Whether or not Hilary Clinton will capture her party’s nomination for president, she is drawing attention to the vital subject of education. Articles from the Boston Globe and a blog called Schools Matter (http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/2007/03/so-much-supplemental-tutoring.html) points out that Clinton not only questions the efficacy of the 2002 No Child Left Behind because she believes it makes many schools focus too much on testing, but she thinks it has allowed for tutoring companies to get contracts and go largely unchecked for their results. Clinton says there seems to be little benefit to the tutoring, despite the fact that the companies are reaping $500 million funded by the No Child Left Behind Act. It’s worthy of noting that the New York senator voted for the bill’s passing five years ago, though she now feels the act is failing to fulfill its promise.
Is the No Child Left Behind Act making a difference in our schools? I, for one, continue to worry that our education system is straying from giving our children room to follow their curiosity and go into depth with subjects because of the pressure for schools to teach to the tests. I’d love to hear more from readers who are witnessing the effects of a bill that may have had good intentions, but must now be held under scrutiny for results.
Tomorrow morning at 11:20am (PST)/2:20pm (EST), you can catch me on FOX News Live on the FOX News Channel discussing the practice of parents putting Web cams in their child’s hospital room. A Boston Herald article (http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=190314) talks about the case in which parents did not inform the medical staff of the Web cam they installed in their kid’s room.
It may be a well-founded perception that, to get quality health care, a patient or a patient’s family must maintain eagle-eye vigilance during a hospital stay. However, bringing Web cams into a hospital room opens up a can of worms that may be counter-productive to assuring good care. Among many questions I have, one is about privacy. Web cams should not be in hospital rooms without prior consent from the facility. If consent is given, will the camera actually improve the health care? Would the clear thinking of a doctor or nurse be compromised more or less by being digitally recorded? What would happen if the recording got out on YouTube? What if there are other patients in the room? How do you get consent from them and their families?
There may be situations where the Web cam could be useful, such as if a single parent must be away from their child, during a brief period of time, for other pressing responsibilities. However, this leads to my biggest concern with Web cams, which is whether they are intended to replace a parent or guardian’s presence in the room with a sick child. When a child is in the hospital, he or she needs a care giver’s soothing voice and calming touch. I worry that, as with many of the important things we used to do in-person, there may be a tendency to rely on the cameras rather than be present in the room.
My other major worry is worry itself — wouldn’t the opportunity to watch every move and hear every word remotely via a camera cause greater stress to a parent? It seems there would be a decent chance that indecipherable activity or a beeping monitor could be miscontrued as a problem, making the parent call into the hospital in a panic even if the issue is nothing to worry about? How is this healthy for anyone? And, has anybody tried calling a hospital recently to talk to someone attending to a patient? It’s not easy to get through or get straight answers. Again, the best practice is to have a caring adult in the room with the child.
There are other issues to consider, such as whether a Web cam, once approved by a hospital, should be used in the room of a patient in a long-term coma. This is a whole other track in the conversation, though my initial thought is that it might be an acceptable situation for a camera since it seems unfair to expect family members to be in the room at all times.
Since this is a new topic to me, I’m hoping to get conversation going with readers. What are your thoughts? What points am I missing? What are good ways to ultimately be more confident that our children are getting good hospital care?
On billboards around Los Angeles, including one that looms above a kid-filled Farmer’s Market on Sundays, is a poster for the new movie Captivity, with four panels which graphically depict a young woman in the states of ‘Abduction,” ‘Confinement,’ ‘Torture,’ and ‘Termination.’ Whatever my own personal tolerance is for horror movies, what matters is the effect on children. Countless kids are getting exposed to these images (which are also on New York City cabs), which can (and probably do) cause children nightmares and a sense of anxiousness about the world they just don’t need. Lionsgate and After Dark Films, who have partnered to put out the movie, claim that the ads were not the ones chosen for the marketing campaign and were mistakenly put up, but they — and others — still bear responsibility. Isn’t it possible to drum up enough business for these violent flicks without catching children in the net?
This is a topic that keeps coming up (http://www.familymanonline.com/?p=31) because those advertising horror films just do not seem to take into account the effect of even brief glimpses of these ad can generate in young minds. Parents are and must continue to pressure the powers that be (movie studios, billboard companies, city political representatives) to choose less harmful means to get the word out about their films. If you want to read more about this particular billboard, and the reaction to it, check out columnist Steve Lopez’s piece in the Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez18mar18,1,2190267.column?ctrack=1&cset=true).
Oh my dear wife, thank you for the reminder of why we share a life./You left for just two days/And oh was I amazed/That solo parenting three involves a lot of work and strife!
OK, so my poetic skills need a little work, but I hope the message is clear: Parenting three children is much easier on my nerves and resources when my wife is there with me. This week, my wife left town for a scheduled three-day conference just 150 miles upstate. The first 36 hours were fine. I got the kids to their schools, fed them their meals, put them to bed, got myself to work, and managed to keep my cool with them for the most part. But the next several hours involved losing my middle child for 10 minutes on a busy street (this has happened before: http://www.familymanonline.com/columns.php?id=34) and generally running out of gas last night with two hours and dinner left to get through before I could rest a bit. My wife decided to surprise me by coming home early and I’ve rarely been happier to see her. It was one of those times when I realized how much I rely on her to share the parenting load. My respect for single parents grew even more in the last two days — and so did my respect for my wife.
