10 year old, Aaryan casually asked his mother, “What’s the big deal about vibrating condoms? Aren’t condoms the good guys who keep HIV out of the picture?” His parents were caught off guard. They had no answer to their son’s question. They were used to answering their 10 year old’s questions on the solar system and global warming, but talking about condoms with their 10 year old was something that they were not prepared. They knew that they had to ‘have the talk’ but the details of when and who were comfortably shelved back. Seema, his mother shockingly said, “10 is not an age to talk about sex!” Well, as parents, we always feel its not the right time. But our children are growing up faster than we realize. And they are more aware of their surroundings than we give them credit for.

We agree that talking about sex and puberty with your kids is difficult. Like Lena, a mother of two teenager children says, “I’ vent spoken to my children about sex. I assumed that with the constant bombardment by our media, they will pick up all that they need to.” A wrong approach, according to Dr. Sheetal Pradhan, a child psychologist, who says, “ Media tends to portray emotions in extreme – no doubt the young mind picks up all that’s there, but the child does not know the difference between the good and the bad. He watches the drama unfold between the hero and the heroine…he watches them run around trees and kiss under the stars. He sees everyone around him smiling…and assumes that it’s the right thing to do!” And when Lena was called by the school counselor because her daughter was caught ‘kissing’ in the empty class room, hell hath no fury! But it was too late. Maya, her teenage daughter was experimenting with all that she had seen. Her parents hadn’t spoken to her and she just assumed that it was ok!

Shocking! But more and more parents are faced with daunting challenge of fast forwarding the clock and having ‘the talk’ at an early age. Talking early helps to establish a relationship with your kids that will continue as they get older. So that by the time they reach the rebellious teens, they’ll not only know the facts, but they’ll feel they can be open with you about their feelings and what’s going on in their lives.

Why is talking about sex important?

Children will learn about sex whether or not you want them to. “The sources are many, but it may not always be the right information. A gallimaufry of information would leave your child confused and usually is a trigger to experimenting”, says Dr. Sheetal. She adds, “As a parent, you play a very important role in making sure that the information is right. While our children need to know the biological facts about sex, they also need to understand that sexual relationships involve caring, concern and responsibility. Very often the child sees a movie wherein two people meet and later end up in bed together. But you need to educate them that in real life there is time to get to know each other — time to hold hands, go bowling, see a movie, or just talk. Children need to know that this is an important part of a caring relationship.”

When should I start?

A dilemma faced by all parents…but child psychologists across believe earlier the better. When they are young, the first question that would crop up is “where do babies come from?” And before you know it, puberty would hit in and your child needs the right information before they start experiencing bodily changes.

I’m uncomfortable talking about sex with my child

“Thinking back, my parents never educated me about sex. My mother had an open woman to woman conversation only after I got married.” When I asked her, she said, she was uncomfortable. And I don’t blame her. It is difficult talking to your child about sex. How do you get down to the basics? But, avoiding it is not the solution. No one said parenting was going to be easy. The discussion is what is important and being honest about your awkward feelings shows your child how to face difficult situations. Its okay to say something like, “You know, I’m uncomfortable talking about sex because my parents never talked with me about it. But I want us to be able to talk about anything—including sex—so please come to me if you have any questions. And if I don’t know the answer, I’ll find out.”

Bringing it up

1. Use everyday situations to start conversations. TV programmes are often a good opportunity to talk about relationships, or talk when you’re doing something like the washing up. This makes your child feel that sex is a normal part of family life and not a special subject.

2. Children notice the tone of what you say as much as what you say. So don’t get cross or put them down.

3. If you don’t know the answer, say so but find out later.

4. Try to be truthful as stories about storks delivering babies just confuse children.

What if my child does not want to talk to me?

13 year Mia would roll her eyes every time her mother would broach the topic of sex! She would rather read about it from Mills and Boons and the net, because she says, “the information is so cool and talking to ma is boring”. Teenagers often find it much harder to talk to their parents about sex, so it’s important talk to children when they’re much younger, rather than leaving it until they feel really awkward. You may have to accept that your teenager doesn’t want to talk to you. Children need privacy and the chance to make their own decisions, but to have your support when they need it. You can help by making sure that they know where else to get advice if they don’t want to discuss these issues with you.

