Empathy for Children, not Penalties, on Planes

From news.com.au this week came the headline ‘Noisy kids? You should pay extra on planes’ – an opinion piece by Claudia Connell. She rejects one airline’s new offer that she can pay extra to travel in a quiet zone free from under-12s. Instead, she suggests that families with noisy children should pay the higher penalty, not the people like her "just wanting a quiet journey". Claudia writes that she is “not a person who hates kids,” has “nieces, nephews and godchildren that I adore”, and has “made peace” with the fact that she won’t have her own children. She’s just not fond of crying kids on planes. She’s “sympathetic” of a mother struggling with a bawling baby, but refuses to “accept that it’s now my lot to have my quality of life diminished by having other people’s families forced on me.” Her ticket price should not include “13 hours of hell”, she asserts. Read full article
Why Have Good Parents Gone Bad?

Dr Wendy Mogel asked this question when presenting at the Young Minds Conference in Sydney this week. Dr Mogel is an acclaimed clinical psychologist, parenting expert and author of The New York Times best-selling parenting book, The Blessing of a B-Minus. Her presentation explored the ‘new normal’ for today’s parents and she made some practical suggestions for raising self-reliant children and teenagers. Read full article
How Supportive Parenting Impacts Your Child’s Brain

The importance of parental love and warmth to children’s emotional wellbeing is widely accepted. It makes sense that a loving childhood may protect children from developing mental illnesses later in life. A recent study by experts at Washington University illustrates why good parenting skills and parent wellbeing is so important that it can even affect the size of an important part of our brain – the hippocampus. Read full article
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