Firstly. One of my favourite memories was getting up on a Saturday morning and running down the hall all rugged up in my blanket to watch Saturday morning cartoons. (because there were no good cartoons during the week)
Personally, I think cartoons today are better designed than cartoons in the 70s. The amount of violence in Loony Toons is crazy. And it's pointless violence. It's violence for the sake of violence. It's violence that has the expectation that children will laugh at it. In modern cartoons there quite often is a meaning behind the violence. However, I say this but I have the view that there is too much violence in children's television. A viewer is more likely to experience death, either direct viewing or assumed death, in a Disney cartoon than in a movie by any other studio. Why can't there not be violence in a few well made children's shows? Take Frozen. The whole movie was AMAZING and it would have been amazing without a bad guy and violence. The battle against winter was a great idea for a conflict. My favourite kids movie is Ponyo because there is no violence and no bad guy. It's just a little boy and girl trying to solve a problem and it is very well written. (The kid also doesn't have to be a genius)
Now, onto yet another rant. I really have to stop this ranting business.
My pet hate. People who say kids today are more violent, misbehaved, uncaring, etc. They are not. In Australia, my generation (25-35 year olds) was the lowest volunteering group of people as teenagers and still are today. In short, my generation is exceptionally selfish. The current generation coming through of 10-20 year olds are the second highest volunteering group in Australia behind pensioners. My favourite stat to show how caring the next generation is. In any given month, 34% of Australian teenagers volunteer their time in some way. This could be through umpiring, coaching, helping a neighbour or giving up their time to assist their school. (86% of Muslim's from the same age group volunteer their time... but that's a religious expectation) Since volunteering contributes more to the Australian economy than our main industry, mining, this bodes well for the future of our country.
Penny said:
It just makes me wonder how many kids out there aren't really sick but are actually just in the same situation he was. What happened with him leads me to belive that ADHD and aspurgers aren't as big of a problem as we think it is.
Over medication. Yes! As a teacher this is a pet hate of mine and the USA was soooo much worse than Australia in this regard. Australian doctors can't accept bribes or kick backs and have no choice in the brand of medication that gets used when they prescribe a drug. We still over medicate though due to inaccurate expectations of what children should be like and should do. Working at a camp in the USA the line for night and morning meds was so long it was sickening. In my time working with children (At least 10 years if you don't count my volunteering as a teenager) there are 2 kids I'd say had ADHD or ADD. One 7yo couldn't concentrate long enough to feed himself. He would stab his food with his fork and then something would grab his attention and he'd be off. It would never make it to his mouth unless someone constantly passed him the food. This sucked because the medication that helped him concentrate took his appetite. The other boy was 11 and would cry because he wanted to do his work but he couldn't focus. But in any class I would have at least one ADHD medicated kid (except in my desert school.. we didn't have doctors to medicate them)
Sir Ken Robinson, a UK educator knighted for his contributions to our understanding of education and creativity, notes that if you look at ADHD diagnosis that some states seem worse than others in the USA. The further east you move the more ADHD there seems to be.
"What I do know for a fact is that it's not an epidemic. These kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out and on the same whimsical basis and for the same reason. Medical fashion. Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the Earth. They're being besieged by information form every platform. From computers, from iphones, from advertising and from hundreds of television channels. We're penalising them now for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff. At school for the most part. It seems to me that it's not a coincidence, totally, that ADHD diagnosis has risen in parallel with the growth of standardised testing. We give them ritalin and adrol and a whole manner of dangerous drugs to get them to focus and calm them down. According to diagnosis, ADHD increases as you move east across the country. People start losing interest in Oklahoma, can hardly think straight in Arkansas and by the time they get to Washington they've lost it completely. It is a fictitious epidemic."
Great talk by Sir Ken Robinson on modern education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
There was another amazing talk that Ken Robinson did where he discussed this little girl called Gillian Lynn. During her school years her mother took her to a psychiatrist because she wouldn't concentrate. The psych talked to her for a bit then asked the mother to leave the room with him and have a chat. As he left he put on the radio and they went to the obvservation window. Gillian straight away began dancing. He said, "There's nothing wrong with her. She's just a dancer." The mother enrolled her in a dance school and she went on to choreograph the hit musical, Cats, and become a multimillionaire.
When I moved from my very difficult school to my easy suburbia school I was told by some teachers. "You have so many behaviour problems in your class. It will be a hard year." Turns out a 50 year old teacher who has been in an easy school her whole life thinks that fiddling is a behaviour problem. Bad expectations are a big cause of over medication in my opinion. I went a whole week teaching that class and still couldn't point to the behaviour problems they were talking about. The deputy, who also had been to difficult schools, used to laugh constantly with me at the other teachers who complained about kids who wouldn't sit still. But what teachers say about kids today is true. We know kids fidget more today in class than in the 70s. That's a fact. But the currently understood reason why is pretty interesting. It is because of the lack of outdoor activity and physical movement. Children today have critically weak core muscles. Critically because it may cause back problems later in life and it makes it hard for them to learn. Their body, knowing this will be a problem, makes them feel uncomfortable from sitting still and gives them the urge to move around so they can increase the strength in those muscles. Hence, fidgeting. This is why many teachers will contact a child's parents and talk about "behaviour issues." The behaviour issue is the parent doesn't kick their kid outside and give the child the opportunity to develop their core strength. The education system has poor behaviour because it still believes that children should be educated by a factory model system.
