When Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears ran amok, the public blamed their mothers. Their fathers - Lohan’s had served time in jail and had addiction problems - escaped rebuke entirely.

Now an Australian study provides some evidence that bad mothering has a worse effect on children than bad fathering.

It shows that mothers who exhibit “toxic” behaviours - from being cold and indifferent to being abusive, manipulative or over-controlling - are far more likely to warp their children’s outlook on life than fathers with similar behaviour.

Wayne Warburton, a research fellow at Macquarie University’s Children and Families Research Centre, said: “Mothers have a really powerful effect on the way their kids view the world and themselves, probably because kids spend more time with their mothers, especially in the crucial early years.”

Dr Warburton asked 441 university students to fill out detailed questionnaires on the parenting styles of their mothers and fathers, and on their own patterns of thinking.

He asked them to recall 72 parenting behaviours, including “making a child feel ashamed”, being unloving or rejecting, and frequently telling the child they were stupid or would fail. He also asked questions designed to uncover destructive thinking patterns in the students, such as being “clingy” out of a fear of being abandoned.

He found young adults were two-thirds as likely to develop unhelpful patterns of thinking if the toxic parenting they had experienced came from their father rather than their mother.

If a range of poor parenting behaviours existed, they tended to be found in the same parent, the study found.

Just over 22 per cent of the mothers and 14 per cent of the fathers were classified as toxic.

Dr Warburton said he was surprised that toxic mothers outnumbered toxic fathers. “When I first saw the figure I thought many of the people came from single-parent families but that wasn’t true. I’m at a loss to explain it.”

He said while mothers had more influence on their children, it was surprising that fathers had two-thirds the effect of mothers, given their lower levels of contact. “Fathers still have a significant effect on the development of their kids’ patterns of thinking.”

Source: Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
http://www.smh.com.au/news/parenting/the-sins-of-the-mothers/2008/09/11/1220857740080.html

So much of what babies do - and how their parents react - is a relic of our hunter-gatherer past, says Desmond Morris in his new book, writes Mary Russell

He has published some 50 books, enjoys a parallel career as a surrealist painter, does one drawing every day without fail, has a theory about the office of the future (it will be a huge televisual voice-activated screen occupying one whole wall of your living room, on which your work colleagues will appear in hologram form), and because he is entranced with the subject matter, is unashamedly enthusiastic about his latest book, called simply Baby. Yes, Desmond Morris is back again with an examination of that most intriguing of animals, the human infant.

It is 41 years since he first hit the headlines with The Naked Ape. “If I wrote that book now,” Morris tells me in his Oxford home, “I’d call it ‘The Talking Ape’, because that’s what sets us apart from other animals: we can make symbolic equations. I might say to you, ‘look at that tree’, and the sound of the word bears no relation to a tree, yet you immediately visualise a tree. I know we’re only divided from apes by two chromosomes, but they’re pretty big chromosomes.”

An instant bestseller (12 million copies sold to date) it allowed him and his wife, Ramona, to buy a house in Malta, where she had their son, Jason.

“We were married for 16 years,” he says, “and people were asking why we didn’t have a child. They thought I should be studying a human child rather than other animals, but we were living in a flat in London and an urban environment with all that concrete is no place to raise a child. Then, when he was born, people said ‘now you can study him’, but I said, ‘no, I’m going to love him’. You can get too scientific.”

Jason, now himself the father of four children, lives with his wife in Co Kildare, where he is director of racing at Horse Racing Ireland.

This latest book, Baby, is gorgeously illustrated, with the text covering every aspect of human growth from conception through to the second year, thus taking in that minefield of childhood: the terrible twos. Not that Morris sees it like that at all: “What happens is that a small baby who is secure and loved can do very little for the first year or so, but then that very security allows him to try things out and sometimes it gets out of hand.”

Thus the terrible twos go through what he benignly describes as the “eccentric phase”. Does he tell us how to deal with such matters? “No. I just give people the facts about the child’s development, and after that it’s up to them,” he says.

He has great sympathy for the young single parent - it’s usually a mother - coping on her own in an urban setting. “That’s a very lonely place to be. It’s part of our birthright to come together in groups and that doesn’t happen any more,” he says.