Source: MSN India, India
http://lifestyle.in.msn.com/relationships/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1695993

With many grandparents baby-sitting their grandchildren during the day, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health wondered whether those children might be at a higher risk of injury in the care of older people whose parenting lessons were learned in an era where car seats weren’t the law and child-proofing wasn’t a multimillion-dollar industry.

The findings, published yesterday in the journal Pediatrics, surprised its authors. In some cases, working parents who chose to have grandparents care for their children cut the risk of childhood injury in half. Even when compared with organized day care or care by the mother or other relatives, having a grandmother watch the child was associated with decreased injury for the child.

“There are some grandparents you would not leave alone with grandchildren,” he said. But “you’re not going to hurt them if you do the right selection.”

Among other findings: The odds of injury were greater among children of parents who never married compared with those whose parents stayed married. The odds of injury were greater for children living in homes without their father.

Bishai and colleagues analyzed data collected about more than 5,500 newborns in 15 U.S. cities in 1996-1997, with a follow-up 30 to 33 months later. Bishai said he does not know whether the information would be different had it been collected more recently.

Delores Miller, 63, said she gladly volunteered to provide child care for her granddaughter Imani when Miller’s daughter returned to work at a Baltimore credit union. She bought Imani a toy mop, broom and vacuum so when it was time for housekeeping they did it side by side. And during trips to the grocery store, she made sure Imani always stayed close.

“Children can get more one-on-one attention, rather than in a group of people,” said Miller, who cared for Imani for six years until she started first grade this fall. “Imani was more familiar with me than anyone else. I know more about her behavior and well-being than any stranger would.”

Source: Baltimore Sun, United States
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-te.grandparents04nov04,0,6701080.story

‘Sex education’ is a much misinterpreted phrase. The idea is not to make children more proficient at sex, the way maths education should make them better at doing sums.

That is why, when Schools Minister Jim Knight launched a review of the subject last week, he referred carefully to ‘relationship education’. The government intends some kind of tuition in ‘personal and social health’ to become compulsory in English schools, taught from the age of five. It is already a mandatory part of the curriculum in Wales and Northern Ireland.

What the precise content of those lessons will be and what right parents will have to exclude their children from them are still open to discussion. But whatever language the government prefers to use, that discussion will really be about sex.

Children already learn the facts of procreation. What worries the government is that, outside the classroom, sex is increasingly seen as a normal form of recreation. Britain has the highest level of teenage pregnancy in Europe. It also suffers from high levels of sexually transmitted infection. According to the Health Protection Agency, people aged 16-24 accounted for half of all diagnosed cases of genital warts and gonorrhoea last year and nearly two-thirds of chlamydia cases.

A poll in today’s Observer reveals one in three has had sex before the age of consent.

According to moral conservatives, this is all symptomatic of a culture of sexual licence that rejects self-restraint and abstinence. By extension, they argue, teaching children about contraception in school legitimises promiscuity and undermines parents who want to impart more traditional values to their children.

There are three problems with that argument. First, the actual content of sex education classes is not licentious. They aim to empower children to resist social pressure to have sex and to understand the risks involved. Second, advocating abstinence is fine, but teenagers still have to understand what it is they are abstaining from. Upholding ‘traditional values’ often means treating sex as taboo altogether. Third, even if it is desirable for parents to teach a responsible approach to sex, many are clearly failing to do so.

It is true that British attitudes to sex are generally permissive, as The Observer poll also shows. There is nothing wrong with that. It is certainly better than a culture of sexual repression. The important thing is not to deny that sex happens, but to teach about all the consequences. It is ignorance, not education, that puts young people at risk.

Source: Guardian Unlimited, UK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/26/sex-education-relationships

‘IT MAKES CHILDREN ANGRY’ | Expert urges end to corporal punishment

During a recent speech in Chicago, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a Harvard psychiatrist, related how, when he was a child and misbehaved, his father would “smack me in the back of the head.”

“It was like shock treatment,” said Poussaint. “He had a theory that if you misbehaved, something must be wrong with your brain and you needed a correction.”

