It is a sad irony that people who write about education, such as myself, generally confine themselves to the worlds of primary, secondary and further education.

Indeed, one might reasonably argue that, for most children, what happens to them before the age of five will influence their lives forever.

This being so, perhaps it is time to pay a good deal more attention to who brings up our children, who gives (or denies) them the life chances that are so earnestly wished for all children, but which so many unfortunates never get.

To address this question we might do worse than to start with the words of Clarissa Williams, the new president of the National Association of Head Teachers, who advocates paying mothers to stay at home and raise their own children, arguing that, while real communication takes place at home … the present system leaves schools and nurseries to bring up children.”

It is surely time that the subject of parenting became a primary concern of society, and of our planning for the future, the first thought being that babies are made by two parents, not one.

With Britain having the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe, we need to have a serious think about the messages we give out to young people.

We need to tell them that sex is not a game to be played anywhere, with anybody, entirely without care or consequences.

After all, human beings are not like baby animals who mature in a few months and can safely be left to mothers alone to rear.

Our children are a responsibility, emotionally, physically and economically for up to two decades and the natural instinct of the animal male to mate frequently with any available female, leaving the resulting progeny as evidence of their superior virility cannot be allowed to be seen as a viable lifestyle choice for human beings, in spite of Ken Livingstone’s assertions to the contrary.

When I was young, girls under 16 were labelled “jail-bait” and left well alone by any young man who valued his freedom.

Indeed, my cousin had a baby at 13 and the father of the child spent three months in prison to remind him of his responsibilities.

Nowadays, there is arguably more, not less, need for vulnerable girls, badly parented themselves, cast adrift by family breakdown, desperate for someone to love them, to be treated in the same way that teenage prostitutes are at last beginning to be treated - as victims of sexual abuse - and their abusers charged accordingly.

False promises of individual freedom, the emotional blackmail of the media, their peers and testosterone-fuelled teenage boys, require girls to be protected by the law, from themselves and their own mixed-up emotions is necessary.

Here, of course, is where education could play a major role.

Since most children will ultimately become parents, there is a need for a course, lasting the whole five years of secondary school, that takes in sex education and child development classes, backed up by visits to ante-natal clinics, nurseries, baby clinics, Sure Start” groups and play schools, to show them just what being a parent entails and what hard work it is.

Hopefully, such knowledge would encourage children to focus on other disciplines taught in school as a real alternative to early sexual experience, teenage pregnancy and a life of struggle.

Source: Birmingham Post, UK
http://tinyurl.com/5l9ate

A powerful coalition of England’s leading independent schools is demanding that the Government scale back its new national curriculum for the under-fives, claiming that it violates parents’ human rights by denying them the freedom to choose how they educate their children.

The Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents 1,280 fee-paying schools educating more than 500,000 children, has written a blistering letter to Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, complaining that the new curriculum will mean that the education of under-fives is subject to greater government interference than that of any other age group.

A leaked copy of the letter, seen by The Times, says that the curriculum, known as the Early Years Foundation Stage framework, will compromise its member schools’ independence. “This clumsy intrusion into the early years’ curriculum of independent schools is both unjustified and unnecessary. More importantly, this interference conflicts with the rights of parents to privacy in their home life, which includes the freedom to choose how they educate their children and to educate them free from the control of the state,” the letter states.

The letter, copied to the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, also complains that the framework is likely to hold back children’s progress and to lower standards. George Marsh, who is headmaster of Dulwich College Preparatory School in South London and chairman of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, said he was concerned that the framework might eventually herald greater interference in the curriculum for older children.

The framework becomes law in the autumn and will affect all 25,000 nurseries and childcare settings in England, whether they are run by the state, charities or private companies. It sets out up to 500 developmental milestones between birth and primary school and requires under-fives to be assessed on 69 writing, problem solving and numeracy skills.

The framework has come under heavy fire from a number of leading child development experts and academics, including members of the Government’s own early education advisory group.