And then he gets to it - the hunter-gatherer bit - about how in the old days, and we’re really going back here, the male could display his manliness by hunting and killing and so forth, and thus, his masculinity recognised and established, he could return home to display tenderness towards his children without anyone calling him a girl’s blouse. The other thing was that when we lived in small tribes, the mother could take her child with her to work, swaddled on her back or placed in a hanging basket on a tree so that the two were always within sight or hearing of each other. “Now,” Morris says, “that’s gone. You can’t breastfeed in the boardroom - unless you’re Karren Brady .”

His other concern is with what he calls “yes parents” and “no parents”. A controlling one (a no parent) robs the child of the feeling that the world is full of possibilities. These children grow up to be over-cautious and conservative in their outlook, whereas a child with a yes parent is adventurous and non-conformist. I can tell from this that his own mother was a yes mother and he agrees.

“When I was about five or six, I asked if I could have a tame fox for a pet, and I got not one but two.”

And lots of other creatures as well, which was very noble of his mother, he remarks, because we all know it’s the mother who ends up looking after all these pets.

Mothers rate big with Morris and this is partly because the female is pre-programmed to relate to babies. Come, I can’t help interrupting, surely nurture is a big player in the ping-pong game of gender bias. But he is unperturbed.

“I’m not so sure,” he says, far too genial to contradict me outright. “Children will make a choice. They’ll filter things.”

And so I tell him of my son who, when small, was given a doll’s house to play with and the doll family always ended up on the roof of the house awaiting rescue by a fire engine or a helicopter because some action-packed drama was taking place below. He nods. “Yes, the child will make a choice that accords with its gender,” he says.

But I’m still not convinced by his pre-programming theory. How can he say for sure, I ask, feeling like Doubting Thomas. After all, this is a man who has spent his life studying animal behaviour.

“Well, there’s the pupil test,” he explains. “You have a device that measures pupil dilation, which, as we all know, is an indication of how much you like something. When you show a female an image of a baby, her pupils will dilate whether or not she has had a baby. But do the same with a male who is not yet a father and there is no response. No emotional bonding. However, do it with a male who has become a father and the pupils dilate just like a female’s.”

Sitting in Morris’s wonderfully comfortable library, its walls lined with books (all catalogued), masks and whatnot on the wall, rugs on the floor and a soft, low sofa that just begs to be sat upon - it’s a joy to watch the show as he acts out a woman’s pupils dilat- ing to an alarming size, popping his own eyes to emphasise his point. And because, in this dark world of bank crashes and credit crunches, he’s so smilingly positive, you’d almost want to hug him. But of course I don’t, because this is a serious interview, and so instead I ask him which creature might act as the best role model for a would-be parent.

“Birds,” he says promptly. “They have to make a nest and keep the egg warm, and both parents feed the young, and that’s what’s important: pair bonding. It demonstrates that human babies need two parents just as birds do. This is partly due to the fact that humans have serial litters. They need someone else there. In the animal world generally, a cat or a bitch will have a litter but won’t have another one till those babies have grown up and left the nest. The human mother will have a second litter before the first one is even weaned, sometimes.”

It’s not like monkeys, which cling to their mother’s fur and go wherever she goes. Incidentally, in the human baby, there’s what’s called the Moro reflex. Check it out. It occurs in very young babies when they fling their arms out and then bring them together again as if embracing something. They do the same with their legs.

“It’s a relic gesture,” says Morris’s book, “from when a baby felt itself falling from its mother’s body.”

Although Morris doesn’t tell parents how to behave, he does hint: “The relic gesture alerts the mother to the fact that her baby is suddenly feeling unsafe and physically insecure.”

So do something about it, is the gentle hint.

The baby book, says Morris, was a gift, as it allowed him to do what he’d trained as a zoologist to do: observe. “I’m not an experimenter. I just watch. You can’t ask babies questions or give them a questionnaire to fill in. You just watch them.”

There are gender differences that he outlines but doesn’t emphasise. Boy babies cry less because in the hunter-gatherer period they couldn’t make much noise or their prey would run away. Men are focused on one goal while women multi-task, though that doesn’t mean one can’t do the other.

” Ramona,” he says, “can multi-task, but so can I. It just means I have to try a little harder.”

