Helicopter Parenting? Why There Are No Medals In The Parenting Olympics
The following is re-posted from Psychcentral’s Dr John M Grohol, and poses some interesting questions about some trends towards over-parenting or “Helicopter Parenting” and it’s possible impacts on our kids. While there are many children who come from situations of parental neglect and laxity, there are also concerns regarding over protection. See what you think about what he has to say…
Let Your Children Be Children
Everyday, the same scene plays itself out across American neighborhoods across the United States. Mothers pull up in their Suburbans and Lexus SUVs at the entrance to their housing development. Even though the families live in perfectly safe, middle-class (or better) neighborhoods, parents feel the need to chauffeur their children the few blocks from the bus stop to home. Why?
This behavior may be understandable if the child is 5 or 6. But at 8 or 10, this behavior is ludicrous and symptomatic of a dangerous infection that has spread throughout this country in the latest generation of parents.
If not stopped, we may end up raising a whole generation or two of children who have little effective life coping skills and no connection or understanding to the world around them.
If you’re around 30 or older, think back to your own childhood. How much time was scheduled by your parents, and how much free time did you have on your own, to do with as you please? You may be surprised at the contrast between the scripted lives you as a parent plan for your children versus your own unscripted, imagination-driven childhood.
Here’s another scene from modern parenting. A child holds their 8th birthday party at a local birthday party place. All the parents not only arrive to drop off their child to attend the party, but also stay to supervise the child during the entire time they are at the party.
This isn’t just one or two worried parents — this appears to be very much the norm in many towns throughout middle-class America now. When it’s time to eat the cake, the birthday song is sung, the cake is cut, and then all the kids sit down at long rows of tables and begin eating. Their parents stand, like a prison lineup, along the outside walls of the room, keeping a close eye on their child.
At the first sign of a child’s conflict, parents are quick to intervene nowadays. “I just want everyone to play nicely,” they may explain. But they’re depriving their child of the opportunity to learn invaluable problem-solving skills. Especially if a child has no siblings, how else are they going to learn such skills except through trial-and-error interaction with their peers?
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There are many rationales for these kinds of parenting behaviors. But if we look at some of the most common ones, they all don’t stand up to tests of data, reasoning or logic.
One rationale is safety. “I’ll do anything to protect my child!” Okay, then why are you driving them home from the bus stop a few blocks away? Because statistics show that your child (age 15 years or younger) is 5 to 7 times more likely to die in your car than they are to be abducted by a stranger. And put into perspective, both are highly unlikely occurrences to begin with. With approximately 78 million children in the U.S., only 1,638 children died in car accidents in 2008, compared with only 200 who were abducted by a stranger.
Still another excuse for this behavior is a sense that there’s no reason not to help out our children or placate them with this thing or that. Why not buy them that toy while we’re out shopping for some new clothes? Why not pick them up at the entrance to our housing development?
Because it teaches our children that every outing is a chance for a reward. So much like a mouse in a cage pressing a button to receive a pellet of food, our children can inadvertently learn that any type of outing results in a toy and all of life is just another opportunity for a reward. When a reward isn’t granted, it’s an excuse to act out or punish those who grant the rewards.
Another rationale is wanting to provide our children with all the benefits we didn’t have. If our parents seemed uninterested or didn’t spend as much time with us as we may have wished, we’re going to ensure we’re there every minute for our children.
But somehow this has become twisted to trying to smooth over every life bump our child experiences, so that they experience virtually none at all. By the time they go off to college, they have had only this womb-like protected life that little prepares them for the realities of life — people who treat us badly, failure at something we want to be good at, rejection by others, and honest hardship.
Understandably, there may be times where a parent has good reason to need to pick up their child at their bus-stop, or attend a birthday party with them. But these should be exceptions, not the rule.
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If you see yourself in this entry, it’s not too late. I highly recommend one of the following books, either Richard Weissbourd’s The Parents We Mean To Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development or Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy. These books talk about the importance of letting children be children, exploring their imagination on their own, on their own unscripted and unscheduled time. The research we have on child development suggests this results not only in happier children, but children who grow up to be more well-adjusted adults.
