Children are struggling at school because they don’t know if they are left or right-handed

The proportion of infants arriving at school not knowing whether they are right or left-handed has trebled in the past decade, researchers say. The situation has been made worse by excessive parental fears, driven by cot death, about letting them lie or crawl on their front.

“The most important thing parents can do is ensure that when they are being observed during the day, they are given a chance to be on their front.” Previous research by Portwood has found that 57% of three-year-olds are unable to carry out tasks expected at their age. She cited children’s inactive lifestyles as “a major contributory factor”.

Other experts have also raised concerns about children’s development. “Brain development is at its most rapid between the age of zero and three,” said Aric Sigman, a psychologist and a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. He pointed to research showing that for every hour a day a three-year-old watches television, there is a 9% rise in attention problems.

Sigman has described television as “the greatest unacknowledged public health issue of our time”. He also believes video games have led to children spending less time working with their hands and failing to grasp concepts such as weight, volume and measurement.

“By using your hands, you can actually become more civilised,” said Sigman. “These are problems likely to persist in life, they are rather indelible.”

The problem was highlighted at the Conservative party conference when a restaurateur told a session addressed by David Willetts, the shadow skills secretary, that she was unable to find British employees under 25 who had the dexterity to peel a potato.

Source: Times Online, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article5114484.ece

A visiting international childhood expert says children should watch no television in the first two years of their lives.

The director of the Centre on Media and Child Health at the Harvard Medical School, Dr Michael Rich, says there is little benefit in putting a child under the age of two in front of a TV screen.

“There is no scientific evidence that children under the age of about 30 months, two-and-a-half years, can learn much of anything other than fairly rote imitation or mimicry from an electronic screen,” he told ABC radio’s The World Today program.

“What we know is that at least for national data from the United States that children under the age of two on average use electronic games for about an hour, a little over an hour a day,” he said.

“[We know] that 26 per cent of them have a television in their bedrooms and that it is very much integrated into their daily lives, largely in the format of parents using the television as an electronic babysitter.”

Dr Rich says TV screens do not provide the kind of stimuli most optimal for brain development.

“The best things are interaction with other human beings face to face, manipulating the physical environment, stacking up blocks, trying to get a raisin in your mouth and open-ended creative problem-solving sort of play,” he said.

“So a blank piece of paper and a crayon or a piece of clay to play with.”

Dr Rich says television and other media consumption should be restricted to about two hours a day for teenagers.

“It is really the school age years where kids start watching television on their own and actually teenagers, the data shows, use television less than school age kids,” he said.

“They start using more music and online media rather than television.

“But frankly there is no reason why young people, who have otherwise rich lives and homework to do and sleep to get, need to get more than an hour or two at most of media time each day.”

Source: ABC Online, Australia
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/06/2412591.htm

Parents, you can keep those flash cards and alphabet books.

But there’s another device in your home that can help develop language and visual skills. It’s called - hold on to your remotes - the television set.

Instead of being simply society’s whipping boy and the root of all cultural evil, the so-called “idiot box” might actually boost test scores, especially in disadvantaged homes, a recently published study out of the University of Chicago says.

Even as it baby-sits electronically, the TV can be teaching both modes of learning and facts, other studies suggest, and keeping those who watch it from engaging in more destructive behaviors.

That’s the good news about the boob tube. There’s certainly bad, including the warning that “there’s no two-dimensional screen that can equal a three-dimensional caregiver,” says Dr. Donald Shifrin, the American Academy of Pediatrics spokesman on the impact of media on children. Then there’s the study showing kids who watch more TV do less reading.

But we’ll get to the numerous caveats - especially the one about “Desperate Housewives” being less helpful than “Sesame Street” - later.

For now, let’s deal with what many may find surprising.

The prevailing, almost unquestioning cultural bias against TV, especially among the upper-middle class, is nailed by the humor blog Stuff White People Like, which puts “Not having a TV” at No. 28 on the list.

“The number one reason why white people like not having a TV is so that they can tell you that they don’t have a TV,” the authors write. But there is an academic consensus, if not a popular-culture one, that TV may actually be useful as more than just a means for frazzled parents to buy a few moments of uninterrupted time or wind down mindlessly at day’s end.

“I used to laugh and say, ’I did 25 years of research on children in television, and I can summarize it in one sentence: It’s the content that matters,’” says Aletha Huston, a professor of child development at the University of Texas.

