Pediatricians and child development experts have repeatedly warned parents that putting a television set in a young child’s bedroom is associated with a host of undesirable outcomes, including poorer school performance, behavior problems and obesity. But what about teenagers? Epidemiologists at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health wondered whether the undesirable outcomes of bedroom television might be blunted at this age.

Apparently not, according to a federally funded study of 781 adolescents between 15 and 18 published in the April issue of Pediatrics.

Daheia J. Barr-Anderson and her colleagues found that the two-thirds of youths who had a bedroom set watched more TV, moved less and had poorer diets and lower grades than those without one.

Parents who are considering whether to put a television in a teenager’s room should refrain from doing so, the authors recommend.

Source: Washington Post, United States
http://tinyurl.com/4gltwq

Computer games and fast food have been blamed by doctors for a startling rise in the number of children being treated in hospital for sleep disorders.

Eating too much sugary food is also blamed for preventing children from dropping off to sleep.

Newly released NHS figures show that the number of under-11s referred to hospital specialists for insomnia, sleep-walking and sleep-related breathing problems has rocketed by 26 per cent over the past five years.

But the true numbers affected could be much higher because the figures reflect only those seeking medical help.

Studies have linked poor sleep to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). And lack of sleep harms children’s ability to learn at school.

Psychologist Chireal Shallow, of the Naturally Nurturing clinic for children’s sleep disorders in London, said: “There are likely to be thousands more children whose parents do not seek treatment.

“A lot of the problem is guilty parenting where kids are allowed the rule of the roost because Mum and Dad come home from work late.

“The light, sound and movement of television or computer screens is stimulating and keeps children awake and there should be at least an hour’s gap before going to bed.”

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “It’s absolutely crazy for parents to let their children go to bed any time they like.

“Parents need to exert more authority and remove computer games from bedrooms to make sure kids have the best start in life. I’m sure teachers would be delighted.”

The NHS statistics show nearly 3,000 children under 11 had their sleep monitored overnight by specialists during 2006 compared with only 2,200 in 2002.

Of those, 1,733 were boys.

Professor Jim Horne of the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, said that children aged five to eight are particularly vulnerable to sleep problems as a result of ‘electronic distractions’ because having a rigid bedtime routine is so important to them.

“If they sleep better, the ADHD symptoms disappear.”

Jane Howell, 34, from Morden, South West London, struggled for years to get her son Marcel, now 13, to sleep.

After spending most of the day at school in front of a computer, Marcel would spend the evenings watching television but then found it hard to drop off, often not falling asleep until just a few hours before he had to be up again. “Eventually the problem got so bad that Jane approached a sleep clinic. “She said: “The clinic asked me about his routines and said computers, televisions and mobile phones were a distraction.

“They told me to minimise the time he uses computers and after 8pm it’s now wind-down time.

“He now has much more energy and is sleeping better. As parents you have to be hard on your kids. They want to do their own thing but you have to be strict.”

Dr Rob Primhak, a consultant paediatric respiratory physician at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, said there was now a shortage of specialists due to the numbers coming in.

“There has been a huge surge in demand,” he said.

Mandy Gurney, of the Millpond Children’s Sleep Clinic in London, said: “Not getting a good night’s sleep can have the same effect as four units of alcohol, so imagine what it is like for a child.”

Source: Daily Mail, UK
http://tinyurl.com/4ktvhr

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. And when babies sleep less, they may gain too much weight. A new Harvard study finds that babies and toddlers who sleep fewer than 12 hours daily are at greater risk for being overweight in preschool, startling evidence that the link between sleep and obesity may affect even very young children.

“The two (behaviors) are acting independently. In combination, they are particularly risky,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Elsie Taveras of Harvard Medical School.

The findings, published in April’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, are based on mothers’ reports of their babies’ sleep habits and TV viewing, and direct measures of the children’s height, weight and skinfold thickness.

Starting when the babies were 6 months old, mothers were asked how long their children napped during the day and how long they slept at night. Moms were asked again when the children were 1 and 2 years old. They were asked about TV time when the children reached age 2.

