Kids’ Sweet Tooth Linked to Alcoholism, Depression

CAROL’S SUMMARY:
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, about two-thirds of Americans are counted as either overweight or obese. Childhood obesity is a serious health crisis, and Michelle Obama is launching a campaign addressing this issue, as cited in a Wall Street Journal earlier this week.

Ms. Obama’s objectives are to:
o improve nutrition and physical education in schools;
o promote activity such as walking and biking in community planning;
o make healthy food more available, particularly in poor areas;
o and make nutrition information on food packages clearer.

Today’s article from AOL News cites a related study that links children’s preference for sweets to a family history of alcoholism or depression. Funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the research was conducted by scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, and published online in the journal Addiction. As the article iterates:

“The findings suggest that a preference for sweets might not be solely about taste buds, but instead could have to do with the child’s chemical makeup and family history. However, an outside expert at the U.K.’s Cardiff University, professor Tim Jacob, told the BBC the Monell study’s findings were interesting, but that it’s tough to make firm conclusions from one study alone. The results could reveal something about children’s brain chemistry, but also might be explained by behavior and upbringing, he said.

“While it is true that sweet things activate reward circuits in the brain, the problem is that sweets and sugar are addictive, because the activation of these reward circuits causes opioid release, and with time more is needed to achieve the same effect,” Jacob said. “But the taste difference may be explained by differences like parental control over sweet consumption.”

Helping students make healthy choices starts at an early age by offering them develop strong decision-making skills. As educators, we can help to make a difference by fostering critical thinking skills and life skills that promote delayed gratification and how to manage strong emotions. All of LifeBound’s student success programs aim to equip students with the skills they need for school, career and life, and our PEOPLE SMARTS book empowers them to make informed decisions. In addition to content that challenges students to assess the outcomes of their behavior, each chapter contains a true story courageous teens who have overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles through personal action. We also offer sessions for parents that teach coaching skills to support them in their role as leaders at home. For more information or for a review copy or to receive a curriculum sample of the PEOPLE SMARTS text, please call the LifeBound office toll free 1.877.737.8510 or email at contact@lifebound.com.

ARTICLE
AOL News
by Lauren Frayer
(Feb. 10) – A new study finds that children are more likely to have an intense sweet tooth if they have a family history of alcoholism, or if they’ve suffered from depression themselves.

The research was conducted by scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, and published online in the journal Addiction.

Sugary foods and alcohol trigger many of the same reward circuits in the brain, so scientists in this case decided to test the sweet tooth of children with a family history of alcohol dependence. They also hypothesized that children who suffer from depression might be more likely to crave sweets, because they make them feel better.

To view the entire article visit
http://bit.ly/9sfGXk

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Recession Affected Students’ Financial Attitudes and Behaviors, Study Finds

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

A new study sponsored by the University of Arizona titled:  “Wave 1.5 Economic Impact Study: Financial Well-Being, Coping Behaviors and Trust Among Young Adults,” cited in the Chronicle of Higher Education, reveals how the recession has affected students’ financial attitudes and behaviors.  More students reported engaging in what the researchers term “typical” financial coping strategies, like cutting back unnecessary spending. For example, 31 percent said they cut back on communication expenses. However, the report also revealed there was a large jump in the use of “risky” coping strategies, like dropping a class, postponing health care, or using one credit card to pay off another, though relatively few students reported these behaviors.

 

Even though the number of students engaging in risky behaviors remains small, the researchers predict that habits formed in the college years will stay with the students over their lives, said Joyce Serido, assistant research scientist and co-principal investigator of the study. That means the impact of choices made in college could be magnified over a lifetime. Therefore, it is important for educators to help students make better financial decisions, like borrowing a reasonable amount to stay in school rather than dropping out because of the expense, said Soyeon Shim, professor of family and consumer sciences at the University of Arizona and principal investigator of the study.

 LifeBound’s updated version of MAJORING IN THE REST OF YOUR LIFE (fifth edition), teaches students about personal finance and is relevant for seniors in high school or freshmen in college. Additionally, LifeBound’s ninth grade success book, MAKING THE MOST OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL, will be revised this spring and will include a whole chapter on financial planning and exercises at the end of each chapter to build financial literacy skills well before college. To receive a review copy of either or both books, please call the office toll free at 1.877.737.8510 or email contact@lifebound.com, and we will ship a copy to you.

