Childhood

If there is one topic that is guaranteed to cause much debate and controversy it is about the “right” way to deal with, and discuss overweight children. Many still believe that even though one in four Australian children has a significant weight issue that it is simply “puppy fat” and that children will grow out of it.

Based on this belief, it is inferred that we should basically ignore the fact that a child is overweight or obese - we should leave them be.

If only this were true. After working in the area of child and adolescent obesity for more than 10 years I can tell you that childhood obesity is a massive issue here in Australia. When you see a child who appears to have a little “puppy fat” or “muffin top”, you are actually looking at a serious weight issue.

Continue reading "Don’t turn a blind eye to your overweight child" »

One more sleep till D-Day… but this year, I’ve actually felt good about Christmas. It’s not a familiar feeling. In my adult life, Christmas tradition has involved ambivalence tending to hostility, a fortnight of creeping despair, then curling up after a bottle of cognac to cry in a corner and throw up mince on the rug.

Many of those years, if the bloke in the red suit had existed, I would have left him out a roast leg of venison and hoped that the reindeer could smell it on his clothes. No doubt many of us go through stages like this, where we want to go out and club a ringy-dingy elf right in the head.

And no wonder. The season can’t compete with how it was as a kid, when days were as long as novels and “Ten more minutes” was a judicial sentence. The heat somehow arrived earlier. The lead-up to Christmas stretched out to the horizon, as afternoons led a charge deep into the evenings and the grass dried to gold. Stepping outside to air already hot before we’d dressed for school. The toy shops excruciating in their possibility. The advent calendar crawling by, glue and crappy chocolate marking days that dragged out their final demise like a row of dying grandparents.

Continue reading "And so this is Christmas, which now I embrace" »

Often, I use the privilege of being a journalist to write some flippant observation or other about life according to one working mother with an eye for the ridiculous and very little shame.

But I couldn’t let this week pass without writing about a deeply serious subject that has touched thousands of Melburnians in the last couple of weeks; the suicide of a high-achieving school captain at a prominent private secondary school.

When it happened, the ripples spread well beyond the school community to parents and students who knew the boy from Melbourne’s sprawling school social network - who were calling and texting each other madly in states of high distress, just as the Year 12 exams began.

Continue reading "A lament for the childhood our kids should have had" »

Were the recent British riots caused primarily by children who were placed in forward-facing strollers?

Another dilemma for mothers – as if they didn’t have enough on their plates – is the forward/rearward-facing stroller/carrier controversy raised by Cathrine Fowler, Professor of Child and Family Health Nursing at the University of Technology, Sydney.

I am acquainted with Cathrine as a professional colleague and respect her work; in many areas we would be to total agreement. I’m sure she has sound reasons for her thoughts on strollers and carriers. Nevertheless, I see it differently.

Continue reading "Moving forward, it doesn’t matter which way babies face" »

When my daughter told me she felt stressed one Saturday morning, I did a double take. She’s 10. She sleeps with a stuffed bear and has drumsticks and dirty socks strewn across her bedroom floor.

In my eyes, she’s still a child. Yet here she was, “stressed”. I asked her what it felt like (“Like I can’t really enjoy myself”) and why (“Because I have to write a speech and then do all this maths homework”).

I wrapped my arms around her and declared it a homework-free day. Instead, we went to the park. Later, we baked her favourite cake and read The Encyclopaedia of Immaturity together, in which we learnt how to make vegie-proof tongue covers and take photos that look as if your head’s fallen off.

Continue reading "Childhood isn’t preparation for life, it is life" »

Childhood is supposedly a time of joy and carelessness; an endless frolic of dimpled cheeks, flaxen hair and rubious joy (to paraphrase Irish poet George Darley).

The Academy Award-nominated Australian children’s book illustrator and author Shaun Tan sees things very differently.

Firstly, he acknowledges that children can concertina with hopelessness and misery just like real, live humans.

Continue reading "Revealing a darker side of childhood" »

When the shower on the bottom floor landing began sprinkling water on my face I knew our project was complete.  We had built a three-storey tree house, decked out with a cooking area, carpeted living room and water supply system.

Parents from Baradine came to admire it, the Australasian Post came to photograph and the four of us – Bimbo Kelly, Rusty Patterson, Oscar Purdy and Emu Emerson (that’s me) – came to make it our “adventure home”.

Oscar and I built on the design work of Bimbo and Rusty who, in 1968, spent days walking along the gullies of Baradine Creek in search of a gum tree big enough to cradle a tree house.  Obligingly, there it was - a magnificent soaring red gum, its roots plunging deep into the wide shoulder of the sandy creek bed.  At its back, over a fence, was a stand of native cypress pine trees – a perfect source of timber.

Continue reading "1970 was the year I was never out of my tree" »

The worst - or maybe just the most memorable - thing about getting in trouble as a kid is that split second when you get sprung by your olds and the game is up.

America’s “Balloon boy” Falcon Heene will surely remember for the rest of his life the moment he first saw his dad after hiding for hours in the attic, fearing he would be yelled at after tampering with the balloon.

Most of us have a story about the worst things we did when we were kids but very few of them will be of Falcon’s order: “I started a national panic and a desperate mid-air chase of a balloon that was covered live on the network television for hours. People worried I was dead but I was just hiding in the attic.”

Continue reading "Sprung tales: the worst things you ever did as a kid" »

Any day now researchers can be expected to conclude the best thing parents could do for children is to have none in the first place.

It wouldn’t be all that surprising amid the deluge of useless advice thrown at parents on how best to raise their kids.

The latest tip for mums and dads, in draft federal government guidelines reported this week, is that children should not watch television until they’re two years old.

Continue reading "Time to study the bad advice given to good parents" »

Noted US Professor of Economics James Heckman is a much quoted figure by the Australian Labor Party. 

In these times of economic upheaval and challenge his message has a unique and appealing social angle – essentially his work outlines the economic benefits of investing well in early childhood education to address social disadvantage.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has quoted Heckman extensively in the past, and did so again this week in his Burgmann College Address , saying:

Continue reading "Big Brother Rudd ignores the family in education" »