boundaries that must be respected by the child.

Parents have to teach their children nasty, uncomfortable truths - such as you can’t always have what you want, that you have to think of others occasionally and that life can be annoying and dull at times.

A friend who tried to tell you that would be dumped at once.

But any psychologist will tell you that getting stuck into extreme and self-destructive behaviour, such as drinking, promiscuity or even drug addiction, is often due to children never having learned to say “No” to themselves with the help and advice of a loving parent.

But what if the parent wants to come along and share those experiences?

The supreme irony is that while most of us would never hit or abuse our children, we are still doing them an immense wrong by trying to just be their friend.

We are soft as candy floss with our children, because we want them to like us.

Our parents may have been tough and it was uncomfortable, so - confusing authority with authoritarianism - we tell ourselves we want to practise a different way of parenting.

Unfortunately, it often turns out to be no parenting at all.

According to Dr Poulter: “When mothers become best friends, it leaves their children motherless.”

The upshot is that girls can sometimes have to push themselves to dangerous levels of aberrant behaviour until someone intervenes and says enough’s enough.

But being a strong parent can be uncomfortable. One friend said she hated getting cross with her children when she got home from work because that was their only time together and she didn’t want to spoil it by telling them off.

On another occasion I invited a famous cookery writer to my home and he explained how he’d meant to punish his daughter’s bad behaviour by saying he wouldn’t take her out to lunch, and then realised that would mean he couldn’t go himself, so he gave in. Wanting to be a friend instead of a parent can be equally disastrous in mothers of boys.

Feeling they have a friend instead of a mother can lead to great rage in boys, says Dr Poulter.

There is also research that boys whose mothers don’t stand up to them, especially if they are single mothers with no male influence in the household-can be disruptive in schools, as well as frighteningly dismissive of women.

No one wants a return to the idea of Victorian parenting, with its overtones of children being seen and not heard, but we do need to re-establish a sense of parental authority.

Of course, it’s healthy for parents to get on with their children, to chat and laugh together, though not to become one of those ghastly mothers who claim their daughters “tell them everything”.

Daughters who have been brought up with a clear sense that they have a mother instead of an ageing best friend won’t need or want their mum to go on the pull with them, like Fergie boasts of doing.

They will have friends and boyfriends of their own.

And if mothers who want to be their daughters’ best friends don’t see that, they will remain sad figures trying to prevent their children from growing up - just so they can go along for the party.

Source: Daily Mail, UK
http://tinyurl.com/53yo3s

Some children are being “left behind,” but it isn’t schools leaving them there. And yet many educators, politicians and other people with good intentions continue to push schools to do more, sounding the alarm that American children are at a global disadvantage when it comes to education. I’m not sold on the solution — which is more schooling, not simply more rigorous academics. I’m not even sure I agree on what the problem is.

In a Sunday story by Howard Buck, Evergreen Public Schools Superintendent John Deeder said schools should do more. When asked what he would do if he could wave a magic wand and reform education, Deeder said, among other things, that the school day should go from six to seven hours and the school year should go from 180 to 210 days — going beyond many Asian countries’ 200 days. Teachers should work 240 days per year, Deeder says, with 30 of them dedicated to training and curriculum development. He would make full-day kindergarten mandatory and preschool available to all 3- and 4-year-olds in the state — a goal many administrators, lawmakers and Gov. Chris Gregoire share.

But putting more hours in a day, more days in a year and two or three more years of a child’s formative years in the hands of the government is not the way to get parents more involved. As Deeder told Buck and reiterated to me Monday, “We can’t legislate to people how to be parents, but I wish we could get across to them the correlation between their involvement and their kids’ success.”

Bingo.

Parent involvement in their children’s education is directly correlated to kids’ success. Research backs up this common sense, but for some reason it isn’t touching down in the right way with parents or educrats. If more parents were more involved, richer and more rigorous school time would be easier to achieve; it would be unnecessary for schools to take on almost-full-time parenting duties and cradle-to-grave schooling.

A child can succeed when the odds are against her. And schools need to do all they can to connect students to learning that prepares them for the outside world. But getting parents involved is where societal energy is desperately needed. Even if you add more years, more days and more hours to a school year, without supportive home environments and active parenting, kids will fall behind.

Blame those most responsible

What can schools do? Keep trying to engage students, for sure. Tests are good, too, so we can see if students are learning. But schools must also quit bearing the brunt when students fall short. It isn’t typically a school’s fault when a child fails. That blame goes to students themselves and their families.

Taking on more hours, days and years of a child’s upbringing not only sets up schools for more public floggings, it is at cross purposes with inspiring involved parenting. Like many welfare programs, when the government offers more help, some stop helping themselves.

I asked Deeder if he worried that taking on even more would backfire, creating a public that expects schools, rather than parents, to be kids’ primary educators. His answer: “Here’s where I come from on every decision I think about: What is best for kids? For everything you do there’s an unintended consequence.” More school time, he says, is better for kids. It would be better than the day care kids get now, he added. And if some people adopt the attitude I fear, he says that’s too bad.

Putting kids first is good policy, and I admire Deeder’s passion. But in the long run, kids will suffer in a system that usurps, rather than challenges, parental responsibilities.

We can’t legislate how to parent. But when it comes to academics, we should expect and can require more from parents. They are the ones leaving children behind. They hold the keys to student success.

Source: The Columbian, WA
http://tinyurl.com/6p4ah2

Children as young as three are being bullied at Victorian kindergartens and teachers are not doing enough to stop it, a report has found.

Up to four children in each kinder class of 20-25 children may be affected by bullying, Deakin University researchers Gary Humphrey and Beth Crisp said.

They dismiss the widely held view that three and four-year-olds are too young to deliberately bully others.

In a paper published in the recent edition of the Australian Journal of Early Childhood, they say preschool bullying has been dismissed as a “developmental stage involving rough play and squabbling, which they will grow out of”.

But Mr Humphrey and Dr Crisp warn it means not enough is done to help affected kids.

“By denying the potential for bullying to take place between children of kindergarten age, some authorities have determined that systematic intervention to prevent or stop bullying at preschools is therefore unnecessary,” they said.

Their research suggests victimisation by very young children is similar to that of older children and there is no evidence to suggest young children are more resilient when bullied.

Mr Humphrey and Dr Crisp interviewed four parents of children who had been bullied at kinder.

They said their children were “scared and lacking in self-esteem as a result of having been subjected to constant teasing, name-calling or rejection by other children”.

They found some teachers actively denied the bullying and were hesitant to use the term.

A number of kinder teachers contacted by the Herald Sun were reluctant to use the word to describe harmful behaviour between three to five-year-olds.

And they strongly disagreed teachers didn’t do enough to protect children.

Kindergarten Parents Victoria chief executive officer Meredith Carter said aggressive behaviour was a feature of early childhood.

Ms Carter said all preschools are required to have behaviour management policies that stress the need to give children a safe, secure environment.

Source: NEWS.com.au, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23547589-421,00.html