dote that brought home to me – in an unexpected way – the positive role HSE is playing in building support for a balanced, thoughtful approach to risk in children’s play. I was running a workshop on risk-benefit assessment at a playwork conference, and one of the participants – a manager of an after-school club – shared a revealing story. It begins last September, with a boy brea
Institute of education explain how children develop their own social lives – individually or as a group – that operate alongside the dominant adult culture. Here, play is not a means to an educational end, but a central activity. It’s what children do at the margins of the adult world, and often making use of the time between their adult-directed activities. They echo the words of he anthropologist Erik Erikson, who cautioned adults against defining play as “not work”. Play not only affords children an early source of identity, but is full of useful information about yourself and the world around you, for once not filtered through adult minds and eyes.
I like the example that Moss and Petrie give of how children’s maps of familiar areas may give prominence to features that are inconsequential to local adults: “Children use features of school playgrounds intended for other purposes for their own: flights of steps may become jumping apparatuses, castles, alien dens, shops. In a London suburb, a grassed bank, with scrubby trees, runs for a short stretch alongside the pavement…For at least seventy years…children have scrambled on to the bank and walked behind the trees in a matter of twenty yards and then clambered down again. They have work a clear, narrow path. Is path has no place in adult culture – for adults, paths are usually taken to reach a destination; yet children endow following the path with their own meanings, it is part of their local culture.”
The creation of private spaces, away from adult view, and sometimes away from other children, is an essential part of childhood culture. A report by Demos and the green Alliance, which interviewed over a thousands children about their play habits, noted that secret or special places, wheth
Jen and Oli are childhood sweethearts. They've been married a year but nothing has quite prepared them for the psychological landscape of expecting a baby
by Jane Ribbens McCarthy, Carol-Ann Hooper, Val Gillies, authors of Family troubles?
What do we expect of contemporary childhood in general, and children’s family lives in particular?
This is the question at the heart of our new edited book, Family troubles? Exploring changes and challenges in the family lives of children and young people. While modern childhoods are undoubtedly complex and multi-faceted, and some regret what they see as the disappearance or erosion of childhood, it also seems undeniable that high hopes are also strong and persistent, not only for improvements to children’s well-being but for an idealised childhood as a special time of innocence and freedom. A ‘proper’ childhood is seen to be underpinned by a secure and loving home life, with full attention paid to children’s developmental and educational needs, along with special events like outings to theme parks and all the presents and trappings of birthdays and Christmas. Put like this, it becomes immediately apparent that this is an ideal that many children around the world may not experience – even in the affluent global North, economic downturns are increasing those materials inequalities between children’s lives that have always been present. So, how helpful is this ideal of childhood, for parents as well as children, and how well does it equip children for life more generally?
Changes and challenges are undoubtedly a feature of all family lives, so when are ‘troubles’ usefully seen to be a ‘normal’ part of the family lives of children and young people, and when are they seen to be significantly troubling and troublesome, and if so, to whom and with what consequences? When do we need to ‘normalise trouble’, and when may it be necessary, on the contrary, to ‘trouble the norm’ and recognise harm in practices still taken for granted in some contexts? And, in questioning the idealisation of childhood, do we risk undermining the important gains that have been made towards improving the position of children generally since the late 20th century, such as through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?
These are some of the really difficult questions that we have been grappling with since we held a Colloquium in London in July 2010 to set a dialogue going, and open up some new conversations on difficult topics. Since then, the UK Government has initiated its policy on Troubled Families, which uses specific criteria to create a clear-cut category of 120,000 identifiable families for intensive interventions . Such categorical boundaries may have their uses, although there may also be dangers. But our aim has worked in the opposite direction, to question such boundaries and develop conversations across different fields of work, and to ask what difference does it make to the cultural resources available to children if we view troubles as to some extent a ‘normal’ (expectable and expected) feature of childhood and family lives. Opening up these sorts of conversations in the book involves crossing boundaries, between mainstream and problem-focused family research, between researchers and practitioners, across a wide range of different sorts of issues.
Looking at things this way can show up complexities, ambiguities and uncomfortable uncertainties that may feel never-ending. But this may also be a realistic view of the messiness of actual family lives for all of us. And recognising this may be important in shaping our expectations of for children’s lives. What does a ‘proper childhood’ realistically mean, in a globalising and rapidly changing world?
Nevertheless, while it may be productive and important to open up such questions, where does this leave practitioners and policy makers trying to answer such questions in practical terms, answers that may be hotly debated and contested, with important implications for children, young people and parents’ lives? The book also, therefore, grapples with the search for answers to some of these questions, even as it seeks to deal with their complexities.
