ProWomanProLife

Universal daycare isn’t a good idea. Specific programs to help children and families in lower-income brackets, or people with various life challenges (self-inflicted or not), I can see. There is research that shows daycare helps those children, at least a little. But your average kid from the average middle-income family? Not so much.

“It’s also the best anti-poverty program. I want every single child in Canada to have the opportunity to get a square meal when they come to daycare; to get loving care and tender care,” Mr. Ignatieff added. “A lot of children in our country, we don’t like to admit it, start in a very turbulent difficult environment at home. The great thing about these programs is they give kids an equal start.”

Mr. Ignatieff is correct in one sense: Studies show that, on average, child care moderately improves the cognitive performance of children from low-income families — and the benefits last into adulthood. On the other hand, the same studies generally have shown no such lifelong benefits for children from middle- and high-income families.

Oh, and in the average normal family, “loving care and tender care” is something kids get at home, not in a government institution. When’s the last time you felt loved by a government bureaucrat?

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Thanks for posting about this, Brigitte: I try to keep my day job, in which I research child care, and my after-hours life, PWPL, separate. But on a day when a politician follows up an announcement about daycare with one about abortion that becomes difficult, to say the least.

Or so it seems. Claudia Schiffer, 39 and still working as a professional model, is pregnant with her third child. Good for her (and hubby, of course). Here’s the part of the story I like best:

The 39-year-old catwalk star – who is one of the world’s most successful models – has previously spoken about how motherhood changed her entire attitude to her career.

Claudia – who married Michael, 38, in May 2002 – said: “I used to work every single day and travel round the world. I worked weekends, I never took one second off. When I met my husband I said, ‘You know what, this is important. I’m not going to work weekends any more.’

“And when I had kids, I became even more careful. Modelling work is fine because you can do one day here, two days there, you’re never long gone.”

Parenthood good for your heart, researchers say. Woo-hoo!

Contrary to popular belief, having kids might actually lower your blood pressure. Despite the often hair-raising trials and tribulations of raising a little one, researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah say parenthood has a positive effect on the heart akin to cutting out salt or taking up exercise. The study, published in the Annals of Behavioural Medicine, measured the blood pressure of 200 adults (70 per cent of whom were parents), and found that those with kids had systolic blood pressure 4.5 points lower and diastolic blood pressure three points lower than non-parents. The effect is greater on mothers, whose systolic blood pressure was on average 12 points lower and the diastolic seven points lower than their childless counterparts. As Julianne Holt-Lunstad, the psychologist who led the research explains, “While caring for children may include daily hassles, deriving a sense of meaning and purpose from life’s stress has been shown to be associated with better health outcomes.”

Love the headline on this story: “Beware of friends offering sperm”. Go ahead and read the rest of the story if you want. The details don’t really matter – everything you need to know is right there in the headline.

Good column on New Year’s Resolutions in today’s Citizen. I liked reading about Benjamin Franklin’s quest for self improvement. And the concluding idea of the piece should be the mainstay of parenting today, I think:

It is difficult to raise a good student, but it is much more difficult to raise a good person.

That’s Dennis Prager, apparently, and I’d think that if a parent raises a good person, they will be a good student, whether or not they get good grades.

A British institute says trying to preserve the traditional family is a “trap”. How non-jolly.

Aunts, uncles, grandparents and even siblings will take on increasing childcare responsibilities in a form of “communal parenting” to cope with the effects of marital breakdown and growing pressures in the workplace, according to the Family and Parenting Institute.

Rising divorce rates, fewer marriages and the growth of civil partnerships mean that the traditional family model is no longer “the norm” and Government efforts to rescue it are futile, according to Dr Katherine Rake, the organisation’s new chief executive.

Dr Rake will use her first major speech in the post to warn against the “trap” of attempting to preserve traditional family structures through Government initiatives.

Here’s a fine puzzle for you: What do you tell your child when he comes home confused by a classmate who went from 12-year-old boy to 12-year-old girl over the summer vacation? That you’re pretty confused, too?

A BOY aged 12 turned up at school as a GIRL – after changing sex during the summer holidays.

Teachers called an emergency assembly to order fellow pupils to treat him as female.

The lad, whose parents have changed his name to a girl’s by deed poll, arrived in a dress with long hair in ribboned pigtails. He is preparing for sex-swap surgery.

Angry parents told yesterday how their kids were left tearful and confused after school staff announced the boy pupil was now a girl.

They said the head teacher should have informed them in advance of the “sex change” so they could prepare their sons and daughters and inform them about gender issues.

Three things: 1) While I do not wish to diminish the pain that individuals caught in the wrong gender experience, isn’t 12 a bit early to go ahead with gender reassignment? 2) Why didn’t the school warn other parents? You can’t expect 12-year-olds to accept such concepts without some kind of preparation, and it’s not nice to surprise people that way. And 3) What a stupid thing to do! By not warning the other parents and giving them a chance to prepare their kids so they could deal with their sex-swapping classmate, they made it even harder on said classmate:

[Parents] added that the school’s failure to do so [give them a heads-up] had left the boy to suffer cruel taunts and bullying.

One mum said: “They behaved appallingly by throwing this hand grenade into the room and then leaving the inevitable questions about it for unprepared parents.

“Maybe we could have explained sexual politics and encouraged our kids to be more sensitive if we’d had a chance to be involved.”

So here’s the lesson: If you’re going to let children undergo sex-change operations, you must be prepared to do some work to ensure other children react reasonably well to the change. I do think 12 is way too early for this kind of operation, but that doesn’t mean I’m prepared to treat this kid and other children in his situation badly. Dressing up a 12-year-old boy as a girl and sending him to school with no preparation is dumb and stupid and cruel.

A long piece on sex-ed and this newish “philosophy of inclusive, non-threatening, pleasure-focused sex education” that’s apparently now making its way into high schools.

Where to begin?

I’m glad the kids are interested to know more about what makes for good sex and happy, healthy relationships. I’m sure they’ve had it up to there with the “how to put on a condom properly” tutorial (sort of like having to watch An Inconvenient Truth over and over again, I suppose – it gets tedious pretty fast). But there is a big giant BUT. Two, actually. One, no matter how fun you think it is to fool around with a “plush pink vulva puppet” in a high-school class, the secret to good sex isn’t technical. It’s something that comes with the kind of commitment very few teenagers are ready to make, and you’re not doing them any favours trying to make them believe otherwise. Plus they’ll find out the truth on their own eventually (I did) and realize then that they’d been lied to all this time (ditto). And two, please people, do not leave this crucial topic for sex-shop owners to deal with for you. Talking to your kids about healthy relationships (yes, including the sex part) is your job. If you don’t do it, somebody else will, whether you like it or not. So get to it.

In Saturday’s Ottawa Citizen. Read it here. The accompanying picture, taken by a photographer associated with the Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Foundation,  is worth buying the paper copy. I don’t know what else to write. I read it and I cried but my tears were a mix of grief for Joseph’s parents and joy for Joseph’s life. It showed me once again that very short lives can be jam packed with meaning and purpose.

This is hilarious:

With steep state budget cuts under debate in Sacramento, Los Angeles County supervisors voted Tuesday to push for changes to CalWorks and other government aid programs they said would save nearly $270 million.

Included in their suggestions is a novel proposal: Put unemployed parents to work caring for their own children.

That’s so obvious! If we pay parents to look after their children, we turn them into paid professionals and suddenly all is well. Take that, Charles Pascal!