Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘safety’

Our world is a weird and wonderful place, but sometimes, we act in weird ways that make it not so wonderful anymore. In many situations, there is a conflict between what is good for us personally and what is good for everybody. In others, the conflict is between what is good for us right now and what will be good in the future. Without considering the implications of our actions, they sometimes make the world just a little bit less pleasant.

Of course, when we do many of these things and lots of other people do them too, the decline accelerates. I often think of my kids and the kind of place I would like them to have when they grow up and it makes me worry.

When we lived in Texas, there was a period of frost every year. That was bad for the lawn, roads were slippery during morning rush hours and there were always accidents because of the frost.

Yet, a friend of mine found a way to have fun with his kids during that time. Before going to bed on Friday night, he would water his driveway, which was short, straight and steep. When his boys woke up on Saturday morning, the driveway would be ready for some extreme sliding!

This went on for a while and nearly became a family tradition, except one day, my friend’s mother-in-law came to visit on Saturday morning and slipped on the ice. She was thoroughly upset with my friend’s carelessness and promptly sued him (and her daughter, who was married to him) for her medical expenses.

The following year, my friend’s insurance raised his premium and he stopped wetting the driveway.

If you are a parent of a child who has been diagnosed or suspected as having ADHD and you are considering putting them on Ritalin, this post is for you! I have written about ADHD in this blog before, hoping to empower parents to take control over the health and wellbeing of their children and making sure their kids do not become a label. I hope today’s story and video will help you make more informed choices about ADHD and Ritalin.

I have been working in the special education field for 25 years. My amazing mentors and teachers warned me that one day, the inflation in the use of drugs to solve academic or behavioral problems like ADD, ADHD, emotional struggles and even tiredness will be so high that my job would be to stay on guard and offer parents alternatives and hope. I took this job description very seriously, but never in my darkest and most pessimistic dreams have I seen it becoming as big or as scary as this.

I am angry and I want to cry from frustration, because we have lost one more child to a form of organized crime. I am writing this post to recover, to remind myself of my job description, to try and save other children from a horrible fate and to offer hope, only this time I need that hope myself.

While Tsoof was doing his assignment on video game violence, I was shocked with the level of violence the kids were exposed to and it really got me scared. By the end of it, he also showed me some statistics about parents and that got me even more scared.

Parents and video games

Here is a list of figures from a US research into parents’ involvement and attitude towards playing video games:

- 50% of parents play computer and video games with their children

- 93% of computer and video games are purchased or rented while the parents are present

- 88% of games are purchased by adults

- 72% of parents believe video games are “fun for the entire family”

- 71% of parents are asked to play by their kids

- 66% of parents believe computer and video games provide good opportunities for them to socialize with their kids

- 63% of parents believe computer games are a positive part of their kids’ life

- 50% of parents claim that playing computer and video games with their children provides good opportunities to monitor the game content
10% of parents never check the official rating of the computer and video games their kids use
Now, I ask you, would you not feel like there must be someone to blame? Do not feel devastated after reading these figures?

Did you know when reading such things, people use a defense mechanism that says “It won’t happen to me”. I did the same. I said to myself, “I’m OK. My kids are not exposed to video games. We have never purchased any computer game in our life. We don’t have a game console at home”. But this mechanism only gives us a false illusion that we are safe, because we are not.

In the first chapter of the series, I wrote some facts about the gaming industry and some research regarding video games and violence. Here is a list of real life killings and acts of violence inspired by video games. You may even recognize some of them.

April 20, 1999: 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher in the Columbine High School massacre. The two were allegedly obsessed with the video game Doom.

1 April 2000: 16-year-old Spanish teenager José Rabadán Pardo murdered his father, his mother and his sister as an “avenging mission” given to him by the main character of the video game Final Fantasy.

20 November 2001: 21-year-old American Shawn Woolley committed suicide after what his mother claimed was an addiction to EverQuest.

February 2003: 16-year-old American Dustin Lynch was charged with aggravated murder and used an insanity defense that he was “obsessed” with Grand Theft Auto III.

7 June, 2003: 18-year-old American Devin Moore shot and killed two policemen, inspired by the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

This year, my 15-year-old son Tsoof had to do a school assignments in drama class. If you think Drama studies are all about playing, make belief or acting, they are not. He had to research a topic and present it in a special style and he worked really hard on this project. Gal and I felt happy and privileged to watch the whole process of this assignment and the way he grew from doing it.

Our kids do not play computer or video games that often (they are too busy ice skating, singing, playing music, dancing, playing sport and reading to have much time left for video games), so we did not expect this to make any difference to Tsoof, but it did big time.

We were shocked by how easy it was to find information on video games and violence. It is all there – all the proof for the negative and devastating effects of violent video games on our society. Yet, the spread of violent video games is increasing and things are getting worse.

