A few years ago, a restaurant owner in Chicago caused an uproar by posting a sign that read:

Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices.

I wouldn’t think anyone needs a sign to state the obvious, but in this age of permissive parenting, they do. Offended mothers mounted a boycott! They were shocked that anyone would dare insinuate their children didn’t have every right to climb onto the counter and start waving salt shakers over their heads.

Their contention? Perhaps it’s a display of their individuality through creative dance, and besides, “it makes little Taylor happy.”

Too often we expect others to do as we say and not as we do. Dinner service in a crowded restaurant is slow, and you snap at the waiter. You’re running out the door when the phone rings; so you grab it and say, “What do you want? I’m busy.” Do you treat friends and strangers with equal consideration?

Even if your manners are generally good, everyone slips from time to time, which gives parents the chance to highlight their own mistakes in front of their children, own up to them, and say how they will change their behavior in the future. If we model good manners, our children will be quick studies.

My own children haven’t always been angels, but when they err I immediately point it out and have them correct their behavior. At times I have made them apologize to the people that might have been bothered by their behavior. Because of that, there are numerous times on airplanes and in restaurants where employees will actually thank my husband and me for having such well-behaved children. I actually think this highlights the plight of manners in our society. I constantly have to correct their manners, and the thought that they are better than most is pretty scary!

While punishing bad behavior is necessary, there should also be a focus on acknowledging good behavior. One waitress came to our table and, in front of our children, detailed the bad behavior and poor manners of children who had been at a nearby table. She then thanked our children for behaving so well.

I think it really made an impact on them to hear it from someone else. They realized that good manners do matter to more people than just their parents! (And what do parents know anyway?) That said, it’s just as important to hear it from Mom and Dad.

E.D. Hill is a FOX News Channel host and author of “I’m Not Your Friend, I’m Your Parent.” She has eight children.

Source: FOXNews
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,429727,00.html

A child health expert says 20 per cent of Australian parents are unfit to raise children because they lack the means or life skills.

Professor Fiona Stanley says many others don’t devote enough time to their children because of job commitments.

The Sunday Telegraph reports Professor Stanley, an adviser to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and former Australian of the Year, has also criticised the government’s paid parental leave policies.

She’s warned that a national campaign is needed to protect the futures of Australian children.

“There are a worrying number of threats to children’s health in today’s society,” Prof Stanley, founder of the Institute for Child Health Research, said.

“If we don’t respond to these challenges, we will be looking at our generation as being the last generation that lives longer than its parents.”

Mental illness, obesity, asthma and substance abuse are the biggest health risks for Australian children, Prof Stanley said.

But cultural changes of the past 30 years are having just as big an impact.

“There have been incredible changes in the workplace, which might have been good for people’s income, but are not good for parenting,” she said.

She said paid parental leave is crucial.

A draft report for the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into paid parental leave will be released tomorrow.

Prof Stanley said up to one in five parents are financially and socially ill-equipped for child-rearing.
“There’s this increasing group of parents who are just not making ends meet,” she said.

“They don’t have the capacity to be a parent.”

Source: The Australian
http://tinyurl.com/4qa4p4

Any sprint coach will stress the importance of a good start. That’s why sprinters focus just as much on the starting blocks as the finish line – for what happens at the outset often determines the outcome.

Such is life.

This is the first lesson, quite literally, that advocates of early childhood development will teach you. The human brain is essentially front-end loaded, according to scientists. The pattern of your life is stamped to a large degree by the stimuli and experiences of early childhood which imprint themselves on the developing brain.

Other kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are already losing the race before they darken the doors of a school. By no means are they doomed, but they do face an uphill battle. Research shows that if kids have not caught up in literacy and language skills by Grade 3, chances are they never will. Or if they are experiencing a behavioural or learning impediment, this spells trouble down the road.

One-quarter of Canadian kids up to six years old are in that situation. That’s not just a scary statistic, but a call to action. Not only is this a tragedy for the children who never reach their potential, but also for our society. Underachievement carries a lot of baggage in terms of costly social and health problems.

