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Musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings about unschooling, natural parenting, sustainable living and more by Wendy Priesnitz. Archives - April, 2007 Learning Shouldn’t be a Struggle – April 27, 2007
Big Step for Children’s Rights – April 26, 2007
Canada ratified the UN Convention in 1992. It puts children at the center of family, community and culture. But the senators feel there is a gap between “the rhetoric and the reality” in terms of how it is applied to children. So the committee is trying to strengthen the active involvement of children in all institutions and processes affecting their rights. “The Convention on the Rights of the Child is not solidly embedded in Canadian law, in policy or in the national psyche,” says Senator Raynell Andreychuk, Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights. “Children’s voices rarely inform government decisions, yet they are one of the groups most affected by government action or inaction. Children are not merely underrepresented; they are almost not represented at all.” In a press conference earlier today, committee member and Liberal Senator Jim Munson told the media, “Children must be in the room. Children must be at the table. Too often we dictate ... to children and it’s just not right.” However, the committee admits that many Canadians are against full implementation of the UN Convention. In its report, the committee has made 24
recommendations on the rights and freedoms of children. These include
the establishment of an independent children’s commissioner to monitor
government implementation of children’s rights and of a federal
interdepartmental implementation working group to coordinate and monitor
federal legislation and policy affecting children’s rights. It also
encourages the government to make spanking and other forms of corporal
punishment of children illegal. Medicating Your Kids and Your Dogs – April 24,
2007
That rivals the number of prescriptions for antidepressants that were written for children in 2002, spread among several different diagnoses, including depression, attention-deficit disorder, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Many readers of my work will be familiar with my skepticism about some of these labels and the causes of the so-called problems that they label. But there are few credible studies that show these drug treatments work. And there are increasing signs that they increase the incidence of suicide and some antidepressant manufacturers have even issued warnings to that effect. (For more on this, visit ablechild.org, the Parents for Label and Drug Free Education website.) An article that we published last summer in Natural Life magazine documented how antidepressants can cause agitation in five percent of patients, and even create a form of extreme agitation known as akathisia, which can lead to suicide. It also described a 2005 study that found patients are twice as likely to attempt suicide on antidepressants as on sugar pills. Apparently, Eli Lilly knew more than 15 years ago that Prozac patients were far more likely to attempt suicide and show hostility than were patients on other antidepressants. At any rate, I’ve been thinking about this
recently in light of reports that the Virginia Tech murderer had been
taking antidepressants of some sort. And he wasn’t the first school
shooter to be doing so. As far back as 1998, a 15-year-old from
Oregon who opened fire in his school cafeteria was on Prozac and Columbine
killer Eric Harris was on another brand of antidepressant. So why
aren’t we, as a society, looking at the causes of children’s
alienation rather than medicating them into oblivion? And why isn’t
the correlation between antidepressants and manic behavior being
investigated? Instead, around the same time as the Virginia Tech massacre, the
Journal of the American Medical Association published a new study
claiming that the “benefits” of antidepressants trump the risk of
increasing some children’s chances of having suicidal thoughts and
behaviors. And newspapers carried cute little stories about Prozac for
pets. It’s not only insane but grossly irresponsible that we continue
to allow the pursuit of drug company profits to harm our children in
this manner, not to mention that we are apparently in danger of creating
a new generation of manic dogs. Understanding
the Killing – April 18, 2007
It’s likely that there were multiple causes for
this awful rampage. Among them are the abhorrent “right to bear
arms” and laws that allow guns to be sold to mentally unbalanced
people; an aggressive and warring culture; a society that medicalizes
young people’s problems, leading to the killer’s apparent use of medication for
depression, which can cause suicidal or homicidal tendencies; an
institutional attitude that characterized the first two murders as a
“domestic dispute” and therefore not all that important; media
coverage of other mass shootings (many in schools,) which creates
copycat crimes; and a tendency for a sort of lurid ambulance chasing
fascination with such crimes. But I would also add to that list a school
culture that is all the things I remembered from my youth but worse.