The book is full of observations that we once knew but have forgotten. Small children’s feet are best left unshod, so only put shoes on them when they go outside. Tests have shown that toddlers rarely stray more than 60 metres from their mothers, so you don’t have to yank them back, they’ll come of their own accord. Unless they’re going through their eccentric phase, of course. At which point, you may find you’re giving yourself a hug. This, as Morris notes in his book, People Watching, is a comforting device employed by adults in moments of stress. Well, it’s better than reaching for a bottle of mother’s ruin.

• Baby: The Amazing Story of the First Two Years of Life, by Desmond Morris, is published by Hamlyn

Source: Irish Times, Ireland
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2008/0912/1221138432919.html

Adults with low literacy skills are less likely to get married or buy their own house, research suggests.

A National Literacy Trust report looking at the effects of literacy on the nation’s happiness found stark differences between those with good literacy skills and those without.

The report, which looked in particular at men’s happiness, found that only half of men with poor reading skills were satisfied with their life so far, compared with 78% of men with good reading levels.

By the age of 34, just over half (52%) of men with a low reading age were married or cohabiting, compared with 68% of those with good literacy. For women, this figure was 60%, compared with 70% of their peers.

While almost eight out of 10 people (78%) with good literacy skills were likely to own their own home, the same could be said of only four in 10 (42%) of those with poor skills.

Poor male readers were also more likely to live alone, with 43% leading solitary lives compared with 30% of good male readers.

The report, published by the National Year of Reading, was based on analysis of figures from the last 10 years. It defined poor reading skills as the equivalent of a reading age of seven, while good reading skills are the equivalent to the reading age of an 11-year-old, or at least a grade C at GCSE.

The report noted that those with poor reading skills were also likely to drink and smoke more.

More than a third of those with a low reading level (36%) drink more than 40 units of alcohol per week, compared with only 17% of their peers.

Poor women readers are more than twice as likely to smoke every day than those who are good readers (42% compared with 19%).

Source: The Press Association
http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5j9_LokzFcI77Md-8yXpAWRen8PQQ

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

Caesarean childbirth may weaken the attachment of a mother to her baby, a study has shown.

Scientists found women were more emotionally responsive to the cries of their babies if they chose to give birth naturally.
Those who had Caesarean deliveries were significantly less sensitive to the sound of their own babies crying. Parts of their brains believed to regulate emotions, motivation and habitual behaviour were not as strongly activated as they were in natural birth mothers.

Researchers believe the difference may be explained by a “bonding” hormone released in the brain during labour. Oxytocin, known as the “love hormone” or “cuddle chemical”, creates feelings of attachment in both humans and animals. It is also produced in women during breast feeding, and also sex.

Between 10% and 20% of all births in the UK are now delivered by Caesarean section. Controversially, the procedure is linked with post-natal depression.

Caesarean deliveries may be advised for health reasons, but increasingly they are being seen as a “lifestyle choice”. The “too posh to push” tag has been applied in the media to women who pay for private Caesareans. Women who delay motherhood are more likely to have the operation because child birth risks increase with age.

The new research by British and US scientists involved 12 American mothers having their first baby. Six had natural vaginal deliveries and six Caesarean sections. Two to four weeks after the births, the women underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brains while listening to the recorded cries of their babies.

The scans revealed a range of brain regions that were more highly activated in natural birth women while hearing the sound of their babies crying. These were parts of the brain that dealt with emotions, empathy, motivation, reward-seeking and habit.
The findings were published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Research leader Dr James Swain, from the Child Study Centre at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, said: “Our results support the theory that variations in delivery conditions such as with Caesarean section, which alters the neuro-hormonal experiences of childbirth, might decrease the responsiveness of the human maternal brain in the early postpartum.”

Source: The Press Association
http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5iew4M7SadUR3mNgT69KHn2WSyA_A

Schools across the country will be opening their doors to students beginning next week. For thousands of children across Canada, this will be their first step inside our nation’s educational system and this is the week to prepare your child as well as the family.

To help ease the transition into the classroom, The Learning Partnership (TLP), a national not-for-profit organization dedicated to championing a strong public education system in Canada, is providing strategies and resource ideas that will enable parents to help prepare their children for the start of kindergarten by introducing early literacy and numeric learning skills through play.

“Our children deserve every opportunity to succeed,” says Veronica Lacey, president and CEO of The Learning Partnership. “Starting school is a huge milestone for both the child and parents. More than ever before, it’s important that we reach out to parents and teachers — and help provide them with the necessary tools to make sure that children are given the opportunities to succeed at school.”