“If used correctly, television can be a wonderful medium for kids. It can be a way of exposing them to the world. It can be a resource for kids to get to places and times they wouldn’t get to,” says Huston.

Yet, “it is a message that doesn’t get out there somehow,” she says, citing the surprisingly intense interest when “we published a study a few years ago showing the positive effects of ’Sesame Street’ on early schoolkids’ performance.”

The Chicago study came out of the Graduate School of Business, where young economists have been looking at media and its effects. Although based on an old data set, it offers new confirmation of the evolving views of television.

Standardized testing of almost 350,000 6th, 9th and 12th-grade students showed that the students who had more exposure to television in early childhood did slightly better on the tests than those with less exposure.

“We find strong evidence against the view that childhood television viewing harms the cognitive or educational development of preschoolers,” write Jesse Shapiro and Matthew Gentzkow in the paper, published this year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

There’s a big caveat: The testing data are from 1965, because those kids had been around when television rolled out from city to city in the U.S., providing what essentially hasn’t been seen in the United States since, a large-scale, clear-cut, before-and-after comparison.

“It’s an open question how the ways in which television is different now than then would affect the data,” says Shapiro, an assistant professor of economics at the GSB.

But even with more recent data, another U. of C. economist reached a similar conclusion to that of Shapiro and Gentzkow.

“Despite the conventional wisdom, watching television apparently does not turn a child’s brain to mush,” wrote Steven Levitt, with co-author Stephen Dubner, in the 2005 hit book Freakonomics.

They looked at a huge early-childhood study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education in the 1990s and found “no correlation,” they wrote, “between a child’s test scores and the amount of television he watches.”

One of the big questions for economists is not just examining an activity in isolation but considering what activity it replaces.

Psychological research shows that violence in media increases aggression, for example. But “violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies,” another recent study of media effects found. The implication: However aggressive you may feel, you can’t do the crime if you don’t have the time.

Violent movies aren’t the same as children’s afternoon television shows. But Shapiro and Gentzkow also found that much of the impact of the medium they were studying seemed to be related to what activities it might be replacing.

In their findings, even after controlling for parental income and education levels, TV’s “effects are more positive for children from less advantaged families or from families where English isn’t the first language,” Shapiro says.

Put another way, that translates into a whopper of a caveat: “For children with highly educated parents and rich home environments, the cognitive effects of television appear to be smaller and may even be negative,” they write.

In other words: TV as a surrogate parent is not equal to Scrabble with an English-lit-major mom.

The common wisdom is that TV has been in decline for decades, but many critics share the view of another popular book, Everything Bad Is Good for You. In it, author Steven Berlin Johnson contends that TV now is actually much better, “more complex and nuanced,” than it was at the time of Shapiro’s study.

“The most debased forms of mass diversion - video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms - turn out to be nutritional after all,” Johnson writes, largely because the storytelling and complexity of action demands much more of the viewer.

He’s looking at adult TV, comparing the intricate “The Sopranos” to the simple “Starsky & Hutch,” for instance, but the argument can also be made for children’s television, where the straight-ahead action-hero cartoon story has been replaced by the subtle social interactions and multiple layers of meaning in “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

Patricia Greenfield has looked at more contemporary data, too, and concluded television is a mixed educational blessing. It’s likely responsible for a rise in verbal IQ scores, while it may be to blame for declines in verbal SAT scores.

“The real strength of television in teaching vocabulary is the visual context for teaching definitions,” says Greenfield, director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at UCLA and California State University at Los Angeles. That applies to IQ tests, which use “everyday vocabulary,” she says. Meanwhile, SATs look for “Latin-based, literary vocabulary,” which TV, by and large, does not offer.

Her 1998 paper, “The Cultural Evolution of IQ,” also makes the case for television’s helping to teach “visual intelligence,” the reading of signs, symbols, images so vital in today’s culture.

With television and DVDs being used widely in schools and by parents, her reading is that anti-TV forces may actually be “in decline,” to the point that “I’m a little bit more concerned about people not understanding the costs, only looking at the benefits.”

That’s certainly a worry of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends no screen time for children under age 2 and a maximum of two well-chosen hours per day for older kids.

The concern is not TV per se so much as what TV, especially relevant with one study showing nearly 40 percent of children age 6 and younger have TVs in their bedrooms.

