Posts Tagged ‘Depression’

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The Cheapening of Real Conditions

July 10, 2012

I know of people who struggle with debilitating depression. It is a complex illness, with many different triggers and dimensions. I imagine that it must frustrate people suffering from depression to read articles like this one:

Violence aired on TV round the clock is causing depression, anxiety and post-traumatic disorder amongst children, according to a senior psychiatrist at the Ziauddin Hospital, Dr Syed Ali Wasif.

 “A child or any other individual who is abruptly exposed to the sound of a cracker or breaking news on a TV channel goes through fear, anxiety, uncertainty and hopelessness,” Dr Wasif told The News on Tuesday.

 “The child can develop depression and post-traumatic disorder. It also affects their educational productivity,” he said.

Are you telling me news is a trigger for depression? How would people suffering from this complex condition feel about that assertion?

The same goes with autism. With the autism spectrum seemingly widening every day, now including cases of such slight autism you wouldn’t be able to detect it if you weren’t alerted to the diagnosis, I feel for those with clear autism. Why should they be pigeonholed with others who have a dramatically easier quality of life and functionality?

If “the sound of a cracker” really is enough to send a child into clinical depression I’ll eat my shoe.

Click on the link to read Schools Have to Wake Up to Confidence Issues Amongst Students

Click on the link to read, Stricken with Self-Doubt

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Posted in Child Welfare | Leave a Comment »

Cyberbullying is More Harmful than Traditional Bullying

March 15, 2012

I’ve been of the opinion for quite a while that cyberbullying is the form of bullying that does the most harm and is the hardest to address. By invading the home of the child, cyberbullying takes an environment that was traditionally safe and has ensured that victims of such bullying have nowhere to hide. Cyberbullying also reaches a far wider audience, replacing the half a dozen or so witnesses in a playground incident with literally thousands online.

Children think face-to-face bullying is more harmful than cyber bullying but new research shows that perception to be false.

Researchers from Queensland University of Technology surveyed over 3000 students in Years 6 to 12 from 30 schools nationally and found 45 per cent said they were bullied.

The victims of face-to-face bullying, often referred to as traditional bullying, reported it had harsher impacts than victims of cyber bullying. However, other signs show the opposite to be true.

Lead researcher, Associate Professor Marilyn Campbell, said victims of cyber bullying reported higher levels of anxiety and depression than children who had been bullied face-to-face.

“When we measured their social problems, children who had been cyber bullied had much higher scores than victims of traditional bullying but they didn’t see it themselves,” Campbell told Education Review.

Campbell said children were usually bullied by kids they knew and often because they were different.

“It’s a cycle. They go to school, they get bullied. They go home and get cyber bullied. They go back to school and are bullied again.”

It is absolutely vital that schools stop sitting on their hands and start becoming more proactive when it comes to fighting cyberbullying. Schools are quick to point out that since the bullying is done outside school gates it becomes a parenting issue rather than a school issue. That may be true when it comes to legal obligations but not moral obligations. Schools should be expected to do what they can to ensure that their students are protected from being harassed or bullied by other students, regardless of where the harassment takes place.

Schools have got to stop obsessing about potential lawsuits and handballing issues to other stakeholders. They must show they care and fight for the wellbeing of their students!

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Posted in Cyber Bullying | Leave a Comment »

Kids Need Meaningful Relationships More than Mobile Phones

March 12, 2012

No matter how advanced technology becomes, nothing will stop us from needing human contact and real interaction. You might be able to stockpile Facebook friends, but nothing can replace the loyalty and support offered by a real friend.

Sometimes I feel that we have allowed ourselves to live in glass cubicles, shielded from real people, real conversations and real experiences. The same technology which was devised to bring us closer together has been misused and ultimately, has kept people out.

Teachers have been instructed to keep emotional distance from their students, the local small business operator who cared about his/her community as much as their bank balance, has been replaced by people not interested in the place where they work or the people who frequent their establishment. People are much less likely to say things like, “I just met someone on the train. We got talking and she told me all about her interesting life.” The only talking on trains is via mobile phone.

Is this really a natural way to live? Is this how we want our children to grow up? Are we really surprised to read that children don’t play with other children like they used to?

A new study that found almost 50 per cent of kids don’t play every day has prompted an expert’s warning about a generation of depressed and anxious youngsters.

The study, hailed as the first of its kind in Australia, carried out a total of 1397 interviews, including 344 with children aged between eight to 12.

About 40 per cent of them said they don’t have anyone to play with while 55 per cent say they’d like to spend more time playing with their parents.

Forty-five per cent said they were not playing every day.

The MILO State of Play study, which also interviewed 733 parents and 330 grandparents, found that more than 94 per cent of them believed play was essential for child development.

But it is still rapidly falling off the list of priorities, said child psychologist Paula Barrett.

“The longer we de-prioritise it, the more likely we are to have unhappy and inactive Australian kids which are more likely to be anxious and depressed, resulting in a raft of social problems in adulthood,” she said.

Dr Barrett said unstructured, active play was essential to help children learn important life skills, develop imagination and creativity.

“This finding highlights a concerning yet common misperception that many parents share – they dont think that kids need to play regularly after the age of eight,” she said.