There is no “right way” to parent (contrary to what the hundreds of parenting books suggest). The right way is to find the way that works for you and your partner, while respecting the needs of your child. Those needs include the need to be connected with nature, to be connected and learn how to interact with other children who aren’t their siblings, with no adults around.
What if your child doesn’t want to play outside or walk from the bus stop? Well, they often don’t want to learn arithmetic or do their chores, and yet we still find a way to have them understand the value of each. And if you’re feeling pressure from other moms, well, now’s the time to take a stand for what you believe in and what the research shows. Your child will thank you in the end.
Children — like adults — learn by doing, as much as they learn through formal teaching. If we take those informal learning opportunities away from our children, we ultimately hurt them while ironically trying to help them. We hurt their ability to learn the way they were intrinsically built to learn — through natural experiences, through interactive experiences with their peers, and through unscripted, unstructured play time.
If you want to help your child today, give them time to be a child.
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Emotional Intelligence: Learning To Roll With The Punches
It’s a hot-buzz topic that covers everything from improving workplace performance and successfully climbing the corporate ladder to building the happiest of marriages to ending school bullying. But what exactly is Emotional Intelligence (EI)? If we lack it, can we learn it? And how do we know if our EI is high or low? Is it only high if we’re really, really nice?
Three scholarly researchers – including University of Cincinnati Psychology Professor Gerry Matthews – delved into the science of EI and published “What We Know About Emotional Intelligence: How it Affects Learning, Work, Relationships, and Our Mental Health.”
Published by MIT Press (2009), the book was recently awarded the American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence – the PROSE Awards – in the biological and life sciences category of biomedicine and neuroscience. The book, co-authored by Matthews, Moshe Zeidner (University of Haifa) and Richard D. Roberts (Center for New Constructs, Educational Testing Service, Princeton, N.J.), was also on display at the UC Libraries’ Authors, Editors and Composers Reception and Program from 3:30-5 p.m., Thursday, April 22, in the Russell C. Myers Alumni Center.
MIT Press promotions describe EI as the “ability to perceive, regulate and communicate emotions – to understand emotions in ourselves and others.” Workplaces want to test for it to find the most EI-talented employees, and consultants are touting training and EI tests to improve productivity. “In the popular writings, EI tends to be defined very broadly and one can’t proceed with scientific research with such a vague and broad definition,” Matthews says.
Matthews’ research interests have explored how stress, mood and coping ability can affect performance on tests, in the workplace and on the highway. He adds that amid the grim economy, even the people who have jobs are feeling high levels of stress in the workplace and are feeling more challenged by workplace demands and concerns about job security. In general terms, those who can roll with the punches – with a shrug and a smile – may have higher Emotional Intelligence.
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Then again, “The intimate association of personality and emotion sets a trap for researchers interested in Emotional Intelligence,” writes Matthews. “It might seem that happy, calm states of mind should be seen as the person imbued with high Emotional Intelligence. However, such emotional tendencies may be no more than a consequence of biases in brain functioning or information-processing routines operating without insight or ‘intelligence.’ Some individuals – in part because of their DNA – are simply fortunate in being prone to pleasant moods, so it follows that emotional states do not alone provide an index of Emotional Intelligence,” Matthews states in the book.
In fact, Matthews says he’s skeptical that people who are better at managing stress hold higher Emotional Intelligence, but as the researchers found as they tried to narrow down the science of Emotional Intelligence, more research is needed. For instance, is someone with higher EI in the workplace more productive, or are they just better at self-promotion and forming positive relationships with co-workers? Matthews says he believes EI appears to be very modestly related to workplace performance, and could turn out to be nothing more than a business fad.
He adds the researchers are also skeptical about all of those EI tests, particularly those self-assessments. After all, people could be rating themselves the way they see themselves or the way they would like to be seen, and not like they actually are.
Currently, authors Matthews and Roberts are researching the testing of EI through video scenarios. The situation judgment test involves watching the videos unfold a challenging situation, and then the video comes to a stop and offers different options for resolving the problem. Matthews is building on his earlier research which explored whether negative moods affected good decision making abilities. “Through the video project, the idea is to see if emotionally intelligent people are better able to make rational decisions under stress,” he says.
