It is terribly tragic to read of the number of children harming themselves on purpose. What makes it even more unsettling is that these children don’t take up this practice based on peer pressure, television, advertising or any other common triggers for unhealthy child behaviour.
When a child decides to cut themself, they are expressing deep and complex issues such as hopelessness, self-hatred, loneliness and anger. Often a child’s cuts goes unnoticed.
I am grateful that a study has brought this silent but shocking issue to the fore:
Studies have suggested about one-fifth of teens and young adults engage in self-injury at some point to relieve negative emotions or reach out for help, for example. But this report is the first to ask the question of kids as young as seven. Researchers found one in 12 of the third-, sixth- and ninth-graders they interviewed had self-injured at least once without the intention of killing themselves.
“A lot of people tend to think that school-aged children, they’re happy, they don’t have a lot to worry about,” said Benjamin Hankin, a psychologist from the University of Denver who worked on the study. “Clearly a lot more kids are doing this than people have known.”
Hankin and his colleagues spoke with 665 youth about their thoughts and behaviors related to self-harm. They found close to eight percent of third graders, four percent of sixth graders and 13 percent of ninth graders had hit, cut, burned or otherwise purposefully injured themselves at least once. In younger kids hitting was the most common form of self-injury, whereas high schoolers were most likely to cut or carve their skin.
Ten of the kids, or 1.5 percent, met proposed psychological criteria for a diagnosis of non-suicidal self-injury, meaning they had hurt themselves at least five times and had a lot of negative feelings tied to the behavior, the researchers reported Monday in Pediatrics. Youth who self-injure often say they do it to help stop bad emotions, or to feel something — even pain — when they are otherwise feeling numb, according to psychologists.
Tags: Benjamin Hankin, Child Welfare, Education, Helen DeVos, News, Parenting, Pediatrics, Psychology, self-injury, Stephen Lewis, Steven Pastyrnak, Study, Teens, University of Denver, University of Guelph
Topical Teaching 
June 12, 2012 at 6:03 am |
According to Sir Kenneth Robinson every country is bent on reforming their education system. In his opinion they are beyond reforming because they are no longer relevant. Most education systems, he argues, were developed during the industrial revolution, in response to the need for large numbers of compliant factory workers. The world has changed but the way we do school has not. We are educating our children for jobs that do not exist now, let alone at the time when they leave school. I can support this because I have seen the extreme example of repeated attempts to prop up this kind of education in a community where virtually no jobs exist for most of the population, let alone the numbers of school leavers being added to their number each year.
Robinson believes that we need a completely new paradigm to change the way we do schooling. The current paradigm Is broken. It can’t be repaired. He believes the hierarchy of subjects needs to change and students need to be educated according to their interests and abilities, instead of being funnelled into courses that lead to non existent jobs.
I believe he is quite correct as far as he goes. I believe there must be, hand in hand with the operation of a new educational paradigm, a system of community development so that there will be a meaningful world into which today’s youth can be educated. I am watching a spectre unfold, in the NSW education system, which recognises this, as far as Aboriginal youth is concerned. They are bringing in a concept of “Connected Schools” which attempts to fit Aboriginal youth for life in their community, with a raft of employment skills (for which no jobs exist). Under this idea (I won’t call it a new paradigm.) there is some attempt at community development but it is a lame one. Furthermore the whole concept, while it purports to have Aboriginal youth in its sights, is the result of work done over 10 years ago in troubled urban communities in the USA and UK. This is hardly relevant for Indigenous youth in rural communities in NSW. It’s a cut and paste job, rather than a new paradigm and as such will go the way of all attempts at education reform in this area going back over all the time I have been teaching, because rather than changing anything, in terms of the way things are run, it is very much more of the same. The same goals, the same wishful thinking, the same self delusion, the same bureaucratic organisation, the same ineffective but autocratic leadership. It does not even begin to understand the issues but takes a scheme out of one context overseas and attempts to apply it to a vastly different context in this country.
This is not to say that I have all the answers and the NSW DEC at least recognises the needs and is making an attempt at addressing those needs but without, what W.Edwards Deming calls “deep knowledge” of your system and what Peter Senge calls “the underlying structures”, cut and paste solutions is all you will be able to offer.
June 12, 2012 at 6:07 am |
In the light of my above post, the tendency to self harm among students caught up in an irrelevant education system is not surprising. I have seen it myself, the feelings of frustration and hopelessness and sheer misery felt by our young people, and especially our indigenous young people, all too often, first hand.
June 15, 2012 at 1:53 am |
Thanks John. I really appreciate your contributions.