Children’s Health

Many organisations will tell us that they regard ‘children’s safety as paramount’. This sounds appropriate but we need to ask ‘from which harm are you trying to protect them’? The answer is not as straightforward as many of them think. The following is an excerpt from Stop Feeding Us Lies in the chapter entitled Playtime Makes Us Better People

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“Professor Tanya Byron is a clinical psychologist and author of several books on children’s mental health. She believes that children are being “raised in captivity” because of the “insane” levels of risk aversion. Back in 2009 she said, “Very rarely are children seen on the streets, playing outside, taking themselves to school because we live in such a risk averse and paranoid culture around child safety.” She wrote a report for the Government on children’s use of websites and video games. In it, she warned that far too many children were kept indoors because of parental fears about safety, but were then allowed free access to the internet where they were exposed to cyber-bullying and sexual predators.

In his book, No Fear: Growing up in a risk averse society, Tim Hill argues that childhood is “being undermined by the growth of risk aversion and its intrusion into every aspect of children’s lives. This restricts children’s play, limits their freedom of movement, corrodes their relationships with adults and constrains their exploration of physical, social and virtual worlds”.

He discusses the Government’s contribution to this awful mess and cites The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 as a major step towards more risk aversion (and therefore worse outcomes for children). The idea was to make sure that people who worked with children, or vulnerable adults, had no previous record of inappropriate behaviour. This sounds like a good idea, but as Tim Hill points out: ‘The Act places around nine million adults technically under suspicion of abuse: a third of the adult working population.’ The Act, for the first time, extends mandatory vetting to include over two million volunteers and workers involved in sport and leisure activities, and over 200,000 school governors.

Governments of every type are very keen on producing new laws, but they all seem to be incapable of grasping the Law of Unintended Consequences. The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act was supposed to keep children safe from people who want to do them harm. What it has actually done is to assume that millions of adults, who volunteer to help with a huge range of children’s activities, are potentially unsuitable or even dangerous, unless they can prove otherwise by paying about £60 for a Disclosure and Barring Service check (DBS, formerly known as CRB.) It has created an atmosphere of fear and mistrust between children and adults. As a result, large numbers of volunteers are giving up because of the insinuation, the cost and the danger that an innocent remark, or the slightest physical contact with a child, will result in an accusation of abuse, which will destroy not only their reputations but also their careers and perhaps even their lives. This law has greatly increased the aversion to risk in children’s lives, which is one of the main destroyers of free play. Tim Hill concludes: “Underpinning and connecting all these harmful tendencies is an assumption of children’s vulnerability (or in the case of antisocial behaviour, their villainy) combined with failure to prioritise ways of fostering their resilience and sense of responsibility.”

We have already looked at the evidence which illustrates that instinctive play is the best way to foster children’s resilience and responsibility, but as a society we seem to be doing our utmost to prevent the proper development of young people. Our paranoia about safety, and fear of risk, has become so widespread and intense that it has spawned a culture of blame and litigious victimhood. While I agree that people who have been damaged by someone else’s negligence should be able to seek compensation, I am horrified by the attitude that every accident must be someone’s fault. If you put the words ‘accident claim school’ into an internet search engine, you get pages of law firms specialising in accident compensation. My dictionary defines ‘accident’ as ‘an event that happens by chance without apparent or deliberate cause’. How can you sue someone for an accident? According to reports in the press, on average, education authorities in England settle two compensation claims of £7,500 each, every school day of the year.

A typical example of this occurred in 2013 and involved a six year old girl who fell over in the school playground after being bumped by another child who was playing tag. The girl cut her head on a wooden planter, which had passed health and safety checks, and her mother sued for compensation via her solicitor. The City Council decided to settle out of court and the girl received £1,100. However, the council had to pay the mother’s legal costs of £13,000 as well as their own legal costs of £20,000. They decided to settle because they could not afford the legal costs if they had lost the case. The girl got £1,100 but the solicitors, between them, got £33,000. You and I paid out that money for a typical childhood accident. The judge involved in the case described it as “a complete waste of tax payers’ money”.

Compensation claims for childhood accidents cost the tax payer an enormous amount of money. As you can see from the example above, sometimes the lawyers get 30 times as much money as the girl who had the accident. Worse still, this culture of blame actively encourages the attitude that every mishap in life is someone else’s fault and thereby diminishes the importance of personal responsibility. I regard personal responsibility as the corner-stone of a successful society. This compensation culture denies children the opportunity to learn from their own mistakes. Lastly, and by far the worst, is the damage this attitude is doing to children’s play. Schools, education authorities and voluntary organisations are now terrified of being sued and their response is to cut back on every situation where children might fall over and graze their knees.