The researchers are also examining the link between EI and school social and emotional learning programs.
Source:
Dawn Fuller
University of Cincinnati
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Pack Up Your Troubles And (Apparently) Smile: Physical Enclosure Helps Psychological Closure
Read the original research paper HERE (Free PDF-internal link)
ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2010) — Finding it hard to get over a failed love interest? Just can’t get details of a bad financial move out of your head.
A new study from the Rotman School of Management suggests you might want to stick something related to your disappointment in a box or envelope if you want to feel better. In four separate experiments researchers found that the physical act of enclosing materials related to an unpleasant experience, such as a written recollection about it, improved people’s negative feelings towards the event and created psychological closure. Enclosing materials unrelated to the experience did not work as well.
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“If you tell people, ‘You’ve got to move on,’ that doesn’t work,” said Dilip Soman, who holds the Corus Chair in Communication Strategy at the Rotman School and is also a professor of marketing, who co-wrote the paper with colleagues Xiuping Li from the National University of Singapore and Liyuan Wei from City University of Hong Kong. “What works is when people enclose materials that are relevant to the negative memories they have. It works because people aren’t trying to explicitly control their emotions.”
While the market implications might not be immediately obvious, Prof. Soman believes the findings point to new angles on such things as fast pick-up courier services and pre-paid mortgage deals that relieve people’s sense of debt burden. If people realize that the memory of past events or tasks can be distracting, perhaps there is a market for products and services that can enclose or take away memories of that task.
The paper is to be published in Psychological Science.
Read the original research paper HERE (Free PDF-internal link)
Game On: The Decline of Backyard Play
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I found this post from Peter G. Stromberg @ Psychology Today. It really got me thinking about kids and the pressure that we may put on them as parents…What do you think?
A few weeks ago I flew to Denver with my younger daughter so that she could participate in a volleyball tournament; she has been travelling to tournaments for the last two years but this is the first time we had to fly. My daughter is 11 years old.
Shouldn’t my daughter be riding her bike around the neighborhood and jumping rope with her friends? Why is she, at age 11, playing on a team coached by a former Olympic-level athlete and competing against nationally-ranked teams based thousands of miles from our home? There is research to suggest that unstructured play and basic movement activities (running, jumping, balancing) are more beneficial for children of her age than specialized training in one particular sport. Why in the world should an 11 year old child be in year-round volleyball training? Well, let me explain.
I would guess that many readers who are older than 30 will share my own experience: at my daughter’s age and into my early teens, I spent every possible minute getting into pick-up games of basketball and football with my friends or just roaming around outside. This approach didn’t produce a skilled athlete, but it sure was fun (and cheap). Today, in most areas of the country, such activities are simply less available. One reason my daughter doesn’t head down to the park to play with her friends is that they aren’t there-they are at soccer practice, or piano lessons, or having pre-arranged play dates.
There has been a recent and enormous shift in the way children play in our society, away from unstructured outside play and towards organized competition under adult supervision. Why? One reason that will come quickly to mind is stranger danger. Many parents (including me, by the way) now believe it is unsafe for children-perhaps particularly girls-to be outside without adult supervision. Although neighborhoods vary, statistics that I have seen on this issue do not support the belief that in general accidents or attacks on children are more frequent now than, say, 30 years ago. It seems more likely that what has changed is extensive news coverage of issues such as attacks on children, which often fosters the belief that such events are frequent.
In short, actual danger from strangers is probably not the real reason for the decline in outside play. Well, how about this? Public funding for playgrounds, parks, and recreation centers has been declining since the 1980s. There aren’t as many places to go for public play anymore, and the ones that persist are likely not as well-maintained.
