Better childcare will curb social ills

The first few years of a child’s life are the most important; it is in these early years that the quality of their lives is laid down. Yet too many parents who wish to nurture their children at home are being forced back to work by financial pressures when their children are still babies.

We need to level the financial playing field for parents. The current system pressurises mothers - and it is mostly mothers - into going back to work soon after their children are born. Yet the research shows that the seeds of later unhappiness and antisocial behaviour by young people are often sown by the failure of parents to form a close and loving relationship with their babies.

Society is paying a high price for the quick fix of getting mothers back to work so soon after birth.

We seem, as a society, to place economic and academic concerns well above relationships despite the latter’s crucial role in a child’s - and later an adult’s - wellbeing. Regardless of the very large body of scientific and sociological evidence, children’s policy and political thinking miss the influence of the early years on a host of social problems we face today.

I asked Dr Samantha Callan to form the Early Years Commission to study this question. Its report, which will be published tomorrow, should make compelling reading for policy makers and parents. Crucially it shows that violent and antisocial behaviour by young people can be traced back to parental neglect when they were very young. They in turn pass on this dysfunction to their own children, perpetuating the cycle.

Professor Margot Sunderland, a child mental health expert on the commission, unambiguously stated that the quality of childcare has lifelong consequences for mental health as the first three years of a child’s life are crucial for healthy brain development and psychological stability.

The yardstick of quality applies across the spectrum of childcare: parental, informal and formal. It’s not the case that home care is always good and nursery always bad. But whether it is politically correct to admit this or not, there is a “hierarchy” of quality in childcare that policy is currently ignoring.

If parents want more than anything else to be with their children most of the time in the early years, and want to give them the continuity and intensity of relationship that science says they need, then surely they are the ones best placed to provide it.

Facilitating this aspiration should be a cornerstone of childcare policy. If parents don’t want to do this or cannot (and 81% of parents said financial pressures made them return to work early), the emotional and cognitive needs of their children must still be met.

This can be done by well motivated family members, well trained nursery nurses or other childcare professionals who have the time to give them enough one-to-one care. The evidence shows that, after motivated parents, family members offer an excellent childcare source.

Yet at present they are discounted by policy makers. Worryingly the commission also heard that childcare professionals are unsure if they should even hug children and that many nurseries prioritise health and safety and administrative needs, not personal childcare. Empathy doesn’t feature in the measurement of care quality, yet it is critical.

It seems that most of the public sense that policy is wrong. When asked in our poll, 82% of adults said that more should be done to help parents who wish to stay at home in those early years and some 70% felt that parents were encouraged to put their children into daycare too soon.

We need a fairer system in which the financial sacrifice of giving up work to look after a baby is offset by extra help from the tax and benefit system. The commission’s report recommends “front-loading” child benefit so a larger proportion of the child’s total entitlement would be available during the first three years when parents most want to spend time caring for children and when attachment and intensive nurture are most important.

It also recommends transferable tax allowances to reflect the fact that, if one spouse is not working outside the home, that family requires more support from the tax system. Similarly the benefits system should not penalise low-income couples who want to live together – which requires tackling the “couple penalty”. And it proposes a change in the rules to allow working parents to use childcare tax credits to pay unregistered close relatives to look after children.

With the growing demand on mental health facilities, the rising number of children in care and the peculiarly high levels of dysfunctional family behaviour, our failure to place cognitive and social development in the early years at the heart of our policy for children is already costing us dear. It is surely time to change all of that.

Source: Times Online, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article4692207.ece

We had only one house rule when my daughter was born — sleep when the baby sleeps.

But as an anthropologist who has looked at parenting from an evolutionary view and across cultures, it made no sense to me at all. Human babies, I knew, are physically and emotionally entwined with their caretakers, so you might as well sleep together or there will be hell to pay.

Recent research on infant sleep and depressed mothers by Roseanne Armitage of the University of Michigan Medical School underscores the strength of that adult-baby entrainment. Armitage and colleagues asked mothers who were depressed during pregnancy, as well as mothers who had a newborn and were not depressed, to wear a wristwatch device called an actigraph which measured sleep, rest and activity. The researchers also put tiny versions of the actigraph on the mothers’ 2-week-old babies. Turns out, the babies with happy mothers often came with an inborn sense of circadian rhythm, meaning they innately distinguished between day and night, and soon adjusted the major portion of activity accordingly. But the babies of depressed mothers had no such rhythm, and their sleep and activity patterns were all over the place all the way to the end of the study eight months later.

