Robert Paterson's Weblog

Protecting our kids from dangers on the web - Street Proof them

Euan Semple was called into be on a show on TV in the UK to talk about how best to protect kids from online predators and porn.  Here is the interview.

The UK government was planning to set up all sorts of Controls, Safety Settings, Education Programs and Standards. Euan advocated common sense. Can the government really save us all? Do they understand the net anyway.

On the face of it "Banning Pedophiles" is good rabble rousing politics - but can a simple solutions work - might they even make the situation worse.

Todd Mundt and I talked about this and I went further. My own experience with my now grown up kids is that no matter what you do - they will find a way to get online and try everything.

Euan and the other guest and I are all agreed - The best protection is not a barrier but your own attention and engagement. It's our relationship with our children that is their best defence.

Kindergarten & Kids - Get the organizational conflict off the table

The rumour is that the government will announce a school based Kindergarten on or around April 4.

The current owners of private kindergartens and those that staff them, Early Childhood Educators, are naturally worried about losing out to schools and Teachers.

Again I appeal to government to think more broadly than merely react to each week's new crisis focused on our children.

All the fuss about kids has been about who wins or loses in the operational sphere. In the Child Care Facilities Act, it was the interests of the in group of the owners. Now with Kindergarten, the owners and ECD's will be pitted against the schools and the teachers. Guess who is not being talked about?

Yes we are not putting the kids first.

I don't mean that we should not give those involved attention. They have legitimate issues that have to be considered.

But if we only see the issue as staffing and ownership then we have a on/off binary problem that cannot be solved.

The only way to solve a complex problem - one that has more than 2 sides - is to go higher in context.

Please please be careful. It's not rocket science to look at complex problems. If you continue to simply react, the mess will only get worse.

Kindergarten on PEI - Will this be announced this week?

The rumor is that the government will announce the establishment of kindergarten in schools.

What will be the issues if this is to be done well?

What is the risk of by reacting, that they are making more trouble for themselves?

It feels like a plane where the pilot is reacting too much and is risking losing control. Is this what is happening on the 5th floor?

What we really need is a comprehensive strategy

CHANCES - What we do

When many think of CHANCES, they have images of kids in daycare, parents in classes.

This is all true but it is only the surface. This short slide/video show looks beyond the obvious to what is really at stake.

Our children's future is largely settled before they go to school.

The loss of all the young - how deep can a wound be?

For all my readers beyond Atlantic Canada - this weekend, 7 boys and the coach's wife were killed on an icy road just as they were about to get home after a basketball match.

My heart goes out to all their families and their friends.

Sometimes you can never really get over this kind of loss. I know that I haven't. My room mate at school Jamie Borwick went out with his brother Freddie at this time of year for a spin in Freddie's new car. It was a present from their parents to Freddie on his 21st birthday. They spun out on an icy bit of road and were killed. They were the only children of the Borwicks. Jamie was 18.

They were the first of my friends to die. I just could never come to terms with Jamie being gone. For decades I would dream of him being alive. I would always in this dream congratulate myself that I had been right - he was not dead. But of course, then I would awake and he would be gone.

"Our boys were a team," Cleland said. "We figured it's the only just thing we can do is to have one last gathering as a team.

"We're all of the belief that our boys are happy that they're still together, they're probably still playing someplace."

I was in Africa at the time but when I got back, it was in time to return to our school for a commemoration for the boys. Their parents were shattered. Having been through all the work of raising two boys all the way to adulthood - and now emptiness.

We can never really walk in another's shoes - but I could never be comforted and I suspect that the families and the friends of these boys will always have an ache no matter how much time goes by. Some wounds can never be healed. It has been 40 years and I weep again tonight.

The Christmas Story - CHANCES

For me part of the Christmas story that rings out over millennia is that great things often have humble beginnings. Christ is born not a Prince in a palace but in a stable. Humble beginnings outside the system seem to be the beginnings that have the possibility of having the greatest impact.

When I think of great innovation - I can think of hardly any that has not followed this metaphor of humble beginnings. Even Einstein, a patent clerk in Bern fits the model. Imagine the reaction of the System to the news that a theory that would change physics and our understanding of the universe had originated from a non scientist!