Family troubles? is available to buy with 20% discount from www.policypress.co.uk
Breadwinning Moms, Caregiving DadsDouble Standard in Social Judgments of Gender Norm Violators
- Ruth Gaunt, Department of Social Sciences, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RQ, UK Email: rg433{at}cam.ac.uk
Abstract
This study explores the role of gender ideologies in moderating social judgments of gender norm violators. Three hundred and eleven participants evaluated a male or a female target who was either a primary breadwinner or a primary caregiver. Attributions of personal traits, moral emotions, and marital emotions were examined. Results showed that both traditional and egalitarian individuals applied a double standard when judging deviations from gendered family roles. However, and as predicted, traditional individuals evaluated the normative targets more favorably than the norm-violating targets, whereas egalitarians evaluated the norm-violating targets more favorably. These findings shed light on the important moderating role of gender ideologies and help account for the inconsistencies in previous findings regarding social judgments of gender norm violators.
Article Notes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Published online before print April 4, 2012, doi: 10.1177/0192513X12438686 Journal of Family Issues January 2013 vol. 34 no. 1 3-24
I love most things about being pregnant. I'm very lucky to have been really healthy through both my pregnancies. And the awareness of the new life taking shape inside me is mind-blowingly wonderful. But there is something about it that I really don't enjoy – and that's the pressure to consume. Suddenly, there are all these people trying to sell me stuff. Mostly stuff I really don't need.
I don't think marketing is inherently evil. Like most mums-to-be, of course I'm buying some things for the baby I'm expecting. But at the same time I'm trying to limit my consumption – reducing, reusing and recycling where I can. But I'm also being targeted as a consumer, and I didn't expect so much of that pressure to come to me through the NHS. I want to entrust my midwife with looking after me during my pregnancy; I'm very happy for her to give me leaflets containing advice – but not adverts.
In my antenatal clinic, there's a large ring-binder labelled "Information for Pregnant Women". Inside it there's a plethora of leaflets for private services, including acupuncture, reflexology and hypnobirthing. The label on the folder also bears a get-out clause in smaller print: "We do not endorse these services. These numbers are for information only."
But placing these leaflets in a folder in an NHS waiting room, and labelling it "Information" (when a more accurate label would be "Adverts aimed at pregnant women") is plenty of endorsement. The sort of endorsement companies would pay good money for.
A couple of maternity hospitals have realised they can make money by offering dubious services to expectant parents. Two hospitals announced such schemes in March, hoping to cash in on their pregnant customers by offering hypnotherapy courses, as reported by Zoe Williams in the Guardian. The latest research looking at the effectiveness of hypnotherapy failed to find any evidence that it helped with either women's subjective experience of pain during childbirth, or indeed rates of epidural use. If we're to cling on to an NHS, we need it to cling on to its principles. We need to be able to trust that the NHS is at least aiming for evidence-based medicine, and isn't out to exploit patients commercially.
In fact, NHS-endorsed commercial exploitation of pregnant women isn't a new phenomenon. It's been happening for more than 50 years, right across the UK. And it's still happening, every day.
When pregnant with my first baby, I refused to accept the "Bounty Pack" offered to me by my midwife. But this time I decided to find out what this was all about, and I took the pack home. Rather like that folder in the waiting room, it's not called the "Bounty advertising pack", it's the "Bounty Pregnancy Information Folder". And they really want to make sure you don't lose it – its says "Carry your maternity notes in this folder" on the flap.
In fact, this is just pack number one of five. Packs two and five are available from Bounty's retail partners, but three packs are delivered to you through the medium of the NHS. The first by "your healthcare professional" at the pregnancy booking appointment, and pack three on the labour ward. Then you can expect a visit from the "Bounty lady" on the maternity ward, bearing pack number four.
Back to pack number one. Inside, there's a booklet, Bump to Birth, bursting with around 50 pages of adverts for nappies, shop clubs, infant painkillers, maternity clothes, prams, nappy creams, as well as plenty of adverts for Bounty itself and reminders to collect the rest of your Bounty packs. The rest of the booklet is full of generic advice. I'm prepared to admit that some of it might be genuinely useful (although available elsewhere – on the NHS website, for instance, where it's not interspersed with adverts), but much of it is like reading a diluted version of The Little Book of Calm. "Top tips for coping with tiredness" includes such gems as "Work for a bit, rest for a bit." And "Think about all the tasks you need to do. Can someone else help out?" I'm not sure how I got through my first pregnancy without it…
Alongside the booklet, there's a pile of leaflets: another reminder to collect your second Bounty pack, a leaflet encouraging you to join the Bounty parenting club, and others – for life insurance, a junior ISA, a photo book, an iron supplement, online shopping, and a particular washing liquid, as well as a booklet about private antenatal care and newborn heart checks.
So why are midwives so keen to deliver this junk mail directly to parents? Why are Bounty reps allowed on maternity wards, to give out more packs, free samples, and to encourage parents to buy photographs of their new baby? The answer is stunningly simple: Bounty pays NHS trusts for the privilege.
In 1984, the British Medical Journal published an investigation that raised concerns about "Bounty… exerting commercial pressure on new mothers at a time when they are most vulnerable." The authors described the breach of trust beautifully: "NHS endorsement is implicit in the way Bounty works with such ease within the hospital… Mothers… are susceptible to commercial pressure, and this is recognised and exploited by Bounty."