Although the researchers were adamant that all babies should be put on a sleep schedule to “fix” any “irregularities” in circadian rhythms caused by maternal mood disorders, that suggestion misses the mark.

Human infants are born neurologically unfinished and therefore designed to be constantly attached to an adult who is attuned to their needs. The problem with depressed mothers is not so much that their babies have sleep “problems” but that the mothers, day and night, are emotionally and physically affecting their infants in ways they may not even notice.

Responding to the endless needs of a helpless baby in a culture where most of us have no experience with kids can be a shock to even the most psychologically balanced person. Just imagine being depressed about the baby, or something else, and then being faced with this screaming infant who won’t sleep when she’s “supposed” to. And then read that one “should” put that baby in a crib, alone, and let her cry it out until she sticks to a sleep schedule, by gum. It would make any parents near the edge fall over into depression.

Surely there’s a more humane approach to helping sad mothers and fussy babies that addresses both their needs,

Oh, yeah, I’ve got it: Sleep when the baby sleeps and you’ll both get enough sleep.

Source: LiveScience.com, NY
http://www.livescience.com/culture/080905-baby-sleep.html

Parents spend a lot of money on their children’s care, education and extracurricular activities to help them reach their potential and to give them the best possible start to their lives.

If an infant’s relationship with their carers is inconsistent or unstable, they won’t get the ongoing, responsive interactions required for the healthy development of these capacities. If you have a less attentive care - when an infant is rarely noticed, touched or talked to - you lessen their ability to withstand stress, to learn, to control emotions and develop into healthy adults.

Knowing this, we should welcome the recent comments by the children’s author Mem Fox about the importance of good care for our babies and infants. The responses to her comments show the community is justifiably concerned about how we provide the quality of care young children need for optimal development.

At a time when the nation is deciding the best model for a national paid maternity leave scheme, it is timely that the needs of the child become the central focus in any decisions that are made around care. Yes, some parents will always have to return to work early. However, a well-supported paid parental leave scheme of at least 12 months would make this an exception rather than the rule it may become.

If we continue to abandon our parents to find their own unsatisfactory way out of the dilemma of working and having a family, then premature return to work will occur.

The more time parents spend with their children, the more they learn how to be better parents. The repeated interactions parents have with their children help them to become better at responding to their baby’s needs and identifying problems. When parents are in prolonged employment during their children’s early years of life, the opportunities to learn these parenting skills can be affected.

We need to find better ways to allow parents to stay at home during the first year of their child’s life, to provide these continuous one-on-one interactions that infants need with their parents for healthy brain development.

However, parents will only take leave from work to spend time with their infants during these critical first few years if they can afford it. We now need a system that supports parents in their role as carers as well as their role as workers.

It is much more cost effective and developmentally advantageous to provide parents with paid leave for at least 12 months so they can foster that important one-to-one relationship and nurturing environment that will optimise their baby’s chances during a crucial stage of their early development.

Gillian Calvert is the NSW Commissioner for Children and Young People and Marie Coleman is the spokeswoman for the National Foundation for Australian Women.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
http://tinyurl.com/5aljat

There’s nothing controversial-sounding about Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to make a $10 billion federal investment in high-quality early education. After all, 38 states and the District of Columbia now underwrite pre-kindergarten. With GOP stalwarts such as Alabama Gov. Bob Riley and South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds on board, and support coming from the likes of Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, as well as a host of big-city police chiefs, you’d think that the benefits of preschool are as generally accepted as the reality of global warming. Think again.

While the McCain campaign remains mum on the topic, the free-markets think-tank, the Reason Foundation, has rushed in to fill the void. In an Aug. 22 Wall Street Journal commentary piece that’s getting wide circulation in the blogosphere, foundation staffers Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell take a rhetorical cudgel to preschool. Not only is pre-K a waste of money, they claim - it can even do “lasting damage.” This op-ed comes dressed in the trappings of social science. That may make it sound impressive, but the argument is pure snake-oil.