Occasionally, my wife and I have one of those talks about who would get our sons should we die. It’s hard for me to even write that sentence in public, let alone blog about it, but there is the reality that, should we die, we have no one named who would take legal custody of our boys. So, we’re now planning to plan ahead, especially because we do not want any confusion should something (God forbid) happen to us unexpectedly. A friend of ours, Eric Grodan, is an attorney who does family estate planning. His firm, Martin Neely & Associates, is conducting a couple of free seminars to explain the estate planning process and encourage business. While I’m happy to shamelessly plug Eric’s seminars because he’s a smart guy and dedicated dad, I’m also posting a few of his thoughts on the subject of what he calls Kids Protection Planning (which was originated by Martin Neely & Associates), for anyone outside (or even inside) the L.A. area.
As Eric explains, “Traditionally, in an estate plan a guardian is named in a will to care for minor children should something happen to the parents. If there is no plan in place or if the named guardian is more than 20 miles away, the police would have no choice but to call Child Protective Services to take the children out of the home and into their custody until the permanent guardian arrives, if any. Our Kids Protection Plan addresses and resolves this problem by naming temporary guardians who are the first responsder in the event of an emergency. Of course we also name permanent guardians.
“So, step 1 is to create and memorialize a kids protection plan that names first responders; Step 2, inform the first responder of their role; and Step 3, inform the nanny and/or other caretakers and make sure that they know where these important document are in the event of an emergency.”
I hope some of this information is helpful. You might ask your own attorney about it. If you live in the L.A. area, you can head over to the seminars at the Storyopolis Bookstore in Studio City (http://www.martinneely.com/Family/kidsevent/?ndrx=99) on March 25 or April 1.
Put aside for the moment that this new book on how to help your child form healthy habits is written by a clear-spoken, vastly experienced pediatrician and mother of three, and that the glowing and rather informative-in-itself foreward is penned by the YOU: The Owner’s Manual guys — Drs. Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz. The first reason to read this book is for its unique and massively insightful RealAge® Healthy Kids Test. This exam, which makes up the first chapter of author Jennifer Trachtenberg, MD’s, book, asks questions about everything from your child’s general health, acitivty, and nutritional habits to your kid’s social and emotional well-being. You can score the test and get a detailed explanation of what areas you might want to focus on to improve the life of your kid.
The next seven chapters of the book (http://www.goodkidsbadhabits.com), which you can read swiftly because of the plain language and intuitive organization, offer tried and true (Dr. Trachtenberg has worked everthing out in her years as a doctor and mother) suggestions for getting your kids to exercise more, maintain good hygiene, improve homework habits, boost self-esteem, and prevent injuries and illnesses.
Laden with health facts, incisive charts, age-appropriate details, and true parent stories, Good Kids, Bad Habits is an invaluable resource for care givers of children who are seriously in danger of having a lower life expectancy than their parents. Some of the information is hard to hear, but the tips are so well explained that the book will make you feel far more empowered and hopeful for our children’s future.
When I told my oldest son that I received two awards for my writing, he caught me off guard with his excitement. I’m not sure if he was happy for some kind of confirmation that anyone besides his mommy thinks I can string a sentence together or if he was cheering for himself. After all, my columns and articles prominently feature him and his brothers.
And, in my ridiculously pseudo-Academy Award fashion (hey, I might as well pretend!), I want to thank my wife and kids for being dutiful subjects and supporters. My wife deserves more than a few special dinners for being the most patient and insightful of copyeditors. All of my parental units who have loved and taught me more than I sometimes care to admit. My good friends who have been the first readers to make me feel what I write is sometimes true and occasionally funny. My editors, Bill Lindsay and Deirdre Wilson, also deserve my gratitude for their long-standing support and guidance. Bill, especially, because he both promotes the writing of dads and practices what he values in fatherhood. And, to my readers, who make me feel part of a community of parents who consistently take pride and joy in caring for their children, despite all the trials and tribulations.
With all the scandal plaguing the Walter Reed Army hospital for its deplorable treatment of our soldiers comes a new report that other problems exist within military medical centers, particularly with regard to caring for mental health patients (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7738485). I listened to the radio report, finding myself taken in by the parents who spoke of their children who had been neglected despite suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other ailments. Whatever a person’s stand is on the military involvement in Afghanistan and Iran, it seems we all should agree about the sacrifices of our soldiers. We must care for them, in sickness and in health, the way we do our own children, for so many of them are barely older than high-school students. The majority of us will never know the mental effects of being in a war zone, of being responsible for the lives of other soldiers, and then having to walk around as a civilian with those memories. We must give these brave men and women more psychological care before, during, and after — long after — they serve in the field.
Unfortunately, the military is not the only place in which mental health care is lacking. The reality is that the medical care system at large too often ignores the urgency of many mental health issues. Health maintenance organizations put limits on the number of visits mental health patients can have and how much will be covered, despite the fact that depression and other diagnosable health cases appear to be on the rise (witness Newsweek’s cover story on men and depression - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17190411/site/newsweek/). In light of all our resources as a great nation, we do too little to keep ourselves healthy, in mind and body. We, as parents, should speak out, lobby, and vote in ways that make the country more attentive to the full health care needs of this and future generations.
Bruce Kluger, who frequently comments (often satirically) on politics and culture, also writes from the heart about fatherhood. In one of his newest pieces, he explains the emotions he feels over his daughter’s march toward adolescence (http://www.rd.com/content/openContent.do?contentId=34273). While plumbing his own emotional depths, Kluger also finds that his 6th grader still needs to return to a favorite stuffed animal. The column points out that tweens will go back and forth between the symbols of their younger years and the elements of their more mature ones.