I was not sure how to present Tsoof’s findings to you. I was debating whether to tell you my opinion or maybe there was no need. I think maybe just giving you some of the facts about it will be enough for you to understand the severity of the problem. As I believe that as parents, we have lots of power to change this horrible phenomenon. So sit back and be horrified!

Parents are the most important agents of socialization in our society. Unlike teachers, who are the second biggest influencers on children, the same parents are around their kids while their teachers change. It is only sensible to think that if we want to support kids’ health and wellbeing, we need to support the most important people in their life – their parents.

I came up with the idea of supporting kids by supporting their parents about 20 years ago when I had an early childhood center. I could increase my young kids’ success and confidence whenever I got to the parents and made the partners in the process of education. There was 100% correlation between the success of the child (1½ years old to 4 years old) and the level of their parents’ involvement. My young students could read, do math and solve 60-pieces puzzles. They had the fine and gross motor skills expected of kids 3 years older than they were. At first, their parents did not believe their own eyes, but I just sent all their games and work sheets home so they could see their kids were able to do everything I said they could.

After 25 years in education, I can dare to say that investing in the parents is the most effective investment in children. And as with any investment, the sooner you start, the greater the returns.

I believe that government organizations should be investing in parents, but until that time, I will use this blog to help parents help themselves.

Here are the next 5 tips to help parents stop the cycle of bullying, help themselves and help their children be confident and avoid being bullied, being a bully or being a silent bystander.

Personal development is a good way to eliminate many problems in our society, because it goes through all the levels of change – developing awareness, making a decision to change, creating new habits and living the change. Changing a whole society of bullying is no different. We can move from a bullying society toward a caring, sharing and respectful society using the same personal development techniques.

In the last chapters of the bullying series, I gave tips for parents to stop the bullying in their life, whether to help themselves out of feeling like victims, to stop them bullying their families or to help them help their children. Since bullying is a never-ending cycle, any break in the cycle makes a huge difference to many people you are in contact with. Much like in the movie “Crash”, everything that happens to us touches the lives of the people around us directly or indirectly and we have the power to make a difference in the world by giving strength to our families, partners and children.

Good luck! Well, you do not really need luck. You need a conscious decision to work on yourself and be strong so you will never be picked on by a bully and never feel like a victim and try to gain that power back through your children.

Here are the next 5 tips for parents to work on their personal development and stop the bullying cycle.

When their physical life is in a mess, parents find it harder to cope with the challenges that are part of every day. This situation puts many parents into a reactive mode and makes them easy targets for bullies. You can help your kids by helping yourself be more in control of your life. Adopt a lifestyle that lets you control your circumstances more than they control you.

You can also teach your kids every tip here to make sure they will not be bullying victims and, of course, you need to be a good role model for them by “walking the talk” and showing them how to be in charge of your life.

Control over your life is a good way to build confidence. It does not mean you have 100% control of everything that happens to you in life (we wish!), but it definitely means that you will save your energy for situations that are truly out of your control. Unfortunately, there will always be situation like that, but if we are not too busy with an out-of-control lifestyle, we can handle the accident, the misunderstanding, the trauma, the health problem and the relationship issue better.

Here are the 5 more tips for parents to build their emotional strength and stop the bullying cycle.

In the last few posts of the bullying series, I started introducing 50 personal development techniques for parents to help stop the cycle of bullying. A bully is a person who feels weak and powerless, who is bullied himself by another person, who feels weak and powerless, who bullies others gain power, who bully others to gain power… and this cycle will never end, unless we stop it somewhere.

Families are the best candidates to focus on, because parents, although some are bullied themselves and bully their kids, still have an interest in raising wonderful, successful, happy kids. If we give parents strength and empower them to be aware and develop themselves, they will raise happy and confident kids, who will raise happy and confident kids, that will raise more happy and confident kids and slowly, we will reverse the bullying trend.

In this post, you will find 5 more techniques to stop parental bullying using personal development techniques. Each tip is very powerful. Parents can learn to develop it and become roles models for their kids to develop it too. Your kids are mirrors – they will copy your behavior. When you change, so will they.

Personal development and emotional intelligence may seem like the stuff of workshops and seminars, but they are made up of simple mindset changes anyone can do to have a better life. As long as you have the desire to change, this series of posts can show you how. And when you start changing, even just a little, you will gradually pick up speed and be able to make changes more quickly and easily.

We are often so busy living our life we assume it cannot be changed and that make changes harder, because we are not letting go of what is happening here and now. If that is the way you feel, spend a few minutes breathing deeply with your eyes closed, let here and now dissolve away and imagine how your life could be.

When you are relaxed and hopeful, keep reading.