The Reason Foundation staffers cherry-pick from the studies to make their case. They treat research whose outcomes comport with their biases as gospel, even when those studies flunk the test of scientific respectability. Research published in leading journals that reaches a contrary result go ignored. The staffers’ biggest gaffe is the contention that James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a leading authority in this field, is an ally. Quite the contrary: In a recent Science article, Heckman calculated that, over a 40-year-period, the annual rate of return on investment for the children who participated in the famous Perry Preschool experiment is a glimmering 16 percent. If Perry Preschool were a business, Warren Buffett would want to invest in it.

These writers show their true colors when they describe the parents of the Perry preschool youngsters as “drug addicts and neglectful.” Those mothers and fathers were poor, badly educated African Americans - to leap to the conclusion that they were drug-addled speaks volumes about the authors’ biases.

To be sure, pre-kindergarten isn’t a panacea. Giving all kids a decent shot at success would require offering parents the support that many of them need to raise their children well, as well as strengthening the public schools. What’s more, when preschool is badly done - with classes that are too big, teachers who know too little about child development and parents who are discouraged from getting involved in their own kids’ education - no one comes out ahead.

When pre-K is done right, though, the evidence confirms that it can alter the arc of children’s lives. That’s why the goal of policy should be to guarantee every 3- and 4-year-old a preschool opportunity as good as what the wisest parents would want for their own children.

When the Reason Foundation abuse the research to discredit pre-K they’re doing the next generation a disservice. And because good preschool is a sound investment in the country’s future, they’re short-changing the rest of us as well.
Point and counterpoint on preschool

The evidence demolishes the Reason Foundation’s claims.

Claim: Oklahoma and Georgia enroll the biggest proportion of children in pre-kindergarten. Nonetheless, students in those states perform terribly on the nationally mandated fourth-grade reading and math tests. Preschool is money down the drain.

Fact: In both Oklahoma and Georgia, math and reading test scores increased once the preschoolers reached fourth grade. Nationwide, a RAND study shows, good state pre-kindergarten programs lead to higher test scores.

Claim: The benefits of Head Start, the nation’s biggest early education program, fade out over time. Any early education gains are illusory.

Fact: The most rigorous research shows that Head Start makes a long-term difference: educational attainment is higher and crime rates are lower.

Claim: Children in Finland, who don’t start school until age 7, do well on international tests. If they don’t need pre-kindergarten, then why do we?

Fact: Finnish youngsters aren’t babes in their mothers’ arms until they reach age 7; their parents have a host of early childhood education options from which to choose. What’s more important, international studies show that preschool helps all children and that the least advantaged youngsters benefit most. In nations where pre-kindergarten is widely available, 15-year-olds do better on international tests than youngsters in similar countries where pre-kindergarten is less common - that means the benefits of early education endure. Moreover, in countries where most children attend preschool, the test score gap is narrowest - that means early education does the greatest good for those who most need the help.

Claim: Preschool can do lasting damage, reducing kids’ motivation and increasing their aggressiveness.

Fact: Studies that meet the highest scientific standards show just the opposite - that good pre-kindergarten programs have positive effects on how children develop socially and emotionally.

Claim: Only the most disadvantaged children can benefit from pre-kindergarten. If government is going to invest in early education, that’s where all the money belongs.

Fact: Research dating to the 1980s, including a study of Oklahoma youngsters published in the prestigious journal Science, concludes that while the least well-off kids may gain the most from high-quality preschool, middle-class youngsters are also better off.

David L. Kirp, professor at Berkeley Law and the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, is the author of The Sandbox Investment (2007). W. Steven Barnett is the director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle, USA
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/01/ED3612LC8C.DTL

Parents who teach their children at home could have twice the impact on raising their child’s performance at school compared to a good nursery education, a new study suggests.

There have been rising concerns about the relatively low numbers of children taking up science and mathematics at the secondary level and evidence is published today that parents could have a much bigger impact on raising standards later on than preschool education, by a Government backed project following more than 3000 children.