Some argue that it relies too heavily on formal learning at the expense of free play, while others fear that its formal literacy targets will instill a sense of failure in teachers and children because they are beyond the reach of most under-fives.

There are also fears that the legislation, which requires nursery staff to make constant written observations on children to note their progress, will interfere with teachers’ ability to interact with children.

Ms Hughes has so far resisted any attempts to water down the new curriculum, arguing that standards have to be set high to ensure that children from deprived backgrounds are given the same opportunities for learning in the crucial early years as middle-class children.

She said that the 69 early learning goals were aspirations, and not targets.

The entrance of the ISC into the debate will raise the stakes considerably, not least because the independent schools have chosen parents’ human rights, not just child well-being, as their main point of attack.

Unlike the national curriculum for schools, which does not apply to independent schools, the framework will apply to all pre-school settings.

The letter, signed by Chris Parry, the ISC’s chief executive, outlines a number of other objections to the framework, which will apply to 946 of its member schools, which cater for children up to five years old.

It complains that an anomaly in the legislation will leave independent schools with stricter staffing controls than the state sector, requiring private schools to hire three or four adults for each reception class of 30, compared with one in the state sector.

Mr Parry says: “It seems ridiculous that [the framework] should dictate rules relating to staffing in the independent sector and this prescription smacks of an ideological approach.”

The ISC also complains that the requirements for teachers to produce written observations on each child will result in teachers “acting as time and motion experts hovering around children with clipboards, Post-it notes and cameras to collect ‘evidence’ ”. This will not raise standards, but will “simply distract teachers from their teaching responsibilities”.

Mr Parry says that there was inadequate consultation with ISC members over the new law, adding that the regulatory impact assessment which followed the so-called consultation was “materially misleading”.

ISC schools, the letter adds, have been given contradictory advice from local authorities as to how the framework should be implemented. Some have not been able to get any advice at all. It says that, given this lack of consultation, there should be a 12-month transition period for the implementation of the framework.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, said that individual parents would have the option of applying for an exemption for their child for some or all of the learning and development requirements of the framework.

He added that the framework was flexible enough to support a wide range of approaches to education.

Source: Times Online, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article4004420.ece

Darling, that was wonderful: British couples reveal the quantity of sex after parenthood may be down but the quality is up

Do people’s sex lives start to fizzle out after they have children? Does their arrival mark the end of romance and the start of fantasising about other sexual partners - or even a night of uninterrupted sleep?

Shining a light on this deeply private area of couple’s lives is not always easy. So when we posted a questionnaire on Times Online, we were not entirely sure what to expect.

So far nearly 1,700 men and women have answered questions that range from how often they have sex and how long it lasts, to how many children they have and whether the children have affected the quality of their sex lives. Many also wrote at length about their own experiences.

David Thompson - the only one of those we contacted who agreed to give his real name - spoke with lyrical nostalgia about a long walk in the woods with his girlfriend. The weather was perfect, no one else was around and they had nothing on their minds but each other; so they made love beneath the trees.

Now aged 37, Thompson is married to his girlfriend and a father of three. “Making love spontaneously outdoors is something we would never do now,” he said. “We’re too busy running after the kids, making sure they don’t beat each other with sticks.”

His experience seemed typical: most of the respondents to our survey agreed that having children meant having less time for love-making. Yet despite recent reports about the rise in sexless marriages, the overwhelming majority still had a sex life – and few complaints about its quality.

“Frequency has gone down because we are both constantly tired and frazzled with the demands of our jobs and looking after the family,” wrote a married mother of two, who said she had sex two to three times a month. “But quality has gone up, as we have got closer after the birth of our child . . . We trust each other more and so are more open with each other.”

In all, 1,675 respondents - 54% of them male - filled in the survey on the Times Online’s Alpha Mummy blog. While not strictly scientific - because the respondents were self-selected - it painted a reassuring picture of what happens to romance after having children. The majority of parents said they had sex more than once a month; and 63% said the frequency of their love-making ranged from several times a week to two to three times a month. For 46%, love-making sessions lasted 20-45 minutes, while 34% made love for up to 20 minutes and 3% for more than an hour.

