Idolising Children?

We will get there when the term “stay-at-home dad” is no longer required, when we just have mums and dads who do the work of raising a family which encompasses a whole morass of activity.

The Age have  nice little piece today on fatherhood and home.

It makes some good points. Most interesting though is the new research centre set up to look specifically at fatherhood - The Australian Fatherhood Research Network

A focus on finding ways to engage and include fathers, driven by men is an important step. And Dr. Richard Fletcher has done some good work in the past with this project.

Keep an eye on what they produce in the future.

Tags: fatherhood, research, dads

In the face of World Bank data such as this  - the luxury we have to explore the development and growth of our children in the way we do should never be taken for granted.

When for so many parents just finding enough food for their children is their biggest concern, you can’t help but think some of our concerns about our children could handle a little bit of perspective. Our idolising of childhood, compared to this reality, looks very trivial indeed.

Tags: children, poverty, childhood, development

While Kenneth Davidson focuses on education funding in today’s Age he misses several important questions about the investment in IT in Australian schools.

1. What is the value of one-off investment in technology that is currently becoming outdated every 18 months? Unless you are willing to fund ongoing IT infrastructure upgrades you are basically setting up the next 10 years of students to be learning on tools that will nnot be capable of handling the tools available.

2. What is the value of providing tools (i.e. computers) if you have not skilled up teachers to effectively support children’s learning and development with this technology? A better investment would be to pay Michael Wesch as a consultant for 3 months and run professional development courses for all teachers in media literacy and connectivity-driven education.

Instead, our kids get a bunch of new computers - another great short-term solution, from a government spouting long-term rhetoric.

Tags: idolisingchildren, policy, education, the age

Don Edgar has been pretty supportive of the work I’ve done to-date about childhood, development and all the issues that surround it.

The work he, and his wife Patricia Edgar do is inspiring. It always is a step ahead of the public debates. Their arguments are rooted in a breadth of research and common sense - there is no dogma, hysteria, just plain speaking and innovative and truly different ideas.

In The Age this week, Patricia wrote an opinion piece to support the launch of their new book: The New Child: In Search of Smarter Grown-ups from Wilkinson Publishing.

I haven’t read it yet. But, no doubt it will be about more than simply education.

The thing we often fail to grasp is that our children will grow up and be able to build on our knowledge, because they come after us they will know more about the way the world works and the way we interact. We need to find ways to embrace and engage with the world they are entering because we have to give them a values framework and teach them how to learn and support their development in this new environment. The new child requires a new kind of adult - an adult that respects and honours children as fellow human beings with responsibility for the future. Not just cute kids who need to go to school to learn stuff.

Tags: idolisingchildren, childhood, research

I’ve always had an interest in the work-life balance debate because I think our attitudes to work and productivity impact significantly on our children and contribute to the reasons why we idolise and misplace what is actually best for them.

Mum hasd been feeding me a few newspaper articles that are starting to share the stories of over-worked duel income households who are getting fed up with the pace of it all. It is fine when they are child-less, but people with children can’t maintain the ethic of 14-16 hour days many industries now expect.

So, it was disappointing not to see greater disapproval with Kevin Rudd’s recent comments about the work ethic he expects of the public service - day and night I understand he said.

Thankfully, Andrew Hamilton of the continually great Eureka Street online journal holds our PM to account…strange no one asked Kevin what happened to the hard fought for 40 hour working week.

Read a great piece here - http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=7566

I sat in a class about 10 years ago with a journalist named Steven Dow. He has always written brilliantly. I didn’t expect him to be writing a piece like this. Hats off - he captures the whole thing perfectly.

Thanks Steve.

“School’s in for dads”, The Age, 13 February 2008

…there are hundreds of millions of rants being posted everyday. most of it is worth the small about of bytes it takes up in (cyber)space.

But, over at Fairfax, some clever person has convinced Martin Flanagan to blog.

The world wide web will be a better place becuase of it. Read here.

Over at Eureka Street they have gone daily, and no longer are subscriber based - like New Matilda.

Their first daily offering are two beautiful poems from P.S.Cottier - a poet of whom I know nothing about and a ‘google’ search produces very little.

You can read my favourite “Progress” - here.

It resonates - because I’m definitely still following through as well…

The ongoing sensational reporting of research into the eating habits of children is driving me nuts!

“THOUSANDS of school children feast on junk food and fizzy drinks for breakfast, sparking fresh concerns over Australia’s childhood obesity epidemic,” writes Jill Stark in The Age.

There is no reference to the name of the study, who the authors were, or what the sample size was. No basic information that allows the general reader to make an assessment of this claim. Nothing to tell us about who those “one-in-ten” might be and why they have such a terrible diet to begin with..

Blogs always border on being mere immeadiate reaction rants - and that is what this post threatens to be. Needless to say, the broad sweeping brush strokes offered by much of the field of “public health” contribute to poor understanding of obesity and the overused term of “epidemic” does an injustice to children whose self-esteem is crushed by the moralising over weight in western society.

Children shouldn’t be eating junk food for breakfast, yes they need to eat healthy and the scrapping of any programs - like Nutrition Australia’s healthy eating program discussed in the article should be reported with concern. But, the issue of obesity is far more complex than we are yet willing to acknowledge. Easier to just point at the fat kids and say “get thin” - rather than develop a sophisticated idea about body image and weight that acknowledge body mass index and other population health measures do little for the individual child or family whose personal circumstances mean weight is one of the leats of their concerns.

In today’s Age Larissa Dubeki writes a suitably outraged opinion piece on hair removal products and brazillians beng marketed to the tween market - “Why 10 is too young for your first Brazillian”. The issue is endemic. In researching our next book, my wife Tania has established that the broad range of tween magazines are selling sex and adult concepts of sex to children as young as six.

The debate on this issue is really reaching a climax, but beyond bans on products, advertising and greater regulation of advertising (all which are needed). There is little discussion about why children are being marketed to in this way, how we let it get to this point, why we let it continue and what else can be done about it.

I don’t have a suite of answers to those questions - except to ask them, and then ask us to look at our culture more broadly.

I’d contend that the reason childhood is more sexualised is that our culture is becoming more sexualised. Of course that is a very simple way of defining it, but children live in the same society we do. The idea we can stop them from being exposed to the world in which they live is somewhat naieve.

Can we have a culture where the objectification of women can still be so rife and the demands placed on very specific and often demeaning forms of beauty and sexuality that we can completely shield our children from? I doubt it. The values of a society seep through to the new generations.

So, at some point in the debates about the sexualisation of childhood we have to start having a discussion about the sexualisation of adulthood.