Many will criticise me for drawing a parallel with the state of society and the development of new technologies. Of course technology isn’t solely to blame for a lack of real and personal interactions. But let’s face it, they have made the issue more serious. Just look at the advertisement above. Do we really want life’s pleasures to be about how nifty our touch screens can become?

In 2005 a landmark movie was released entitled, Crash. It depicted New York as a place where people are too insecure and selfish to interact with others. The only way a person can have any dialogue with a stranger is if they, quite literally, crash into each other.

Our children need real friends, not Facebook friends, they need play dates not peer-to-peer gaming sessions and they need the adults in their lives (including teachers) to scrap any notions of emotional distance and become engaged.

Let’s tear down the barriers and bypass the touch screens and actually … talk with each another!

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Posted in Child Development, Technology | 3 Comments »

The Role of Teacher in Helping Students Deal With Divorce

June 5, 2011

 

In a previous post I observed that:

It is my opinion that while divorce is a fact of life and that in most cases there is nobody to blame, it is quite distressful for the child.  The fact that it is common and has also effected other classmates provides next to no comfort for the child.  I believe that when a child’s parents separate the teacher must refer the matter to the school councillor (if the school has one), and spend more time with child building their confidence and displaying patience when the child plays up or has difficulty completing a task.  It is not sufficient to wait until the child shows signs of anxiety or rebellion.  The time to initiate support is straight away.

Now we find just how difficult it is for kids academically:

Young children of divorce are not only more likely to suffer from anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem and sadness, they experience long-lasting setbacks in interpersonal skills and math test scores, new research suggests.

Children do not fall behind their peers in these areas during the potentially disruptive period before their parents divorce, the study revealed. Instead, it’s after the split that kids seem to have the most trouble coping.

“Somewhat surprisingly, children of divorce do not experience detrimental setbacks in the pre-divorce period,” noted study author Hyun Sik Kim, a doctoral candidate in the department of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “From the divorce stage onward, however, children of divorce lag behind in math test scores and interpersonal social skills.”

“Children of divorce also show enhanced risk of internalizing problem behaviors characterized by anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem and sadness,” Kim said.

While the negative impacts do not continue to worsen several years after the divorce, “there is no sign that children of divorce catch up with their counterparts, either,” he added.

The study is published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review.

In the study, Kim discussed how the fallout from divorce might harm childhood development.

Children may be stressed by an ongoing parental blame game or child custody conflicts. This stress could be compounded by the loss of stability when a child is shuttled between separate households or has to move to another region altogether, thus losing contact with his or her original network of friends.

In fact, Kim observed a dramatic change in family locations, suggesting that children of divorce were more likely to change schools.

Parents’ divorce-related depression might also play a role, as could economic strains when family income suddenly drops, he said.

In his research, Kim analyzed data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study on 3,600 children who entered kindergarten in 2008.

The children were tracked through fifth grade. Over that time, Kim compared children whose parents had gotten divorced while the child was in the first, second or third grade with the children of intact marriages.

While divorce is an unfortunate fact of life for many adults and their kids, it is crucial that teachers play a supportive role, offering appropriate care and displaying patience and sensitivity at all times.  Just because it happens frequently, doesn’t make it any easier for those involved to adjust to and overcome.

 

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Posted in Children and Divorce | 1 Comment »

Teacher Stress a Real Issue

April 27, 2011

At a time when teachers are being unfairly picked on by politicians and the media and forced to take the heat for standardized test results and missed benchmarks, there is no wonder why teachers are suffering from stress.  The paperwork is ridiculously high and the support is nowhere to be seen.

Just look at what toll it is having on teachers in Britain:

An increase in Government targets and high-stakes Ofsted inspections is fuelling a rise in serious mental health problems among school staff, according to teachers’ leaders.

Most teachers said behaviour policies in schools were inconsistently enforced, allowing many pupils to get away with bad behaviour

The National Union of Teachers claim stress is now the main reason for driving teachers out of the profession.

It follows the publication of figures last year that showed almost 309,000 school teachers – more than half of the workforce – were signed off sick for an average of two weeks in 2009.

The NUT claim that staff are now routinely expected to work more than 50 hours a week after being swamped by marking and form-filling.

Speaking at the union’s annual conference in Harrogate, activities told how many teachers were resorting to alcohol to get through the day or even attempting suicide because of the workload.

Sue McMahon, branch secretary for Calderdale, West Yorkshire, said: “As a divisional secretary I have seen a meteoric rise in work-related stress and in more than one occasion have had to support a member who has attempted suicide.”

She said the problem was being caused by “the demands being placed on our members to hit Government targets”.

“We got into teaching to teach, not to be beaten by the target-driven culture of those Stepford heads who relish the Government agenda,” she said.

“The target tsunami escalating from the aspirations of this Government is sweeping away those [teachers] that you are struggling to support. And as the wave gets bigger it is leaving a trail of devastation in its wake that used to be a world class education system.”

Teachers need more support and consideration.  It isn’t an easy profession, and yet it continues to be more taxing and highly stressful than ever before.  Less paperwork, less beaurocracy, more support and more leadership from our politicians and administrators please?


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Posted in Teachers Stress | 1 Comment »

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