Posts Tagged ‘childhood’

The play deficit

Tuesday, September 24th, 2013

When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend Read more

ADHD, or childhood narcissism?

Tuesday, September 24th, 2013

In a typical American classroom, there are nearly as many diagnosable cases of ADHD as there are of the common cold. In 2008, researchers from the Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University found that almost 10 percent of children use cold remedies at any given time. The latest statistics out of the Centers for Disease Read more

The distinct, positive influence of good fathers

Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

I understand where Jennifer Aniston is coming from. Like many of her peers in Hollywood, not to mention scholars and writers opining on fatherhood these days, she has come to the conclusion that dads are dispensable: “Women are realizing it more and more knowing that they don’t have to settle with a man just to Read more

Children seduced by new technologies

Friday, June 8th, 2012

Take a look around you and, in cars, shopping centres and restaurants, chances are you’ll find young children engrossed, not in the world around them, but in their new digital reality. Australians have smartphones and tablet computers gripped in their sweaty embrace, adopting the new internet-enabled technology as the standard operating platform for their lives, Read more