The researchers combined the sleep answers to find an average pattern for each child during the first two years of life. They found 586 of the children slept an average of 12 or more hours a day and 329 of the children slept less than that.

Among the long sleepers, 7 percent were obese at age 3.

The short sleepers fared worse. Twelve percent of them became obese 3-year-olds. Adding TV to the picture, 17 percent of those who slept less than 12 hours a day and watched two or more hours of television a day were obese by the time they were 3.

Obesity was defined as having a body mass index in the 95th percentile or above. BMI is a measure that combines height and weight. A 3-year-old who is 3 feet, 3 inches tall and 40 pounds would be considered obese.

The researchers took into account other risk factors for obesity, including TV viewing, and still found the children who slept fewer than 12 hours a day had a doubled risk of being obese at age 3 than the other children.

Sleep’s impact on appetite hormones may explain the effect, Taveras said. In prior studies, sleep-deprived adults produced more ghrelin, a hormone that promotes hunger, and less leptin, a hormone that signals fullness.

TV viewing is thought to increase the risk of obesity both because it takes time away from calorie-burning play and because of food ads for snacks and fast food.

The families in the new study lived in Massachusetts and had relatively high incomes and education levels, making it difficult to apply the findings to everyone, Taveras acknowledged. Sleep researchers who read the study said it adds to growing evidence of the link between poor sleep and obesity. A study published last year found that every additional hour per night a third-grader spends sleeping reduces the child’s chances of being obese in sixth grade by 40 percent.

“The main message for parents is that there has to be regularity in sleep in children. It’s very important to maintain a schedule,” said Dr. Michelle Cao of Stanford University’s sleep disorders clinic. She wasn’t involved in the study but co-wrote an accompanying editorial in the journal.

Taveras recommended practices that teach infants to fall asleep on their own, putting them to bed when they’re drowsy but not fully asleep.

Pat Prinz of the University of Washington, who wasn’t involved in the study, said parents who rely on day care should make sure their toddlers have plenty of time to run, jump and play.

“The more active they are in the day, the better they’ll sleep at night,” Prinz said. But she cautioned that genetics may play a role in sleep and a person’s genetic makeup may limit how much sleep duration can be improved.

Source: The Associated Press
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hU7C7YWiJZnZmED5gI2CUbejRYvwD8VT7VV80

If you’d like to know what to do to help your kids grow up healthy, try this: Take the television from your child’s room, throw it in the backyard, and tell the kid to run rings around it. That’s the message in the latest news showing that inactivity impairs children’s health and well-being and may be setting them up for heart disease and diabetes in adulthood.

Many children, even tiny tots, have TVs in their bedrooms, a fact that has dismayed pediatricians, who presume that less TV is always better. But there’s been little evidence that those TVs are really doing harm, aside from two studies showing that children with bedroom TVs tend to be fatter than their TV-less peers.

Now, researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health have kindly provided the ammo that parents need to say a big fat “no” to the personal entertainment center. They looked at a group of 781 teenagers ages 15 to 18 and found that the 62 percent with a bedroom TV were less likely to exercise or to eat fruit and vegetables and got lower grades. Maybe that’s because—no surprise here—so many of them watched more than five hours of television a day. (I’d like to know how high schoolers have five-plus hours a day to watch TV, once they’ve dealt with school, homework, and IM-ing. Maybe they need more chores.)

The picture is particularly troubling for girls, who typically become much less physically active than boys as teenagers. Their moderate and vigorous physical activity dropped by an hour a week if they had a bedroom TV; the boys’ activity level didn’t change. (On the other hand, only TV-owning boys saw a significant difference in grade-point average, 2.9 compared to 2.6—possibly because they already spend less time than girls doing homework.)

“Parents should move forth and get rid of that TV,” says Daheia Barr-Anderson, a postdoctoral fellow and physical activity epidemiologist at Minnesota who led the study, published in April’s Pediatrics. She is sympathetic to the fact that parents might not mind having teens holed up in their rooms, rather than rolling their eyes in the living room while Mom watches Grey’s Anatomy. But, she says, “it probably is the best for the health of your children.”