The story elicited chuckles from the largely African-American audience, but Poussaint’s point was no joke to him.

One way to help reduce violence in poor, black urban neighborhoods is to reduce it in the home, he says.

In his most recent book, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, co-authored with entertainer Bill Cosby, Poussaint cites one study that showed that 94 percent of black mothers agreed that “a good hard spanking” was a useful “disciplinary technique” compared with 65 percent of white women and 46 percent of Asian-American women.

Not all black parents who use corporal punishment create violent children, he noted. Poussaint grew up in Harlem, received his M.D. from Cornell and served as a script consultant to NBC’s “The Cosby Show.”

But, Poussaint said, “Violence begets violence — it makes children angry.”

“I think a lot of homicides relate to rage and anger and getting back at someone, even if it’s a nameless face,” he said.

Psychotherapist George Smith, whose Management Planning Institute works with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, said he sees the effects of spankings in preschool classes his group conducts: “Kids emulate their caregivers. They become physical.”

Psychiatrist Carl Bell, president of the Community Mental Health Council, said less educated people of all races tend to spank at higher rates.

“Poor black people — poor people in general — have no idea how life works. People who don’t know how life works think it’s best to bully people to get what they want,” said Bell.

Blacks are more religious, said Bell, and cite Proverbs: “He who withholds his rod hates his son, But he who loves him disciplines him diligently.”

No single child-rearing factor leads to violent behavior, Bell says. “I wish [ending spanking] was the magic bullet,” he said.

But for Poussaint, it’s a start.

“If we think of violence as learned behavior, if you are using it on your child, what are they learning?” said Poussaint. “The black community [has] to put this on the table.”

Source: Chicago Sun-Times, United States
http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/1219230,CST-NWS-spank14.article

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

They used to be a essential part of boys’ play. But fears about gun crime have put an end to toy replicas. Should James Bond fan Phil Hilton abandon his quest for a life-like 007 shooter?

When I’m in toy shops with my family, I quietly run my eye around the shelves to see if they have one. They never do, but I keep looking. I don’t say anything to the children and I certainly don’t ask at the counter. I’m worried the staff will be shocked by my question or think less of me and assume I have a dangerous dog tethered outside. I’m scanning the shelves for a toy gun. Not any toy gun: a James Bond toy gun.

This autumn, the 007 film Quantum of Solace is released and the first licensed Bond toys have been unveiled. I’m excited because my whole family has developed a shared interest in the Bond series, most of all my son, who’s seven. I too was a Bond fan when I was seven, back in 1971; I too watched the films with my father, and the real centre of my secret agent fantasy world was my gun.

I remember with utter clarity my Lone Star 007 cap gun. It stood apart from other toy firearms in that it came with a silencer. I was able, in character, to attach the silencer to the barrel and make a deadened thudding noise with my mouth as I “fired”. The silencer fascinated me because it represented cool-headed professionalism. Anyone could shoot someone but it took real presence of mind to attach an extra part to your gun and then shoot someone.

Pinned down in my bedroom, probably wearing something itchy and nylon, I didn’t panic. I calmly and methodically screwed my silencer on to my gun and did what I needed to do for my country. I also had a shoulder holster and, memory tells me, a lighter that fired plastic pellets. All of which amplified these qualities of manly savoir faire and mastery of one’s tools. The interest in the gun was not about killing or violence, it was a glimpse of life as an adult. James Bond represented the kind of man I wanted to be - not a trained assassin, but someone resourceful with cool stuff he’d use to overcome obstacles.

I have grown up to be one of the least James Bond men in the universe. I wear luminous cycle clips on my bike, foreign travel makes me nervous (what if I suffer a tummy bug?) and if ever called upon to defend the world against a criminal genius I would opt to do so in a clerical capacity.

It is precisely because I am a namby, non-violent modern type of man that I enjoy the escape into microfilm, facially disfigured baddies and unsafe driving that Bond offers. I genuinely don’t know whether I should’ve introduced our most famous secret agent to my family, but he has brought me pleasure over the years and one rainy afternoon I came home with the complete Sean Connery box set.

