Don’t leave a phone in your child’s bedroom

Mike the Psych's Blog

Just the presence of a smartphone or device is enough to disturb children’s sleep patterns as they anticipate the possibility of getting a message and can’t relax.

Using devices  at any point in the 90 minutes before bedtime more than doubles the risk of a poor night’s sleep. Even leaving it charging in the corner can have a detrimental effect, possibly because children are subconsciously engaged with them if they know they are within earshot.

Researchers ta Kings College London examined the digital behaviour of 125,000 children across four continents. It’s known from previous studies that around three-quarters of children and adolescents have at least one device in their bedroom at night.

Screen-based media may adversely affect sleep in different ways: psychologically stimulating the brain, delaying or interrupting sleep time, and affecting sleep cycles, physiology and alertness. They effect both the quality and the duration of sleep.

Sleep is undervalued but…

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Does “the terrible twos” actually exist?

I’ve never agreed with the idea of the “terrible twos” and now a former teacher, coach, and therapist has come out and said what many of us have long thought.

Tantrums are caused by lax parental discipline and unrealistic expectation rather than being an inevitable part of child development.

Gillian Bridge, in her new book The Significance Delusion says this behaviour is peculiar to the UK and the USA where there is an acceptance that toddlers’  frustrations are worked out in “semi-feral behaviour labelled the terrible twos” which doesn’t exist in many other parts of the world.

She says visitors to the UK are often baffled by misbehaving toddlers and either had higher standards of behaviour for their own children or were more indulgent of childhood without having expectations about a child’s self-control. Some thought Brits expected too much of their youngsters.

In more traditional cultures in Asia and Europe children are expected to learn quickly about hierarchies and the fact that adults had more rights than children because they had more knowledge, wisdom and experience. (Perhaps a lesson to be remembered as children get older and parents want to be their best friends on social media).

In Britain however toddlers are routinely taken to places where they are unlikely to behave well such as a pub or the cinema. “We take our children to an awful lot of places and get them to fit in with adult arenas which we wouldn’t have thought appropriate years ago” Bridge told the Times.

To make maters worse parents often ignore the ensuing meltdown or try to discipline them when their behaviour shouldn’t be unexpected in such environments.

She says this is apparent at the nursery gates where “harassed Mums and Dads … vainly attempt to restrain their struggling, squawking tinies or hopelessly give up on the attempt“. She says people view this almost as a rite of passage.

She added that parents are inconsistent and often didn’t behave to the standard they expected of their children.

Another so-called expert and super-many Jo Frost says these are the 5 areas where parents make mistakes.

Sleep – ensuring both parents and children get enough – and on a regular routine.

Food – establishing good eating habits and appropriate nutrition

Play – teaching children to socialise by playing and sharing

Screen time – no more than 30 minutes a day for toddlers

Manners – set a good example by behaving as you would like your children to behave.

I would include in that not smoking, getting drunk, or swearing in front of them – or is that too blindingly obvious?

Boys behaving disgracefully at school & where are the teachers?

I was sickened to read that an MPs report says sexual harassment is rife in schools. Girls as young as 11 are groped, taunted and called “slags” and “sluts” and unwanted touching is accepted as a daily part of life in the classroom.

Well it shouldn’t be!

Apparently many boys think nothing of pulling up skirts, slapping bottoms and feeling girls’ breasts. Nearly 3/4 of girls had been called offensive names, over half had been sexually harassed and a third of girls aged 16-18 had been sexually touched at school. It’s assault people. In the workplace people would be sacked and even charged with a criminal offence.

What are the boys thinking about? On-line pornography will no doubt get some blame but what about the fact that most schools let pupils use their smart phones at school where they can sext away to their hearts content rather than confiscate them on arrival.

What do their mothers think about this? Do they think it OK? And what about those with sisters. Are they happy for this to happen to them? (If so we have bred a sick society).

And what are teachers doing about it? Well overlooking it obviously. It’s not the kids who need compulsory SRE (sex and relationship education) but the teachers who need to be reminded that they have a responsibility for the children’s safety.

Next time it happens line up the offenders and shame them and if it’s serious report it to the police; next time report it to the police anyway. Three strikes and you’re out springs to mind. We are too liberal about these behaviours.When teachers themselves have been found guilty of inappropriate behaviour with children and of posted inappropriate material on social media sites what kind of example are they setting?