ARTICLE
Chronicle of Higher Education
By Beckie SupianoThe economic downturn has had many negative effects, but for one group of researchers, it came with a silver lining: the chance to see how young adults respond to financial upheaval. Their findings, which show a rise in risky financial behaviors and a drop in self-reported well-being, were released Monday.
The researchers were working on a longitudinal study of college students’ financial attitudes and behaviors when the recession unexpectedly provided a “natural laboratory” for measuring the students’ response to tight times.To view entire article visit
http://chronicle.com/article/Recession-Affected-Students/64053/

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Scholars Identify 5 Keys to Urban School Success

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

This month, University of Chicago Press releases a new book, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago, based on 15 years of data from this city’s 409,000-student school system. The research identifies five keys to urban school success:

1) Strong leadership, in the sense that principals are “strategic, focused on instruction, and inclusive of others in their work”;

2) A welcoming attitude toward parents, and formation of connections with the community;

3) Development of professional capacity, which refers to the quality of the teaching staff, teachers’ belief that schools can change, and participation in good professional development and collaborative work;

4) A learning climate that is safe, welcoming, stimulating, and nurturing to all students; and

5) Strong instructional guidance and materials.

The authors liken these “essential supports” to a recipe for baking a cake: Without the right ingredients, the whole enterprise just falls flat. In the interview below for Education Week, lead author Anthony S. Bryk said: “Often what happens in school reform is that we pick just one strand out, and very often that becomes the silver bullet.”

Here is an excerpt from the article’s summary of the findings:

“Schools that were rated strong in all five areas were at least 10 times more likely than schools with strengths in just one or two areas to achieve substantial gains in reading and math. Likewise, a weakness in one area exacerbated other weaknesses. For instance, 33 percent of schools with weak teacher educational backgrounds and 30 percent of schools with weak professional communities stagnated, compared with 47 percent of the schools lacking on both measures.”

LifeBound’s stair-step programs, for grades 5-12, have designed a similar approach to student success at each of these grade levels. Here are the components of the LifeBound programs:

* Quality instructional materials consisting of student books and curricula;
* Faculty training that promotes leadership development;
* Parent sessions to enlist support from home; and
* Data assessments to measure results, all work together to realize desired outcomes for success in school, career and life. When schools don’t adopt a comprehensive plan for student success and transition programs, the quality of the results suffer.

How can we help ensure that districts adopt district-wide comprehensive plans for improvement at all grades levels?

What accountability systems can we put in place at the district level that help promote and support student success for all learners?

How can we encourage district leaders and school Boards to implement sustainable change across grade levels?

ARTICLE
Education Week
by Debra Viadero

Offering a counter-narrative to the school improvement prescriptions that dominate national education debates, a new book based on 15 years of data on public elementary schools in Chicago identifies five tried-and-true ingredients that work, in combination with one another, to spur success in urban schools.

The authors liken their “essential supports” to a recipe for baking a cake: Without the right ingredients, the whole enterprise just falls flat.

“A material weakness in any one ingredient means that a school is very unlikely to improve,” said Anthony S. Bryk, the lead author of Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago, which was published this month by the University of Chicago Press.

To view the entire article, visit
http://bit.ly/cnXQEx

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Helping Self-Harming Students

CAROL’S SUMMARY
According to mental health experts, self-injury behavior among adolescents often masks deep psychological trauma caused by physical or sexual abuse, but research also indicates that cutting and other forms of self-harm are ways some teens cope to relieve stress or to express strong feelings of rage, sorrow, rejection, desperation, longing, or emptiness. Worse, the behavior can become compulsive as the brain starts to connect the false sense of relief from bad feelings to the act of cutting, and it craves this relief the next time tension builds.

The article below cites that “approximately 14 to 17 percent of children up to age 18 have deliberately cut, scratched, pinched, burned, or bruised themselves at least once (Whitlock, 2009), with 5 to 8 percent of adolescents actively engaging in this behavior (J. Whitlock, personal communication, September 27, 2009).” The articles also lists stressors that can play a role in self-harming behavior, and I’ve categorized three of the most common ones here:

Peer pressure – Students that lack strong social skills or those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds may struggle to experience a sense of belonging, especially as students compete to buy expensive technological gadgets and designer clothes and shoes. Social networking can further alienate some students and make them vulnerable to cyberbullying. Some teens now refer to “MySpace” as “MeanSapce.”

Stress overload – Some students feel the pressure of having to juggle too many activites in order to gain admittance into a top college or university and worry that they’ll let down their parents and other significant adults in their lives if they don’t get accepted to their first or second school of choice. The author of this articles writes: “To cope with the stress, some of the more emotionally vulnerable adolescents turn to self-harm, resort to eating-distressed behaviors like bulimia, or engage in substance abuse.”

Poor modeling at home – Some teens witness the deficient ways their parents cope with stress by abusing prescription medication, drinking or overeating. “In families of self-harming adolescents, emotional disconnection and invalidation are common family dynamics.”

This article gives specific guidelines on ways schools can recognize and help students who are engaged in self-inflicting behaviors. One venue is by helping them become emotionally intelligent so that they acquire the coping and self-advocacy skills they need to manage strong emotions. Another antidote is to help students discover their unique abilities and gifts and to honor the many ways our students manifest these talents in the world. Three of LifeBound’s books: # 1 Success in Middle School, # 2 People Smarts for Teenagers and # 3 Gifts & Talents for Teenagers, are designed to help accentuate students’ strengths, while addressing the potential problems of growing up.