You introduce your children to all kinds of cultural influences that have meant something to you and it’s impossible to predict which will take hold and which will be met with indifference. Bond was an instant hit. The cool-period jazz of Miles Davis is yet to catch on.

With the four of us watching Bond as a family, my partner and I hoped to place the violence and the (far more shocking) gender politics in context. Now we’ve been to an Ian Fleming exhibition and we own all the films and a couple of posters. The children dress up in crazed approximations of formal evening wear and occasionally allow me into their games. My son hogs the Bond role and my daughter plays female spies who start bad but later change their minds. I’m left playing a series of megalomaniacs (and, yes, I do the central-European accents if you must know). Obviously, as I have plans to take over the entire lounge and garden, Bond has to outwit and finally kill me. He could attempt rehabilitation and find me useful work in the community, but on the whole he’d rather shoot me - over and over again until dinner time. The weapon of choice is mostly pointed fingers. These are sometimes accompanied by an incongruous pirate cutlass from the dressing-up box.

So I can picture the pure joy the addition of a proper weapon would bring to our household but I also realise that while I’m taking cover behind the sofa, real gun-crime is creeping on to our streets. We know now that another horribly out-of-context family photograph of a young person on the news means there has been yet more death in violent circumstances. Last week saw the police uncovering a real gun factory converting replicas into deadly machine guns. Chillingly, the replicas were bought from a legitimate source with the cover story that they were to be used in a James Bond film. The arrival of this terrifying, desperately depressing gun culture understandably means that not everyone finds the idea of a seven-year-old with a toy pistol entirely comfortable.

Somewhat conflicted (and typecast as a criminal genius), I remain reluctant to give up on buying a Bond gun, but my search of London’s toy shops is turning into a hopeless quest. Not only are there no branded Bond-esque guns, there are virtually no toy guns anywhere at all. Have they been banned and no one told me? Am I a dysfunctional dad for even wanting one? Should I make one from Lego? I decide to take my search more seriously.

I sit and methodically work my way through a list of toy shops, call and ask them whether they sell guns. They all tell me they don’t and when I ask why most respond as though the answer is self evident: “All the usual reasons - it’s inappropriate in the present climate and they have such negative connotations.”

I find a memorabilia site called James Bond Toys. Here, collectors pay huge sums for what were once the contents of the cupboard in my boyhood bedroom. If I didn’t have to earn a living, I would devote most of my time to looking at pictures on this site and communing with secret agent suitcase sets with binoculars, plastic daggers, rare, branded roulette games and, of course, guns - with silencers. I call Nick Bennett, who runs the collection, thinking vaguely that I might splash out £30 or £40 and treat my son to the exact model I once owned myself. He tells me that the gun I was probably playing with in the early 70s would cost me around £200 and anyway he doesn’t sell them to children.

His argument is passionate and coherent: “I don’t want kids running round with toy guns these days; there is too much violence in other media. Children nowadays can access any amount of violence at any time through DVDs and video games. I see children playing 18 certificate computer games all the time. I think if children could re-enact those games with guns they wouldn’t have the education to understand that this was wrong. When we used to play with guns as a child there was an innocence to it. We didn’t see the effect a gun could have. Now you can.”

I track down the company that has first dibs on licensed Bond toys in the UK, Popco Entertainment. This is appro-priately called the Master Toy License. (I hope someone shouts, “We have the master toy license!” in a middle-European accent.)

Barry Eldridge, Popco’s marketing manager, confirms that they have no plans for a Quantum of Solace gun. He says there is no market for them and secondly they wouldn’t be allowed to make them accurately enough. The Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006 has outlawed anything that could be mistaken for the real thing, to the extent that a range of bright, non-gun-like colours have been prescribed for toys. This legislation is entirely reasonable and nothing to do with the government attempting to influence play - it is designed to stop crimes being carried out, or potentially fatal confusion arising, if the police were called to deal with someone holding a realistic toy gun.