A few with insight come to wonder at the new marvel but most act like Herod and do their best to kill the new as they know that it can threaten "The System".

Nearly every great new idea goes though this process.

Then there seems to be a long pause while the full import of the idea sinks in. It is essential to have powerful advocates. Darwin had Huxley. Einstein his lifelong friend and mathematician Michel Besso. It took until 1915, 10 years, for Einstein to survive and to be recognized.  The battle over evolution is still being fought!

Why this post?

This is Ann Robertson, the ED of Chances Family Resource Centre and the person who brought Best Start to PEI.

I took this picture yesterday at the Xmas party for CHANCES where over 400 parents and kids attended.

I am posting today because I have a feeling that 2008 will be the 1915 year for Ann and all she stands for.

Her work is to create the conditions where parents can have the best chance of doing their very best in raising their kids. Her work is rooted in the knowledge that how we interact with our children in the first six years of life governs their future destiny - their health, their behavior, their ability to learn and to cope - their chance of having some dignity and control in their lives.

At this time when it is now clear to all that we have a real crisis on PEI, where our few kids have the worst educational and health outcomes of all children in Canada, I am seeing signs that the ideas and the practice that she brings may gain wider acceptance.

I first met in in the equivalent of a "Manger". She had a staff of 3 and little or no resources. I had just spent 18 months working for Dr Fraser Mustard, the intellectual giant behind promoting the core concept that where resources had to go was in the early years. This was the period where our destiny is literally shaped by our experience.

At first the system glommed onto the idea - but co-opted it as systems always do to add more resources to the existing system. Ann was given a clear choice be co-opted or die. She chose to fight.

The system could see what the future would mean if the underlying idea behind the Early Years was adopted. It would mean a shift in resources out of schools to parents. Heresy!

In spite of a massive campaign from the system to destroy her, Ann has assembled a magnificent organization and a great alliance of support. Like Martin Luther, who went to the German Princes to protect himself and his ideas that man can have a direct relationship to God, Ann found strong allies in the Federal Government like Wayne Easter here on PEI, John Godfrey in Toronto and Ken Dryden. Fraser would thunder support as well. All the time the case was being built and proved.

But the Inquisition does not deal in truth only in heresy and Ann stood for the heretical belief that parents, not institutions, were the key to their children's future and that given the right kind of support most parents could do a good job.

For the last 10 years, she has endured all that the system could throw at her. Budget cuts, reviews, delays, forensic accounting, shunning. You can imagine what it must have been like at times. The turning point came when the Conservative Government attempted to to renege on a deal with the Feds and to rip the funding away.

Then the people acted - mums came to the legislature and nursed their babies in the gallery. A child dropped her rattle on the ministers desk. People wrote, the radio and TV were full of parents making their support  clear. The government were shamed into backing down.

Never for one moment did Ann raise her own voice or act rudely.

My straw poll of the influencer's on PEI is that we are ready now. We have a new government. The science and the practice have all been proved. For Ann has gone beyond the theory. Her organization is working with the most challenged families in our community and transformation is occurring regularly. We have the research and the evidence of now more than 5 years of data covering the entire Island.

My question to us all then - knowing the power of any system - Do we care more about our kids and our future to start to get behind parents?

In this Christmas season, once Saturnalia and always a holiday based on the renewal of life, can we commit to the renewal of our society and back our kids who are of course our only future?

We have only a decade ahead of us to do this. If we lose this generation, we will be lost.

More First day at School - Ivy

This is Ivy - Jeremy and Tannis' daughter - this is her first day of school last year. Check out the knee
Here is how the day started ....

Ivy went to school yesterday for an hour of orientation with Tannis there to fill in forms and be nearby. They found out that her class is being split into two smaller classes of 13 students each -- can't argue with that student-teacher ratio. This morning she was determined to ride the bus to her second day of school, with no mommy and daddy around...until halfway through breakfast when she broke down in tears and started rethinking the bus plan. So we agreed that I'd take her in the car and we'd follow the bus to school to get the hang of the route.

