Safety culture

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


“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.”

Activity Breaks

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

Fit children finish first in the classroom

The title of this post is the same as one of the chapters in my book, Stop Feeding Us Lies. The rest of this post, between the lines, is an excerpt from that chapter.


         In today’s politically correct world, you are unlikely to hear anybody in public office saying, ‘Physically fit children are academically superior to unfit children’, which is a problem because research from around the world has proved this to be true. As I explained in Chapter 3, physical activity increases the production of nerve-growth factors in the brain. One of the reasons we possess elaborate brains is because our ancestors, over a long period of time, were chasing animals for food. It has recently been discovered that the process of enhancing brain function by exercise produces rapid results in the development of children.

         In October 2013 Professor John Reilly, from Strathclyde University, and Doctor Josie Booth, from Dundee University, published their findings from a study which is following the lives of 5,000 children born in 1991 and 1992. This group is known as the ‘Avon Cohort’. The researchers examined the amount of moderate to vigorous physical activity the children were doing at the age of 11 and compared this to their academic performance in English, mathematics and science. Their results showed that the children with higher levels of moderate to vigorous exercise had better academic performance across all three subjects, and this was true for both boys and girls. The children were assessed again at both 13 and 15 years of age, when it was found that their academic achievement was still linked to how much energetic exercise they had taken when they were 11.

         Professor Petri, from the University of North Texas, studied 1,211 children of very diverse ethnic and social backgrounds. As well as testing their fitness and academic achievement, he also took into account other influences like self-esteem, social support and economic status. At the end of the study he said, “Cardiorespiratory fitness was the only factor that we consistently found to have a positive effect on both boys’ and girls’ grades in reading and maths tests.” So, the frequently quoted idea that children from poor families, given little support, are always going to struggle in school because of their backgrounds is not proven in this study.[3] In fact, physical fitness was shown to be the most important factor relating to academic grades.

         There are many similar studies, by different universities, which also found a direct link between physical fitness and performance in school, but at the University of Michigan they went a step further and showed why this happens. Professor Art Kramer studied a group of nine and ten-year-olds by testing their ability to use oxygen while running on a treadmill. This is a standard measure of fitness, which is often used by athletes, and he discovered that the physically fit children were much more efficient at using oxygen than the less-fit children. When he tested their mental capabilities, it was clear that the fit children had a greater ability to remember and integrate various types of information than their less-fit peers. He knew that a part of the brain called the hippocampus is particularly important for the formation of memories, so he gave these children an electronic brain scan to measure the relative size of structures in the brain. When he analysed the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) data, he found that the physically fit children had a bigger hippocampus than the out-of-shape ones. On average, it was 12% larger which is clear evidence that physically fit children perform better in academic tests than unfit children. This happens because the physical exercise, which has made them fit, has also enlarged the parts of the brain that improve memory through the production of nerve growth factors.


       This is very significant information for the education of our children. I have studied the National Curriculum and it contains no requirement to improve the physical fitness of children during PE lessons. There is no mention of a raised heartbeat or increased strength but children are expected to be able to explain why exercise is good for them. There is a great opportunity here for schools to improve the performance of their children. Other research in the book also shows that increased exercise and fitness is likely to improve their general health, mental health, self-esteem and long term prospects.

Is a vegan diet safe for children?

The simple answer is no. A quick internet search reveals that parents from all over the world have been convicted in court of causing either the death, or severe malnutrition, of their own young children as a result of their vegan diet.

In Canada – Religious Vegan Parents Convicted in Starvation Death of Son. This boy was fed a strict vegan diet and died at 14 months old. At the time of death, the child suffered from a rash on 70% of his body, gangrene, hypothermia, and a staphylococcus infection.

In Belgium –  Baby Death: Parents convicted over Vegetable Milk Diet. The baby, Lucas, weighed just 4.3kg (9.5lb) when he died aged seven months, dehydrated and malnourished. The parents ran a ‘health food shop’ and fed him for four months with milk made from oats, buckwheat, rice and quinoa.