That’s relevant, but it still isn’t really at the heart of why my daughter plays highly competitive volleyball at such a young age. The fact is that if she doesn’t play now and decides to take up the sport at 14 or 15, the train will have left the station. Unless a child has extraordinary athletic gifts, she will be so far behind by that age that she will not be able to find a place on a team. It isn’t only that opportunities for unstructured public play have declined, it’s that opportunities for highly competitive play have expanded to such an extent that in some sports that is all that exists. There are simply no possibilities in my part of the country for recreational volleyball for children 10-18. And the situation is similar for many other sports as well: our focus on producing highly competitive teams with highly skilled participants leads to a lack of focus on producing opportunities for children who simply want to play a sport casually.
This, I think, gets us close to probably the most important reason that highly competitive sport for the few has begun to replace recreational sport for the many among children today. We as a society don’t care about recreational sport for the many. The logic of entertainment has come to control youth sports. Parents, kids, and the society as a whole are excited by the possibility of championships, cheering spectators, and (for the really elite) media coverage. And we aren’t really excited by our children playing disorganized touch football until they have to come in for dinner. What’s the point of that? Nobody is watching.
This isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just the way our society works. I really wish my kids could play pick up games and intramurals the way their not-so-athletically-talented dad did. But the intramurals and pick up games are far fewer now. Strangely enough, childhood obesity rates have skyrocketed as they have faded. Or maybe that’s not strange at all.
This post reflects on issues I have been thinking about for years, but it is also heavily influenced by a recent book called Game On by ESPN writer Tom Farrey. To learn more about play in general, visit my website
from Peter G. Stromberg @ Psychology Today
Self Help For Anxiety & Depression: A List Of FREE Interactive Self Help Websites
Today I wanted to get around to doing what I have been meaning to do for a while and post a list of free access interactive and/or educational websites which I have come across. These sites are fantastic resources and each one offers a different way to get involved with your recovery. Please note I am not affiliated with any of these sites and they are not affiliate sites. I hope you find one or more useful as I know many of my clients have.
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Self Help / Educational Websites
Updated 27th March 2010
- Anxiety Online
- Beyond Blue
- Depnet
- Bipolar Disorder Education Program
- Blackdoginstitute
- BlueBoard
- BluePages
- CRUfAD – Self Help
- Depression Education Program
- e-couch
- Feardrop – online exposure therapy for phobias
- Living Well Working Well
- MoodSwings
- Multicultural Information on Depression online (MIDonline)
- Virtual Clinic
- Added 27th March 2010
- Depressioncenter.net
- Beatingtheblues (UK)
There you have it! Check them out and let me know what you think. Know of any others? (No affiliate sites please).
Money & Happiness: Higher Income Only Increases Contentment If You’re ‘Keeping Up With The Jones’s’
Read the original research paper HERE (Free PDF internal link)
Source :ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2010)
A study by researchers at the University of Warwick and Cardiff University has found that money only makes people happier if it improves their social rank. The researchers found that simply being highly paid wasn’t enough — to be happy, people must perceive themselves as being more highly paid than their friends and work colleagues.
The researchers were seeking to explain why people in rich nations have not become any happier on average over the last 40 years even though economic growth has led to substantial increases in average incomes.
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Lead researcher on the paper Chris Boyce from the University of Warwick’s Department of Psychology said: “Our study found that the ranked position of an individual’s income best predicted general life satisfaction, while the actual amount of income and the average income of others appear to have no significant effect. Earning a million pounds a year appears to be not enough to make you happy if you know your friends all earn 2 million a year.”
The study entitled “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction” will be published in the journal Psychological Science. The researchers looked at data on earnings and life satisfaction from seven years of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which is a representative longitudinal sample of British households.
First they examined how life satisfaction was related to how much money each person earned. They found however that satisfaction was much more strongly related to the ranked position of the person’s income (compared to people of the same gender, age, level of education, or from the same geographical area).
The results explain why making everybody in society richer will not necessarily increase overall happiness — because it is only having a higher income than other people that matters.
The three authors of the paper were Chris Boyce, Gordon Brown (both of the University of Warwick’s Department of Psychology), and Simon Moore of Cardiff University.