Perhaps they’re all linked. And while I’m most definitely not
trivializing this horrible massacre, there are this many or more people
being killed in places like Iraq and Afghanistan every day. How much do we value those lives?
Food for thought, here.
Who are the Child Care “Experts?” – April 6,
2007
However, the most compelling part of this study is the finding that parenting quality was a much more important predictor of child development than was type, quantity or quality of child care. That is good news in light of a recent Canadian study authored by Dr. Fraser Mustard entitled Early Years 2: Putting Science Into Action. As back-up for its recommendations for institutionalizing early childhood, the Mustard report blamed everything from substance abuse and illiteracy on a supposed lack of parenting skills. In an op-ed piece last week in the National Post newspaper, Kate Tennier, founder of Advocates for Childcare Choice, which favors funding the child rather than the daycare spot, quoted Mustard as saying that only about one-third of parents are highly competent, the rest are “OK” and “about 17 percent are godawful.” There will always be some parents who could use some help with parenting skills and/or community support raising their families (not to mention access to affordable housing, fairly paying jobs and so on.) But instead of shifting the responsibility onto institutions and thinking up Orwellian ways to screen children in order to slot them into ever-earlier formal learning environments, governments should be giving parents and children the respect they deserve. For starters, they could foster a culture of learning in every home, provide community and tax supports to parents who wish to stay at home with their young children, and encourage changes in workplace culture to include nursing mothers; young children; and career-track part-time, flex-time or home-based work. If we want to prepare the next few generations of
children for happy, productive, socially-aware adult lives, we need to
rethink many things, including our attitudes toward childhood. And we
need to decide who are the experts in regards to our children: the
children and their parents, or bureaucrats and politicians. It’s OK to be an Introvert (except in school) –
April 1, 2007
Our society favors extroverts – and they apparently outnumber introverts by about three to one. They dominate public and social life, doing well as politicians. Being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, and is seen as a mark of confidence and leadership. Introvert-type behavior, on the other hand, is considered abnormal. An introvert is considered to have a problem – to be antisocial and shy, to have an illness which needs to be overcome. However, research has shown there is a biological basis to it, relating to different types of brain activity. The introvert/extrovert concept goes back to the 1920s and the psychologist Carl Jung, on whose work the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is based. Jung was, in fact, an introvert, as were Katherine Hepburn, Hans Christian Andersen and Albert Einstein. Stock market guru Warren Buffet and philanthropist billionaire investor George Soros are others. Of course, like anything else, most of us are a combination of both types. School can be a terrible place for an introverted child who dreads its demands to “perform.” I shudder even now when I remember my fear when called upon to read aloud in front of the class, to write a rhyming couplet on demand, to stand in the aisle beside my desk and sing the scale or answer a math question. Group activities are prevalent at school, and that inhibits the development of ideas in introverts. Also, we need time to think about the answer we will give to a question, but teachers tend to move on to the next person if a student doesn’t respond quickly. Fortunately, introverts tend to be artistic and smart – more than 75 percent of people with an IQ above 160 are introverted – so I did well in school. Another feature of introverts is that, unlike their opposites, they don’t need a lot of encouragement or positive reinforcement to work hard or succeed; nor do they care much what others think of them. Nevertheless, school was not a pleasant experience for me. Hmmm, come to think of it, it might not be a great place for extroverts, either, because their short attention spans, impatience with frustration and love of action could get them labeled! Anyway, not understanding that introversion is normal and doesn’t need to be cured, my more extroverted mother pushed me to be more social and less “shy,” in the same way she tried to push my father into social situations where he wasn’t comfortable. Thinking about how frustrating it must have been for her to live with my father and me, I realized that this is probably the source of much conflict and concern among home educating families. How much simpler life would be if parents understood and appreciated these sorts of personality differences, gave their introverted children a place to be themselves and trusted them to be extroverted when appropriate. Here’s a good website for parents of introverts.
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Topics & Passions: natural learning ~ What I'm Reading:
Courage for the Earth: Rachel Carson by Peter Matthiessen, ed
(2007, Houghton Mifflin)
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The Big Picture – April
16, 2007