Perhaps you could argue that Bounty is doing something useful, providing all those advice booklets and free samples – and women can always choose not to accept their gifts. But this is happening in the NHS. It seems like exploitation. At the very least, it's a breach of trust.
There are some advantages to being an anatomist. When the Bounty lady approaches me on the maternity ward, I shall tell her, very accurately, exactly where she can stick her free samples.
Alice Roberts investigated the impact of unborn consumers for Radio 4's Costing the Earth
Yes, it is true that two-year-old children don’t have much impulse control or emotion regulation skills and that coupled with their very strong preferences has given them a bad reputation as irrational and explosive. I’ve been told all sorts of things about “the terrible twos,” especially when I was a nanny and again as I prepared for motherhood. But it really doesn’t have to be this way. Tantrums and other toddler behaviors that are difficult for us are actually just a signal that a child’s needs aren’t fully being met. Luckily, we CAN meet those needs and enjoy far less of those pesky behaviors.
A couple of years ago I saw an amazing documentary film called, “Edison’s Day” which is about a 20 month old boy whose parents are both Montessori trained. Their whole home is set up to accommodate the budding independence of toddlerhood. And their son Emerson is clearly thriving as he’s included in meaningful work, helpful tasks, and independent activities throughout his day. If you want to be completely inspired by what a toddler can accomplish if given the opportunity, definitely watch “Edison’s Day.”
I’ve done my best to set up my home in a similar way and have always encouraged my daughter Julia to develop independence as well as nurturing her ongoing cooperation in every possible moment.
And with a few adjustments to your home environment, the way you handle transitions, and your daily routines, you can have terrific twos just like Julia and Edison have! Here are some tips to get you started:
1) Track your child’s ability to communicate and offer help.
Sign language, guessing what he wants and verbalizing for your child, and helping a child to simplify a sentence can all support toddlers in gaining the confidence to communicate their needs. “You want the cup? Can you sign ‘please’? OK!”
2) Set up a leaving home and arriving back at home routine
complete with low hooks, a bin or basket for shoes, and a playful but consistent attitude. “We put our shoes away when we come inside.”
3) Warn toddlers of an impending transition with plenty of time for them to get on board.
“We need to go to the grocery store. Would you like to go now or in 5 minutes? Is there anything you’d like to bring with you?”
4) Empower your child with the skills and knowledge of the daily routine, self-care practices, and household tasks.
Toddlers are FAR more capable than we might think, so invite your child to try new things and try not to do things for them if they’re capable and willing to do it themselves.
5) Establish a few very clear rules, post them publicly, and ask everyone in your child’s life to help you maintain those boundaries.
Also, offer an acceptable alternative if your child breaks a rule. “It’s not OK to throw books, but here’s a ball you can throw instead!”
6) Establish a consistent daily routine and ask your child to anticipate what happens next.
“Do you remember what we do after we take off our shoes and coat?…That’s right! We go to the bathroom.”
So, why do these things make such a huge difference in the life of a two year old? For young people, routines create security. So the more predictable the daily routine is, the more likely your two year old will know what to expect and feel comfortable and prepared for what’s next.
And then there’s their budding independence. The “I do it,” stage. The more we can embrace and nurture a toddler’s autonomy, the happier and more relaxed they will be. That’s because a toddler’s main goal in life is to grow up and become a capable adult. They want to be just like us, so let’s help them learn how!
Have a fantastic week, Shelly
dote that brought home to me – in an unexpected way – the positive role HSE is playing in building support for a balanced, thoughtful approach to risk in children’s play. I was running a workshop on risk-benefit assessment at a playwork conference, and one of the participants – a manager of an after-school club – shared a revealing story. It begins last September, with a boy brea
UNICEF’s latest Report Card compares child well-being in the world’s richest countries. The report is a follow-up to Report Card 7, which in 2007 placed the UK at the bottom of 21 developed countries for overall child well-being.
UK child well-being: what the report says
Setting out the latest available overview of child well-being in 29 of the world’s most advance economies, this report puts the UK in 16th position, below Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal.
Worrying findings include high rates of teenage pregnancy, and high numbers of young people out of education, employment and training. The UK has one of the highest alcohol abuse rates among 11-15 year olds, and was placed in the bottom third of the infant mortality league table.
Although the Report Card shows the UK moved up the league table in overall well being, since 2010 the downgrading of youth policy and cuts to local government services are having a profound negative effect on young people age 15-19.
Institute of education explain how children develop their own social lives – individually or as a group – that operate alongside the dominant adult culture. Here, play is not a means to an educational end, but a central activity. It’s what children do at the margins of the adult world, and often making use of the time between their adult-directed activities. They echo the words of he anthropologist Erik Erikson, who cautioned adults against defining play as “not work”. Play not only affords children an early source of identity, but is full of useful information about yourself and the world around you, for once not filtered through adult minds and eyes.