In this easy class I had one boy who apparently was a huge behaviour problem and I got a form to fill out from his psychiatrist. They were diagnosing him with ADHD. They asked flat out if I thought he had ADHD and there were lots of questions about his behaviour. I said no, he was just an 8 year old boy who the education system doesn't fit. I then went on to fill out the form with his behaviours, putting notes next to each question about how I changed systems to suit him. I said his behaviour was perfectly acceptable for an 8 year old boy. He was still diagnosed but the psychiatrist refused to give him drugs which was brilliant. The parents were also great and supported my education style as well as taking on the psychs recommendation to spend more time doing things with him. However, his teacher that he was going into last year is a "sit down, shut up" kind of teacher so I think he would have been medicated.
People say "These kids today." That is such a cop out. I say "These parents today" and "Those parents in the 80s." One of the biggest causes of childhood problems today was a badly researched parenting psychology in the 80s. There was this idea that came out that was used to parent children. You should not say no and shouldn't allow them to have negative experiences. I tried and tried to find it but I can't find the research I have in my text book, Child Development by McDevitt and Ormrod, that shows children who were parented in this way back in the 80s interact a lot less with their children and spend more time doing things just for themselves, without their children. They spend more time at the gym, use daycare centres more, their children have more screen time, drink more alcohol and they are more likely to feed their children fast food. In short, there is a significant group of parents today who are bad parents because of bad parenting advice given to THEIR parents when they were children. In short, these parents are more likely to be selfish.
The other big destroyer was also from the 80s and 90s. "Stranger Danger." It destroyed many important childhood experiences by breeding fear into children through their parents and made parents keep their children at home. This fear has been transferred to the current generation of parents even though the police stopped the stranger danger program in the late 90s knowing how misinformed and destructive it was. I was raised in the stranger danger generation but I was lucky that my parents believed my highly protective dog was protection enough when I played on the street or walked to the shop. Today, none of my friends will allow their children to play on the street without supervision. In Australia up until last week it was school holidays but you wouldn't have known it. I saw only 3 kids in a town of 4000 people who were out riding their bikes. This doesn't mean the majority parents aren't giving their children meaningful time outside. They do. They take them to the pool, play with them, take them to sports, let them play in the backyard and many other things. But they don't let them do it by themselves without adults directing what is done. Children have less opportunity to play creatively. Structured play such as play groups and sporting clubs just aren't as beneficial as kids having to make up games and be creative. But free play isn't the only thing important. Having no parents around is also important. Being unsupervised.
Australia is currently conducting the biggest longitudinal study of children ever undertaken in the world. 12,000 children born in 2005 are being tracked through detailed parent surveys and huge numbers of other research tactics including interviewing, videoing and children attending university experience. This study is tracking all aspects of children's lives. From screen time, to interactions, to personalities. All these results are available to all world universities and there's some amazing research that is coming from it. The most important results are made into an Australian documentary every two years and follow around 15 of the kids. If you want to look it up it's Life at 1, Life at 3, Life at 5, Life at 7 and Life at 9. In Life at 9 the children were given a task. They had to walk to the shop by themselves, buy an icecream and walk home. They were shadowed by a TV crew and they wore their own camera. Of the whole group of children, only 1 child made it to the shop. The majority turned back because they were too scared to cross roads or they were scared of some people. The child who made it has a mother who is blind and has a lot of independence. This lack of independence will most likely have negative ramifications for a child as they grow up. It will be interesting to see the results.
Part of this longitudinal study has actually shown that childhood obesity is linked closely to this as well. What is the biggest indicator of childhood obesity? No, it's not screen time, or time exercising, or diet. It's time spent outside. A 5 year old uses more energy fidgeting in a week than in 10 hours of organised physical activity such as team sports. A child who goes outside for two hours will use the same amount of energy because they use a lot more energy from their brain and every part of their body than during organised sports.
Anyway, I'm going to stop there. To sum up. The people who complain about "kids today" seem to be people who were parents in the 80s. There is building evidence that suggest it was their fault that we have these "kids today." But, I think these "kids today" are a great group who will do more than their parents did for society but in a different way.
Also Calico. I agree in 99% of cases completely. Violence is usually due to some underlying issue that isn't a clinical problem and often doesn't need a label. Usually it needs a bullet for the abusive parent and the grandparent who abused that parent. And that 16 year old girl will probably need a bullet as well. (I don't believe in killing people but I do like over the top reactions to hammer home my point) It takes a lot to break a cycle of violence.
End rant.