Ten-year-olds who have attended “high quality” preschool tend to score higher on mathematics tests than those who haven’t, reports Prof Edward Melhuish of Birkbeck, University of London, and colleagues from the Effective provision of Preschool and Primary Education (EPPE) project.

He said they were surprised by the degree to which early experience both in the preschool and home were so influential later in the child’s life.

“For the average child who went to a particularly effective or high quality preschool their maths scores would be boosted by around 27 per cent,” says Prof Melhuish.

However, the project revealed that the education of the parents - particularly the mother- still has the greatest influence, having twice the effect and thus boosting maths scores even more.

What parents did at home mattered too. “The effects of the early home learning environment were very strong, much stronger than people had anticipated.”

“An ideal home learning environment would be rich in stimulation and very responsive to the child’s communications and activities,” says Prof Melhuish.

“Parents would talk to their children frequently, read to them, maybe visit library to increase range of books for child, provide opportunities to draw, paint, learn songs and rhymes, dance and physical activities, play with numbers and shapes.

The important thing is that the home provides lots of learning opportunities, The fact that learning is taking place is more important than the actual content of the learning. This provides the child with the mental structures needed to learn new things.”

The team calls in the journal Science for countries such as America to adopt universal preschool, which might cost up to £5000 per child, of the kind adopted in Britain since 2004.

Whereas much of the previous research on preschool’s long-term effects focused on disadvantaged children, the researchers followed children from throughout England, from ages three and four through to age 10, and is still studying them at secondary school.

“This detailed data allows us to examine the effects of various factors while allowing for the differences in the other factors and backgrounds of children,” says Prof Melhuish.

“Our study is the first to show that preschool shows advantages across the whole population, while being able to allow for other confounding factors.”

The home environment is the most important; five years of “effective” primary school is next most important but is closely followed by 18 months of preschool experience in terms of relative size of effects.

As for what parents should look for when chosing a preschool, he says: “A play-based curriculum that offers lots of learning opportunities that cover reading and play with numbers and shapes and some time in individual, one-to-one activities as well as small group work”.

Starting “between two and three can be very beneficial, particularly for children from disadvantaged homes.”

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/5jevbu

About a month ago, I was shopping at the market when I came upon a woman smacking her young son. “I don’t ever want to see you hit your sister again,” she warned him. Apparently, the lad had walloped his (now-crying) sibling, which led to the mother’s admonition.

I don’t usually interfere with parents disciplining their kids unless I think that it’s crossing the line into abuse (or neglect), but I did make a mental note of the situation. If we were to dissect this scene, what part of it seemed incongruent? Surely, the mother was being reasonable in reprimanding her son for hitting his sister. But to make her point, she hit her son! I just didn’t comprehend how she didn’t see the inconsistency of her message, as well as the correlation between her behavior and that of her son’s.

This point was drilled home to me when a friend recently sent me a video called “Children See, Children Do.” It’s a powerful reminder that, in every sense, parents model the way for their children. Of course, we tend to think of role models in positive terms, as people who enrich our lives and teach us important lessons and values. But in truth, role models work both ways, showing good and bad behavior that kids pick up on. You need only look at rap artists or young celebrities out of control to realize that even if you don’t approve of the content of their songs or the antics of their lives, your kids quite possibly may be emulating them. How many girls thought it was “cool” when 15-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears became pregnant or when Mylie Cyrus posed provocatively on her MySpace page.

It’s no different for parents. Since parents are the strongest role model a child has, what you do matters - a lot. In fact, everything that you do, your children see and, most likely, will end up doing, as well. From screaming at the car that cut you off in traffic to lying to a friend to get out of dinner plans, your child takes it all in and considers it acceptable behavior.

Modeling the way is one of my favorite parenting principles. It’s a relatively simple concept to understand but far more difficult in practice. After all, as flawed souls ourselves, we do act inappropriately at times, especially when we’re angry, upset or anxious. We carry prejudices and biases that at times can be hard to mask. We have behaviors - whether it’s smoking, drinking or speaking negatively of others - of which we’re not proud. We don’t want our children to pick up on our bad habits, traits and behavior. But children take it all in and, seeing us as their primary role model, regardless of whether you tell them it’s bad or not (the old “do as I say, not as I do” mentality), they’re going to think it’s OK to model that negative behavior or attitude.