I like the example that Moss and Petrie give of how children’s maps of familiar areas may give prominence to features that are inconsequential to local adults: “Children use features of school playgrounds intended for other purposes for their own: flights of steps may become jumping apparatuses, castles, alien dens, shops. In a London suburb, a grassed bank, with scrubby trees, runs for a short stretch alongside the pavement…For at least seventy years…children have scrambled on to the bank and walked behind the trees in a matter of twenty yards and then clambered down again. They have work a clear, narrow path. Is path has no place in adult culture – for adults, paths are usually taken to reach a destination; yet children endow following the path with their own meanings, it is part of their local culture.”
The creation of private spaces, away from adult view, and sometimes away from other children, is an essential part of childhood culture. A report by Demos and the green Alliance, which interviewed over a thousands children about their play habits, noted that secret or special places, wheth
If Riverboom���s photographer Gabriele Galimberti had happened to shoot me, aged 6 and surrounded by my favorite toys, he would have seen the following: plastic medieval weaponry; assorted Lego (Space, Castle and Pirate); an inflatable��Tyrannosaurus rex��(punctured slowly into extinction); a Superman action figure (I lost it and hyperventilated with grief); a pair of cuddly rabbits (Sally and Billy); toy cars; a tiny guitar; a plane you launched with an elastic catapult; a replica pistol I thought my mum didn���t know about.
Everyone remembers their childhood toys. The fact that I can recall how most of mine tasted better than I can remember the names of my primary school teachers says everything you need to know about the universe kids inhabit. Indeed, when Galimberti hit upon the idea of photographing children from around the world with their toys, he was not expecting to uncover much we did not already know: kids love dolls and dinosaurs and trucks and cuddly monkeys, and will construct worlds around them before eventually, inevitably, disregarding them for ever. ���At their age, they are pretty all much the same,��� is his conclusion after 18 months working on the project. ���They just want to play.���
But how they play can reveal a lot. ���The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning, they wouldn���t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them,��� says the Italian, who would often join in with a child���s games before arranging the toys and taking the photograph. ���In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn���t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.���
Yet even children worlds apart share similarities when it comes to the function their toys serve. Galimberti talks about meeting a six-year-old boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers they believed waited for them at night ��� from kidnappers and poisonous animals respectively. More common was how the toys reflected the world each child was born into: so the girl from an affluent Mumbai family loves Monopoly, because she likes the idea of building houses and hotels, while the boy from rural Mexico loves trucks, because he sees them rumbling through his village to the nearby sugar plantation every day.
Ultimately, the toys on display reveal the hopes and ambitions of the people who bought them in the first place. ���Doing this, I learnt more about the parents than I did about the kids,��� says Galimberti. There was the Latvian mother who drove a taxi for a living, and who showered her son with miniature cars; the Italian farmer whose daughter proudly displayed her plastic rakes, hoes and spades. Parents from the Middle East and Asia, he found, would push their children to be photographed even if they were initially nervous or upset, while South American parents were ���really relaxed, and said I could do whatever I wanted as long as their child didn���t mind���.
With the exception of computer games, he noticed that toys haven���t really changed over the past three decades or so. And there is something reassuring about that. ���I���d often find the kind of toys I used to have,��� he says. ���It was nice to go back to my childhood somehow.���
Ben Machell – The Times Magazine
start →
Original Article
You have free access to this content Medicalized mothering: experiences with breastfeeding in Canada and Norway
- Therese Andrews,
- Stephanie Knaak
Article first published online: 27 FEB 2013
DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12006
© 2013 The Authors. The Sociological Review © 2013 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
Issue
Original Article
You have free access to this content No right time: the significance of reproductive timing for younger and older mothers' moralities
- Maud Perrier
Article first published online: 27 FEB 2013
DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12005
© 2013 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2013 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
Issue
Vetting procedures turned schools into hostile environments and made volunteers feel like “second-class citizens”, it was claimed. Many people are also deterred by the amount of time needed to fill in forms and the administration fee of up to £20, the report said.
CRB checks are believed to have been behind a 35 per cent drop in the number of primary school volunteers between 2003 and 2008.
The conclusions come amid a continuing backlash over the system.
Last month, the Court of Appeal ruled that legislation requiring people to disclose all previous convictions to certain employers as part of CRB procedures represented a breach of human rights.
Josie Appleton, Manifesto Club director, told The Daily Telegraph: "There is simply no need for mothers and fathers to prove they are not paedophiles before they are allowed on a school trip.
“This government promised to reduce vetting to common sense levels, but unfortunately over-checking is continuing apace.
“School volunteers should be welcomed rather than subjected to such suspicious procedures, which in any case do little to protect children.”
But a Department for Education spokeswoman said: “We expect headteachers to take a common-sense approach to criminal record checks and adhere to the changes this government brought in to ensure the vetting system was scaled back to sensible levels.”
Researchers obtained data through the Freedom of Information Act from the Criminal Records Bureau.
It was revealed that 135,208 checks were made against school volunteers in 2011/12, including 30,055 parents or grandparents.