Read the original research paper HERE (Free PDF internal link)
‘Quirky Yes,Hopeless No’:Making Quirky Cool & Helping Kids With Aspergers Learn Social Skills
By PATRICIA MORRIS BUCKLEY – For the North County Times | Posted: March 17, 2010Beth Wagner Brust knows there are few things more difficult than watching your child struggle to make friends. Her youngest son, Ben, was diagnosed with ADHD in kindergarten, but by third grade he still didn’t have any friends.
“My pediatrician said he had Asperger’s,” explained Brust, a Carmel Valley resident. Asperger’s is considered a higher form of autism that makes social interaction, among other things, difficult. “Like any parent, I was thrown for a loop. Then I heard about the Friends Club in Carlsbad.”
The Friends Club is a safe, non-threatening and non-stressful environment where kids with Asperger’s get together to learn the “unwritten” social skills. Now it’s inspired Brust and Cynthia La Brie Norall, Ph.D., to write “Quirky, Yes — Hopeless, No: Practical Tips to Help Your Child with Asperger’s Syndrome Be More Socially Accepted” (St. Martin’s Griffin).
Asperger’s children are often the kids who are bullied, sit alone at lunch and rarely get an invitation to a birthday party. But at the club, they learn such skills as making eye contact, greeting people, letting others talk about their interests and being less rigid through games, breaking skills into baby steps and role playing.
By learning the subtle social cues that typical children take for granted, they can begin making friends. And that’s exactly what happened with Ben.
“By the end of the first year, I heard him ask another kid, ‘Am I boring you?’ and I almost fell over,” recalled Brust. “I’d never heard him say that before. It was amazing to see that growth in six months.”
The Friends Club was the brainchild of Norall, an educational behavior psychologist. While working at a preschool in Valley Center in 1992, she first encountered children with autism. That’s around the time that autism diagnoses began to rise dramatically. Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 out of every 100 8-year-olds is autistic.
“I just found this population fascinating,” Norall said. “I went to every seminar and conference I could on autism. I really wanted to help them.”
In 1999, she opened her own practice, Comprehensive Autism Services and Education (CASE). A year later, she started the Friends Club when her mentor, Dr. B.J. Freeman, a child psychologist who founded the Autism Clinic at UCLA, suggested that she do something to help those higher on the autistic spectrum.
The Friends Club broke the commonly held professional belief that social groups should also contain typical children.
“I got a lot of negative criticism over that decision,” she said. “But these kids know that they are different and if I brought in typical kids, the Aspies (kids with Asperger’s) would stand out. They needed a place to connect.”
Norall likes to tell the story of a teenage girl on her first time at Friends Club who said, “Well, Cynthia, it’s about time you put this together for my species.”
Nine years later, thousands of Aspies have been through the Friends Club. In addition to the branch in Carlsbad, there are Friends Club satellites in Napa, Vancouver, Canada and Oahu, Hawaii, and also a camp during the summer. Twenty-two groups have approximately 150 kids. Groups are broken into age categories; from very young (age 3 to 7), to tweeners, teens and young adults. Norall’s staff now numbers 50, a few of whom are Friends Club graduates. Each group contains six kids and two leaders.
Parents, amazed at the results, kept encouraging Norall to write a book. With that goal in mind, she’d kept extensive summaries of each activity as a report for the parents, but also to remind herself what the kids had taught her. Still, it took Brust, a children’s author herself, to persuade Norall to really get writing.
They decided they wanted the book, originally titled “Decoding Your Asperger’s Children: Lessons Learned at the Friends Club,” to be a practical parenting guide rather than a book on what Asperger’s is or how to “cure it.”
The book is organized alphabetically by topic, such as cooperation, discipline, bullying, perfectionism, anxiety or meltdowns. The lessons teach “people skills,” including how to greet others, how to make eye contact, how to pay compliments, how to cooperate and ask for help and how not to be rude.
Ultimately, Norall and Brust wanted their readers to understand how the Aspie’s brain is wired differently. Then they can not only help the youngsters, but also be less frustrated overall and enjoy the differences these kids bring to the world.