It’s hard being a parent. We all know that. But it’s also a privilege. Pay attention to your less desirable conduct, habits or attitudes. They all translate into messages that your kids, as your primary audience, are receiving. If you aren’t proud of them yourself, or if you don’t wish for others to see these behaviors in play, chances are that you shouldn’t let your children observe them either.

Step up to be the best parent you can be. And when you make a mistake, such as losing your temper or not following through on something you say you’ll do, be sure to admit the mistake to your child. A child hearing his or her parent say, “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done that,” is a powerful thing. It tells your child: “We’re human and fallible, but we do our best, and when we fall short, we admit it.” And a parent who communicates that just may be the ultimate role model.

Source: DetNews.com, MI
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080826/OPINION03/808260378

As a child safety measure in the car, its importance could never be underplayed.

Researchers, however, yesterday warned that the convenience of the portable car baby seat is having some far less desirable effects.

They claim many parents are using the chairs to also restrain infants in the home, which in turn is damaging their development.

Such ‘cotton wool’ treatment later leads to poor concentration in the classroom because children’s reflexes have not been sufficiently developed, they say.

The researchers from Liverpool John Moores University examined 120 children aged ten and 11 at a school in West Yorkshire.

The youngsters were given tests in reading, non-verbal reasoning and shortterm memory and split into four groups.

One group took part in a specially designed movement programme, the second did sound therapy, the third did both programmes and the fourth did neither.

The movement programme involved 40 minutes of simple exercises, twice a week, for eight months within normal PE lessons.

Activities included crawling on a mat, hand-to-eye exercises and playground games such as skipping. Eight months later, all 120 children were re-tested.

The children who took part in the movement programme performed ’significantly better’ overall in comparison to the children who did not. Their reading, memory and general reasoning had all improved.

‘People are trying to be too safe but they are causing further problems.’

Meanwhile, the separate music programme involved children listening to classical music through headphones for 30 minutes a day over eight weeks.

The music was filtered to create higher frequencies to help boost the auditory processes, which is the speed at which one can process what’s being heard.

At the end of the experiment, the children performed better in reading than those who had not taken part in the music programme.

‘The Government should consider using movement programmes in schools to iron out difficulties children might have.’

Source: Daily Mail, UK
http://tinyurl.com/69anux

Barack Obama says he believes in universal preschool and if he’s elected president he’ll pump “billions of dollars into early childhood education.” Universal preschool is now second only to universal health care on the liberal policy wish list. Democratic governors across the country — including in Illinois, Arizona, Massachusetts and Virginia — have made a major push to fund universal preschool in their states.

But is strapping a backpack on all 4-year-olds and sending them to preschool good for them? Not according to available evidence.

“Advocates and supporters of universal preschool often use existing research for purely political purposes,” says James Heckman, a University of Chicago Noble laureate in economics whose work Mr. Obama and preschool activists routinely cite. “But the solid evidence for the effectiveness of early interventions is limited to those conducted on disadvantaged populations.”

Mr. Obama asserted in the Las Vegas debate on Jan. 15 that every dollar spent on preschool will produce a 10-fold return by improving academic performance, which will supposedly lower juvenile delinquency and welfare use — and raise wages and tax contributions. Such claims are wildly exaggerated at best.

In the last half-century, U.S. preschool attendance has gone up to nearly 70% from 16%. But fourth-grade reading, science, and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — the nation’s report card — have remained virtually stagnant since the early 1970s.

Preschool activists at the Pew Charitable Trust and Pre-K Now — two major organizations pushing universal preschool — refuse to take this evidence seriously. The private preschool market, they insist, is just glorified day care. Not so with quality, government-funded preschools with credentialed teachers and standardized curriculum. But the results from Oklahoma and Georgia — both of which implemented universal preschool a decade or more ago — paint an equally dismal picture.