Eldridge outlines the effect of this law on the toy industry: “If you go into any toy shop you will find that 99% of toy weapons are fantasy weapons - cowboy guns, space guns, that kind of thing. Something that’s meant to be a machine gun is covered in white splodges. Bond is about realism, and you couldn’t have a bright pink Walther PPK - that would be wrong.” Popco will be making a Quantum of Solace range called 007 Mission Arsenal. This arsenal will be a modern one in that it will not contain a gun but will consist of secret phones, surveillance cameras and invisible pen sets. The young Bonds will presumably communicate their enemies to death.

So life has moved on to the point where my old 007 gun has become a dangerous irrelevance and yet I can still picture the pleasure it would bring to our games. Penny Holland is a child development expert and author of We Don’t Play with Guns Here. She used to be against all toy guns but now believes that such games could play an important role in growing up. “There are all sorts of issues that children are playing with when they use weapons in hero-related games,” she says. “These have very little to do with violence and more to do with safety. When you are a very young child, you have to deal with leaving secure situations such as nursery and school and preparing to leave your family and become independent in the world.” She says acting out the role of someone invulnerable can be a way of preparing for independence. Holland sees the way guns have been pushed out of nurseries and schools as an unthinking adult response that doesn’t reflect the way children use fantasy to make sense of real life.

I describe for her my games with my son and she asks about the way I explain real violence to him, because this is the context for our James Bond role-play. As long as I explain the damage actual aggression can do, she doesn’t feel that our imaginary battles are harmful.

Holland believes that violent adults are formed more by the actual violence in their everyday lives and not by what she terms “hero-play”. She points out the narrative that drives Bond is an ancient one and reflects the need for invulnerable figures shared by both adults and children.

Holland seems to have an impressive grasp of the real ways in which children play. She reminds me that if my son actually hits me during a role-play, I obviously stop the game and tell him that it’s ceased to be fun. It’s as if she’s been watching us. There I am stroking my white cat substitute (a light grey teddy bear), I’m being all cold and ruthless in a Larry Olivier foreigner accent when the young 007 tires of our verbal sparring and rams his fist deep into my scrotum. I’m no longer distant and evil, I’m shouty and cross and saying stuff like: “That really hurt. Who taught you that? Stop laughing … ”

Like any modern parent, I feel that everyone else spends more time with their children than I do; that other dads are achieving more golden dad moments than I manage and that I shouldn’t listen to so much Radio 4 when the children are around. It is really this urge to create memorable (ideally photogenic) child and father situations that had me searching for a Bond gun. I’m not a policymaker or politician, but I have reached a conclusion on this complex issue. What it is needed is a certificate or photo card identifying me as Ever So Nice and therefore allowed to buy toy guns as long as I don’t take them out of the house - about three of these certificates could be given out to tremendously nice families every year. I sense the detail of my legislation still needs work …

Source: guardian.co.uk, UK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/sep/06/family.seanconnery

Facebook makes Mom and Dad kids’ mentors, spies and friends

Julia McGovern was shocked when her mom sent her a “friend” request on Facebook. She had been on the social-networking site for four years and had no idea her mother even knew what it was.

“It was my world,” says Julia, 18, of Hopkinton, Mass. “She was still just e-mailing.”

Not anymore. Parents are flocking to social-networking sites – sometimes to monitor their kids, and sometimes for the same reason teenagers signed up: to communicate and to share.

For some teens, this can feel like an intrusion on their virtual space. For others, it’s just a new way to stay in touch with mom and dad. It depends, experts say, on how well parents and kids communicate, online and off.

In general, teenagers are closer to their parents today than in previous generations, says Nancy Robinson, consumer strategist for Iconoculture, a cultural trends research firm in Minneapolis. Kids today often prefer hanging out with their parents to being holed up in their room, she says.

That can easily extend to social-networking sites, which – after texting – are the No. 2 way that teens communicate technologically, according to Don Tapscott, author of Growing Up Digital (1997) and the upcoming Grown Up Digital (both from McGraw-Hill Professional).

Dylan Akers, 17, of Cambridge, Mass., invited his mom, Carolyn Bailey, to join Facebook and helped set up her page. Bailey, 46, a health and fitness counselor, says she has had more conversations on Facebook with her son’s friends than with him.