But that’s not all. It’s also an important economic issue. Increasingly, our prosperity will depend on producing knowledge workers – a fact that is more readily grasped in China than here. Other countries are investing in early childhood development programs – Scandinavians lead the pack – but Canada ranks last among industrialized countries in spending in this area.

Our current crop of political leaders doesn’t get it yet. Prime Minister Stephen Harper foolishly cut the Liberals’ modest funding of such initiatives. And the provincial Tories recently canned a pre-Primary pilot program deemed too expensive to expand provincewide.

But there are signs the business community is paying attention. Last week, former banking executive Charles Coffey made a direct pitch to a primarily business audience at the Halifax Club.

“Of course your universities and colleges need more dollars,” he said. “But I’m just as convinced that at the other end of the educational spectrum, major investments in your early child development programs are sorely needed too. When corporate Canada divides its philanthropy pie for education, why can’t a larger piece be devoted to early childhood development? It’s time to invest in bridging the gap.”

At the moment, early childhood education in Canada consists of a loose patchwork of programs and assistance. Advocates would like to see billions invested in creating a nationwide network of community hubs, preferably centred around schools, that would provide support for parents, child care, social services and activities.

For those who toil in the trenches, this is an investment in human capital we can no longer afford to put off.

“I’ve spent 10 years on the South Shore of Nova Scotia as a supervisor of special education and student services,” Theresa Griffin, Maritime co-ordinator of the Council for Early Child Development, told The Chronicle Herald editorial board last week. “We could tell those kids coming into the system who were going to need support. But you know what? Those kids had to fail. They had to fail badly and repeatedly before we could put any kind of intervention in place for them. And then … the intervention was not tailored to their needs, nor intensive enough, of sufficient dosage, to make a difference.”

That’s a waste of government resources. But it’s also a waste of human resources which our society needs. Without greater emphasis on early childhood development, we might as well be entering the global race without tying our shoelaces first.

Source: TheChronicleHerald.ca
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Editorial/1081664.html

When it comes to instilling a love of reading, husband and I have done everything right — or so we thought. We read together with the boys during the day and at bedtime. We go to the library regularly as a family. And through the years, the boys have shown their love of books by falling asleep with piles of children’s page turners on their beds.

But when it comes to getting 6-year-old to actually read by himself, well, that’s another matter entirely. Early reading books simply aren’t engaging him. We’ve tried “Little Bear” books with some success. “Frog and Toad” are stories he likes, but not if he has to go it solo. “Amelia Bedelia” makes him laugh, but again … he’s got no desire to pick it up like his Legos, for instance.

And so, we’ve lowered our expectations. A few paragraphs in a Star Wars sticker book … great! Signs on roads and buildings … sure. The Lego catalogue … um, is he actually looking at any of the words? Do the instructions on math worksheets count?

According to Jon Scieszka, I’m not alone in having a boy who is not finding reading material that truly engages him. Scieszka, who spent years teaching, is the author of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and is the Library of Congress’ first national ambassador for children’s books. He’ll be in Washington this Saturday for the National Book Festival on the mall from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

“We’ve had this problem with boys not achieving and reading for a long time,” Scieszka says, noting that although we’re generalizing about boys, there are always exceptions. “For the longest time, you couldn’t even say boys and girls were different. It was taboo in the educational world.” But different they are, biologically and socially, he asserts. Boys need “move time,” which they’re getting less and less of in school these days. “That’s how they’re built,” he says.

The biggest change we can all make in giving boys a love of reading is to expand our definition of reading beyond fiction, Scieszka says. Research shows that boys will read with their friends and want to be readers, but they want it on their terms. “They’d rather read nonfiction or humor, graphic novels, science fiction, action adventure, audio books, or online reading and magazines,” Scieszka says. Much of this reading, boys don’t even think of as reading, he notes. Also key: Include boys in choosing their reading material. Often books that were favorites of mom or teachers (who are mostly female) and librarians (also, mostly female) will feel like “going to the dentist” for boys, Scieszka asserts.