Further ammunition comes from the University of North Carolina, where researchers have found that less active children are more likely to develop metabolic syndrome as teens. This cluster of symptoms, which includes high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and diabetes, vastly increases the risk of heart disease. The researchers charted the health and physical activity of 389 children when they were 7 to 10 years old and then again when they were 14 to 17. Almost 5 percent of the children had at least three symptoms of metabolic syndrome as teenagers. The children who were less active and less aerobically fit in grade school were five to 6 times more likely to develop metabolic syndrome. The children at the highest risk were overweight to begin with and got no vigorous exercise—things like playing soccer, swimming, or running intensely enough to get breathless.

It’s shocking, and sad, that teenagers in the bloom of youth increasingly have health problems that used to be associated with the infirmities of old age. The good news, if there is any, is that we already know the remedy. Alas, it’s exactly the kind of exercise that the schools have chucked, with PE wiped out in favor of more academic sessions and recess a mere blip. Yes, children will ace those standardized tests. They can then go on to shorter, sicker lives, all because we didn’t encourage them to run when they were young.

Source: U.S. News & World Report, DC
http://tinyurl.com/49ca2r

Larry Rosen, professor of psychology at California State University-Dominguez Hills, has long studied “the Net generation,” the first to have grown up with the Internet, not to mention cellphones. In Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation (Palgrave Macmillan), he helps parents understand social networks. His advice: Talk to your kids, learn the technology and don’t panic. USA TODAY’s Janet Kornblum spoke with the author.

Q: Why did you write this book?

A: For kids — what I’m calling the Net generation, anybody born after 1980 — technology is not a tool. It just is. It’s part of their life. They think of it differently.

Q: How has technology influenced this generation?

A: They do things in a more abbreviated fashion. They IM (instant-message) with multiple people at the same time. They can’t uni-task. They do everything on their own. They’re very self-motivated.

Q: How does it specifically affect their relationships?

A: They make commitments to people online they don’t even know. But their strongest commitment is to their family. They see more of the world as a social world. So social problems are very important to them.

Q: Do you think the Internet is fundamentally changing kids?

A: This world encourages us to multitask. I think it encourages kids to be much less patient. More terse.

Q: Why are social networks so popular?

A: When I grew up (a baby boomer), our social life was outside. We hung out. The next generation spent time at the mall. This generation spends time at home — connected. Kids have to be social. It’s all part of the preteen and teen years and young adult years. MySpace happened to come around at the right time when you had a whole generation of kids who needed a place to be social.

Q: Weigh the positives and the negatives of social networking.

A: Because they have a combination of people they know face-to-face in the real world and people they don’t, (those of the Net generation) get a lot of chances to bounce ideas and to test out things on a social network that they probably wouldn’t do face-to-face.

I hear that a lot from kids — that they feel much more comfortable saying things online than they ever would off-line. That’s a real positive because they get to test out their world. They get to figure out who they are.

Q: So how should parents think about social networks?

A: You can certainly use your parenting skills to help them get the most out of MySpace — to not be addicted, to not be bullied and to know what to do when you’re bullied. But taking (MySpace) away from them is really like restricting going to the mall with their friends or going to school and talking to their friends. It’s tantamount to making them a pariah.

Q: Can you give some solid parenting tips?

A: Talk to your kids. If the computer is in their rooms — which is not a good idea — walk in and ask them what they are doing. Ask them what’s new, what they like about it — don’t be judgmental. Tell them you want to learn. Kids love rules, believe it or not. Kids need limits.

They’re defining a new generational attitude. But they’re not new teenagers. We know what adolescents do.

You have to learn what potential problems there might be, and then, like a good, authoritative parent, you discuss those with your kids. You know there might be sexual predators out there. And you have to know: ‘Well, does anyone say anything nasty to you? How do you handle that?’

Q: Compare the Internet and social networking to television.

A: Every waking minute of every day, they are interacting with some sort of technological medium, except perhaps when they’re in school, and even then, kids are texting from their pockets. They’re wearing iPods all day. It’s just a different world for them. The impact of television on society took years and years and years. And we had a chance to adapt to it.

The kinds of tools these kids are using are vast. Nobody heard of MySpace five years ago. Nobody heard of an iPod five years ago. Nobody heard of instant messaging.