“I think everybody views my mom as a cool mom,” Dylan says. “I’m pretty open with her about my life. I don’t have to be too careful. Whatever I put on there, I wouldn’t mind her knowing.”

Many parents believe they need to monitor their kids online. Some limit their teenagers’ online exposure to strangers by using the sites’ stricter privacy settings.

Rod Carveth, 53, of New Britain, Conn., made his teenage daughter include him as a friend when she signed up for MySpace and Facebook. He wanted to make sure she wasn’t posting anything inappropriate or revealing too much personal information.

He has had to ask her to remove messages that contained vulgar language.

“It started mostly as a check,” says Carveth, an instructor at the University of Hartford, whose daughter is now 16. “Since then, it has evolved to where I will leave messages, ‘Have a nice day. Don’t forget to do this.’ That kind of thing. And she’s responded to me as well.”

Some experts warn that parents who “friend” their kids without being invited to can send the teens a message that they don’t trust them. Michael Solomon, a professor of marketing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, says teens who post suggestive photos or inappropriate messages will block their parents from accessing the information anyway.

“It can backfire,” Solomon says. “It can embarrass the kids and their friends and create resentment.”

Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007), believes parents should keep a discreet distance on social-networking sites.

“I do think it can bring them closer together” by helping parents learn more about their children’s interests and friends, she says. “Where it gets tricky is, what’s happening on social-networking sites is really conversations between teens and their friends. You’re not just listening in on your own teen. Suddenly, you are hearing what all their friends are doing as well.”

Goodstein sees these sites as the new mall, a place where teenagers can hang out without authority figures.

Adults also should remember that teenagers are watching them back.

Liz Funk, 19, a senior at Pace University in New York City, says it was strange to see one of her high school teachers send a drink to another on Facebook.

Funk, who blogs about tween and teen girls, adds, “I really can’t recommend that parents get accounts for the sole purpose of monitoring their children. I think what’s more important is parents need to engage their kids in dialogue about what is and what isn’t appropriate to be posted online.”

Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing for MySpace, says most parents are pursuing their own interests on the site, not just watching the kids.

“Other than the front door you come through at MySpace.com, you might never see the same content or have the same experience,” he says. “You might be on MySpace just to discover great music, share it with your friends. Your mom might be on MySpace to share photos and to blog, and never the two shall meet.”

At Facebook, which was originally created for college students, the number of users ages 35 to 54 more than tripled in the 12 months ending in July, according to the site’s survey of 3,100 users. The 13-34 age group doubled, and the number of users ages 65 and older grew by 150 percent.

Kel Kelly, 45, Julia McGovern’s mom, says she didn’t join Facebook to spy on her daughter or be part of her crowd. She doesn’t friend her daughter’s friends, and if one of them friends her, she makes sure to tell their parents.

Sometimes she sees photos or messages she doesn’t like, but she doesn’t intervene unless it’s something dangerous.

Julia says her mom never crosses the line.

“It’s become an easy way to interact with her, to keep her in my life,” says Julia, who is heading to Syracuse University in the fall and plans to use the site to keep in touch with mom. “It will be a lot easier than making phone calls.”

Source: Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, IN
http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080812/FEAT/808120371

Just one in 50 teachers of the youngest schoolchildren in England is male, figures revealed.

Only 2% of staff in nursery and reception classes - teaching under-fives - are men, Department for Children, Schools and Families figures show.

Critics say men are deterred from working with young children because of the idea that it is women’s work, the low wages and fears they may be branded paedophiles, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Anastasia de Waal, head of family and education at the think-tank Civitas, told the newspaper: “It is very important for children, particularly young ones, to see men as teachers.

“Seeing men as role models is very important.

“The idea that men are afraid of being seen as paedophiles is very serious. Obviously we want to protect children but we don’t want to get to the stage where we are harming them because they dont see any men in schools.”

A Department for Children, Schools and Families spokesman said: “Male childcare workers act as positive role models for children, which is why we launched a campaign to attract more men to the sector last year.

“The campaign challenges the stereotypical view that childcare is a woman’s role.

“Also, several of our recent early learning partnerships projects focused specifically on engaging fathers in their children’s early learning and our Children’s Plan called on all public services to take account of the needs of both parents.”