“Are we viewing ’Elimidate’?” the academy’s Shifrin asks. “Or are we viewing ’Dora the Explorer’?”

The doctors group understands that youngsters are growing up “as digital natives,” he adds. “We want parents to understand it’s up to them to be literate enough to know what’s being taught” on the screens.

He recommends the Web site Common Sense Media (commonsensemedia.org) as a good way for parents to achieve such literacy.

“We are not going to censor television - we’d like to censure it at times - but what we are going to say is, ’Caveat emptor,’” Shifrin says. “It’s about what you watch, how much you watch and where it’s watched.”

—

HOW TO USE IT

1. Don’t be passive. The stereotype is of the viewer numbly flipping through channels, looking for anything of interest. Instead, seek out what you have good reason to believe will be good or interesting and watch then or set your DVR or VCR to record it. You don’t read books or go to films at random, do you? One quick way to find out what the critical consensus is: the Web site Meta critic.com, which sums up what major critics say about a show then provides an average rating. For kids’ TV, try common sensemedia.org.

2. Ignore TV series in their first run. If you don’t need to be part of water-cooler chatter the next morning, the much more efficient, educated way is to get a well-reviewed series from Netflix or your library after it has come out on DVD. Watch at your pace, without commercials.

3. “Documentary” does not equal “medicine.” Many of us have some brain filter that counts nonfiction as castor oil, even when another part of our brain knows better. To take docs out of the equation - the great work of PBS’ “Frontline,” for instance - is to miss some of television’s best work.

4. Take the TV out of the bedrooms. We’ve all got great kids with great judgment, but they are curious creatures, and left alone with the box, they’ll seek out its most shocking fare - not to mention get one more reason to procrastinate. Take temptation off the dresser.

5. If they must have TVs, use filters. All those ratings that were put in place do actually work. Spend 10 minutes with your TV’s manual (”Ratings”), and you’ll be able to limit the viewing possibilities to appropriate levels, plus be able to set a password strong enough to keep your settings from being overridden by the electronic-media genius you’re raising. (…)

Source: Boston Herald, United States
http://tinyurl.com/5l7cb5

Many parents cringe at the thought of discipline. They also seem reluctant to have high expectations of their kids, or to hold them accountable for their performance. They do not want to “hurt” or “pressure” their children.

A harried mother approached me after my talk in an exclusive private school. “My son is at his computer till two in the morning,” she said. “He says he has to do a lot of research.” Her son is in first year high school, and has low grades.

“I do a lot of research,” I replied, “but I do not stay at the computer for more than a couple of hours every day. Your son is more likely playing games instead of doing his homework.”

She sighed. “I think so, too. My husband and I actually told him we would ban the computer, but he got mad at us. So we lifted the ban. What do we do now?”

I stifled a sigh. “You need to set limits,” I said. “An outright ban is difficult, because he needs to use the computer for tasks like word processing. But make sure he does not use the computer for more than two hours a day.”

“But he will get very angry!” she said. “He will tell us that he hates us!”

I looked her in the eye. Our children often say things they do not really mean. Your son will at first hate the fact that you are curtailing his leisure, but when his grades improve, he will be thankful, and so will you. Learn to say no—gently but firmly. Set limits because you care for him. He is your son, after all.”

Permissive parenting

In the incisive book Think, award-winning writer Michael LeGault discusses the lost art of sharp and critical thinking in American life. Permissive parenting is one trend; others are pervasive commercialism, anti-intellectualism, and promoting image without substance.

Without clear thinking and the willingness to persevere, LeGault says bad scenarios may repeat themselves such as the United States government’s failure to respond after Hurricane Katrina, the declining quality of US businesses, and the dismal scores of students in international tests.

I believe permissive parenting is one of the causes of educational problems not only in the US, but in our society as well. LeGault cites statistics showing that teenage boys play video games for 13 hours a week and watch television for another 25 hours. Many American parents are aware of this, but do not know what to do. In a 2001 Time magazine/CNN poll, 80 percent of Americans said, compared to kids of 15 years ago, their children were more spoiled; 35 percent said they were more permissive with their kids; 75 percent said children had fewer chores; 48 percent said children had too much influence in family decisions.

I am not saying that kids should have no say at all in the family, but when they stay up till the wee hours to play games, then something is wrong. When boundaries are not set, things go haywire.