“We wanted a book that had no jargon, but written in a conversational tone like Dr. Spock,” said Brust. “We also wanted readers to be able to skip around in it. There’s always a ‘trouble du jour,’ and you can read just about that. Parents of special needs kids have no time and it doesn’t take a big time commitment to read this book. We’ve made it as accessible as possible.”
The finished manuscript quickly sold to mainstream publisher St. Martin’s Griffin. “Quirky, Yes — Hopeless, No” hit stores in August. Alyse Diamond, the book’s editor, believes there’s nothing like it in a market filled with technical books by doctors or memoirs by mothers.
“What gripped me was that this wasn’t just another book written by a doctor,” said Diamond. “The co-writer is a mom and she’s been in the trenches with her son, so together they bring a unique perspective that you don’t normally see. More and more kids are being diagnosed with autism every year. It’s not going away. That’s why it’s important to us to get a book like this in the hands of people who need it.”
Reaction to the book has been highly positive. Publisher’s Weekly said, “Although a dozen or more experts are cited, the book is conversational in tone, full of insights and will help and encourage parents and their Aspie or high-functioning autistic kids alike.”
Temple Grandin, the author of “Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships” and “Thinking in Pictures,” and perhaps the most famous person with autism, said in her review, “This is a fantastic book for helping people on the autism spectrum learn social skills. Great for individuals on the spectrum, teachers, and social skills training specialists.”
While good reviews from major publications and notable names in the autism field are welcome, the ones that mean the most to Norall and Brust are those from parents and professionals who work with the children.
“I want everyone to read this book so that the teasing will stop,” said Brust. “These kids can be creative and fun. I love being around Ben because he thinks differently. But that can also be frustrating because we don’t understand how they think.”
The good news is that Ben, now a senior at Canyon Crest High School, is doing so well that he plans to attend community college soon. While he just stopped going to Friends Club, Brust sees the lasting value of what he learned there and hopes that people who read their book will experience some of the same social connections he’s had.
“This book is about helping Aspie kids navigate the world better,” Brust said. “Every chapter has something specific and concrete that parents can do to make a difference. Our goal is to help as many of these kids as possible.”
REPOST: Talking to Your Child About What’s in The News
I originally blogged this post on August 5th last year. With the recent natural disasters in places like Haiti and Chile, and also the very raw and terrible tragedies involving young children and youth closer to my home in southeast Queensland, Australia, I have decided to repost it. I have done so in case it is helpful for other parents who, like myself are dealing with kids who are concerned about what they see and hear and read about troubling local and world events…
My experience is that many children, particularly those who have generalised anxiety can become quite distressed by exposure to seemingly innocuous exposure to events that are a part of everyday life.
Although news gleaned from television, radio, or the Internet often is a positive educational experience for kids, problems can arise when the images presented are violent or the stories touch on disturbing topics. While we worry about our childrens’ exposure to violence and sexual content in movies, on the internet, and on tv, we need to remember that news programs shpw often live and real images and media from real events which are often distressing and increasingly graphic.
News about a natural disaster, such as the devastating earthquake in China or cyclone in Myanmar, could make kids worry that something similar is going to hit home, or fear a part of daily life — such as rain and thunderstorms — that they’d never worried about before.
Reports on natural disasters, child abductions, homicides, terrorist attacks, and school violence can teach kids to view the world as a confusing, threatening, or unfriendly place.
How can you deal with these disturbing stories and images? Talking to your kids about what they watch or hear will help them put frightening information into a reasonable context.
How Kids Perceive the News
Unlike movies or entertainment programs, news is real. But depending on a child’s age or maturity level, he or she may not yet understand the distinctions between fact and fantasy. By the time kids reach 7 or 8, however, what they see on TV can seem all too real. For some youngsters, the vividness of a sensational news story can be internalized and transformed into something that might happen to them. A child watching a news story about a bombing on a bus or a subway might worry, “Could I be next? Could that happen to me?”Natural disasters or
stories of other types of devastation can be personalized in the same manner. A child in Massachusetts who sees a house being swallowed by floods from a hurricane in Louisiana may spend a sleepless night worrying about whether his home will be OK in a rainstorm. A child in Chicago, seeing news about an attack on subways in London, might get scared about using public transportation around town. TV has the effect of shrinking the world and bringing it into our own living rooms.