Source: The Press Association
http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jtHGZzALO6_KynChwlehtUDnc3fg

Too many parents have the wrong approach when raising their children.

That’s according to sociologist and youth minister Jim Hancock, who says parents should not raise children. They should raise adults.

“Our task has often been defined as raising children and ultimately that’s what we’ve ended up with - adult-aged children who don’t feel very well prepared for life in the real world,” Hancock said. ” I think if we were to shift our emphasis to raising adults, everybody is happier.”

In his book, Raising Adults: A Humane Guide to Parenting in the New World, Hancock explains that the main difference between raising children and raising adults is summed up in a key word from the recent Fourth of July holiday: independence.

“It begins with the notion that I do not want to be a daddy forever,” Hancock said. “It starts with getting them away from being dependent on us. A lot of it has to do with how we interact with them around problem solving.”

Hancock emphasizes that his parenting philosophy is not based on permissiveness. He fully agrees that parents need to set guidelines and apply discipline.

If a child forgets to pack a lunch or bring along lunch money, the child will be hungry that day. But Hancock says the child probably will not forget to prepare for lunch again.

“We have almost no record of children starving from one missed lunch on the North American continent,” Hancock said, adding that in this context, parents let their children forget or make a mistake so they can learn a skill that increases their likelihood of becoming a responsible adult.

Hancock tells the story of a woman who skipped a business meeting in order to take her adolescent son’s homework to him at school. “I thought, ‘how long has she been doing that?’ Probably since he was 6 years old, and he’s learned to depend upon her for those kinds of details. He will be very angry with her one day when she takes a vacation or dies and he’s left without his homework.”

Not to mention when he’s 32 and the boss needs the memo, and his mother is not there to bring the document to him.

In his free, online book, Ten Things We Should Never Say to Kids, Hancock tempers this advice by suggesting that parents should never say to their children, “You can do anything you set your mind to.”

“That’s the kind of wishful thinking that leaves kids not quite trusting us,” Hancock explained. “We have blown smoke at them instead of talking about goal setting and hard work and dedication. The setting of one’s mind on something does not equal success.

“If you think you can’t, you won’t. If you think you can, you might.”

And if you think you can implement these parenting philosophies, you just might raise a well-adjusted adult instead of raising a child.

Source: Warrick Publishing, IN
http://www.tristate-media.com/articles/2008/07/11/warricknews/editorial/03parents.txt

If you were an energetic nine-year-old boy who loved school, did your best but also loved charging about, trying to beat your friends at every game possible, imagine the hell of our currrent state school system where ball games are banned from the playground in case someone gets hurt, there is no outside play in bad weather and you are constantly in trouble for being too competitive because winning is not what it’s about. And, worse, Jamie Oliver fruit smoothies have replaced sponge pudding in your school dinner, so you’re starving by two o’clock.

Sue Palmer is a former head teacher, literacy adviser and the author of 21st Century Boys. She says it is a biological necessity that boys run about, take risks, swing off things and compete with each other to develop properly. “If they can’t, a lot of them find it impossible to sit still, focus on a book or wield a pencil,” she says, “so their behaviour is considered ‘difficult’, they get into trouble and tumble into a cycle of school failure.”

Boys are three times as likely as girls to need extra help with reading at primary school, and 75 per cent of children supposedly suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are male. “We are losing boys at a rate of knots, particularly in literacy,” Palmer says, “because at some point in the past 30 years, masculinity became an embarrassment.”

Research by Simon Baron-Cohen, a respected Cambridge professor, that began as an investigation into autism, puts a solid case for biological male/female differences in the brain, with boys tending to be “systematisers” and girls “empathisers”. This explains why boys generally are less keen on reading and comprehension, and lag behind girls in literacy. A lot of boys find it easier to explain the workings of a watch than to discuss how a character in a story is feeling. “But now,” says Palmer, “apart from the very bright ones, boys aren’t even doing better at maths and science.”

Some people blame this nosedive, first noticed in the mid-Nineties, on the “feminisation” of education - too many women teachers, girl-friendly classroom environments and modular exam systems that suit girls’ study skills but disadvantage risk-takers. “Geniuses are much more likely to be male,” Palmer says, “but if you don’t tick the right boxes, you fail.”