The Protection of Freedoms Bill was introduced in September 2012 to reduce the number of people covered by “regulated activities” in schools. It suggested volunteers only needed to be checked if they regularly worked in schools – including once a week – or acted alone without teachers’ supervision.
But the report found that a further 57,183 CRB checks were ordered on volunteers in the autumn term between September and December after the Act was introduced, including 11,321 parents or grandparents. This suggests that numbers could soar higher than last year's total by the summer.
The total covered 10,136 school governors, 27,599 classroom helpers, 5,780 reading assistants, 1,244 host families for language exchanges and 1,010 school trip volunteers.
It blamed a combination of unclear Government guidance to schools combined with continuing recommendations from local councils that all volunteers are vetted.
The report said that some schools routinely vet any adult involved with the school as a “matter of routine box-ticking”.
One man from Hertfordshire was asked to undergo vetting simply to provide cash sponsorship for the school, even though he would not be coming into contact with children.
Last term, a school in Wiltshire asked all parents to complete a CRB check to watch their children play sport.
The report told how some schools “mark out volunteers as a kind of second-class citizen” by requiring them to wear “parent helper” badges at all times or ID tags sporting their CRB reference number.
It said these “arduous terms and conditions would be more appropriate for felons on remand” than school volunteers.
“The criminal records check puts up a barrier to volunteering within a school,” said the report.
“This barrier is logistical – forms must be filled in, documents produced, and the check takes several weeks to return.
“The barrier can also be financial – some schools ask parents to pay the administration fee for the criminal records check, which can be between £7 and £20 pounds.
“Most importantly, the barrier is the hostile, high-security atmosphere vetting creates. Rather than being welcoming and open, encouraging parents to come on their child’s school trip, child protection rules create a suspicious and hostile atmosphere.”
In the final part of her series on the post-war history of the British family, Kirsty Young looks at how children have come to dominate family life in the last decade.
Evocative archive of children from the last few decades is interwoven with parents and children talking about life today, and reveals just how far we have come from the 'seen and not heard' days of old.
Kirsty also looks at the new kinds of families in which children are growing up, the so-called 'blended' families of step-mums and dads and siblings, as well as the gay families who are changing the face of modern parenting.
Kirsty finishes the series by looking at how our ageing demographic might ask us all some tough questions about our family set-ups in the years to come.
21 February 2013 Last updated at 20:20 ET By Helena Lee BBC NewsWould you put your baby or toddler outside in the freezing cold for their lunchtime nap? Most Nordic parents wouldn't give it a second thought. For them it's part of their daily routine.
Daytime temperatures this winter in Stockholm have regularly dropped to -5C (23F) but it's still common to see children left outside by their parents for a sleep in the pram.
Wander through the snowy city and you'll see buggies lined up outside coffee shops while parents sip on lattes inside.
And if you are visiting friends and your child needs a nap, you may be offered the garden or balcony instead of a bedroom.
"I think it's good for them to be in the fresh air as soon as possible," says Lisa Mardon, a mother-of-three from Stockholm, who works for a food distribution company.
Continue reading the main story“Start Quote
End Quote Brittmarie Carlzon Pre-school head teacherWhen the temperature drops to -15C we always cover the prams with blankets”
"Especially in the winter when there's lots of diseases going around... the kids seem healthier."
Her children have been sleeping outside since they were born.
The youngest, Alfred, is two and she puts him outside in the pram to nap once a day, for an hour and a half. When he was younger he slept outside twice a day.
This isn't a recent fashion. Lisa's mother, Gunilla, now 61, says she also did it with Lisa when she was a baby.
"Yes we were doing it back then as well… It was important for her to get fresh air and stay healthy," Gunilla says.
And Lisa's father, Peter, was put outside by his mother to sleep in a pram in the 1950s. Only when it got to around -10C (14F) did she bring him indoors.
Nowadays most day-care centres in Sweden put children outside to rest. It's common to see rows of prams lined up in the snow at nap-time, with youngsters fast asleep inside.
At Forskolan Orren, a pre-school outside Stockholm, all children sleep outside until they reach the age of three.
"When the temperature drops to -15C (5F) we always cover the prams with blankets," says head teacher Brittmarie Carlzon.
"It's not only the temperature that matters, it's also how cold it feels. Some days it can be -15C but it actually feels like -20C (-4F) because of the wind," she says.
"Last year we had a couple of days with a temperature of -20C. On those days we brought the prams inside some of the time the children were sleeping, but most of their sleep they spent outdoors."
One group at the pre-school spends all its time outside, from 09:00 to 15:00 every day. Out in the fresh air they do everything children normally do inside, only going inside at mealtimes, or in unusually cold weather.
The theory behind outdoor napping is that children exposed to fresh air, whether in summer or the depths of winter, are less likely to catch coughs and colds - and that spending a whole day in one room with 30 other children does them no good at all.
Many parents also believe their children sleep better and for longer in the open, and one researcher in Finland - outdoor napping is popular in all the Nordic countries - says she has evidence from a survey of parents to back this up.