In the past five years, I found myself becoming not just a teacher, but a de facto parent to several students, who suffered from depression, insomnia, anxiety; who slept no more than three hours a night, who did not eat well, who had sex without lasting relationships, who were angry at their parents and/or the world.

I ask them about their parents’ role. “Do your parents know you have not been sleeping well?” A shrug. “Do they know you are having sex?” A shake of the head.

Set limits

“Children not only need standards and rules for healthy social, ethical, and intellectual development,” says LeGault, “they desire them. [Standards lead to] good work and study habits, nurturing an outlook that aspires toward excellence, and acquiring a wide, eclectic base of knowledge … I think it’s a very valuable, realistic lesson to teach your kids at a young age that nothing is easy or automatic (even though it looks like it is), and that to be good at even one thing is going to take them way more work and struggle than they ever imagined.”

What happens when parents set limits? “Kids may sulk and be visibly unhappy,” LeGault says. “Parents can feel their pain but know it’s not going to kill them.” I repeat—it is not going to kill them.

LeGault says authoritative parents may appear “stodgy and uptight,” but they can take comfort in the fact that they are doing the right thing.

“The fear of growing up, or fear or loss of a child’s love and respect, or maybe just the path of least resistance, has led many parents to choose to be their child’s friend rather than their guide and mentor,” LeGault says. “Such an approach focuses on providing kids with material pleasures and comforts rather than demanding that they meet high expectations and do the work required to do so. The net result is a generation of adults who have transformed the traditional meaning of the child-parent relationship by adopting the most lax and permissive parenting practices in history.”

Thankfully, many parents have seen the light. Actor and comedian Bill Cosby urged his fellow African-Americans to become better parents in a 2004 speech: “I am talking about these people who cry when they see their son [in jail]. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol? The church is only open on Sunday and you can’t keep asking Jesus to do things for you. You can’t keep saying that God will find a way … People with their hats on backwards, pants down around their crack, isn’t that a sign of something or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up?”

LeGault gives parents a rallying cry: “Dare to try to let your kids fail. Dare to say no. Dare to use punishment when your child misbehaves. Dare to turn off the television. Dare to make them do chores. Dare to kick them off the computer. Dare to turn their world upside down. Dare to set the agenda.” (…)

Source: Inquirer.net, Philippines
http://tinyurl.com/5sqehj

When it comes to parenting, we Indians have a rare flair of feeding our kids with all kinds of nonsense. The tradition of such parenting has started taking its toll and families have started experiencing untold miseries triggered by their own kids.

Parents have always been role models for kids of all ages. This has been endorsed time and again, everywhere in the world. This is a similarity found in all cultures and when cultures communicate and exchange their niceties, naturally there will be polarisation in parenting too.

Howsoever hard and fast that polarisation might be, when it comes to real parenting, we Indians have a rare flair of feeding our kids with all kinds of nonsense, thinking that it is all for the children’s good. And the children, who have the rare faculty of not differentiating between what their parents are doing and what they are supposed to do, pick up wrong signals and precedents from a very early age, and become the chips of the old blocks by the time they come of age and be parents themselves.

The tradition of such parenting has started taking its toll, and families in this subcontinent have started experiencing untold miseries triggered by their own kids. It starts from basic human habits to telling lies and committing crimes. Eating too much, drinking, smoking, disclaiming and dishonouring, scaring and browbeating and so on goes the list.

However, our children pick up these evils, don’ts and lies the same way they chip down fatty Lays chips, cookies, wafers and other confectionaries. What is the price the modern nuclear family pays for this? What is the risk the kids come to shoulder when they come of age? How is this going to put the society to ransom in the long run? We parents hardly take time off to think about it. We are obsessed with the welfare of our kids, and we feed them with flat lies and fatty Lays alike. The consequences are manifold.

The kids become the replicas of their parents; with everything attached, both good and bad.

They take things for granted thinking that if parents do, it must be right. A kid grown with a lot of browbeating turns out to be a bully.

If the parents tell lies or break their promises, or fail to keep their word, the kids of such parents will also have the same traits in the long run.

When parents are not able to imbibe qualities that last for a lifetime, children pick up the worst qualities from other social agencies, and these qualities last for a lifetime and beyond in the form of familial ignominy.

Mothers force-feed their kids. They do it as if the kid is going to die if he skips a meal. This feeding tendency leaves the kid fed up with food. He or she resorts to eating junk and drinking deadly beverages.

