Idolising Children?

I’ve always had an interest in the work-life balance debate because I think our attitudes to work and productivity impact significantly on our children and contribute to the reasons why we idolise and misplace what is actually best for them.

Mum hasd been feeding me a few newspaper articles that are starting to share the stories of over-worked duel income households who are getting fed up with the pace of it all. It is fine when they are child-less, but people with children can’t maintain the ethic of 14-16 hour days many industries now expect.

So, it was disappointing not to see greater disapproval with Kevin Rudd’s recent comments about the work ethic he expects of the public service - day and night I understand he said.

Thankfully, Andrew Hamilton of the continually great Eureka Street online journal holds our PM to account…strange no one asked Kevin what happened to the hard fought for 40 hour working week.

Read a great piece here - http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=7566

I sat in a class about 10 years ago with a journalist named Steven Dow. He has always written brilliantly. I didn’t expect him to be writing a piece like this. Hats off - he captures the whole thing perfectly.

Thanks Steve.

“School’s in for dads”, The Age, 13 February 2008

…there are hundreds of millions of rants being posted everyday. most of it is worth the small about of bytes it takes up in (cyber)space.

But, over at Fairfax, some clever person has convinced Martin Flanagan to blog.

The world wide web will be a better place becuase of it. Read here.

Over at Eureka Street they have gone daily, and no longer are subscriber based - like New Matilda.

Their first daily offering are two beautiful poems from P.S.Cottier - a poet of whom I know nothing about and a ‘google’ search produces very little.

You can read my favourite “Progress” - here.

It resonates - because I’m definitely still following through as well…

The ongoing sensational reporting of research into the eating habits of children is driving me nuts!

“THOUSANDS of school children feast on junk food and fizzy drinks for breakfast, sparking fresh concerns over Australia’s childhood obesity epidemic,” writes Jill Stark in The Age.

There is no reference to the name of the study, who the authors were, or what the sample size was. No basic information that allows the general reader to make an assessment of this claim. Nothing to tell us about who those “one-in-ten” might be and why they have such a terrible diet to begin with..

Blogs always border on being mere immeadiate reaction rants - and that is what this post threatens to be. Needless to say, the broad sweeping brush strokes offered by much of the field of “public health” contribute to poor understanding of obesity and the overused term of “epidemic” does an injustice to children whose self-esteem is crushed by the moralising over weight in western society.

Children shouldn’t be eating junk food for breakfast, yes they need to eat healthy and the scrapping of any programs - like Nutrition Australia’s healthy eating program discussed in the article should be reported with concern. But, the issue of obesity is far more complex than we are yet willing to acknowledge. Easier to just point at the fat kids and say “get thin” - rather than develop a sophisticated idea about body image and weight that acknowledge body mass index and other population health measures do little for the individual child or family whose personal circumstances mean weight is one of the leats of their concerns.

In today’s Age Larissa Dubeki writes a suitably outraged opinion piece on hair removal products and brazillians beng marketed to the tween market - “Why 10 is too young for your first Brazillian”. The issue is endemic. In researching our next book, my wife Tania has established that the broad range of tween magazines are selling sex and adult concepts of sex to children as young as six.

The debate on this issue is really reaching a climax, but beyond bans on products, advertising and greater regulation of advertising (all which are needed). There is little discussion about why children are being marketed to in this way, how we let it get to this point, why we let it continue and what else can be done about it.

I don’t have a suite of answers to those questions - except to ask them, and then ask us to look at our culture more broadly.

I’d contend that the reason childhood is more sexualised is that our culture is becoming more sexualised. Of course that is a very simple way of defining it, but children live in the same society we do. The idea we can stop them from being exposed to the world in which they live is somewhat naieve.

Can we have a culture where the objectification of women can still be so rife and the demands placed on very specific and often demeaning forms of beauty and sexuality that we can completely shield our children from? I doubt it. The values of a society seep through to the new generations.

So, at some point in the debates about the sexualisation of childhood we have to start having a discussion about the sexualisation of adulthood.

The surprise of the New Year was to find out I was being quoted in the New York Times.

That be said, it was one line. But, hey, it was a mention in the New York Times.

The article from Brian Stelter gives a reasonable overview of the argument. I feel he left me a little short though. The full quote from which my quote was taken was:

Adults may think it is respectful to let children make their own decisions, but it isn’t. Especially at a young age children don’t have enough experience or knowledge to make a wide range of decisions. Respect is supporting children’s development, guiding their decision-making and giving them the capacity to understand that you can’t do everything.

But, with a National Press Club in Washington, an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and David Letterman’s The Late Show and the announcement by the Australian Government that Bindi with be a “tourism ambassador” for Australia we have an eight-year-old girl whose father has recently died, whose mother is still grieving, keeping the schedule of an A-grade celebrity. And, not one person is standing up and saying, “Is this appropriate?”

At the time my issue was, and still is, the idea that respecting children means letting them make all of their own decisions. This simply isn’t the case. Children need to have their development supported and this means in the case of children engaged in public life they need to be supported to enjoy what they are doing, but also adults need to make decisions when enough is enough.

So, the idea is that I update this blog more frequently than I have been. Not a resolution, so much as a good idea. There is some value in these things. If only for clarifying my thinking and following the always contentious debates surrounding childhood, children, parenting and families.

Simon Castles had a great piece in the Sunday Age. He manages (where others have failed) to begin to express a concern about the impact our obsession with “seeking to protect our children from pedophiles” is having on men’s ability to relate and interect with children.

It reminds me of when I was doing childcare work and a young boy came up to me when I was doing a days casual work at a centre I am not usually at and asked me, “When are you going to work?”

When I told him I was working at the childcare centre for the day he was so rapt, he and many other boys spent the whole day following me around and hanging on every word I said.

More men in childcare…when that happens we will really know we are beginning to do the right thing by children. That is one key indicator of our success.

Thanks Simon - great piece.

Over at the Fairfax Whose your daddy? blog, Sacha Molitorisz has blogged a bit about parenting books. He has his own coming out in August - a dad focussed one to help fill a bit of that void.

He gives Idolising Children a run…and proceeds to include a few paragraphs from an email discussion about the book.

Very generous of him. Thanks Sacha. Enjoy the trip to Germany.