Tiredness was the chief reason given for having less sex now than before having a family; causes of this included the sheer physical energy needed to look after children, disturbed nights, early starts, pressures at work and general stress.

One pregnant mother, who has one child, said the reason why she was having sex only two or three times a month was, in fact, nothing to do with having a baby. “Running our own business does more damage,” she wrote. Other reasons for less frequent sex included sharing a bed with children or sleeping in separate beds - in some cases so that fathers were not woken up when a baby needed to be breast-fed.

One mother of three complained that it was hard ever to escape from children - “I’m worried about little hands opening bedroom doors,” she wrote.

Sex with his wife was described by one father as “quick, covert, much like a military strike . . . My daughter seems to have been born with a built-in radar which informs her any time my wife and I try to get close . . . even if she’s in the other room . . . at two in the morning”.

Some parents said they stole private moments while the children were playing in the garden or when the nanny was on duty. “We have to make the most of the opportunities, but the quality seems to get better with age and experience,” wrote a father of three, who described sex with his girlfriend as “better than ever” after 13 years together.

It was striking just how many parents had a positive view of their sex lives - whatever the frequency. “The sex we have is really great. It is maybe not as saucy as it was when we first got together, but it is more effective in that we both know what the other likes and what works for us both,” said a mother of one, who has been with her husband for eight years. They still have sex several times a week: “Although sometimes I am tired and think I can’t be bothered, afterwards I always think how much fun it was and am so pleased that I made the effort.”

Another mother, who has three children, said: “Being constantly tired and busy with activities after school made it hard to feel ‘in the mood’. Once the kids were older and more independent, we could return to more intimacy, and now that the kids have left home it is great.”

Some in long-term relationships admitted that the ebb and flow of their sex lives did not necessarily have anything to do with having children.

“We thought children affected our sex life when they were very little; but looking back, it was better then than now,” wrote a mother of two, whose relationship has so far lasted 11 years. “It may be our age, or we may have just got lazy.”

According to Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University and author of Paranoid Parenting, mothers in particular can find parenting a desexualising experience. After a baby is born, he said, “there’s a sense that the baby becomes the priority; the body is given over to the child. And that is sometimes slightly contradictory to the woman as a sexual being”.

Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, says that there can be a tension between “the erotic and the domestic. Family life thrives in an atmosphere of consistency and stability. The erotic crumbles under routine”.

Several respondents recognised these strains in their relationships. “I believe that my partner saw me as a mother/housewife rather than as being a sexually attractive, interesting woman,” said a mother of one.

And a father wrote: “Being in the birthing room was very traumatic for me. Taking second place to our child hurt our sex life . . . I think we both withdrew from the sex part of the relationship.”

One father of two, who had been in a relationship for five years, said: “After the second child, desire just disappeared and never really came back to full strength - and it’s been three years.” The couple’s love-making - two to three times a month - was, however, “great when you get it”.

Another father said that his love life had dwindled to having formulaic sex several times a year: “It was never the right moment so I gave up trying . . .”

On the other hand, many felt that pregnancy and parenthood had put renewed energy into their relationships. “It’s great now because she’s pregnant and has a sex craving,” said a father who has sex about once a week.

Perel said this was not uncommon. “There are lots of women who actually discover through pregnancy, through birth, nursing and bonding with a child, a whole new sense of themselves as women - physically, sexually and sensually.”

The iron bonds of parenthood can often reinforce a relationship, according to Furedi. “Having kids and having some very positive shared experiences bring people together,” he said. “A good sex life for a couple depends on there being a kind of bond, a friendship - it’s what gives you confidence to relax.”

What can be done if the sexual spark between a couple has simply fizzled out? Scheduling time to be alone together is vital, advises Suzi Godson, author of The Sex Book. Perel advises going out for a meal, dancing - anything that the couple will both enjoy. “Just don’t talk about the kids,” she says.

However, one desperate parent asked: but what else is there to talk about by that stage in a relationship?