By concentrating on violent stories, TV news also can promote a “mean-world” syndrome and give kids an inaccurate view of what the world and society are actually like.
Talking About the News
To calm children’s fears about the news, parents should be prepared to deliver what psychologists call “calm, unequivocal, but limited information.” This means delivering the truth, but only as much truth as a child needs to know. The key is to be as truthful yet as inexplicit as you can be. There’s no need to go into more details than your child is interested in. Although it’s true that some things — like a natural disaster — can’t be controlled, parents should still give kids space to share their fears. Encourage them to talk openly about what scares them.
Older kids are less likely to accept an explanation at face value. Their budding skepticism about the news and how it’s produced and sold might mask anxieties they have about the stories it covers. If older kids are bothered about a story, help them cope with these fears. An adult’s willingness to listen sends a powerful message.
Teens also can be encouraged to consider why a frightening or disturbing story was on the air: Was it to increase the program’s ratings because of its sensational value or because it was truly newsworthy? In this way, a scary story can be turned into a worthwhile discussion about the role and mission of the news.
Tips for Parents
Keeping an eye on kids’ TV news habits can go a long way toward monitoring the content of what they hear and see. Other tips:
- Recognize that news doesn’t have to be driven by disturbing pictures. Public TV programs, newspapers, or newsmagazines specifically designed for kids can be less sensational — and less upsetting — ways of getting information to children.
- Discuss current events with your child regularly. It’s important to help kids think through stories they hear about. Ask questions: What do you think about these events? How do you think these things happen? These questions can encourage conversation about non-news topics too.
- Put news stories in proper context. Showing that certain events are isolated or explaining how one event relates to another helps kids make better sense of what they hear. Broaden the discussion from a disturbing news item to a larger conversation: Use the story of a natural disaster as an opportunity to talk about philanthropy, cooperation, and the ability of people to cope with overwhelming hardship.
- Watch the news with your kids to filter inappropriate or frightening stories.
- Anticipate when guidance will be necessary and avoid shows that aren’t appropriate for your child’s age or level of development.
- If you’re uncomfortable with the content of the news or if it’s inappropriate for your child’s age, turn it off.
- Talk about what you can do to help. In the case of a news event like a natural disaster, kids may gain a sense of control and feel more secure if you find ways to help those who have been affected.
sourced from http://www.kidshealth.org
reviewed by: Mary L. Gavin, MD
Viva La Siesta!: A Nap Significantly Boosts the Brain’s Learning Capacity
BERKELEY — If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don’t roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter.
Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings. The results support previous data from the same research team that pulling an all-nighter — a common practice at college during midterms and finals — decreases the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40 percent, due to a shutdown of brain regions during sleep deprivation.
“Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” said Matthew Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the lead investigator of these studies.
In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels.
At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn.
Matthew Walker, assistant psychology professor, has found that a nap clears the brain to absorb new information.
These findings reinforce the researchers’ hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s shor
- Students who napped (green column) did markedly better in memorizing tests than their no-nap counterparts. (Courtesy of Matthew Walker)
t-term memory storage and make room for new information, said Walker, who presented his preliminary findings on Sunday, Feb. 21, at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, Calif.
Since 2007, Walker and other sleep researchers have established that fact-based memories are temporarily stored in the hippocampus before being sent to the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which may have more storage space.
“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder,” Walker said.
In the late
st study, Walker and his team have broken new ground in discovering that this memory-refreshing process occurs when nappers are engaged in a specific stage of sleep. Electroencephalogram tests, which measure electrical activity in the brain, indicated that this refreshing of memory capacity is related to Stage 2 non-REM sleep, which takes place between deep sleep (non-REM) and the dream state known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM). Previously, the purpose of this stage was unclear, but the new results offer evidence as to why humans spend at least half their sleeping hours in Stage 2, non-REM, Walker said.
“I can’t imagine Mother Nature would have us spend 50 percent of the night going from one sleep stage to another for no reason,” Walker said. “Sleep is sophisticated. It acts locally to give us what we need.”