How can districts more effectively educate principals, teachers, counselors, and other faculty about self-harming behaviors and how to respond?

How can we infuse emotional intelligence into our schools to create a more positive culture where all students feel validated and welcome?

ARTICLE
Education Leadership (Dec. 2009)
by Matthew D. Selekman

Student self-harming is one of the most perplexing and challenging behaviors that administrators, teachers, nurses, and counseling staff encounter in their schools. Approximately 14 to 17 percent of children up to age 18 have deliberately cut, scratched, pinched, burned, or bruised themselves at least once (Whitlock, 2009), with 5 to 8 percent of adolescents actively engaging in this behavior (J. Whitlock, personal communication, September 27, 2009).

Self-harming behavior is not a new phenomenon among adolescents. Mental health and health-care professionals have typically viewed such behavior as a symptom of an underlying psychological or personality disorder as a possible suicidal gesture suggesting the need for psychiatric hospitalization or as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by sexual or physical abuse.

However, both research and practice-based wisdom indicate that the majority of self-harming adolescents do not meet the criteria for diagnosable DSM-IV1 psychological or personality disorders, have never had suicidal thoughts or attempted to end their lives, and have never experienced sexual or physical abuse (Selekman, 2009). Most self-harming adolescents use the behavior as a coping strategy to get immediate relief from emotional distress.

To view the entire article visit
http://bit.ly/4J10ZY

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Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

Teenagers are known to be moody and reckless, but why? As one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology, Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia was interviewed in the article below for his insights on adolescent behavior. Studies of adolescent brain development over the past five years are showing that brain systems in charge of impulse control continue to mature into our 20’s. Dr. Steinberg’s lab has been testing people of various ages with computerized risk-taking tests while images of their brain are taken. They are tested alone and then with two friends watching them. Here are their findings:

“For the adults, the presence of friends has no effect. But for adolescents, just having friends nearby doubles the number of risks they take. We’ve found that a certain part of the brain is activated by the presence of peers in adolescents, but not in adults,” said Steinberg.

Dr. Steinberg recently received the Klaus Jacobs Prize and intends to use the $1 million dollar award to extend his work to “teenagers in other cultures so that we can determine whether the patterns are universal. There’s a longstanding debate over how much of adolescent behavior is biological or cultural. Perhaps this award will lead to more answers.”

How can we as educators and parents do a better job helping adolescents navigate the emotional upheaval they experience, as well as model the behaviors we want our students to emulate?

How can we raise awareness among the education community about the need to incorporate lessons on emotional intelligence into the classroom?

How can we better utilize tools that are already available, such as LifeBound’s People Smarts for Teenagers, into the classroom to help middle school and high school students make better decisions and avoid potentially disastrous consequences from high-risk behaviors?

ARTICLE:

The New York Times
December 1, 2009
A Conversation With Laurence Steinberg
Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, is one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology. Dr. Steinberg, 57, has won the $1 million Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize, which will be awarded to him at a ceremony in early December in Switzerland.

To view the entire article visit www.nytimes.com

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The Puzzle of Boys

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

Girls have been the center of academic debate for years, but now that they make up over half of the college student population, some scholars and psychologists worry about the achievement of boys. The article bellows mentions many books published over the last 20 years on the subject. There is a debate over whether there is a real problem boys are facing today, but many of these books discuss varying degrees of masculinity and the need to shed the stoic, emotionally closed-off stereotype boys.

A psychology professor at New York University, Niobe Way, recently finished a book on her interviews of teenage boys about their friendships. In these interviews, Way discovered that boys frequently said they liked their best friends because “They won’t laugh at me when I talk about serious things.” This emotionally intelligent side of boys is seldom seen and seems to disappear during high school. The article below states that:

“Touchy-feely talk about friendships may seem disconnected from boys’ academic woes, but Way insists they’re pieces of the same puzzle. ‘If you don’t understand the experience of boyhood,’ she says, ‘you’ll never understand the achievement gaps.’”

Although these studies contain conflicting data, how can parents use this information to raise emotionally intelligent boys?

What can teachers, principals and districts do to make learning more appealing to boys while encouraging emotional intelligence?

How can a middle ground be reached to pull out the best strengths of boys and the best strengths of girls?

ARTICLE:

The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 22, 2009
The Puzzle of Boys
Scholars and others debate what it means to grow up male in America
By Thomas Bartlett

My son just turned 3. He loves trains, fire trucks, tools of all kinds, throwing balls, catching balls, spinning until he falls down, chasing cats, tackling dogs, emptying the kitchen drawers of their contents, riding a tricycle, riding a carousel, pretending to be a farmer, pretending to be a cow, dancing, drumming, digging, hiding, seeking, jumping, shouting, and collapsing exhausted into a Thomas the Tank Engine bed wearing Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas after reading a Thomas the Tank Engine book.