In America – Vegan couple sentenced to life over baby’s death. The couple were found guilty of malice murder, felony murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children for the death of their malnourished 6-week-old baby boy, who was fed a diet largely consisting of soy milk and apple juice.

In France – French vegans face trial after death of baby fed only on breast milk. The baby died from vitamin deficiencies because the vegan mother’s milk was deficient in the nutrients vital for infant development.

in UK – Baby death parents spared jail. A nine month old girl died of malnutrition and pneumonia because her vegan parents fed her a diet of only vegetables, fruit and nuts.

In Australia – Toddler fed vegan diet so malnourished she had no teeth. The parents of this 19 month old girl have pleaded guilty to ‘causing danger of serious injury’. After feeding her oats, potatoes, rice, tofu, bread, peanut butter and rice milk she had grown no teeth and looked like she was three months old.

These are tragic cases but they are not freakish anomalies. Malnutrition among young children of vegan parents is widespread.

I am extremely concerned that, for some people, veganism has become a quasi-religious doctrine and they feel compelled to follow their ideology even when it causes clear and significant harm to their own children. I am not the only one who thinks it is completely unsuitable for children. The Federal Commission for Nutrition in Switzerland stated, in their 2018 report, “The positive effects of a vegan diet on health cannot be proven, but there are relevant risks regarding nutritional deficiencies. Children and pregnant women are advised against adopting a vegan diet due to those risks.” Across the border from Switzerland, the German Nutrition Society have stated, “The German Nutrition Society does not recommend a vegan diet for pregnant women, lactating women, infants, children or adolescents. Persons who nevertheless wish to follow a vegan diet should pay attention to an adequate intake of nutrients, especially critical nutrients, and possibly use fortified foods or dietary supplements.” On May 16, 2019, the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium issued an opinion that will make it possible to imprison parents who enforce a vegan diet on their children.

Why do children fail to develop on a vegan diet?

Vitamin B12 This essential vitamin is nowhere to be found in plant foods. It is abundant in animal-sourced foods. Studies show that women with vitamin B12 deficiency in early pregnancy are up to five times more likely to have a child with birth defects, such as spina bifida and anencephaly, compared to women with high levels of vitamin B12. Anencephaly is a fatal condition in which the brain fails to develop. B12 is required for the formation of red blood cells and the creation of myelin. Myelin is a fatty substance that surrounds and protects all of our nerve fibres and without it our nerves cannot transmit signals.

Iron. Most people know that we need adequate levels of iron to enable haemoglobin to transport oxygen around the blood stream. However, iron is also essential in brain development. Iron-containing molecules are required for the production of the myelin sheath and of the neurotransmitter dopamine. While iron does occur in many plant foods, it is in a form with very low bio-availability. The iron found in animal foods, which is referred to as heme-iron, is much for readily absorbed. Vegans and vegetarians are much more likely to be anaemic than people who eat meat and consequently, their babies do not get enough iron in the womb.

DHA. DHA stands for Docosahexaenoic acid, which is why we refer to it as DHA. It  is an omega-3 fatty acid that is a primary structural component of the human brain, cerebral cortex, skin, and retina. It is the most abundant molecule in the brain and is essential for our thought processes. It can only be found in animal-sourced foods especially fish. There is none of it in plants, although they do contain a fatty acid known as ALA, which can be converted to DHA. However, the conversion process is very inefficient and vegans and vegetarians invariably have much lower levels than omnivores.

There are many other components of a healthy diet missing from plant-based foods. A vegan diet cannot provide all the nutrients for the development of a fully functioning, optimised human brain. There is more comprehensive information in the members’ area.

References: The Role of Iron in Neurodevelopment: Fetal Iron Deficiency and the Developing Hippocampus

Omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA: health benefits throughout life.

Effects of folate and vitamin B12 deficiencies during pregnancy on fetal, infant, and child development.

Breakfast Cereal

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.