If the need is for maintaining restraint, attitudinal balance, being responsible etc are not taught in the family, kids naturally grow into wanton boys and girls.

Commitments like caring for the weak, elderly and lonely, either in the family or in the society, have to be nurtured in the family ambience itself, and as and when there is an occasion for the parents to be committed and responsible, they have to be so in such a way that their kids pick up this lesson at an early age itself. But do we do this?

What the parents do is that give some lame excuses and lie right in front of their children to free themselves of their responsibilities.

When someone seeks help from our family, we have to help him or her according to the nature of the help and our limitations. Instead, many parents play hide and seek when someone approaches for help. Can we expect our kids to be different when they grow up?

It is unhealthy to eat out for long, and it is hazardous to eat junk food. How many parents are ready to shun such habits? How many new parents have the tolerance to teach their kids the need for maintaining a healthy diet regime?

We feed our kids with all the junk available in the market, and we boast of their chubby size, tastes and the nowhere seen talents and skills. And the kids in turn happen to grow up in a world of illusionary achievements and false prides. Can they ever be what they actually are? We spoil our kids the same way we toil ourselves for their welfare.

Television eats on our health, wealth and happiness. Why are our kids too tip-toeing the same line? They are put in the rut by their own parents.

Consumerism is taking us to new lows everyday; still we take our kids to supermarkets and stuff them with all types of nasty tendencies like buying things we don’t want, buying much more than what we want, eating things that are hazardous, and finally feeding them with a regular doses of ‘use and throw culture’.

No wonder, modern materialistic and monitory criteria that reflects our social, personal and moral values are meticulously copied by our offspring, and they transform themselves into chronic insensible figurines, symbolising falsehood, lies, greed, hypocrisy and snobbery; the dirty and disastrous signs of modern parenting.

It is investment all the way, and the talk of the family is all about returns. The power of money is equated with prestige; and eventually the finer lines that demarcate good and bad, vice and virtue and modesty and malice, truth and falsehood are made to look non-existent and meaningless.

Thus, a generation slowly gets deprived of those humane values that have had much greater sway on human civilisation and sustenance than any material or monetary possession ever had. The ugly face of modern parenting is visible in our families, day in and day out.

Will our kids ever be able to grow into beings of virtue and values?

Among us are innumerable parents who go that extra miles and ensure that their kids pick up good social, personal and cultural values from their parents themselves. There are parents who try to transform their kids into better beings than what the parents had been when they were kids. There are parents who dedicate their whole life carving a niche for their kids by the sweat of their blood. Some parents practice impeccable lifestyle so that their kids would follow their footsteps.

However, in a heterogeneous society like ours, their number is dwindling. Thanks to the pressures exerted by modern market, material and monitory forces, the alien cultures and civilisations that come to play in our society via our so-called modern world order, dictate new benchmarks. The consequences of this cultivated benchmarks of falsehood and felony are so ubiquitous that a little slice of it could be seen on the faces of our modern kids who are raised by lies and Lays alike: by their parents themselves.

Source: Merinews, India
http://www.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=144605

France has banned TV channels from airing programming aimed at children three-years-old and younger. The Parents Television Council believes that’s not a bad thing.

According to a recent AP article, the High Audiovisual Council of France — in an effort to protect children from the harmful effects of television — has banned TV channels that target toddlers. The article notes that television impairs child development — “encouraging passivity, slow language acquisition, over-excitedness, troubles with sleep and concentration as well as dependence on screens.”

The article also states that the Council’s ruling will order cable operators who air foreign channels that target toddlers to broadcast a warning message. That message will alert parents to the harmful developmental effects television can have on children. Christine Albanel, France’s minister for culture and communication, announced a “cry of alarm” to parents in June concerning 24-hour programming targeted at young children, such as BabyFirstTV and Baby TV.

Melissa Henson, the director of communications and public education with the Parents Television Council, says research has shown that too much television can be harmful to young children.

“Human interaction is far more important for a child’s development than even so-called educational videos,” Henson contends. “So putting a child in front of even a video like Baby Einstein or something like that, which is supposed to be beneficial to their brain development, actually can stunt the development far more than just letting them sit in the playpen and observe the world around them and observe people interacting around them.”