No wonder girls are suffering more from depression than boys (but I also blame them for spending too much time on social media)

Girls more depressed & you can blame social media

On the face of it today’s young people have never had it so good. Teenage pregnancies are down, fewer of them smoke and they drink less than previous generations.

So what have they got to be depressed about?

Well they spend an awful lot of time on social media, posting selfies, seeking approval from others. “Like me, like me” they seem to beg.

It’s a recipe for disaster and means they are continually comparing themselves with others. And it’s all artificial.

They spend hours making themselves up for selfies. I’ve taken loads of photographs at parties and invariably the women want to check the photos to make sure they’re OK.

Whether its posting selfies or posting posed photos on Facebook using cats, cuddly toys and even their babies as accessories, it’s all about wanting approval. Over half of teenagers are said to spend more than three hours a day on social media. (I’ve posted before about my views on Facebook)

And this is the most risk-averse generation we’ve seen for ages and maybe that’s part of the problem. No-one dares misbehave any more in case it gets on social media (as it will) and is then held against them later in life e.g. at job interviews.

It’s been said that young people work harder at schools. I don’t believe that for one minute. Exams are easier, course work is often group work and there has been such grade inflation over the years (at all levels in the education system) that you can’t rely on the grading system.

Nonetheless there has been a 10% increase in girls being treated for depression and a 50% increase in self-harming. For boys there has been a decrease over the same 10 year period.

The psychological distress reported includes sleep loss, inability to concentrate, feeling unhappy and worthless. Girls report suffering these twice as much as boys (30% of girls).

Whether or not social media is totally to blame it clearly plays a part. The head of the charity Sane believes the internet has played a huge part. No longer can students get relief from school or peer pressure at home. It’s now always-on.

But lets not forget pushy parents. Kids from better off families report higher levels of stress and anxiety. Lower status children seem to suffer less – perhaps because they have lower expectations, or maybe because they are more resilient.

Schools which have banned smartphones report better results. Parents need to think about reducing screen time and switching off the wi-fi.

As I’ve posted before about smartphone users – Get a Life!

The government has promised to put £1.4 billion into providing mental health support for young people. Maybe we should start helping them closer to home.

 

Free fruit for the kids – nice one Tesco Burnley

I first spotted this a few weeks ago after noticing kids walking round eating fruit.

My first thought was that they’d pinched it or were helping parents reduce the household bill by eating en route to the check-out.

But no, Tesco are trying to get kids to eat more healthily, removing sweets from check-out lanes and offering free fruit as part of their EatHappy Project.

So well done Billie (Community Champion) and the team at Tesco Burnley!

Update 29 July 2016:  Pity scheme has been suspended at Burnley store because of adults taking the fruit when it’s being rolled out in 800 other stores.

Matt  Davies, the new CEO is claiming the credit according to the Sun while the Times says the suggestion came from a Tesco worker in Lincolnshire!

Davies said “We’re hoping this will create healthy eating habits that will stay with children”

First posted 27 March 2016

Boys need a leg up at school but treating them like girls?

The latest research on children’s achievements suggest that there are a million lost boys out there.

These are the boys who have fallen behind girls in the communication skills they need to cope in class.

The research by the charity Save the Children and researchers from Bristol University says that this gap exists regardless of social class.

A professor of education at Bristol University said ” We found gender affects literacy attainment and language development irrespective of social class and includes boys from middle-class homes.”

The worst affected area was Merseyside, where 5-year old boys were 17% behind girls in reaching expected standards in language and communication skills. But even in Rutland, which has low poverty levels, the gap was still 14%.

Girls are ahead of boys in all 152 local council areas in England.

This is worrying because children who fall behind before they reach school tend to stay behind. Boys who are behind at age 5 are four times more likely to fall below expected reading standards by the age of 11.

They struggle to pay attention in class and find it hard to follow lessons or develop friendships. They are also less likely to get good GCSE results and A levels, complete degrees (already there are fewer boys than girls going to universities), get a good job and are more at risk of poor mental health.

A spokesman for Save the Children  said “this research gets to the nub of why boys fall behind. It shows that even before they walk through the school gates they are at a disadvantage that trails them through life.”

The researchers say that parents can help bridge the gap by bringing up boys more like girls.

The research shows that parents spend less time on activities that develop language skills with their sons rather than their daughters.

They sing more nursery rhymes and songs and do more drawings and paintings with girls than they do with boys. So parents can do more with their sons in this regard and also get them to talk more about their activities. They can also read story books as well as non-fiction books to get them interested in reading for pleasure (Dads take note especially).