On the way, we watched kids get on the bus and I suggested that Ivy could try envisioning what it might be like to be on the bus with them, seeing the same orchards going by and following the same route without me there. She asked me to define "envisioning" (she's a total word geek, always wanting to know what things mean), but before I could finish my explanation, she interrupted me: "Daddy, maybe if you'd stop talking, I could do some better envisioning." Fair enough.

How did your first day go?

Blogged with Flock

Tags: FirstDay of School, Ivy Hiebert,

Baby Einstein exposed - It's not stimulation but Trust and Engagement

Finally a devastating indictment of the idea that we can plonk young children in front of a screen and hope for them to develop well.(CNN & Time)

The claim always seemed too good to be true: park your infant in front of a video and, in no time, he or she will be talking and getting smarter than the neighbor's kid. In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby" series, researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers.

Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. "The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew," says Christakis. "These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos."

It's not the first blow to baby videos, and likely won't be the last. Mounting evidence suggests that passive screen sucking not only doesn't help children learn, but could also set back their development. Last spring, Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months, 40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours each day in front of a screen. Three studies have shown that watching television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street, delays language development. "Babies require face-to-face interaction to learn," says Dr. Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "They don't get that interaction from watching TV or videos. In fact, the watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development." Previous studies have shown, for example, that babies learn faster and better from a native speaker of a language when they are interacting with that speaker instead of watching the same speaker talk on a video screen. "Even watching a live person speak to you via television is not the same thing as having that person in front of you," says Christakis.

This growing evidence led the Academy to issue its recommendation in 1999 that no child under two years old watch any television. The authors of the new study might suggest reading instead: children who got daily reading or storytelling time with their parents showed a slight increase in language skills.

The key is Interaction - the very opposite of the TV route. Here is more if you are interested:-

Relationships - Complex Work - Science - Parenting

By chance, as I was looking for more material on Romanian Orphans, I came across this outstanding series on relationships, parenting and the complex outcomes on children of what they experience. It is Called the Science of Mother's day

Apart from the insight that it provides as to why so many kids do so badly at school, the issues related to daycare etc. It also provokes my thoughts about how we are organized for work.

I hear all the time about Stress in the workplace but see little evidence of the tasks themselves being stressful. Compared to say warfare or a dealing room, most jobs are exceptionally routine and require little skill or effort for a well rounded person. But the stress is real and we see its evidence in an ever increasing spiral of health care costs. The workplace drives much of our adult illness today. This slide taken from the Whitehall Study in the link shows that in the British Civil Service that you are 4 times more likely to die early of Heart Disease than the people at the top.

The further down you are in the modern hierarchy, the less long you will live and be healthy.

So here is the link - if you have a workplace where you neglect the needs for real relationship you will get an unhealthy and acting out workforce.

If you have a home life where this is also true, then your kids are in trouble. If there is no loving person in a child's life then later there will be little chance that he will be able to cope with life and little chance that any remedial action will turn this around. What is behind this bold statement?

The connection between neglect and abuse and a primate's ability to thrive or cope is the hormone called Cortisol. Neglect and abuse, drive the production of Cortisol.

High Cortisol levels are at the foundation of the behavioral and health problems of the modern age. What drives them is that we have dropped the ball on the reality that for humans, legitimate relationships are the holy grail for a good life and a healthy society.

I will come back soon to this and point out the dollar costs to the workplace and to the healthcare system. But in the follow on you can see the costs of abuse and neglect on PEI's Children.

War on Junk Food Begins

The reaction to the proposed ban on ads for Junk food (High sugar - high fat) in the UK began this week.

It is just a matter of time before it becomes generally accepted that:

• Most processed food is very bad for us
• That the food industry have known about this for a long time

It is tobacco all over again - the commercial media, the ad industry and the food industry will fight, lie and obstruct BUT the truth cannot be swept away and in a few years we will see that Bad Fod designed to be addictive for Kids will be seen as we see tobacco now.

Businesses that support good food will thrive. Local food systems will grow.