Great new titles are coming out every year, Scieszka says. He recommends Sterling Point Books’ redone autobiographies for older kids and Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggy for younger ones. Other winners in his book: Tony DiTerlizzi’s “Kenny and the Dragon”, “Fog Mound Chronicles” by Susan Schade and Jon Buller, Eoin Colfer’s “Artemis Fowl” books; Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s “Neverland”, Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book” and Corey Doctorow’s “Little Brother”.

In the graphic novel realm, the publisher First Second has a whole range of graphic novels that appeal to younger guys and older ones. Particularly good is the Robot series for younger readers, Scieszka says. For middle readers, try Jeff Smith’s BONE series. And some boys really like Captain Underpants. Finding graphic novels can be a challenge, Scieszka says, because teachers, librarians and parents need to read through them rather than scan them for age appropriateness. Some publishers are starting to recognize this, though, and are putting age recommendations on the books.

And for nonfiction, Scieszka recommends Timothy Bradley’s “Paleo Bugs” and “Paleo Sharks”.

What reading material — particularly alternative reading — engages your sons?

Source: Washington Post
http://tinyurl.com/3gutut

After a weekend of crawling on the floor with our granddaughter, my wife and I support nature’s decision to give the joys of parenthood to the young and leave the less strenuous or episodic side of childrearing to those of a certain age. Learning that her mom and dad were conflicted about attending a weekend wedding, we leaped at the opportunity to spend quality time with their 11-month-old ball of energy.

We had an amazing weekend; truly enjoyable but physically demanding. After raising three kids of our own and professionally caring for thousands more, we felt well equipped and up to the task. Bearing responsibility for an infant, however, is an enormous undertaking, frequently taken for granted.

Toddlers are perpetual motion machines, requiring nearly constant supervision, stimulation, care, and feeding. They are prone to tears when hungry, thirsty, wet, or bored. They may conveniently fall asleep, allowing their caregivers to do the same, or may demand to be fed, changed, or entertained at inopportune times. As children mature and families evolve, we are inclined to forget the energy, organization, and commitment necessary for successful parenting.

Children grow and develop rapidly over the first year of life. In the few weeks since we last saw our granddaughter, she has become independently mobile and is eating table food. She can pull herself to standing, allowing access to objects on table tops and low shelves. She explores with abandon, rapidly moving from room to room in search of new experiences. Of course increased mobility is fraught with danger, especially in a grandparent’s not-totally-baby-proof home. Small objects present the danger of choking or poisoning, and light plugs and wires are hazardous to kids who like to mouth or chew objects as part of the learning experience. Kitchens can be particularly dangerous if cleaning agents and chemicals are stored within reach of a curious explorer.

Even the most ordinary of events pose hazards. While soft foods that dissolve in the mouth are safe, solid foods can pose real risks for children less than 2 years of age. Objects that remain hard, or may be slippery such as hot dogs, nuts, and raw carrots are particularly dangerous, as are pitted fruits and hard candy. Grandparents should be mindful of the dangers posed to infants by the many over-the-counter and prescription medications found in their homes. As a pediatrician, I have personally cared for children who had serious or fatal experiences with each of these examples.

While intended to be comforting and enjoyable, baby’s bath time can be dangerous, as well. Check to see that the water heater or boiler is not set too hot, since children can be scalded by temperatures over 120 degrees. Never leave children alone in the tub, since, aside from a potential drowning or aspiration, their skin is thinner than that of an adult and playing with a faucet can cause severe burns. Medical histories all too frequently report that parents or caretakers, distracted by the phone, have returned to bath-time catastrophes.

To us, parenting is the world’s most important, complex and difficult job; one for which there is little or no training or realistic preparation. Our short caretaking experience reminded us of just how much energy our daughter-in-law and son invest in parenting our grandchild. Our hats are off to them and to all the other parents and caregivers attentively caring for their families’ most precious treasures. (…)

Source: Gloucester Daily Times
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/pulife/local_story_269164437.html

Headaches around the topic of children and sleep tend to be par for the course when you’re a parent. Everything from enforcing bedtimes and pre-sleep routines to making sure they sleep through the night is enough to overwhelm any parent.