BabyFirstTV claims that their programs are designed for parents and children to watch together interactively. However, critics believe the shows are used as baby sitters.

Henson says being interactive with your children helps them to read emotions and interpret behavior, and also creates a better learning environment.

Source: OneNewsNow, MS
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=231702

Although a good night’s sleep and a healthy breakfast can prepare your child for a day of learning, experts are finding other smart ways to beef up the brain.

“Neuro-science is growing so much because of new technologies,” says chartered psychologist Deb Skaret.

“We’re finding that there are lots of things that parents can do to help facilitate the health and overall intellectual development and curiosity of their children.”

Skaret, who holds a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Alberta, has long been a student of the brain and cites the latest research into how exercise benefits the muscle between your ears.

“We’re learning how exercise is critical for brain development. It’s like a spark,” she says, adding that lack of physical activity can be connected to children with attention problems. She says American physician John J. Ratey tested junior high school students by running them on a treadmill before morning classes and found they were more alert in school.

Scientific research shows that exercise increases the fitness level and development of brain cells, and benefits the hippocampus (a seahorse-shaped brain structure) which is vital for memory and learning.

“I’m concerned about a child playing a lot of computer games and not having a balanced, recreational lifestyle. It’s just a hypothesis, but I think we’ll see greater challenges with kids holding down a conversation in the classroom. They’re used to flashy stuff, and maybe it will be hard to sit down and enjoy a book,” says Skaret, who jokes that the thumbs of future generations will be longer because of increased video games use.

Parents should encourage a balance of recreational activities and limit time on computer games, encouraging interaction and conversation with others.

Skaret also recommends parents monitor stressors in their children’s lives.

“A little bit of stress is good. Hey, you got an assignment due, nothing like stress to help you get it done. But chronic stress, such as family fighting, and you get a child with constant anxiety,” she says.

“Chronic stress creates cortisol which inhibits memory. If a child is sitting in school worrying, they can’t concentrate or they learn something and it just falls through.”

Cutting edge research still touts the benefits of sleep and adequate nutrition.

“Basically, when your brain doesn’t have the nourishment it needs, you’re foggy and fatigued. It’s hard to stay focused,” says nutrition specialist Theresa Riege of the Calgary Health Region.

Riege stresses the importance of a breakfast that is a combination of several food groups, particularly protein and whole grains, which will take longer to digest and help students keep their energy level up throughout the morning.

“Avoid that sweet sugar rush in the morning. It will get them going faster, but they’ll lack energy by mid-morning and will inhibit their function from a thinking, and even play, perspective.”

The Calgary Health Region, Nutrition and Active Living, has published a school nutrition guide book for schools, teachers and parents which is available on their website at http://www.calgaryhealthregion.ca/programs/nutrition/services/school nutrition.htm.

“It will give parents some food options and outlines some strategies for packing lunches and snacks,” says Riege.

Source: Calgary Herald, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/5vsjd6

For many adolescents, “screen time” is almost a full-time job that could lead to obesity, diabetes and other health issues, a Canadian researcher says.

Adolescents now spend an average of six hours a day in front of some type of screen, whether it’s a television or computer screen or one of the many portable devices now popular with young people, studies done by Dr. Ian Michael Janssen show. “They spend more hours daily in front of a screen than they do in a classroom in a given year,” said Janssen, a researcher at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, who is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Even if they are still playing with friends, children are increasingly likely to be engaging in more passive activities like playing video games, one reason why only half of Canadian children aged 5 to 17 get as much physical activity as they should each day, according to the Health and Stroke Foundation.

The result is a rise in obesity rates among adolescents. Twenty-six percent of Canadian children are overweight or obese, according to a government health committee report, representing a 15-percent increase over 30 years. In the United States, the obesity rates for preschool-aged children and adolescents has more than doubled over that time period, and more than tripled for children aged 6-11.

Unfortunately, fixing the problem isn’t as easy as simply cutting down screen time, Janssen cautions. While a sedentary lifestyle has been associated with childhood obesity, as reported in the Canadian Medical Association journal, Janssen says that physical activity and screen time are separate behaviors in children.

“Decreasing screen time will not automatically increase physical activity levels,” said Janssen, whose research examines how the two are related and what effects screen time may have above and beyond those on physical activity. Some active kids also spend a lot of time in front of television and computer screens, and some kids who have low screen times also have low levels of physical activity, he points out.