Walker and his team will go on to investigate whether the reduction of sleep experienced by people as they get older is related to the documented decrease in our ability to learn as we age. Finding that link may be helpful in understanding such neurodegenerative conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, Walker said.
In addition to Walker, co-investigators of these new findings are Bryce A. Mander and psychology undergraduate Sangeetha Santhanam.
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More than Words: The Importance of Physical Touch
Psychologists have long studied the grunts and winks of nonverbal communication, the vocal tones and facial expressions that carry emotion. A warm tone of voice, a hostile stare — both have the same meaning in Terre Haute or Timbuktu, and are among dozens of signals that form a universal human vocabulary.
But in recent years some researchers have begun to focus on a different, often more subtle kind of wordless communication: physical contact. Momentary touches, they say — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.
“It is the first language we learn,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life” (Norton, 2009), and remains, he said, “our richest means of emotional expression” throughout life.
The evidence that such messages can lead to clear, almost immediate changes in how people think and behave is accumulating fast. Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, studies have found. A sympathetic touch from a doctor leaves people with the impression that the visit lasted twice as long, compared with estimates from people who were untouched. Research by Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute in Miami has found that a massage from a loved one can not only ease pain but also soothe depression and strengthen a relationship.
In a series of experiments led by Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana, volunteers tried to communicate a list of emotions by touching a blindfolded stranger. The participants were able to communicate eight distinct emotions, from gratitude to disgust to love, some with about 70 percent accuracy.
“We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions,” Dr. Hertenstein said. Now it turns out to be “a much more differentiated signaling system than we had imagined.”
To see whether a rich vocabulary of supportive touch is in fact related to performance, scientists at Berkeley recently analyzed interactions in one of the most physically expressive arenas on earth: professional basketball. Michael W. Kraus led a research team that coded every bump, hug and high five in a single game played by each team in the National Basketball Association early last season.
In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors, Cassy Huang and Dr. Keltner, report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams; at the bottom were the mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.
The same was true, more or less, for players. The touchiest player was Kevin Garnett, the Celtics’ star big man, followed by star forwards Chris Bosh of the Toronto Raptors and Carlos Boozer of the Utah Jazz. “Within 600 milliseconds of shooting a free throw, Garnett has reached out and touched four guys,” Dr. Keltner said.
To correct for the possibility that the better teams touch more often simply because they are winning, the researchers rated performance based not on points or victories but on a sophisticated measure of how efficiently players and teams managed the ball — their ratio of assists to giveaways, for example. And even after the high expectations surrounding the more talented teams were taken into account, the correlation persisted. Players who made contact with teammates most consistently and longest tended to rate highest on measures of performance, and the teams with those players seemed to get the most out of their talent.
The study fell short of showing that touch caused the better performance, Dr. Kraus acknowledged. “We still have to test this in a controlled lab environment,” he said.
If a high five or an equivalent can in fact enhance performance, on the field or in the office, that may be because it reduces stress. A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”
“We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”
The same is certainly true of partnerships, and especially the romantic kind, psychologists say. In a recent experiment, researchers led by Christopher Oveis of Harvard conducted five-minute interviews with 69 couples, prompting each pair to discuss difficult periods in their relationship.
The investigators scored the frequency and length of touching that each couple, seated side by side, engaged in. In an interview, Dr. Oveis said that the results were preliminary.
“But it looks so far like the couples who touch more are reporting more satisfaction in the relationship,” he said. Again, it’s not clear which came first, the touching or the satisfaction. But in romantic relationships, one has been known to lead to the other. Or at least, so the anecdotal evidence suggests.
About Peter
Peter Brown BHMS (Hons) MPsychClin MAPS
I’m a Clinical Psychologist and have a private practice and consultancy in Brisbane Australia. I have 24 years experience in child, adult and family clinical psychology. I have a wonderful wife and three kids.
I am co-founder of Christian Wholeness Counselling Services.
I like researching issues of the brain & mind, reading and seeking out new books and resources for myself and my clients. I thought that others might be interested in some of what I have found also, hence this blog…
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