The other problem boys have is their ability to concentrate and focus. So playing word games and completing drawing tasks can help them build up their concentration and attention span.

Save the Children is recommending having a graduate teacher in each nursery to boost boys’ levels of literacy before they get to school.

The report makes sense but the idea of bringing up boys more like girls is a misleading headline.

It’s been argued for years that there are too few male role models in nurseries and primary schools and the way young pupils are taught is more girl-friendly. Something I posted on several years ago.

Shah Jalal masjid dominates Burnley skyline

Ten years in the building this mosque and madrassa dominates the skyline near the Asda store in Burnley. The £100,000 one tonne white dome was lifted into place in 2014.

The Shah Jalal Masjid Mosque and Burnley Islamic Cultural Centre has cost £2m so far and the new minaret, which was paid for by the community, marked the completion of external work on the mosque withy plans for a further £500,000 to decorate the interior.

Mozaquir Ali, a former Burnley councillor and project coordinator, said it was a symbolic moment for the project which has been planned as early as 1993.

He said: “It was a brilliant day. People turned up to see how it was going. The community is very pleased about it – it has now completed the four domes and the building is now weather tight from the outside.

“it has been a decade of hard work and financial support from the community in Daneshouse which is stricken with unemployment.

“It is a fantastic project which will be a landmark for Burnley and an iconic building not just for Muslims but the community as a whole can be proud of.”

The mosque is one of 13 in Burnley and probably the biggest. I don’t know if any non-muslims use the cultural centre as it’s also a madrassa or Islamic religious school which tend not to encourage outsiders.

Background from Burnleyexpress.net

See also a Mosque in Nelson

Buzz Aldrin lands in Lancashire

I couldn’t believe it when I read in the Lancashire Telegraph that Buzz Aldrin, the second man to land on the moon on July 20 1969, had actually been in Lancashire giving a talk and signing books.

Aldrin was the first man to perform a space walk in 1966 on a Gemini 12 mission before his historic Apollo 11 mission with Neil Armstrong when they became the first humans to stand on another world (as far as we know!)

Aldrin was a key part of the space programme developing underwater training techniques to simulate weightlessness and designing docking and rendezvous techniques. All this on computers that had less power than commonplace domestic items today.

So why was this great man in Lancashire?

He spent 4 hours at Westholme School’s Croston theatre talking to an audience of 700 people from all over the UK about his career as a US fighter pilot and his time at NASA.

There were models of Apollo 11 on stage made by the former chief waxworks artist at Madame Tussauds.

He then signed 750 copies of his new book “No dream is too high. Life lessons from the man who walked on the moon” until late in the evening. He’s 86 years old and still has the energy to do this.

He even found time to don a jester’s hat in Burnley FC colours. This man is truly a legend!

This is just one of three events arranged by his publisher the others being a similar talk in Bath and  a book-signing in London.

Photo appeared in Lancashire Telegraph but looks like a smartphone shot and uncredited.

Helicopter Parents damage their kids

The furore over Brock Turner, the Stanford University student who was imprisoned for 6 months after sexually assaulting a woman who was too drunk to know what she was doing, has not only raised the issue of leniency for sports stars (sentenced by a judge with sports credentials) but also the influence of parents.

His father wrote the court arguing that a prison sentence was “a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action“.

A former dean at the university, Julie Lythcott-Haims, said that it was consistent with a phenomenon she had witnesses developing at the university: helicopter parents.

During her tenure she said parents e-mailed professors to complain about their children’s grades, intervened in dormitory disputes, and refused to let their children grow up and take respocibility for their lives.

“The father’s statement seems to me to be siding with his son at all costs, unable to see that his son has committed a horrendous wrong” she said when speaking at the Times Cheltenham Science Festival.

“He must always love his son but the most loving thing to do is to let the son know that you are loved but your behaviour was reprehensible and you need to accept the consequences of your actions”

Lythcott-Haims has written a book based on her ten year’s experience as dean of freshmen at the university: “How to Raise an Adult – break free of the over-parenting trap and prepare your kid for success”

She writes about the trend for students to be rendered “existentially impotent” by the over involvement off their parents. She says “Over the years I saw more and more students who didn’t seem terribly familiar with their own selves.

