Toxic Childhood

I am currently reading Toxic Childhood - How the Modern World is Damaging our Children and What We Can Do About It by Sue Palmer.

It is a great read and very very interesting. A lot of what she says goes along with my personal beliefs on child-rearing such as the importance of parent intereaction and time and love. I have not finished reading it yet and will give a full book review when I do but in the meantime I highly recommend this book to anyone who is or wishes to become a parent or grandparent or teacher.

The main premise is that a combination of many different factors such as TV, the electronic era we live in, hard working parents, junk food, junk culture, instant gratification, lack of outside play, too much testing and narrow curriculums at school etc are leading to our children being very unhappy, and badly behaved. This in turn leads to the problem we have now with feral teenage gangs and then anti-social or criminal adults. And the point she makes strongly is that even if you bring up your kids to become well rounded and happy individuals we need to make sure as a community and society as whole that we also do our best to help achieve this with other people's kids as well. Otherwise our children will end up living in a violent and nihilistic society.

I was just reading the chapter on nutrition and she makes an interesting point about how we give our children too many choices. That we think loving someone we should give them a choice. (I do this a lot as I think that it is part of the growing up process but maybe I am wrong!). And the choice issue is very important with food. We should decide what, when and where the child eats and they can decide how much. And thats it. If we give them choices they will always pick the unhealthy stuff as we all have a natural liking for sugar and salt etc. As children don't know about the importance of nutrition we have to make these choices for them. I must remember this next time we are eating out and not let Alex choose chocolate cake for his main course just because I feel like spoiling him! I do think a little treat now and again isnt bad but that I mustn't slip into a bad habit.

The other interesting fact was the importance of the family meal together on a daily basis. I have always thought this as it was an important part of my childhood and I really think it bonds a family together. But studies have also shown all sorts of other benefits such as high educational levels and well adjusted teen years as well as the obvious such as conversation skills, better table manners, the ability to share and be patient etc.

I am so enjoying reading this as I am not a great fan of parenting manuals. I can't wait to get stuck in to the rest of the book. Only on page 40 so far.........