This is a rapidly changing technological world and the kids are the first ones to adapt technology.

Q: Are parents keeping up?

A: Parents have a total misconception about what their kids are doing online.

They don’t know how much time they’re spending. They don’t have the breadth of what’s happening to the kids online. They think the kids are being attacked by predators all the time. They are way over-concerned about the technology that the kids are using.

Everything is so different from year to year. No wonder the parents are afraid.

They don’t have to know everything, but they’ve got to see what MySpace is about. They’ve got to understand this whole thing of kids text-messaging all day long. They have to understand what it means to have kids plugged into their iPod all day long.

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2008-03-26-larry-rosen_N.htm

Half of children are unable to speak properly when they start primary school, it was claimed yesterday.

Up to 300,000 are struggling to string a sentence together or to understand simple instructions by the age of five.

Experts blame the growing problem on the death of conversation in the home, institutionalised childcare, “electronic babysitters” - where children are left simply to sit in front of the television - and the demise of the family meal.

They estimate it will cost the British taxpayer around £26billion to support those who suffer in later life because of their early language difficulties.

The shock findings emerged as part of a Government-commissioned review by Tory MP John Bercow of services for children with communication difficulties.

He has warned that youngsters with language problems are “slipping through the net or being cast adrift”.

His report came as delegates at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers conference in Torquay yesterday suggested that some very young children hear only a handful of words such as “get up” and “bed” at home.

This means they are barely articulate by the time they reach primary school.

The children’s communication charity I CAN, which sits on the review’s expert panel, yesterday estimated that around 300,000 pupils start primary school each year with speech, language and communication problems.

Of these, 60,000 have specific disabilities such as stammering or suffer from other conditions including autism or cerebral palsy.

But 240,000 have “delayed” or impaired language skills due to social and environmental factors.

These youngsters are concentrated in disadvantaged areas, where up to half start school with language difficulties.

However, in Stoke-on-Trent, the figure has been found to be as high as 84 per cent.

The Bercow report warns there is a broad group of children and young people “whose needs may be primarily related to their social environment”.

It says: “In some areas, particularly areas of social disadvantage, this group may be as large as 40 to 50 per cent of children at school entry.”

Their needs can be addressed through “a language-rich environment“, the report adds.

In a submission to the review, Jan Myles, assistant secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that teachers are experiencing “underdeveloped parental language skills” in some deprived areas.

But she added: “In more affluent areas, it seems there are circumstances where some children experience a succession of childminders, because mum and dad are at work, or rely on the television or computer to babysit.”

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said last night: “My colleagues in early-years settings talk about children who are fairly monosyllabic when they come into school.

“One of the emphases in the early-years foundation stage is development of language and listening to stories and exploring words. We know that other skills like reading and writing follow the linguistic ability of children.”

Literacy consultant Sue Palmer said that the “electronic babysitter” is becoming more and more of a problem.

She added: “If a child is genetically predispositioned to a problem with language, if he or she is in an environment where they are not being talked to and sung to, then there’s more chance of the problem kicking in harder.

“Parents who haven’t been talked to much or sung to themselves are in the third generation now.

“The old wisdom used to be passed on that the best way to comfort a baby was to pick it up and sing to it, but now we can just use the electronic babysitter.

“We have had these huge sociocultural changes and forgotten the basic stuff - that little babies need to be loved and talked to and sung to and they need to play.

“All we are doing is looking for complex, sophisticated solutions to the problem, rather than recognising that these things have gone missing.”

Hugh McKinney, chairman of the National Family Campaign, said: “There’s no doubt that effective family support is crucial for the upbringing of children.

“A stable family life and effective communication can add to effective educational outcomes.

“But successive governments have failed to grasp this and until effective family policies are in place, this situation will only get worse.”

But Virginia Beardshaw, chief executive of I CAN, said: “People talk about the decline in children’s communication skills.

“It certainly cannot be attributed to any one thing, be that games or television. It’s a reflection of the full impact of 21st century living.”

An earlier report by the Basic Skills Agency found that the art of conversation is dying as families do not make enough effort to talk to their children.