"Babies clearly slept longer outdoors than indoors," says Marjo Tourula. While indoor naps lasted between one and two hours, outdoor naps lasted from 1.5 to three hours.
"Probably the restriction of movements by clothing could increase the length of sleep, and a cold environment makes swaddling possible without overheating," she says.
Continue reading the main storyFinland's 'official' nap advice
Irrespective of the season, many children have their evening naps outside in prams.
Many babies sleep better outdoors in the fresh air than in the bedroom. Sleeping outdoors is not dangerous for a baby. One may gradually start going outdoors when the baby is two weeks old.
According to her research, -5C is the best temperature for an outdoor nap - though some parents she spoke to even put their children out at -30C.
But do children who sleep outside end up catching fewer coughs and colds?
Paediatrician Margareta Blennow says reports from the Swedish Environmental protection agency show conflicting results.
"In some studies they found pre-schoolers who spent many hours outside generally - not just for naps - took fewer days off than those who spent most of their time indoors," she says.
"In other studies there wasn't a difference."
Martin Jarnstrom, head of one of the Ur och Skur group of pre-schools , is another big advocate of outdoor naps, though he emphasises that while the weather may be cold, the child must be warm.
"It's very important that the children have wool closest to their body, warm clothes and a warm sleeping bag," he says.
There is a Swedish saying that encapsulates this thought - "There is no bad weather, only bad clothing."
Another saying sums up what Swedes are likely to think when toddlers in other countries are kept indoors in sub-zero temperatures: "A little fresh air never hurt anyone."
The tragic legacy of this horrific murder continues to haunt British society. The immediate response of British society to this shocking event was an understandable sense of revulsion. But regrettably this very human reaction swiftly mutated into one of moral disorientation.
Policy makers, politicians and media commentators played a critical role in inciting this response. Their histrionic and scaremongering response to this event served to distort the perception of the wider public. As a result this unique and thankfully very rare occurrence was widely perceived as a danger that threatened children throughout the land.
The Sun took the lead by demanding a ‘crusade to rescue a sick society’. The call for moral crusade resonated with other accounts that coupled their condemnation of ‘feral’ and ‘evil’ children with the diagnosis that Britain had become a ‘broken society’. The Economist captured this mood of moral confusion when it observed that Britain was ‘examining the dark corners of its soul’. Unfortunately there was very little serious examining. Instead of examination and reflection, opportunistic moralisation dominated public life.
Indeed one of the most sordid dimension of the response to the murder of James Bulger were the opportunistic attempts to promote causes and political agenda through linking it with the concern provoked by this event. Moral entrepreneurs presented this crime as a justification for promoting their campaign to ban violent videos or to lower the age criminal responsibility.
Labour went on the offensive and accused the Tories of responsibility for creating a ‘Broken Britain’. In turn Conservative politicians reacted to this tragedy by denouncing the underclass culture that breeds feckless parents and feral children in urban Britain. In effect the Bulger case became a focus for political exploitation.
"By the time Jon Venables and Robert Thompson faced a court of justice they had been demonised to the point that it was easy to forget that they were children"
By the time that the two youngsters – Jon Venables and Robert Thompson – faced a court of justice they had been demonised to the point that it was easy to forget that they were children. In what was an unprecedented step the two 11 year-olds were dragged into an adult court and treated as if they were mature individuals capable of exercising the kind of moral responsibility normally associated with adulthood. In their wisdom the courts allowed the name and photographs of the children to be published by the press thereby putting faces to these targets of venomous hate.For me the most disquieting moment is this shameful episode was when I read the summing up of the case against the two children by the trial judge Mr Justice Morland. The killing of James Bulger was ‘an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity’ concluded the judge. These carefully crafted words not only communicated the idea that the killing committed by these two children was an act of evil but also suggested that it was also ‘unparalleled’ and therefore worse than the terrible deeds perpetrated by adults. The conviction and sentencing of the two children provoked a reaction that a civilised society usually reserves for hardened war criminals. ‘How do you feel now, you little bastards?’ asked the Daily Star while the headline of the Daily Mirror stated ‘Freaks of Nature’.
One regrettable and long term consequence of the transformation of the trial into a medieval passion play was that it fostered a climate of opinion where the age of criminal responsibility could be steadily lowered to the point where the distinction between act of a child and adult lost much of its meaning. Since this trial, the age of criminal responsibility has been steadily lowered. British courts now regard children as young as 10 as bearing moral responsibility for the most serious of crimes. In contrast most European systems of justice set the age of criminal responsibility at 14, 16 – even 18.
Promoting parental paranoiaResearch into the British media's reporting showed the case had a major impact on parents. In a survey of 1,000 parents taken a year after the killing, 97 per cent cited the possible abduction of their children as their greatest fear. The Times reported that many of these parents revealed that 'video images of the two-year-old being taken by his killers were still fresh in their minds'. But this event did not simply intensify parental anxiety. Possibly the most depressing legacy of the febrile atmosphere surrounding the killing of James Bulger and the subsequent trial and demonization of Venables and Thompson was its distortion of the meaning of childhood. The demonisation of so-called feral youngsters did not merely exaggerate the scale of violence facing children, but also raised fundamental questions about the state of childhood.