The long-term risk for children is that behaviors and health outcomes tend to track over time, Janssen said. “An obese youth is very likely to become an obese adult.” And because obesity-related health problems take time to develop, the longer a person has been obese, the worse off they’re likely to be. A 50-year-old who only recently became obese is in a better position than one who has been obese since childhood, he said.

Janssen’s real worry about the rise in childhood obesity rates is not that there are now rare cases of type 2 diabetes in kids, where once there were none, but the health problems these children are likely to face in the future as adults, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. When today’s obese children are adults, baby boomers will all be seniors, he pointed out, placing a huge burden on the health care system. “That’s when I’m really frightened.”

Source: Reuters
http://features.us.reuters.com/wellbeing/news/FD5592F0-64B8-11DD-AA35-6CC02BCD.html

We soon will experience the most important time in the entire school year for children: the first two weeks. What happens during this critical period pretty much determines how the rest of the year will go.

When children return to school after the summer break, their perceptions about school and themselves as learners are mostly uncertain. It’s a new year with new teachers, new books, new classes, new schedules and new friends. All of these new things come with the hope that this year could be different and better than all previous years.

That uncertainty in students’ perceptions continues only until teachers administer the first quizzes and tests near the end of the second week of school. When teachers assign grades to those first quizzes, the grades put students into categories. And getting out of a category is really difficult.

Students who receive a C on that first math quiz, for example, begin to see themselves as C students. Their uncertainty suddenly becomes fixed, and they accept the idea that they are likely to earn Cs in math for the rest of the school year.

When the second quiz or test occurs, they expect to receive another C. When they do, it reinforces their perception. Similarly, if they receive a failing grade on that first quiz, they think all following grades will be the same.

But if they succeed on that first quiz and receive a high grade, that, too, is their perception of all that might follow.

This means that teachers must do everything they can to ensure students’ success in the first two weeks. And not fake success, but success in something challenging. The key to motivating students rests with that success. Students persist in activities at which they experience success, and they avoid activities at which they are not successful or believe they cannot be successful.

This is the reason that truancy and attendance problems rarely occur during the first two weeks of the school year. They begin to occur after the first graded quizzes and tests. In students’ minds, the grades they receive on these first quizzes establish their likelihood of future success. And why come to school if there is so little chance of doing well?

Parents, too, must be genuinely involved in their children’s education during the first two weeks. Routines established at home in this critical period profoundly affect the likelihood of success.

Daily conversations about school activities help children recognize that their parents value success in school. Providing a quiet place for children to work on school assignments and limiting the time they spend watching TV or playing on computers further increase chances for success. Checking with teachers to make sure children are well prepared and ready to succeed also can help.

Successful experiences during the first two weeks of school do not guarantee success for the entire year. But they are a powerful and perhaps essential step in that direction.

Teachers and parents need to take advantage of this critical time and use it well. It can make all the difference.

Source: Kentucky.com, KY
http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/478728.html

Despite the fact that pediatricians recommend no screen media exposure for children under age 2, three-quarters of very young children in America live in homes where the television is on most of the time, according to research. A new study has found that leaving your TV set on disrupts young children while they are playing, even if the channel is tuned to adult shows. This means that simply having the TV on, even in the background, may be detrimental to children’s development.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, is published in the July/August 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers looked at 50 children ages 1, 2, and 3. Each child came to a lab with a parent and was invited to play for an hour with a variety of age-appropriate toys. For half the time, a television was on in the room, showing an episode of the adult game show Jeopardy!, with commercials; during the other half hour, the TV was turned off.

Researchers observed the children as they played to determine whether background TV—defined as adult-oriented television that is on and may be watched by older members of the family, but which very young children don’t understand and to which they pay little attention—affected the children’s behavior during play.

Background TV was found to disrupt the toy play of the children at every age, even when they paid little attention to it. When the television was on, the children played for significantly shorter periods of time and the time they spent focused on their play was shorter, compared to when the TV was off.

“Background TV, as an ever-changing audiovisual distractor, disrupts children’s efforts to sustain attention to ongoing play behaviors,” according to Marie Evans Schmidt, who is now a research associate at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston and is the lead author of the study. “Background TV is potentially a chronic environmental risk factor affecting most American children. Parents should limit their young children’s exposure to background television.”

Source: EurekAlert, DC
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-07/sfri-psl070808.php