All-day television, the demise of the family meal and even forward-facing pushchairs are conspiring to destroy regular chat.

Children’s Secretary Ed Balls said yesterday: “It is vital that children and young people with speech and language difficulties are identified at the earliest possible stage and the right support is then put in place.” (…)

Source: Daily Mail, UK
http://tinyurl.com/2hp4m9

Children and youth, whose parents actively support learning at home, do better in many ways. They get better grades, have higher graduation rates, and are more likely to go to college, said an American educationist.

Delivering the keynote speech at the Supreme Education Council’s (SEC) annual symposium on “Parents: Partners in Education”, Dr Heather Weiss said: “You need great schools and hardworking teachers. But you also need strong parental involvement for the best academic performance of children.”

The children are hardly spending 18 percent of their whole day in the schools. Rest of the time is being spent with the parents and family members. This underpins the need for parents’ active involvement in their educational affairs, she said.

“All parents must know what is important for their children and they must develop the skill to support their children. On the other hand, the education supporters must also reach out to the parents,” she said.

Dr Weiss, founder and director of Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP), said parent involvement is a major component of American education reform efforts.

“The US research on parent involvement suggests that there are three particularly important aspects of parent involvement for children’s development and academic success. The first aspect is parenting – the attitudes, values, and interactions about learning that parents demonstrate as they raise their children. The second is parent involvement in home-school relationships – the formal and informal connections, communications, and partnerships with the child’s school and teachers. The third aspect is a sense of shard responsibility for learning outcomes-parents as well as the school take responsibility for the child’s learning and education“, she said.

On the early learning, Dr Weiss said, children’s vocabularies increases rapidly, and they acquire the ability to remember experiences, sustain attention, count and recognize letters. Through interactions with adults and peers, they develop self-concepts and self-esteem, improve emotional self-regulation. In this stage of a child’s life, nurturing, warm and responsive parent-child relationships and parental participation in child-centered activities.

Children who live in a stimulating home environment with books and educational materials, parent-child discussions and other learning experiences develop curiosity and stronger academic skills, and demonstrate higher achievement. When parents limit television watching, children have better academic outcomes, she said.

Significantly, parent involvement in the middle and high school education shows that involvement tends to decrease due to teenagers’ desire for self-reliance and less outreach for parent involvement from schools. (…)

Source: Peninsula On-line, Qatar
http://tinyurl.com/yoepfx

Boys are scoring lower grades, suffering more learning difficulties, and earning fewer high school and college diplomas than girls, a trend that began to emerge in the late 1980s.

According to Layne Gregory, young men in Maine earn but 38.6 percent of the total number of bachelor’s degrees awarded each year by private colleges and public universities in the state.

“This is attributed to a variety of reasons, and I think if it were really easy to define we wouldn’t be having these discussions,” she said.

Gregory is executive director of the Portland-based Boys to Men, a nonprofit that works to support the healthy development of adolescent boys, provide them assistance, as well as educational resources, and increase community awareness about the specific needs of boys.

Gregory will speak tonight, Monday, March 17, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Camden-Rockport Middle School to parents about “It Ain’t Cool to Like School.”

The workshop will address the reasons behind the slipping enthusiasm and diminishing academic aspirations of boys, and then include a discussion about what can be done, now, to turn the trend around.

And the reasons are many, according to Gregory: the brain development of boys is different from girls, their physiology is built for action, and there are a variety of influences – family, school, and community, not to mention societal and cultural.

Masculinity in this culture is defined as being tough, hard-drinking and unemotional, said Gregory, whose own sons are now in their 20s. There has also been a shift away from the typical icons of academic success so that now that has become defined as a feminine domain, she said. Staying after school, doing homework, and getting good grades have become non-masculine.

Gregory will offer insight and possible remedies to parents about how to support their boys, and suggest school-based strategies, including the need to create more “brain breaks.” Boys also need to build their problem-solving and team-building skills, and learn better how to cope with diverse points of view and diverse people.

While there has also been a movement away from competition, Gregory said competition is not a bad concept. The trick is to have competition without exclusion, which can be done.