There are seven times as many women primary school teachers as men, but Christine Skelton, Professor of Gender Equality in Education at Birmingham University, argues that there have always been far more female teachers than male. “Obviously there are some women who understand active boys, and some men who don’t, just as there are energetic girls and inactive boys,” she says.

The current generation of teachers, though, were born and raised in an atmosphere dominated by women’s liberation and “non-gender-specific” education that began in the Seventies. Barbies were banned, most protagonists in books were female and there was no tolerance of war or superhero play. As a head teacher, Palmer remembers making her reception teacher remove all the cloakroom pegs that depicted tractors for boys and bunnies for girls.

“The belief was that you were shaped by your environment, and it was the teacher’s responsibility to ‘socialise’ boys away from their natural inclinations and to encourage girls to study traditionally male subjects such as physics and technology,” she says.

Palmer would never deny that some of it was absolutely necessary - but with movements such as Reclaim the Night, Greenham Common and Gay Pride, groups that offered an alternative perspective to the traditionally dominant male view taking centre stage, masculinity became suspect. “I really think,” she says, “that the almighty cock-up of the sisterhood in the Seventies was that we believed we could turn boys into girls.”

Palmer says that most women are not natural risk-takers, so for teachers who have not helped to bring up brothers and who don’t have sons, boys’ behaviour can be frightening. “Play-fighting, for example, reaches a peak at age 7 or 8 but is not actually aggressive,” she says. “It’s social - it’s the way boys get to know each other and see how the other one ticks. A lot of women teachers are horrified when I suggest that they should let boys get on with fighting and shouting because eventually they’ll come out the other side and start negotiating.”

Another problem for boys seeking adventure is that, because we live in an increasingly risk-averse society, children are rarely allowed to play unsupervised. When did you last see a group of boys climbing a tree?

“There is a rational fear of increased traffic but also an irrational fear of stranger danger, fanned by media reporting of child abduction,” says Palmer. “Parents are worried about being considered irresponsible, so they never let their children out of their sight.” And because we are not used to seeing boys playing outside, when we do it feels hostile even when what is going on is not particularly boisterous.

Dan Travis, a sports coach, argues that it is very important for boys to muck about on their own. “Coaching is formal and necessary but should only take up 20 per cent of the time they play,” he says. “The informal 80 per cent is where most of the learning and practising occurs - away from adult supervision.”

Travis is running a campaign to bring competition back to school sport. “The Sport for All ethos took hold in the Seventies and never let go,” he says. “Games are only about inclusion, with no winners allowed.” This is disastrous for boys, who need to compete to establish their place in the hierarchy, which is how they organise their friendships and something that they understand from nursery age onwards. It is also bad for sport. Palmer adds that “self-esteem” arrived from America and now no child is allowed to “lose” at anything.

Palmer is not suggesting that boys should be allowed to behave in any way they want. What we need, she says, is to celebrate what makes them boys and help them to understand the things that don’t come naturally to them. That means getting them outside more, particularly as space gets squeezed in urban schools. “Not letting boys be boys is not only detrimental to them but also to girls, many of whom become overcompliant with what is considered ‘good’ behaviour and could do with a shove outdoors to take more risks,” she says. “I certainly wish that had happened to me.”

Palmer is especially enthusiastic about the few “outdoor nurseries” that we have in this country, and about the Scandinavian system that puts off formal learning until the age of 7 or 8, concentrating instead on playing outside and the development of social skills.

In the ideal Palmer world, everyone would go to a Scandinavian-style school. What we are doing instead is bringing in the Early Years Foundation Stage, a new government framework that becomes law in September. It says that by the age of 5 children should be writing sentences, some of which are punctuated. “That would be impressive for a seven-year-old,” says Palmer. “So rather than tackling the imbalance in the way that we have treated boys for too long, we are going to make them sit still and learn even younger. I’d call that little short of state-sponsored child abuse.”

21st Century Boys will be published by Orion in early 2009

Source: Times Online, UK
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4288100.ece