Focus: Planting a bomb or a blossom at your kid's wellbeing and development?

I thought I'd like to share a little story about myself. Looking back, I've always been a nice kid, if not, I am often described by my parent's friends as a polite, patient and well-taught kid. But sometimes in my childhood, I must have done something so mischievous, so raunchy, something that would instantly startled my mother's temper. I remembered some, and most of them didn't end well for me. But looking back now, I don't hate my mum, I just felt I was angry and sad but I didn't really put much blame to my mother.

I know some of my friends, whose mother had never beat them up or using physical violence like sticks hitting and smack on the bum, which I found it is impossible. By impossible, I mean sometimes for a parent, if you do nothing to show your authority to your child, they will not listen to you and years gone by, the child will become more disobedient and rebellious, trying to battle against the upper level of dominance. Showing authority by smacking and punishment is needed for a child's development in my opinion. But as I looked at them, they are perfectly fine and nice, not like those baddies and vandal fiends roaring at you across the street at night.

But at the same time, some parents did offer strict rules and regulations at home and outside home where children has to abide with them or else they will have a serious consequence. Again, children turned out to be nice citizens, but some children are as hard as a rock. No matter how you push them to the east, they will drag themselves toward the west. A saying in Chinese described this very nicely: 'Good advice may sound harsh to the ears' Whenever children have to listen to their parent's constant scolding, they tend to dislike it. Moreover, if you tried to force them to behave in something they refuse to, they will directly turn against you.

Different styles of parenting will not determine how a child will turn out to be in their adulthood, and there is no consistence about which method of child-raising is the best one.

So I realised not every family is using the same method of child-raising, although there are several similarities in concept, every parent do it differently. But things can sometime go off and some parents are often seeking shortcut to resolve their children's bad behaviour.

Is it acceptable for mums to do this to their kids? Let's decide.

Here is a perfect example of a mother telling her boy to not to shoplift. She used a radical measure to counter this problem - by putting him on the street while he's wearing a badge written, 'Do not trust me. I will steal from you as I am a THIEF.'

The thing I found in the article was even though the mother has took him for a tour to the detention centre, a walk in the police station showing him cells and cuffs to hint the consequence of stealing, in order to educate his 10-year-old son to not stealing things from shops, he still performed shoplifting. Well, for a mother dealing with such a troublesome young boy, it must have been frustrating.

Now that she noticed everything she's done was held to be ineffective, she decided to use the concept of 'humiliation' as a punishment for his son's wrongdoing. However, this act has stirred up a heated debate regarding whether his mother's act is doing mare harm than good to his son, as the media reported this incident in the news.

I am not certain about others, but I understand her mother's intention is to use this method to let his son to reflect on his acts of shoplifting. Plus nowadays, children are having much more protection and looking after than the past generations have ever had, making the society believe that other than suggestion or encouragement, every other punishment methods should be banned from using on children, that gives children an overwhelming idea that their parents will not smack them, ground them, or even raise their voice at them.

Giving so much protection and attention from the society, I believe children of a certain age will understand no matter how raunchy they misbehave, they won't be suffering from consequences. This has to be changed and rationalised because if more children are like that, the significance and the influence of parents will be diminished. Saying that this kid will be a criminal and suffer from traumatic mental shift is a bit far-fetched, but I think the society shouldn't criticise this mother's act of tough love. I think she will know and capable to make decision on what best it will be for her son.

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Focus: Baby Einsteins DVD doesn't work at all?

I'm a young man, and young people should do something like partying, having fun, hanging out with mates, while I'm reading articles related to parenting. That is kind of odd I believe. But I am so interested that every time I stumble upon an article about kids and their well-beings, I'll instantly read through it bit by bit, unlike other articles which I usually skim through and see if it worths my time to read it. Maybe I'm just having such a potential to be a good father, or am I not?

So this one that I just read (3-year-old article by the way) was about debating the effectiveness of purchasing Baby Einstein videos where they advertised it will help boosting your little pumpkin's intellect, prepare them for sooner education, or outsmart your neighbour's kid. Since it was so well-packaged into a suite of merchandise, guilty parents who feared they aren't doing enough for their baby flocked to stores and buy them, hoping that by listening to those music and watching those videos will make their baby smarter and maybe become an Einstein in the future,

Parents! Give me your money NOW!

Well this study showed us actually by plonking your infant children in front of these videos may do more harm than good to them! They said, when they put them in front of baby DVDs and videos, they learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. Wow, shocker. Also this especially affect babies for those aged between 8 to 16 months old, where their language skills and verbalising abilities are starting to form. "The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew," says Dr. Dimitri Christakis, who worked on this study with the research team at the University of Washington. "These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos."

So apparently the more you let your little babies to watch these videos from TV screen, the less they will learn and the more parents paying these disks from their precious, invulnerable wallet, those companies who made all these counter-intuitive materials will earn all the profits from these poor parents, who just want their babies to be a little bit smarter and brighter. Reality is brutal.

So what should the parents do? Well, that's easy! You can just simply spend more time interacting with your little ones, play with them, talk to them, have some fun times and more importantly, stop drilling your babies little brain with those useless DVDs. They learn everything from you, copying your acts, your lingo, just do your best to be a good influence and example. Your grandfather turned out great even without television, let alone flash cards and stuff like these, right?

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Focus: Drivers, mostly parents, run their cars over their children

Today I came across this article about how common drivers run over children in places like driveways of their own homes, and surprisingly the driver-at-fault is usually their kid's father or mother.

Former Wallaby Brendan Cannon (inset) accidentally backed over his son Samuel in the driveway of his family home. (Image Credit: Brisbane Times)

According to the article, there are about 160 kids being ran over by cars in Queensland, which is quite a number. And besides that, as the vehicle getting larger in size, the fatality for the children also increases.

Some children as young as 2, since they are not tall enough, as parents backing off their vehicles at home they couldn't see anything behind, and there the vehicle went and ran over the child. It's very sad to see people's own children being bumped over. Brendan was very fortunate to see his son being recovered so well. "I really feel for the people who don't get that opportunity to have that second chance with a child." He said.

There are a lot of precautions can be made to avoid a tragedy to happen in families. In the article, the Dad was driving an 4WD, which is quite big and tall. But nevertheless it's not the vehicle's problem, but the constant alertness of a driver. Devices that can detect surrounding objects like infrared sensor can help drivers notice when something is on their way when backing up their vehicles. And also get out of the vehicle and walk all the way around to see if there's anything on the way before backing up. But most importantly, I think they have to make sure where their children exactly are, for example whether they're sitting in the car or wandering around the garage, before really start the engine. In that way, you'll be able to prevent such avoidable accidents.

So always be safe when you drive, and "Supervise, Separate and See" your children.

Source [Brisbane Times]

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