“Probably one of the best things parents can do is get rid of their televisions,” she said. “With TV, they become reliant on visual learning so the experiential and auditory learning gets pushed aside.”

“If you want your children to be brilliant, read them fairy tales,” said Gregory, paraphrasing Albert Einstein. “If you want them to be really brilliant read them a lot of fairy tales.” (…)

Source: VillageSoup Belfast, USA
http://knox.villagesoup.com/Education/story.cfm?storyID=111435

Baby Einstein criticized over Web site assertions

Baby Einstein has changed language promoting some baby DVDs on its Web site, a move critics hailed as a victory in their effort to stop what they say are false claims that the videos are educational.

In 2006, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby, accusing both companies of false and deceptive advertising by suggesting the DVDs help foster speech, understanding of numbers and other educational gains.

University of Washington researchers also entered the debate, questioning the value of the videos.

In early December, the FTC decided not to penalize either company, but it also cited changes on the companies’ Web sites, including removal of testimonials and changes in descriptions of videos, according to documents provided by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

“Parents who visit these sites will no longer be subjected to some of these companies’ most deceptive claims about the educational benefits of their videos,” the Boston-based advocacy group said in a statement.

The Walt Disney Co.-owned Baby Einstein also started a new Web site in February but said that step was not in response to the federal inquiry.

Baby Einstein, though, mentioned separate changes it made in a statement it released after the FTC concluded its inquiry.

“We are hopeful that the voluntary modifications we made to our Web site and three of our DVD packages will help clarify what Baby Einstein is all about,” a news release said in December.

In the release, Baby Einstein highlighted the interactive and explorative nature of its DVDs.

The online changes were not enough to mollify critics, who say the companies continue to benefit from past claims.

“The brand has been built on years of deceptive marketing that people associate … as being educational,” said Josh Golin, associate director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

Last year, a group of UW researchers released a study that suggested overuse of baby videos could slow learning of vocabulary in children from 8 to 16 months old, naming Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby in a summary.

“The right thing is to be explicit that this product is intended clearly for entertainment and has no (documented) educational benefits,” Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a UW professor and co-author of the study, said Tuesday.

Still, Christakis welcomed Baby Einstein’s changes, though he added, “the best available scientific answers suggest no benefits, and at least the potential of harm.”

One of the problems is that scientists are not keeping pace with the consumption of these media products, Christakis said, and are just beginning to understand the effect of media on infants and toddlers.

The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests no television for children under the age of 2. Baby Einstein said it respects that position but that it doesn’t reflect the realities of modern parenting.

“The Baby Einstein Company believes that when used properly, developmentally appropriate video content can be a useful tool for parents and little ones to enjoy together,” the company said on its Web site.

Source: Seattle Post Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/353726_einstein05.html

Ireland’s “PC culture” is letting irresponsible parents believe their children’s obesity is caused by a hidden genetic illness instead of their diet.

“We live in a very politically correct society where you can’t say these things, you’re not allowed to be judgemental about parents because they can be very defensive about this. But then they continue to feed their children Big Macs.

“If they won’t do it for their kids, then the State has to get involved.”

Dr Hanley’s comments come in the wake of rising concerns over increasing child obesity.

National obesity expert and head of the obesity clinic at St Columcille’s Hospital Dr Donal O’Shea said that seeing schoolkids weighing close to 20 stone was now a common occurrence.

Dr Hanley added: “I met a Polish lady recently in a clinical capacity and she said she didn’t want her own child to turn out “like those Irish children” that she went to school with.

“You just don’t see obese children here who are from Eastern Europe,” he said.

“Obviously there are some people who are genetically more disposed to becoming obese, but that’s not the case if you’re always feeding them Big Macs.

DEFENSIVE

“This is serious, and parents need to stop being so defensive and hiding behind claims obesity is a disease. Obesity is caused by poor diet and little exercise.

If it starts in kids, in their teens they can develop diabetes, in their thirties they can have heart attacks, and in their forties they can be dead from stroke.

“But parents would prefer to claim their children have a genetic disease rather than admit their own failure to give them a healthy diet,” he said.

Source: Irish Independent, Ireland
http://tinyurl.com/23pyog