The Better Sleep Council Canada offers these tips to ease the sleep stresses:

Set a good example. Kids learn by example. Parents should establish proper, consistent sleep habits themselves as a model for their children.

Regularly check what you and your kids are sleeping on. While mattresses should generally be replaced every eight to 10 years, a child’s mattress may need to be replaced sooner than that. Your child’s body is growing and changing quickly; a mattress that was beneficial just a few years ago may not big or comfortable enough now.

Set and adhere to a steady sleep routine. Going to bed and waking at the same time will help your child realize that all of us, regardless of age, have bedtimes that we should stick to.

Make your bed. Show pride in maintaining an ordered bedroom that is a relaxing retreat.

Be patient. Don’t be discouraged if it takes a few weeks for your kids to entirely embrace their new sleep routine. Good sleep habits are formed over time. Consistency and commitment to your sleep and health are vital.

Source: Canada.com
http://tinyurl.com/4yfr4m

The class was working peacefully. It was the first lesson of the morning and everyone was a little bleary-eyed.

Joe Smith, I notice was doodling on a text book. ‘Come on Joe. That’s enough of that. Get on with your work please.’

I was new to teaching and trying to be firm but fair. The next minute, Joe grabbed his neighbour’s pencil case and threw it across the floor. When I remonstrated him he told me to ‘f*** off’.

At the end of the lesson I asked him to stay behind. Demanding an apology, I told him I’d be phoning home as well as reporting his behaviour to the head.

Joe simply shrugged. ‘It’s not my fault. I’m ill. I’ve got ADHD. I can’t help it.’

This was the first time I’d heard of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and I actually laughed. Appalling behaviour an illness? I’d never heard anything so ludicrous.

Now, I can honestly say I don’t think there’s a single class I teach without at least one and often two or three children being medicated with this very powerful class B drug.

Ritalin has unpleasant side effects - including sleeplessness and nausea - and the penalty for selling it illegally is a maximum of 14 years’ imprisonment.

If the answer to these questions is yes, then according to the ‘experts’, the child might well have ADHD. Alternatively, they may simply be a typical boy.

Added to the list of symptoms are, in my experience, extreme rudeness and a dislike of being asked to wear school uniform.

If asked several times to stop talking over me, children with the ‘illness’ generally swear at me.

When I phone their home, their parents react with the uniform comment: ‘He can’t help it. He’s got ADHD.’

Unsurprisingly, an increasing number of doctors and psychiatrists are expressing the fear that children are being labelled with a mental illness and given drugs for behaviour that in the past would simply have been labelled ‘very naughty.’

And anecdotally, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that schools are pressurising parents to put children who cause mayhem on Ritalin.

As a teacher, I’m secretly relieved when I hear that a particularly difficult child, one who won’t do any work, who chats and texts through the lesson, who sneers and swears at staff without a second thought, has been prescribed Ritalin.

The drug isn’t known as the ‘chemical cosh’ for nothing. If I’m honest, though, I don’t believe that these children are ill. I think they come from insecure, unstable backgrounds where the concept of a bedtime is as fanciful as the fairy tales they’ve never been read.

Of course, having an active, boisterous seven-year-old child is hard work. But it seems to me that far too many mums and dads are happy to have their children labelled with a psychiatric condition and drugged - even if the existence of the disorder is hotly disputed by the experts.

Youngsters might be turned into wide-eyed, slow-witted zombies, but at least they’re not running amok in the playground and inconveniencing their parents by getting suspended.

Ritalin, like Valium, has become mother’s little helper. It relieves parents of the responsibility of actually having to discipline their children. But as a society, we may pay a very high price indeed for drugging a generation of our children.

* Frances Childs is a teacher in a comprehensive school in the South of England.

Source: Daily Mail
http://tinyurl.com/4aqr7v

Although school has been back for less than a month, it is likely that many children are already experiencing frustration and confusion in math class. Research at The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada could change the way we view math difficulties and how we assist children who face those problems.

Daniel Ansari is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Western. He is using brain imaging to understand how children develop math skills, and what kind of brain development is associated with those skills.