Recent research used by The Learning Partnership has shown that when parents are given the proper early learning resources for use at home, pre-school children are better prepared for school and learning. Furthermore, parents who establish a foundation in early learning for their children at home are better prepared to support school success.

Keeping this in mind and recognizing that preparing children for school can be a challenge, The Learning Partnership’s CEO Lacey recommends that parents and children use early learning materials and engage in play-based activities which will help their children with the transition to school.

Top tips for early learning and a successful transition into kindergarten include:

- Take every opportunity that comes along to talk to your child — ask questions and answer questions. This will not only develop the child’s language skills but also nurture curiosity.

- Read to your child and talk about books to help develop your child’s listening skills and an interest in stories and print.

- Talk to your child about letters and numbers and do fun activities with them to help your child develop number and letter awareness. For example, when at the grocery store make a game of looking for items with a letter that is the same as your child’s initials.

- If English is your second language (ESL), speak to your child in the language that is most comfortable for you. ESL parents should continue reading and talking in their first language to their children.

- Initiate activities with resources such as crayons, safety scissors, construction paper, glue and playdough to help your child develop the finger control and the co-ordination they need for writing as well as encourage their creative expression.

- Chant rhymes and sing songs to help your child play with language as well as hear and recognize sounds and learn new words.

- Encourage independence: help your child learn to get dressed; express feelings, thoughts and needs clearly to others (such as going to the washroom or getting a beverage).

- Help your child make choices, for example: which clothes to wear, what activities to do.

Calgary Herald, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/6xp3p3

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

My toddler son gets plenty of attention, so why does he hit, pinch and have dreadful tantrums?

I never thought I’d have to ask for help with child-rearing. I have two children: a girl, 41/2, and a boy, 2. My daughter is lovely and perfectly normal; she can be naughty, but is manageable. It is my son who is out of control.

My husband and I want to find out what has gone wrong - this problem has come as a shock. Having a full-time nanny means neither she nor I needs to deal with him full time. The children are not dragged out shopping with me or have to wait for me to finish chores. They are always in their comfort environments and attended all the time. Is this the problem?
Diane

Your letter points to several issues that I think are at the root of our overblown parenting culture. You clearly place the needs of your children at the forefront of everything you do, and by doing so you feel that your children will be settled and comfortable and so without any behavioural problems. Your son’s behaviour seems to have shocked you excessively and your way of describing it as “out of control” is an interesting clue as to what might be going on.

First, I feel a need to advocate for your son. While I agree (and know from experience with my own son when he was little) that such repetitive, aggressive behaviour is undesirable and at times embarrassing, it is not abnormal. Your son is behaving like a toddler, particularly a male toddler, and is acting out at a key point in his development. His behaviour is therefore not out of control, it is out of your control - and this is a big difference. At 2 your son is starting a process of individuation, ie, recognising himself as a separate being, with needs and wants and a will of his own. For some toddlers this is marked by an extreme form of challenge to their closest relationships - it is an emotional transition from dependent baby to assertive and independent toddler. In the main, little girls, especially first-borns (who are cognitively and socially more advanced), cotton on quickly that they do best in relationships by being sweet and compliant (though later-born girls can be more assertive). For all toddlers, however, the fact that their frontal cortex is not fully wired up and running efficiently means that they lack the skills of impulse control and self-management. So if I’m 2 and you are playing in my sandpit area, I’ll pick up sand and throw it in your face. While this is not desirable, it is within the “normal” range of toddler behaviour.

Reduced frontal cortex functioning also means that little ones lack the capacity to understand and process verbal explanations and cannot use that information to evaluate how they are behaving. So while you were warning him about his tantrums, he wasn’t taking this in enough to think “crikey, Mum’s not pleased, better pull my socks up”. Actually, the reverse was occurring. Every time he behaved aggressively you rushed over and he got your attention. Parents who spend a lot of time discussing their child’s behaviour with them are actively reinforcing it and making it more likely to happen. With children under 3, actions speak louder than words, and these actions should match what has occurred. If children are aggressive, they get no warning, just an immediate consequence - which, in your recent case, would have been swiftly putting him into the buggy, strapping him in, issuing a firm “No throwing sand; no hitting”, then turning him so he faced away from the playground and leaving him to wail. After three minutes you should have turned him round, repeated your stern words and told him simply and clearly that if hitting recurred, he would be back in the buggy. Ensure that he gets your big attention only for playing nicely, so he learns to differentiate between behaviour that gets positive attention and that which doesn’t.