‘What has happened to children’ was the question recurrently posed by the media and public figures. After the trial of the child culprits, The Sunday Times observed that we will ‘never be able to look at our children in the same way again’. It added, ‘all over the country, parents are viewing their sons in a new and disturbing light’. It was as if suddenly adults did not quite know what made their children tick. What this reaction signalled was not that parents feared that their children were murderers in the making. What it reflected was a sense of estrangement – do we really know them? Such sentiments were particularly directed at other people’s children. Since the Bulger case parental anxieties directed towards stranger-danger have been extended to the threat posed by dangerous and violent children.
The most significant legacy of the panic surrounding the Bulger case was to reinforce the pre-existing trend towards the privatisation of parenting. All too often ‘other’ children are perceived as competitors or as threats to one’s child. In recent years these perceptions have been reinforced by the actions of policy makers who are literally intent on criminalising infants. As a result we now live in a Britain where a 10 and an 11 year-old boys can be hauled before the Old Bailey and tried for rape. The Daily Mail headline ‘Criminals aged just 3: Children responsible for hidden crimewave, including rape and vandalism... and there's nothing police can do’ sums up the belief that society is confronted with an infant crime wave.
Conservative MP Philip Davies, insists that criminals are becoming more ‘precocious’ and that policemen are increasingly concerned about younger criminals. The good MP is all for lowering the age of criminal responsibility and dragging even more children before adult courts: ‘People take the view that if they are old enough to commit the crime, they are old enough to take responsibility.’
British society has become so morally distanced from childhood that it has lost the ability to make a moral distinction between it and adulthood. It looks upon adults as simply biologically mature children, and children as physically underdeveloped grown-ups. This leads to a tragic state of affairs where children’s behaviour is continually interpreted through the prism of adult imaginations. At its worst, contemporary British culture attributes adult motives to children’s behaviour. Consequently, even infants in nurseries are told off for their ‘harassment’ of other kids or for their ‘racist’ behaviour. We live in a world where six year-old children are expelled from school for inappropriate sexual behaviour, where a 10-year-old boy is put on the Sex Offenders’ Register for touching a girl, and where playing ‘doctors and nurses’ is increasingly interpreted as the precursor to an act of sexual violence.
Strangely the myth of the feral child coexists with the powerful counter-myth of the innocent child who is incapable of lying or wrong-doing. Both of these myths are the product of adult fantasy. Both of them express sentiments that fail to grasp the reality of children’s lives. Parents who are continually confronted with engaging and processing these highly polarised myths often become distracted from seeing children for what they are –just children. And that’s the shameful legacy of moral panic created in response to the tragedy of James Bulger.
Frank Furedi’s Moral Crusades in an Age of Mistrust: The Jimmy Savile Scandal is published by Palgrave Pivot this Spring.
Extensive MotheringEmployed Mothers’ Constructions of the Good Mother
- Karen Christopher
- Karen Christopher, Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, 40292. E-mail: k.christopher{at}louisville.edu
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings in Boston in March 2010.
Abstract
Social scientists have provided rich descriptions of the ascendant cultural ideologies surrounding motherhood and paid work. In this article, I use in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of 40 employed mothers to explore how they navigate the “intensive mother” and “ideal worker” ideologies and construct their own accounts of good mothering. Married mothers in this sample construct scripts of “extensive mothering,” in which they delegate substantial amounts of the day-to-day child care to others, and reframe good mothering as being “in charge” of and ultimately responsible for their children’s well-being. Single mothers describe extensive mothering in different ways, and their narratives suggest less accountability to the “intensive mothering” model. Mothers in this sample also justify employment in novel ways: They emphasize the benefits of employment for themselves—not only their children—and they reject the long work hours imposed by an ideal worker model. The article ends with the implications of extensive mothering for the motherhood and employment literatures and for gender equality.
Article Notes
Karen Christopher is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Sociology at the University of Louisville. Her research explores gender, race, and class dynamics in the family, workplace, and welfare state.
This work was supported by an Internal Research Initiative Grant from the University of Louisville, as well as its College of Arts and Sciences and Department of Sociology.
- © 2012 Sociologists for Women in Society
doi: 10.1177/0891243211427700 Gender & Society February 2012 vol. 26 no. 1 73-96
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Studies in the Maternal is an international, peer-reviewed, scholarly online journal. It aims to provide a forum for contemporary critical debates on the maternal understood as lived experience, social location, political and scientific practice, economic and ethical challenge, a theoretical question, and a structural dimension in human relations, politics and ethics.