A 2006 analysis by Education Week found that Oklahoma and Georgia were among the 10 states that had made the least progress on NAEP. Oklahoma, in fact, lost ground after it embraced universal preschool: In 1992 its fourth and eighth graders tested one point above the national average in math. Now they are several points below. Ditto for reading. Georgia’s universal preschool program has made virtually no difference to its fourth-grade reading scores. And a study of Tennessee’s preschool program released just this week by the nonpartisan Strategic Research Group found no statistical difference in the performance of preschool versus nonpreschool kids on any subject after the first grade.

What about Head Start, the 40-year-old, federal preschool program for low-income kids? Studies by the Department of Health and Human Services have repeatedly found that although Head Start kids post initial gains on IQ and other cognitive measures, in later years they become indistinguishable from non-Head Start kids.

If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children. A 2005 analysis by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that kindergartners with 15 or more hours of preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class. Likewise, Canada’s C.D. Howe Institute found a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills among kids in Quebec after universal preschool.

The only preschool programs that seem to do more good than harm are very intense interventions targeted toward severely disadvantaged kids. A 1960s program in Ypsilanti, Mich., a 1970s program in Chapel Hill, N.C., and a 1980s program in Chicago, Ill., all report a net positive effect on adult crime, earnings, wealth and welfare dependence for participants. But the kids in the Michigan program had low IQs and all came from very poor families, often with parents who were drug addicts and neglectful.

Even so, the economic gains of these programs are grossly exaggerated. For instance, Prof. Heckman calculated that the Michigan program produced a 16-cent return on every dollar spent — not even remotely close to the $10 return that Mr. Obama and his fellow advocates bandy about.

Our understanding of the effects of preschool is still very much in its infancy. But one inescapable conclusion from the existing research is that it is not for everyone. Kids with loving and attentive parents — the vast majority — might well be better off spending more time at home than away in their formative years. The last thing that public policy should do is spend vast new sums of taxpayer dollars to incentivize a premature separation between toddlers and parents.

Yet that is precisely what Mr. Obama would do. His “Zero-to-Five” plan would increase federal outlays for early education by $10 billion — about 50% of total government spending on preschool — and hand block grants to states to implement universal preschool. This will make the government the dominant source of funding in the early education marketplace, vastly outpacing private spending.

If Mr. Obama is serious about helping children, he should begin by fixing what is clearly broken: the K-12 system. The best way of doing that is by building on programs with a proven record of success. Many of these involve giving parents control over their own education dollars so that they have options other than dysfunctional public schools. The Obamas send their daughters to a private school whose annual fee in middle school runs around $20,000. Other parents deserve such choices too — not promises of subsidized preschool that they may not want and that may be bad for their kids.

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121936615766562189.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Parents tempted to treat Junior’s misbehavior with a lashing from a tree limb out back or dad’s leather belt are being urged to think again.

A study released Tuesday by doctors at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill finds that parents who spank their children with an object - such as a belt, switch or paddle - are nine times more likely to abuse their child through more severe means. Also, parents are much more likely to beat, burn or shake their children if they spank frequently, according to the study which is being published by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“Parents get angry when they’re spanking and it’s not working,” said Adam Zolotor, lead author of the study and a pediatrician at the UNC-CH’s Department of Family Health. “If a child gets spanked so often, they just don’t care anymore and will misbehave anyway.”

It’s the latest finding in a growing body of research suggesting parents should use their voice, not their hands or household tools, to keep children in line. This study rests on anonymous admissions of 1,435 mothers of children from North and South Carolina randomly selected to share details of the discipline they and other caregivers use in the privacy of their own home.

Rates of abuse, the researchers found, are alarmingly high, even in a survey dependent on parents owning up to behavior that could cost them the right to raise their children. Twelve percent of mothers who reported spanking a child’s bottom with an object also admitted engaging in behavior researchers classified as physical abuse. Also, 12 percent of those who spanked 50 or more times in the last year admitted abuse such as beating, burning, shaking or hitting the child with an object about their body.

Spanking has been a mainstay in American parents’ discipline regimen for generations. Most national studies show that more than half of parents have spanked or slapped their child in the past year. In the UNC-CH study, Zolotor and his colleagues found that nearly half of those Carolina parents with a child between the ages of 7 and 9 whipped their child’s behind with an object in the past year.