Source: Times Online, UK
http://tinyurl.com/5a5wbp

Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals. It is thus with decidedly mixed feelings that we regard the frequent reports that activities once thought to be uniquely human are also performed by other species: chimpanzees who make and use tools, parrots who use language, ants who teach. Is there anything left?

Human beings have evolved to coordinate complex activities, to gossip and to playact together. It is because they are adapted for such cultural activities — and not because of their cleverness as individuals — that human beings are able to do so many exceptionally complex and impressive things.

Of course, humans beings are not cooperating angels; they also put their heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds. But such deeds are not usually done to those inside “the group.” Recent evolutionary models have demonstrated what politicians have long known: the best way to get people to collaborate and to think like a group is to identify an enemy and charge that “they” threaten “us.” The remarkable human capacity for cooperation thus seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the group. Such group-mindedness is a major cause of strife and suffering in the world today. The solution — more easily said than done — is to find new ways to define the group.

Source: New York Times, United States
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25wwln-essay-t.html

No one can read our thoughts, for now, but some scientists believe they can at least figure out in what language we do our thinking.

Before we utter a single word, experts can gauge our mother tongue and the level of proficiency in other languages by analyzing our brain activity while we read, scientists working with Italy’s National Research Council say.

For more than a year, a team of scientists experimented on 15 interpreters, revealing what they say were surprising differences in brain activity when the subjects were shown words in their native language and in other languages they spoke.

The findings show how differently the brain absorbs and recalls languages learned in early childhood and later in life, said Alice Mado Proverbio, a professor of cognitive electrophysiology at the Milano-Bicocca University in Milan.

Proverbio, who led the study, said such research could help doctors communicate with patients suffering from amnesia or diseases that impair speech. It could also be of use one day in questioning refugee applicants or terror suspects to determine their origin, she said.

The interpreters who took part in the study were all Italians working for the European Union and translating in English and Italian.

“They were extremely fluent in English,” Proverbio said in a telephone interview earlier this month. “We didn’t expect a big difference in brain activity” when they switched from one language to another.

The subjects were asked to look at a screen that flashed words in Italian, English, German as well as nonsensical letter combinations. They were not aware of the purpose of the study and were simply tasked with pressing a button when they spotted a specific symbol, Proverbio said.

Meanwhile, researchers monitored them using an electroencephalograph, or EEG, which measures the brain’s electrical activity through electrodes placed on the scalp. The EEG readout was fed into a computer program that pinpointed the time, intensity and location of the responses evoked in the subjects’ brains by each word.

About 170 milliseconds after a word was shown, the researchers recorded a peak in electrical activity in the left side of the brain, in an area that recognizes letters as part of words before their meaning is interpreted.

These brain waves had a much higher amplitude when the word was in Italian, the language the interpreters had learned before age five.

“The research suggests the differences between the two languages are at a very fundamental level,” said Joseph Dien, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas who was not involved in the study.

Proverbio attributed the differences to the fact the brain absorbs the mother tongue at a time when it is also storing early visual, acoustic, emotional and other nonlinguistic knowledge. This means that the native language triggers a series of associations within the brain that show up as increased electrical activity.

“Our mother tongue is the language we use to think, dream and feel emotion,” Proverbio said.

Offering an example, she said that an English-speaking child would associate the word “knife” with a sharp, cold object that is dangerous and should only be used by adults, while these links would be much weaker and indirect once that person learned the same word in another language later in life.

The only exception would be for those bilingual individuals who learn an extra language before age five.

The findings by Proverbio’s team were published earlier this year in the Biological Psychology journal and have surprised some scientists, particularly because the differences in brain activity show up at a point in the thought process when the brain hasn’t yet interpreted the meaning of the words.

“I didn’t expect such differences at the very beginning of the process,” Dien said in a telephone interview.

“They emerge at a very early level of comprehension,” he said. “It will take a lot more work to work out the implications of that.”

Dien said further research in the area could help understand and treat learning disabilities like dyslexia.