If you use this time-out procedure at home, put him in his room for the same amount of time - again, swiftly, sternly and with little attention. His crying will be heart-rending but it is frustration and rage. You must appear clearly in control - if you cry, he will feel anxious and his behaviour will escalate.

I’d like to touch on another issue in your letter: the amount of overall attention your children get. I am intrigued that you have a full-time nanny, given that you are a full-time mother. I apologise if this sounds judgmental, but in describing yourself and the nanny as a team you have set up a situation in which the children’s lives are run for their total comfort. Most siblings must learn to tolerate the frustration of not having the full-time attention of an adult. Many kids must amuse themselves while dinner is being cooked or parents are dealing with household chores. They don’t have a “team” managing them, and so must fit into the running of the family by becoming team players themselves.

I know that families, especially more affluent ones, will do all they can to ensure that their children want for nothing. This, I think, is a big mistake and leads to unsatisfied, demanding children who expect always to be the centre of everything and will, when frustrated, lash out. This extends to the culture of “helicopter parenting”, whereby many children have lives that run from one activity, social event or academic setting to another. These children are never bored, nor have time on their hands to develop an identity separate to the one that their parents desire which, for many, revolve around getting into the “right” schools and being the “best”.

This may sound rather arrogant coming from me, a woman who has been very visible in this culture of parenting as well as being a mother of two. As a clinician, I believe that it is important to enable families to understand their child’s behaviour and in extreme cases get help via services, books, articles or even TV programmes (as long as they are run by those with relevant child-development training). But as this parenting culture has grown, it has blurred the boundary about which child behaviours need professional help and which need a strong and firm parental approach. Indeed, many of the parents I meet in my clinics are overwhelmed by what they “should do” and so feel anxious and powerless in the face of their children’s ultimately normal behaviour.

As a parent, I know that I can over-organise, too. I had a sobering moment the other day when, as I was putting together a schedule for my kids, my 13-year-old daughter suggested that I “chill out” and let her and her brother have a day at home “hanging out”. Nothing makes parents feel more stupid than when their child utters words of wisdom that cut through their neuroses.

Source: Times Online, UK
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4653770.ece

QUESTION: What does research actually say about the impact of men in children’s lives?

ANSWER: Fathers often do not have the same parenting styles as mothers. There is a difference in the way men get their kids ready for the outside world. For instance, fathers tend to give their children more freedom in the park, letting kids befriend a new dog or climb the jungle gym alone. Mothers tend to ask the children to stay close. Dr. Kyle Pruett, a child psychiatrist, researcher and author of The Nurturing Father: Journey Toward the Complete Man, found that a dad’s style of letting kids figure things out for themselves can teach them not to get so upset when they make mistakes and to try again.

Fathers may be the greatest untapped resource in the lives of their children. That goes for grandfathers and uncles as well. When men are involved, children have a tendency to have better problem-solving skills. They also tend to do better both socially and in school.

So, men, think about how you spend time with the kids in your life. Get involved, get more involved, or stay involved. Carve out a special time in your day to be with your kids. Decide how you’re going to spend that time together: shooting baskets, playing a duet, building a model, or sitting quietly and talking about how the day went for both of you. If you’re too tired to get down on the floor to play with your younger kids, cuddle on the couch together for a story. Make a connection with your children’s school. Drop them off or pick them up when you can. Get to know the teachers, go to school conferences, participate in school activities, chaperone a school event or field trip. Introduce your kids to your daily routine. Make a trip to your workplace together. Make sure your kids, or grandkids, know that you have a current picture of them at your job or in your wallet.

Sadly, the average amount of time a father spends with his child per day, other than giving directions or reprimands, is less than 10 minutes. For the sake of your child, and ultimately the community, be determined to find the time to talk and laugh and eat with your child every day. (…)

Source: Albert Lea Tribune, MN
http://www.albertleatribune.com/news/2008/aug/31/dads-talk-laugh-eat-your-child-each-day/