Shaming Teen Mums is a Bad Idea
What if instead of deciding to shame teenagers out of 'choosing' to become parents with a questionable 'public health' campaign, New York City instead focused their efforts on ending the 'epidemic' of advanced age motherhood? Imagine the outrage. Read full article
Looking at Teenage Girls Through New Lenses
As we stand up for International Day of the Girl Child, October 11, I have decided it’s time to celebrate that often dreaded period of a girl's development: her teen years. I want to inject a new word into that conversation around parenting girls. Read full article
What My Mother Whispered In My Ear
This is a conversation my mother and I had last week. What started as a conversation about the current economic climate in Greece, soon turned into reflection for my mother who was born in rural Greece in 1935. As a small child she would walk to primary school with her older brother. Read full article
Confidence is Not Everything - Encouraging My Child
My daughter had an audition for a local youth orchestra and, not surprisingly, she was nervous. "You are playing your pieces beautifully," I told her after a particularly trying practice that ended in hot angry tears. No I'm not. I sound terrible." Yes she was looking for reassurance but it was more than that. Read full article
Raising Barry - an Unconventional Parent Raises a President
Ann Dunham (Soetoro) Sutoro’s life is changing the course of history, yet most people have never heard of this remarkable woman. When I first met Ann in Jakarta in March 1981, I had no idea how great an impact she would have on world history and politics ... We had an immediate rapport. Ann saw me as a young person who shared her idealism and passion for solving the problems of poverty in Indonesia. Perhaps I reminded her of her son Barry, born in Hawaii in 1961, a few years younger than me, and then studying and working in the United States. Read full article
Mummy, Are You Beautiful? - What Would You Say?
"Mummy, am I beautiful?" - "Yes, you are so beautiful!" - "Mummy, are you beautiful?" Children don’t realise how confronting, or how relevant, their questions can be. When my three-year-old daughter posed the question, "Are you beautiful?" to me, I hesitated. And I gave her the answer I knew I should give: "Yes. Yes, I am." This is a question that, once upon a time, I would have laughed at. Read full article
Can a Children's Playground Really Be Too Safe?
Some researchers have suggested that the very safe playgrounds of today are depriving children of the opportunity to challenge themselves - they say a playground is a place where children can encounter and learn to overcome fears. Yvette Vignando debates this idea with psychologist Michael Carr Gregg on The Morning Show, Channel 7 - Michael bemoans the "woosification" of children. Read full article
Playground Safety and Design - Taking the Heat off Parents?
Are safe playgrounds depriving our children of important emotional development opportunities? By making playgrounds safer and reducing physical risk, are we increasing the risk that children will be more anxious and deprived of chances to master their physical world? The value of a safety-first playground was recently questioned in the New York Times - “Can a Playground be Too Safe?”. The writer referred to comments by Norwegian psychologist, Professor Ellen Sandseter who said that it is best for children to encounter certain physical challenges from an early age so that they learn to master them through play. Read full article
I Have a Young Daughter and I am the Language Police
I once saw a study that showed that teenage girls’ self-esteem was linked to how represented their race was in the mainstream media. It was an American study. So Native Americans who were the most under-represented racial group in the media had the highest level of self-esteem, followed by African Americans with Caucasian teenagers at the bottom of the pile. They drew the conclusion that it was because if you see somebody of the same racial group on the front of a magazine you think that if you just lost the right amount of weight, did the right exercise, had the right clothes or wore the right make up you could look like that. Whereas, somebody of a different racial group would never be able to look like that no matter what changes they made. Read full article
Raising Confident Happy Children
Book: Raising Confident Happy Children by Anthony Gunn. What do you do when your son refuses to go to bed because of the monster in the cupboard? Or when your daughter panics before a school play? Or when the death of the family pet prompts anxiety that you're about to drop off the mortal coil? How can we possibly equip our children with all that they need to grow up confident, resilient and brave? Anthony Gunn, psychologist, author and father of a primary schooler offers forty helpful approaches, explaining common fears and setbacks and how to combat them. Read full article