The Italian study also showed links between brain activity and proficiency in other languages. The differences showed up when the translators were shown words in English and in German, a language they knew at a more basic level, Proverbio said.

In this case, the differences in intensity and duration of the brain’s activity were seen some 250 milliseconds after a word was shown, and were traced to areas of the brain used to understand the meaning of words.

This phenomenon had been already discovered by previous studies which, however, had not spotted any difference between the mother tongue and other languages spoken with high proficiency. This had suggested that with some effort “we could all become perfectly bilingual,” Proverbio said. “Unfortunately, that’s not true.”

Source: International Herald Tribune, France
http://tinyurl.com/45dzks

Australian children should be learning a second language from early childhood to keep up with their European and Asian counterparts, a leading language expert said.

University of Queensland Professor Ken Wiltshire has called on state and federal governments to do more to encourage children to learn a second, or even third language.

“In Europe it’s now going to be compulsory for children to learn two languages and ideally three,” he said.

“In Australia kids get an exposure to foreign language for about four or five years from primary school but from then on they can actually escape it, which is a great pity.”

He said Australia’s physical isolation and the position of English as a global language meant many did not see the need to learn another language.

However, he said being fluent in only one language meant Australians would miss out on cultural experiences and it could also prove a disadvantage in international business.

Professor Wiltshire, formerly Australia’s representative on the executive board of United Nations Education Sciences and Culture Organisation (UNESCO), said foreign languages needed to be included in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s “education revolution”.

He said while Mr Rudd’s fluency in Mandarin provided a good role model, the prime minister needed to do more to encourage young Australians.

“There is no point in having a prime minister who speaks Mandarin if he doesn’t introduce good coherent policies that are going to encourage foreign languages,” he said.

Part of the problem was a shortage of foreign language teachers, Prof Wiltshire said, and measures similar to those implemented by the Rudd Government to encourage maths and science teachers were necessary.

“If we can have special incentives and HECS exemptions for science and mathematics teachers why can’t we do it for foreign language teachers?”

Ideally, he said, Australians should learn two foreign languages - one Asian and one European.

“There is a wonderful emphasis in Australia on the importance of early childhood and what would be better than if all these early childhood centres start introducing children to some aspects of a foreign language”.

Source: Courier Mail, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23745220-5003402,00.html

A new report declares that a “boy crisis” in education doesn’t exist and that both sexes are about equal in their standardized tests scores. At least that’s the analysis of 40 years of these tests by the American Association of University Women, which promotes gender equity for women.

So much for those of us who have doggedly maintained that single-sex education — bitterly opposed by some women groups — is far better in the below high school grades, when boys and girls would seem to learn at a distinctly different pace, one that puts male pupils at a disadvantage. But then our contentions are unsubstantiated by anything other than personal experience, clearly making them invalid. Observations from the parenting and grand parenting of 13 children hardly can compare with certified academic analysis.

The study states that success in school depends more on family income and ethnicity (African and Hispanic Americans do worse, it says) than any sign that female teachers might quite naturally possess traits and skills in exercising their craft that are far more favorable to girls. It is a myth apparently that the verbal and cognitive abilities come earlier to girls, that their attention spans are longer and their understanding of written assignments generally keener than those of their male counterparts of the same age and that boys exposed to male teachers do well.

Those boys who don’t progress at the same speed are, as we all know, “late bloomers.” There is nothing to worry about as the AAUW study of the tests from fourth grade to college shows. Junior as we all know will come along even if he is now fidgeting, pounding on his seatmate, or staring out the window as if in a trance even when not zonked out on some anti-hyper drug. He is just a bit of a dreamer who ultimately will overcome these traits and turn toward math and other scientific disciplines with such fervor as to completely overwhelm any female competitor.

Like boxers, education theorists spend a great deal of their time jabbing and counterpunching one another with tests and studies to build support for their opinions on how to save the public schools. In the process much of what is just plain common sense disappears in a welter of statistics that appear irrefutable, if obvious, but completely miss the point. Boys do catch up, given half a chance. Girls certainly can be superlative mathematicians (my daughter is one), and parental support is obviously vitally important to academic progress. Children of families who can afford books and other educational tools are bound to do better. How startling is that?