Research shows that many children who experience mathematical difficulties have developmental dyscalculia – a syndrome that is similar to dyslexia, a learning disability that affects a child’s ability to read. Children with dyscalculia often have difficulty understanding numerical quantity. For example, they find it difficult to connect abstract symbols, such as a number, to the numerical magnitude it represents.

“Research shows that many children have both dyslexia and dyscalculia. We are now exploring further the question of exactly what brain differences exist between those who have just math problems and those who have both math and reading difficulties,” says Ansari.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of children with math difficulties, Ansari says that it becomes clear that children with developmental dyscalculia show atypical activation patterns in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex.

This research holds tremendous promise for people who, in the past, had simply accepted that they are ‘not good at math.’ Understanding the causes and brain correlates of dyscalculia may help to design remediation tools to improve the lives of children and adults with the syndrome.

A report of this research is forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

“We have some cultural biases in North America around math skills,” says Ansari. “We think that people who are good at math must be exceptionally intelligent, and even more dismaying and damaging, we have an attitude that being bad at math is socially acceptable. People who would never dream of telling others they are unable to read, will proclaim publicly they flunked math.”

Ansari says that math skills are hugely important to life success and children who suffer math difficulties may avoid careers that, with help, might be a great fit for them.

An article by Ansari entitled “The Brain Goes to School: Strengthening the Education-Neuroscience Connection,” will be published in the upcoming Education Canada, the magazine of the Canadian Education Association. In the article Ansari says technological advances such as fMRI have provided unprecedented insights into the working of the human brain.

“A teacher who understands brain structure and function will be better equipped to interpret children’s behaviours, their strengths and weaknesses, from a scientific point of view, and this will in turn influence how they teach,” says Ansari.

Source: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080924151007.htm

Youngsters in the United States are three times likelier to be prescribed antidepressants and stimulants and twice as likely to be given antipsychotic drugs than counterparts in Germany and the Netherlands, according to a new study.

The use of antidepressants and stimulants such as Prozac and Ritalin to treat hyperactivity, attention deficit and bipolar disorders in teenagers and young children has become a subject of sharp controversy.

Proponents say these powerful drugs, known as psychotropics, target newly identified conditions that were undertreated or misdiagnosed in the past.

Critics say the medications are being used too broadly, addressing behavioural problems that should be tackled by softer therapies.

Drawing from data on nearly 600,000 youngsters 19 years old and younger, the study is one of the first rigorous comparisons across several countries of how these medications are dispensed among the young.

In 2000, nearly seven percent of children in the US took psychotropics of some kind, while 2.9 and 2.0 percent, respectively, did so in the Netherlands and Germany, according to the study.

One in 12 of American children aged five to nine were taking these medications, four times the European levels.

Lead researcher Julie Zito, a University of Maryland pharmacologist, said psychotropic use in the United States may have increased since the data was collected.

“The US trends appear to be continuing,” she told AFP in an email.

Seeking explanations for the disparity on either side of the Atlantic, the study noted that direct-to-consumer drug advertising was allowed in the United States, but banned in Europe.

“The increased use of medication in the US reflects the individualist and activist therapeutic mentality of US medical culture,” Zito said.

There are also differences in the way behavioural disorders are defined and classified.

The diagnosis of “hyperkinetic disorder” in the European medical system, for example, is more stringent than that of the “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD), the equivalent syndrome in the US classification.

Another difference is who is handing out the medication: there are more psychiatrists per capita in the United States, which could influence prescription patterns, the study says.

Reimbursement policies and government regulatory constraints may also be factors.

Amphetamines and other stimulants are rarely prescribed for children in Western Europe. In France, their use was banned during the period covered by the study, 1999 and 2000.

Government health plans in Europe have also cut down on the use of expensive, patent-protected drugs, especially antipsychotics and antidepressants.

The study was published online, on Thursday, in the British-based open access journal BioMed Central.