Today's children 'are raised in captivity' because of paranoia about health and safety says leading child psychologist
- More children end up in A&E because they don't know how to fall over safely having missed out on outdoor play
- Too much emphasis is being put on IQ by the government
- Children miss out on conkers and snowball fights at school due to 'insane' health and safety fears
By Emily Davies
PUBLISHED: 08:33 EST, 18 January 2013 | UPDATED: 08:42 EST, 18 January 2013
Professor Tanya Byron says paranoia culture means children are raised in 'captivity'
Children today are no longer “free range” but are being raised in captivity due to “paranoia” about health and safety, according to a former government adviser.
Leading child psychologist Professor Tanya Byron warned that youngsters no longer know how to fall over, are still being driven to school at age 12 and are banned from throwing snowballs due to fears about grit.
She said that a risk-averse culture has resulted in levels of paranoia that are “insane”.
Speaking at the North of England Education Conference (NEEC) in Sheffield Professor Byron raised concerns that children are now being raised in captivity.
'We live in a risk-averse culture, the levels of paranoia about health and safety and wellbeing are insane,' she said.
'Most children spend most of their childhoods being raised in captivity.'
Today’s children are “hugely, hugely restricted”, she told delegates.
'There are no more predators on the streets, no more paedophiles, then when I was growing up in the 1970s.'
There are better systems now for tracking those people who have “wholly inappropriate relationships around children', Professor Byron suggested.
Children today are “rarely seen out”, she said, when youngsters used to play outside all the time.
Rising numbers of children are attending A&E and minor injuries units because “kids don’t know how to fall any more,” she said.
'They tense themselves up when they fall, so they sprain.'
Children can no longer be seen playing outside, and missing out on play makes them more vulnerable according to Professor Byron. Picture posed by model.
Children used to fall all the time and scabs were seen as a “badge of honour”, she said.
Professor Byron claimed she had also heard of directives in schools which said children cannot play with conkers without goggles, or throw snowballs because they may have grit in them, and that youngsters are being driven to school when they are 11 and 12.
She told the conference: 'Children are being raised in captivity, children are not free range any more.
'They are taking risks we are not preparing them for. They are having a blast in this fantastic global space. I would argue they are more vulnerable there than if they were hanging out on the street.'
Professor Byron raised concerns that too much emphasis is being put on a child’s IQ, suggesting that emotional intelligence also needs to be considered.
'IQ is something that the government is very interested in and see IQ as determined by exam results.'
She said anyone who has spent time researching the subject knows that “exam results are the least reliable indicator of intelligence”.
Prof Byron also told delegates: 'If we do believe that the only way to get the education system back on track is to take it back to the 1970s, we’re completely delusional. It’s letting children down.'
Children need to be allowed to develop their emotional intelligence, she said.
She also suggested that children learn in different ways, and this needs to be taken into account in the classroom.
Her comments came the day after ministers announced that in future primary schools will be encouraged to teach pupils to work out sums using traditional methods like long division and multiplication, or setting out figures in columns for addition and subtraction.
The move is a bit to stop schools using techniques such as “gridding” and “chunking” which have become increasingly popular in recent years.
Ministers insist that these newer methods are “clumsy, confusing and time-consuming”.
Under the plans, pupils who use traditional methods for working out sums will be rewarded in tests, even if they get the answer wrong.
Low expectations, sexual attitudes and knowledge: explaining teenage pregnancy and fertility in English communities. Insights from qualitative research
- Lisa Arai
Article first published online: 28 JUN 2008
DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.00415
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In 1997 the newly elected Labour government was quick to take measures against teenage motherhood. In 1999 they published a seminal document which became hugely influential in shifting both the public's and policy makers' ideas of the 'problem' of teenage pregnancy. The report was underpinned by a drive to tackle social exclusion. The report's tone was set in its foreword where Tony Blair described youthful pregnancy as leading to 'shattered lives and blighted futures'. But teenage fertility was highest 4 decades ago in 1971 with 51 births per 1000 in women under 20. Since then the numbers have halved.
In this programme Miranda Sawyer hears from leading social scientists who argue that public policy has ignored evidence which shows that far from shattered lives and blighted futures, teenage mothers and their children can and do lead happy, healthy lives.
Constructing Mothers: Scientific Motherhood in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries1
- RIMA D. APPLE*
SUMMARY
Scientific motherhood is the belief that women require expert scientific and medical advice to raise their children healthfully. As it developed in the nineteenth century, women were exhorted to seek out information for themselves. By the twentieth century, women increasingly were told that they continued to be responsible for the well-being of their families, but needed to follow the directions of their physicians. Such instruction positioned mothers as both responsible for their families and incapable of that responsibility. This essay investigates the shifting definition of scientific motherhood and various educational and cultural forums through which women learned this ideology. It also demonstrates that mothers both accepted and resisted the insistence that they depend on instructions from medical practitioners. The history of scientific motherhood is an important lens for studying the complex interrelationship of medicine and social roles.
- © 1995 The Society for the Social History of Medicine
Soc Hist Med (1995) 8 (2): 161-178. doi: 10.1093/shm/8.2.161
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Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & …
Publication Date: Jan 1, 2007
Publication Name: Women: A Cultural Review