But the elusive point is that despite all the stats, separate classes for the sexes are a good idea in theory but are impractical it seems in reality. Why? Because those teaching the boys most likely would be women, not the males that could both understand their charges and provide them with authoritative role models. The public school system from the first to the ninth grades has been the overwhelming domain of women for a variety of reasons. This matriarchal society subconsciously has created an atmosphere, set an agenda and established the standards that clearly favor girls, at least in the early stages. There is nothing sinister about this and they will deny it until hell freezes over. But every parent with a mixed household of children who is paying attention can attest to its authenticity.

There is nothing sexist in single sex education. It is just a practical solution that probably will never come about in any widespread way. The social interplay between the genders at that level can be accomplished in a variety of ways including recess and mixed activities during and after school. But again this isn’t likely to take place anytime soon, certainly not as long as there are studies like the AAUW’s that miss the point.

Source: Scripps News, DC
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/33410

Kids are missing out on connection to outdoors

Last week I shared with you some of the benefits to young people of attending summer camp, such as social, decision-making and leadership skills and increased self-esteem.

This week I will share with you another benefit of attending summer camp: being outdoors.

“Nature deficit disorder” is what happens to young people when they become disconnected from their natural world.

Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods,” coined the term and believes the lack of exposure to nature contributes to some of the most disturbing childhood trends. These trends include depression, attention disorders and a rise in obesity.

Americans are spending less time in nature. According to Oliver Pergams, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Americans are participating in activities such as fishing and camping 18 percent to 25 percent less than they did in the early 1980s. State and national parks report a decrease in visitors as well.

In one study, young people were able to name 1,000 corporate logos but only 10 plant and tree species. Additionally, children ages 6 to 11 spend 30 hours a week watching television, a 400 percent increase over the last several years.

On average, American children are spending only 30 minutes of unstructured time outdoors each week.

T. Berry Brazelton, an influential pediatrician and a clinical professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, is quoted as saying, “The tragedy we are facing in this generation is that there is no time for children to explore, to play, to go outside.”

Brazelton believes outdoor play lets children “find themselves, find out what they’re like as people, find what works and what doesn’t work.”

Why should we be concerned about these trends?

First, how can we expect children to help protect nature when they don’t appreciate it? Conservation efforts will be even more daunting when future generations have not had experiences in nature.

What is more important, research shows that being close to nature may increase people’s ability to concentrate, improve the behavior of children with attention disorders and boost science test scores. Taking a walk in the woods, stopping to smell the roses and digging in dirt are good for mental health, learning and brain development.

Exploring nature and experiencing the outdoors allows learners to use higher-order thinking skills, increase vocabulary, make inferences and draw conclusions. Researchers have also found that outdoor play and nature experiences increase children’s self-discipline and cooperation skills.

What can you do for the children in your life who may be suffering from “nature deficit disorder”?

One thing you can do is provide a summer camp experience.

When young people attend a summer camp, they are typically immersed in nature. Playing, eating and even sleeping take place outside.

Everything a young person does at camp is hands-on. When people (young and old) are able to use more than one sense to learn about something, there is a greater chance the information learned will be remembered.

A week in nature will give young people experiences they will remember for a lifetime.

I encourage you to make a summer camp experience possible for young people in your life. The evidence of camp being a positive experience — with benefits for a lifetime — is overwhelming.

Source: Charlotte Observer, NC
http://www.charlotte.com/218/story/635025.html

I went to a very good workshop with our children’s librarian, Karen Mills, last week at the Salem Library. It was sponsored through Chemeketa Community Regional Library Service’s Ready-to-Read grant administered through the State Library.

It was titled “Fun and Facts of Early Literacy in Storytime: Partnering with Caregivers for Success.” It was given by Saroj Ghoting who is an early childhood literacy consultant.