Corporal punishment has been on the minds of North Carolinians this summer. In June, Triangle residents watched Johnston County mother Lynn Paddock admit she lashed out at her brood of adopted children with a plastic plumbing supply line; Paddock borrowed the parenting advice from an evangelical Christian minister who teaches parents how to rear submissive children. A Johnston County jury sent Paddock to prison for the rest of her life for suffocating her youngest son, 4-year-old Sean.

Over the last year, child advocates have appealed, without success, to legislators to outlaw corporal punishment in public schools. Some districts, such as Johnston County, have recently voted to abandon the practice.

“People want to change behavior immediately, and they think spanking is the way to go,” said Tom Vitaglione, a child advocate from Raleigh-based Action for Children who has pushed for the statewide ban on spanking in schools. “Down the line, though, (these children) do far worse. That relationship of trust is broken.”

At least 56 school districts still allow administrators to spank or paddle children. Efforts to ban that practice entirely have met fierce opposition.

John Rustin, vice-president of Family Policy Council, a non-partisan research group in Raleigh that focuses on family issues, opposed the ban and thinks there’s still a place for spanking in North Carolina’s homes and schools.

“Spanking can be administered in a loving manner to help children understand what’s right and wrong,” said Rustin. “But, it’s not just something that ought to be done with little thought.”

Some Christians heed the Bible’s admonition that parents who spare the rod will spoil their children. Several ministers have written books or taught seminars instructing parents how to employ the rod, preaching that a parents’ hand ought to be preserved for loving and nurturing, not discipline. Michael Pearl, the Tennessee pastor Paddock turned to for a discipline advice, suggests in his books that parents whip babies under one with “a footlong willow branch shaved of its knots” and for older children “plastic plumbing pipe, a 3-foot shrub cutting or a belt.”

Beth Taylor, a mother of two boys, said she finally gave up on spanking years ago when her oldest son began acting worse after she turned to a belt to punish him. It was the only tactic she knew, Taylor said. Growing up, her father had whipped her and her sisters with a strap.

“It made him lash out at me,” said Taylor, who lives in McDowell County in Western North Carolina. “It broke my heart. I worried about him hating me.”

Frustrated, she took a parenting class to figure out what was going wrong. There, Taylor said, she learned her spanking provoked her son. Now, to get her oldest son to behave, Taylor disconnects his cell phone. For her youngest, 7, she takes away his video game machine.

“Nothing gets their attention faster,” said Taylor.

Source: Kansas City Star, MO
http://www.kansascity.com/440/story/754399.html

Guidelines for managing attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder have alarmed leading education researchers, who warn they will cause an exponential increase in children being labelled as having ADHD by schools chasing funding.

A group of 14 researchers in education, disabilities and ADHD from seven universities have written to the Rudd Government, criticising moves to instruct teachers to look out for ADHD and to allocate special funding to schools for students with the disorder.

The guidelines are being reviewed by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians at the request of the National Health and Medical Research Council. Draft recommendations were released for public comment.

In a letter to Education Minister Julia Gillard and Health Minister Nicola Roxon, the researchers say the recommendations will encourage over-diagnosis of ADHD and give schools an incentive to have children classified with the disorder to gain access to extra money.

“This risk is particularly acute for children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds.”

A survey of children’s mental health, conducted by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in 1998, found almost 8 per cent of 12- to 17-year-olds were diagnosed with ADHD.

A study of South Australian children taking medication for ADHD in 1999 found rates highest among children from families with low incomes and high unemployment.

The lead signatory on the letter, Linda Graham from the University of Sydney, said yesterday resources would be better spent on giving teachers the skills and support to deal with a variety of children’s behaviours rather than singling out disorders.

Dr Graham said diagnosing a child as having ADHD was sometimes medicalising normal behaviour and should be a last resort, but it had become the first step in dealing with challenging children. “The diagnostic criteria for ADHD over the past 15 years has been expanding and it’s now almost possible to diagnose one of my cats,” she said.

The chairman of the group writing the guidelines, David Forbes, said between 5 and 10 per cent of children had the features of ADHD and might need special intervention to help them learn at school. He disagreed that training teachers to recognise ADHD would increase diagnosis of the disorder.

Source: The Australian, Australia
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24203785-5013871,00.html