All of these health and safety initiatives begin with the best of intentions but they all snowball out of control. They so often make us neither healthy nor safe. The aversion to risk and the fear of litigation are making children far more sedentary and, indisputably, that makes them less healthy. Jaak Panksepp, Stuart Brown and other researchers have shown that children who are denied the opportunity for normal, instinctive, physically active play, grow up far more likely to be anti-social, violent and aggressive.”

Young children need to play. They have a deep, evolutionary need to do so. This urge to play goes well beyond ‘having fun’; it develops important pathways in the brain involved in creativity and empathy. Children in Primary School often struggle to maintain their concentration in the classroom, which leads to fidgeting and disruption. Research has shown that short bursts of playful activity can boost children’s focus and attention span whilst also satisfying their urge to play.

Activity Breaks can be used at any time in a classroom when attention is waning. They consist of a variety of physical actions which are fun and energetic. They can be performed beside a child’s desk, take three or four minutes and need no equipment. Studies have shown that children love doing them and that teachers report a significant improvement in focus and engagement afterwards. The few minutes taken from a lesson when performing an Activity Break is recovered by the subsequent increase in attention. Other benefits include an improvement in physical fitness and the association in children’s minds with exercise and having fun.

The activities are cognitively engaging. In other words, they require thought, imagination and reaction. Research has shown this type of activity has a greater benefit than a simple aerobic exercise, like running on the spot. However, simple aerobic exercise is considerable better than nothing.

All Primary School teachers should have a pack of Activity Breaks cards in their desk for those moments each day when their children are flagging.

Of course, parents can use Activity Breaks at home with their own children and when they have children’s parties.

The activities are presented on A4 sheets as downloadable PDF files. When they are printed on to white card and cut into quarters they become 14 individual activities on A6 cards with a 15th card as a set of instructions.

References:

Fit children finish first in the classroom

Classroom-based high-intensity interval activity improves off-task behaviour in primary school students. Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 2014

Classroom-Based Physical Activity Breaks and Children’s Attention: Cognitive Engagement Works!

Exercise in schools can help children pay attention in the classroom

Have you ever wondered where breakfast cereal came from? Nearly everybody eats it nowadays and we are told it is a wholesome way to start the day, but who invented it and why? It will probably come as no surprise to learn that the first breakfast cereal was invented by a man called John Harvey Kellogg in 1878. It will probably come as quite a surprise to learn why he did it.

Kellogg was an American medical doctor of some renown and you may be thinking that, as a doctor, he devised Corn Flakes for sound nutritional reasons. Sadly, you could not be further from the truth. As well as being a doctor, he was also a religious zealot in the church of the Seventh Day Adventists. They take Christian scripture literally and have a strong emphasis on diet and health. Dr. Kellogg took these beliefs to extremes. Like many other members of his church, he regarded passion and sexual arousal as sins and the greatest sin of all was masturbation. He went to great lengths to try to stop it. He wrote a booklet entitled ‘The Rehabilitation of Masturbators’, where he described the extreme measures, even mutilation, he used on both sexes to curtail this ‘sin’. He was an advocate of circumcising young boys and applying phenol to a young woman’s clitoris to make the dreaded habit much more difficult. He sometimes sowed silver thread into the foreskin of boys so that erections were painful. He had a wife but never consummated his marriage because he thought it was sinful and they adopted their children.
Corn Flakes were invented as part of his strategy against self-gratification. He strongly believed that completely bland foods would decrease, or prevent, sexual arousal and that strong (nutrient dense) foods like meat would increase physical excitement. So, Corn Flakes were designed from the start to be as bland as possible in the belief that a lack of taste and nutritional quality would diminish normal human passions. His brother, William, who was less of a zealot and more of a business man, started the Kellogg’s company to sell bland, processed flakes of corn. William wanted to add sugar to the flakes to make them palatable but John wanted blandness above anything else. Eventually, William got his way and they now come sprayed with sugar. To make them slightly more nutritious than the cardboard box they come in, they are also sprayed with a few vitamins. This allows the Kellogg’s Company to make the dubious claim that dried flakes of corn might be healthy.
I find it ironic that millions of families all over the world give their children Kellogg’s cereals every morning without realising the sinister intentions behind their invention. The real irony is, that in a much less dramatic and obvious way, he is still managing to damage children’s health and well-being with a daily dose of sugar laden junk food.