Source: AFP
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5ilBNpu4oa62i2RHvWrWC362LFLaA

It’s probably not surprising that mothers excel at recognizing and interpreting the moods and emotions of their infants. Although infants can’t speak, mothers seem to know what their babies are thinking: they smile when their baby smiles and they frown when their baby is upset. Research suggests that the mother’s ability to understand the needs of her infant is very important for establishing a secure mother-infant relationship. However, the neural mechanisms that underlie these behaviors are poorly understood. Such knowledge is crucial for understanding normal as well as abusive and neglectful mothering.

Maternal Rewards

In recent years, several studies have been carried out using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to better understand how a mother’s brain responds to her own child’s cues. The most recent, led by neuroscientist Lane Strathearn and colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine, investigated what happens inside the brain of a mother when she looks at the facial expressions of her own infant. In the study, 28 first-time mothers were shown pictures of their seven-month old child that they had never seen before. (The pictures were taken when the mother was not present.) The pictures spanned a wide range of human emotion and included images of the child making happy, sad or neutral faces. These pictures were then matched with images of an unknown infant. The central finding was that seeing the happy face of the mother’s own infant activated all of the key areas in the brain associated with reward processing. These regions include the ventral tegmental area, substantia nigra and the striatum. This finding suggests that for mothers the sight of their smiling baby is a potent reward and represents a uniquely pleasurable experience. Furthermore, this neural response was graded, so that happy faces led to more activation than neutral faces. Sad faces generated the least activation. In other words, the response of mothers in their reward areas seemed to directly mirror the emotions the infant displayed.

The argument put forth by Strathearn and colleagues is that maternal behavior is fundamentally rooted in these reward areas. Positive sensory cues from infants, such as a smiling facial expression, stimulate dopamine release and thus promote responsive maternal care. However, many questions remain. In their paper, Strathearn et al. do not discuss the significance of the orbitofrontal cortex, although its activity was clearly influenced in the experiment by seeing one’s own infant’s compared with an unknown infant. The importance of the orbitofrontal cortex shouldn’t be too surprising, as this brain area is believed to receive ascending dopamine projections from reward areas and is critical in representing the “value” of a reward. Other studies have also demonstrated that the orbitofrontal cortex is correlated with the positive feelings of the mother, suggesting that it plays a key role in modulating maternal behavior.

Is the Smile Enough?

This study also raises a more fundamental question: is the infant smile the most important element for motivating maternal behavior? It goes without saying that the smiling face of one’s own baby is highly rewarding and encourages maternal care. On the other hand, babies aren’t always smiling and mothers must also learn to respond to infants in distress. In fact, a human mother’s response to an infant in distress is a good indicator of how responsive she is to other infant cues. Studies also show that abusive and neglectful mothers show less empathy and more aversive feelings towards a crying infant when compared with nurturing mothers, suggesting that how a mother reacts to a baby when it’s upset and not smiling is a crucial test of maternal behavior.

According to our own recent work, the orbitofrontal cortex and striatum were more activated in the brain of a mother when she looked at her own infant compared with other infants regardless of the infant’s situation or mood. These brain areas also showed a greater activation when mothers were viewing their infant when he or she was crying (the distressed condition) as opposed to when he or she was happy (the play situation). This discovery makes sense, as a distressed baby might require more effort and thought as the mother must quickly identify the source of the distress and respond appropriately. Another reason to highlight the importance of the orbitofrontal cortex in guiding maternal behavior is that, in our experiment, the activity of this brain area showed a positive correlation not only with pleasurable feelings but also the anxious feelings experienced by the mother. Of course, these anxious feelings are important for maternal care, as anxiety and worry can be powerful motivators. Taken together, these findings suggest that maternal behavior is guided by elaborate and complex neural mechanisms. Although reward processing is clearly an important part of this mental process—it seems to mediate maternal love and feelings of joy—other mechanisms are required in order to explain the full range of the mother-infant relationship.

In conclusion, a smiling face of a mother’s own infant is certainly rewarding and it motivates maternal care, but this is not the only motivator. We hope that in the future other aspects of maternal behavior—such as the maternal desire to protect her infant, which is a biologically essential mechanism for preservation of the species—will get investigated and explored.

Source: Scientific American
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=smiles-and-mother-baby-bond