As a former children’s librarian, I had been to three or four workshops about the importance of reading to your children early on in their lives. This was the most complete.

Saroj gave us some startling facts, such as: there is nearly a 90 percent probability a child will remain a poor reader at the end of the fourth grade if the child is a poor reader at the end of the first grade. Knowledge of alphabet letters when a child enters kindergarten is a strong predictor of reading ability in 10th grade.

Roughly 35 percent of children in the United States enter school without the skills necessary to learn to read, and one study found the typical middle-class child enters first grade with 1,000 to 1,700 hours of one-on-one picture- book reading, whereas a child from a low-income family averages just 25 hours.

What can a parent or caregiver do to give these children a head start in reading? First, I’m biased when I say bring those preschoolers to storytime at the library.

This is a quote from “Becoming a Nation of Readers”: “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children. This is especially so during the preschool years.”

Vocabulary is learned from books more than from normal conversation with adults or children or from television exposure. Don’t wait until the child is ready for school.

I’m not saying that you should teach a child to read before they enter school, but prepare them to get ready to learn to read.

What a parent can do to help get a child be ready to read: talk with your child about what is going on around you. Read together every day. When you talk about the story and pictures, your child hears and learns more words.

Grandparents: you can help too. Read to those precious grandbabies, and pass this column on to your adult children.

Source: Statesman Journal, OR
http://tinyurl.com/6r57te

This story is about having it all. Or for women, more precisely, the challenges of having it all: A career and a family. A new study quantifies what working women are trading away for a full professional life.

Julie Lee is an attorney at an international law firm with offices in San Francisco. She graduated from law school eight years ago and has been totally committed to work ever since.

“I would say that it’s been more than a full-time job. It’s taken priority, pretty much over everything else in my life, including my poor husband.”

It’s also taken priority over having children. And now, at age 37, she thinks it might be time to try. However, she got the message early on — it was an “either-or” proposition.

“When I first graduated from law school and was practicing, I pretty much assumed that I would be working full time. There really wouldn’t be any flexibility.”

In one way at least, Lee represents a striking difference between men and women lawyers. That difference is children.

A new study from Washington & Lee University shows professional women are walking away from motherhood and marriage — more than the general population.

Law professor Robin Wilson’s research makes up a chapter in a new book called Rethinking Business Management.

She says, while four-fifths of senior male lawyers have children, only two-thirds of senior women do, and there is a similar break from marriage.

She looked at more than 100,000 people with at least a college degree, and found that women lawyers, doctors and MBA’s are opting out of marriage at a higher rate than their male counterparts. When they do marry, women professionals have a harder time making it last.

Joan Williams founded the UC Hastings center for work-life law eight years ago. She’s made a career of studying the problem of balancing work and life for women and men.

“Professional men are much more likely to be married to homemakers or women who don’t have the financial withdrawal to leave, even if they want or need to,” says Williams.

Wilson’s research show that among women with a law degree, just shy of 6 percent have a stay-at-home spouse, versus nearly 40 percent of male lawyers. For MBA’s, nearly 10 percent of women have a spouse at home, compared with 44 percent of men. For MD’s it’s just over 12 percent for women versus 48 percent for male MD’s.

As for having families, we asked Williams, what was wrong with careers where you can’t have children.

“There aren’t careers where you can’t have children. There are careers where women can’t have children. So the question is, are we going to design careers so that only men can have them if they want a conventional family life? Or are we going to design careers so that either men or women can have them if they want a conventional family life?”

Williams has written extensively on this. She says, after great gains in the workplace for women in the 1970’s, things began to stall in the 1980s.

“So, the first thing is that if we want to continue to design careers that way, we have to openly acknowledge that that we’re no longer interested in gender equality. The second thing that’s wrong with these “all-or-nothing” careers is that men don’t want them either,” says Williams.

Williams says Gen-x and Gen-y men show signs of being different than their baby-boomer dads. The work-life center hotline is frequently hearing from young men about issues like paternity leave.

Source: abc7news.com, CA
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local&id=6155366