Positive thinking

Edda Sant, Manchester Metropolitan University   If political headlines globally are anything to go by, it seems democracy is at risk. Totalitarian views are on the rise . Far-right parties and leaders have gained voters in many countries . And decisions are being made by law courts or by technical experts from international economic organisations. And people, particularly young people, feel they do not have a say . So it’s not surprising then that governments are turning their attention to schools as a potential cure . Promoting democracy has always been one of the tasks of schools within democratic systems. But this demand is now on the rise. Indeed, across the globe teachers in schools are expected to engage students as democratic citizens. It’s hoped such lessons about democracy and what it is to be a good citizen will help to combat growing support for totalitarian and radical views . Wanted: democratic education In my research , I have examined more...

  Angel Urbina-Garcia, University of Hull Diagnoses of mental disorders and drug prescriptions among school-age children have skyrocketed over the last two decades. The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that 20% of children experience mental disorders – such as depression, anxiety, ADHD and autism – at any given time. This is a significant problem in the UK, where one in eight children between the ages of five and 19 has been diagnosed with an emotional or behavioural disorder . Even children as young as five are getting ill: according to the latest reports, 6% of five year olds suffer from a mental disorder. The challenges are greater still for children from low income families, who are four times more likely to develop mental health problems than their better off peers. While home life, friends, social media and body image all have an impact on the mental health of children, a recent report from The Children’s Society found that more young people feel un...

Matthew Riddle, University of Melbourne   How well are we preparing the typical primary school kid for life when they graduate in 2032? Current attitudes to education around cybersecurity and online safety skew towards caution at all costs. We often focus on schools’ duty of care rather than fostering skills and frameworks of digital ethics which empower students. There is a danger we are letting kids down with a fear-driven mentality instead of engaging their challenges head-on. Both parents and teachers can help kids in this capacity: let’s take a look at how (tips below). Fear can be a barrier We educational technologists often have cybersecurity discussions with students, parents and teachers with digital fluency levels ranging from expert to little-to-no knowledge. As parents and teachers we can understandably be fearful of the role of technology in kids’ lives, however this can sometimes be a barrier to student learning. Around six years ago, Wooranna...

Aoife Daly, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Liverpool   The US policy of separating children from parents entering the country without permission was rightly met with global outrage. After weeks of heart-wrenching stories, images and audio recordings of children crying for their detained parents, Donald Trump finally bowed to pressure and signed an executive order to end family separations. In the UK, while children of immigrant families are not routinely wrenched from parents nor held in cages , many aspects of their treatment are nevertheless inhumane and in breach of international children’s rights law. The UK ended indefinite detention of immigrant families with children in 2010. But there remain what Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister who was a proponent of the change, described as “exceptional cases and border cases” where families are still detained. This might happen, for example, where their removal from the UK is pending and they have ...

 Eva Lloyd, University of East London Despite the important job they do, wages for people working in childcare tend to be low . These workers earn less than the average wage across all UK employment sectors and barely half that of qualified teachers . In the latest government provider survey , it was found almost 20% of day nursery workers in England earn less than the national living wage – including 10% of those aged 25 and over. In contrast, qualified teachers working in state nursery schools, children’s centres or state primary nursery classes receive nationally agreed pay and employment conditions. This is partly because, since 1998 and the introduction of universal entitlement to early education for all three- and four-year-olds, early education is no longer required to be delivered by graduate teachers – except in state nursery schools and nursery classes attached to state primaries. Instead, working with children in private sector settings – such as ...

   Mandy Pierlejewski, Leeds Beckett University We know that when it comes to brain development, it continues throughout most of our lives – from infancy to adulthood. But unlike other more obvious signs of growing up, many parents underestimate how much a child’s brain changes from year to year. Research shows that during early childhood, the links within the brain are busy forming – this is a time when children are learning to learn. And their brains are gradually forming connections that enable them to organise their thoughts. For children to be able to learn new information, they need to relate the new learning to previous learning. They need to develop an awareness of their own thinking and to monitor their thoughts, emotions and actions. And these capacities develop best through play. Psychologist Pam Jarvis explains this in her blog The Psychological Historian , using an analogy of trying to put clothes into a wardrobe with insufficient hangers. T...

David Morley, Sheffield Hallam University A recent World Health Organisation repor t revealed that the number of obese children and adolescents – aged five to 19 years – worldwide has risen tenfold in the past four decades. Worryingly, it also predicts that “obese” is likely to become the new norm. The report stated that: If current trends continue, more children and adolescents will be obese than moderately or severely underweight by 2022. The number of overweight or obese infants and young children increased from 32m globally in 1990 to 41m in 2016 . The vast majority of overweight or obese children live in developing countries, where the rate of increase has been more than 30% higher than that of developed countries. And in the UK, recent research shows that 9% of four and five year-olds are now classed as obese – with the proportion rising to 20% for 10 to 11-year-olds. Efforts to reverse this growing trend have mainly focused on two aspects of a child’s life: d...

Wendy Hall, University of British Columbia How much sleep, and what type of sleep, do our children need to thrive? In parenting, there aren’t often straightforward answers, and sleep tends to be contentious. There are questions about whether we are overstating children’s sleep problems . Yet we all know from experience how much better we feel, and how much more ready we are to take on the day, when we have had an adequate amount of good quality sleep. I was one of a panel of experts at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to review over 800 academic papers examining relationships between children’s sleep duration and outcomes. Our findings suggested optimal sleep durations to promote children’s health . These are the optimal hours (including naps) that children should sleep in every 24-hour cy And yet these types of sleep recommendations are still controversial. Many of us have friends or acquaintances who say that they can function perfectly on four hours of sl...

Raymond Arthur, Northumbria University, Newcastle - UK It might be seen by some as one of the ultimate parenting taboos – to admit that you smack your child. Yet research from the Children’s Society reveals just 14% of adults think slapping children is unacceptable. It’s clear then that a lot of parents still see the odd smack as an acceptable form of punishment – for when all other methods of discipline have failed. Many parents rationalise this type of punishment with the fact they too were smacked as a child and claim it didn’t do them any harm. But did it? Recently, researchers in the US examined over 50 years’ of research involving more than 160,000 children and concluded that smacking children does in fact cause more harm than good. The researchers found smacking often “does the opposite” of what parents want and rarely results in increased immediate compliance by children. It was also shown that children who are smacked are more likely to exhibit higher levels...