What’s to become of a generation that’s been mollycoddled, overprotected, and had their hands held for too long? Will they ever be able to seize the mantle of adulthood? Will they ever become that next generation of leaders we’re going to need them to be? Linguistically parents say “we’re on the football team. We’re going to university”. Their sense of ego is now intertwined with the student”

This father defending his son over a sex crime was just an extreme example of the same trend she thought. She went on to say: “The father rising to the defence as if that is the job of the parents is misguided. The job of the parent is to make sure our children know how to behave properly in the world”.

This is the most sensible thing I’ve heard coming from someone from the university sector for a long time. At the moment it all seems to be about safeguarding, safe spaces and no-platform policies.

Is this because of parents defending their kids rights to be pampered? Is it because young people are more narcissistic than ever with their pre-occupation with social media and lack empathy, a key part of emotional intelligence?

I’ve posted before about helicopter parents being bad for kids and how overparenting makes children less resilient.

English kids are not as clever as they’ve been told

Forget all the A* stuff. When it comes to global comparisons our kids are not doing very well at all.

They are the most illiterate in the developed world, according to a survey by the OECD.

It warned that many young people are graduating with only a basic grasp of English and Maths and are unlikely to be able to get a job in which they can afford to pay off their student loans.

English teenagers aged 16-19 were rated the worst of 23 developed nations in literacy and 22nd in numeracy. In contrast pensioners or those close to retirement age were among the highest ranked of their age group.

Most illiterate nations

1. England
2. Spain
3. US
4. Italy
5. France
6. Ireland
7. Canada
8. Austria
9. Northern Ireland
10. Germany
11. Norway
12. Sweden
13. Denmark
14. Slovak Republic
15. Czech Republic
16. Belgium
17. Australia
18. Poland
19. Estonia
20. Finland
21. The Netherlands
22. Japan
23. Korea

The number of low-skilled people in England is three times higher than top-performing countries like Finland, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands. South Korea came top for literacy and numeracy.

While English teenagers get good qualifications (which I attribute to grade drift, group assessment and multi choice formats) their basic skills remain “stubbornly weak“.

Some graduates have such poor skills they can’t tell when the petrol tank is empty or read the instructions on an aspirin bottle.

The OECD report suggests we would be better off cutting the number of undergraduates and putting more resources into basic education. The idea that everyone should be a graduate is nonsense and the proliferation of Mickey Mouse degrees to allow people to graduate was lamentable.

It also suggested that universities that allowed students to graduate without core skills in English and Maths should be fined.

“Education in England has been blighted by the beliefs of progressive education” said the director of the centre for education at Buckingham University. And this has been going on since the 1970s when I saw student teachers out on teaching practice who couldn’t  spell simple words and had no grasp of grammar.

Recent reforms introduced by Michael Gove when he was education secretary have still to make a full impact although the number of top grades awarded are expected to fall in future years with only a third getting grade 5 (old grade C) which is the global standard.

And to add to students, and educationalists’, woes examination boards have finally admitted that some subjects are easier than others.

Critical thinking is the hardest A level subject followed by further maths, general studies, latin, physics, philosophy, chemistry, biology, and environmental science.

So which are the easiest A levels? Dance, followed by communication and culture, film, electronics, English literature, media, English language, textiles, drama, and photography.

At GCSE level Latin is the hardest subject (I still remember amo, amas, amat, amamus etc) followed by French, German, Spanish, business studies, religious education, history, geography, and music.

And the easiest GCSEs are: Art, English, design and technology, home economics, maths, PE and English literature.

So what are Ofqual going to do about it? Make the easier subjects harder? Well in average subjects a massive 30% of students get a or A* so hardly rewarding the best. In easy subjects only 15% get those grades whereas in difficult subjects 45% get them. Hardly seems fair does it. If it was a harder subject logic says there would be fewer higher grades.

One proposal is to raise the proportion of A and A* to 55% in harder subjects and reduce the proportion to 10% in easier subjects. How well you actually do and what grade you objectively get means nothing when you are applying such criteria.

One alternative was to have a uniform grading pattern and award 30% of students A or A* in all subjects.

This is the crazy world of modern education where what you know and actually achieve in examinations is subject to other criteria. An A* grade is hardly worth the paper it’s written on but at least it prepares students for the dumbing down they will be subject to at universities keen to attract student fees by awarding ever more 1st class degrees.

That’s of course if they’re not too busy worrying about safe spaces and no platform policies instead of actually studying.

In the meantime too many of our children lack basic skills in English and Maths. We should be ashamed.