That doesn’t make him unusual; in fact, in many ways, he couldn’t be more typical. Which may be why a relative recently said, “Well, he’s definitely all boy.” It’s a statement that sounds reasonable enough until you think about it. What does “all boy” mean? Masculine? Straight? Something else? Are there partial boys? And is this relative aware of my son’s fondness for Hello Kitty and tea sets?

These are the kinds of questions asked by anxious parents and, increasingly, academic researchers. Boyhood studies—virtually unheard of a few years ago—has taken off, with a shelf full of books already published, more on the way, and a new journal devoted to the subject. Much of the focus so far has been on boys falling behind academically, paired with the notion that school is not conducive to the way boys learn. What motivates boys, the argument goes, is different from what motivates girls, and society should adjust accordingly.

To view this entire article visit www.chronicle.com

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Racial Achievement Gap Still Plagues Schools

The big question posed by the NPR story below that has yet to be answered is whether lower-level classes can hold students to higher standards, or whether any sorting system sends the wrong message to students about their ability to learn. Tracking has been a fundamental aspect of education in the U.S. since the early part of this century when public schools devised a system of curriculum tracks in order to accommodate the diverse group of students attending school for the first time. Recently, tracking has generated a large volume of research and policy analysis. Here’s a summary from the National Center for Education Statistics:

“There has been much debate over whether or not tracking creates unequal quality in educational experiences and later opportunity (Oakes, Garnoran, and Page 1991). There is also concern about whether tracking perpetuates, rather than alleviates, differences in children created by socioeconomic stratification (Oakes 1992). This issue has been particularly relevant for educators and researchers concerned about equal access to education by minority students who, in racially integrated schools, are disproportionately represented in curricula designed for low-ability or non-college-bound students.” The National Center for Education Statistics also reports: “Postsecondary students who take remedial reading are about half as likely as those who take no remedial courses to earn a degree or certificate.”
Source: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2004/section3/indicator18.asp

Typically, students are assigned to levels by a combination of grades, test scores and teacher recommendations. Columbia Principal Lovie Lilly, who is African-American, conducted research on the experience of black students at her school while studying for her doctoral degree. “Black children in higher-level classes were ignored, or perceived that they were being ignored, or did not feel comfortable going to the teacher after school to get help,” Lilly says. “They gave up and decided to go to level three classes where at least there were other black children.”

Remediation is also costly. Here are annual estimates from one district that tracks this data, Maryland Public Schools:

  • Families pay: $283 million
  • Taxpayers pay: $978 million

How can schools boost the lowest performers while improving achievement for all?

What role do learning styles and multiple intelligences play in the educational outcomes of students?

How can we better prepare students for a love of learning and college level work?

ARTICLE:
Racial Achievement Gap Still Plagues Schools
by Nancy Solomon
October 28, 2009
NPR

American schools have struggled for decades to close what’s called the ‘minority achievement gap’ — the lower average test scores, grades and college attendance rates among black and Latino students.

Typically, schools place children who are falling behind in remedial classes, to help them catch up. But some schools are finding that grouping students by ability, also known as tracking or leveling, causes more problems than it solves.

To view this entire article and listen to NPR visit www.npr.org

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Transfer Students Less Engaged in Campus Activities, Survey Finds

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

The Chronicle article below reports on the results of a new study, by the National Survey of Student Engagement, known as Nessie, which found that transfer students do not engage in “higher impact” activities such as internships, study abroad or project work with faculty as do “native” students who attend the same school freshmen through senior year. The study also distinguished between two groups: “horizontal” transfer students, who made transfers between four-year colleges; and “vertifical” transfer students who transferred from community colleges to four year institutions. Here’s a sampling of the statistics:

* 62% of native seniors said they participated in internships versus only 49% of horizontal-transfer students and 43% of vertical-transfer students.
* The biggest gap was in study abroad: only 7% of vertical students compared with 15% of the horizontal group; 20% of the native students studied abroad.

The report also stressed the importance of a culminating senior experience that “integrates and synthesize learning within the academic major, provides opportunities to reflect on the overall college experience and may facilitate the transition to life after college.” Experts say we need to place the same emphasis on transfer students that we do on incoming freshmen and to sustain that engagement through all four years of college.

If students today don’t get experience outside of school from a part-time job, one or more internships and volunteer work, they often lack the valuable “soft skills” that success outside of school requires. In addition to learning about how to do work, follow-up on projects and see things through to completion, students also get exposed to what they do and don’t like which can be valuable for narrowing down career choices. Many students today will need to start in an area that is not their dream job, but if they work with that starting point and develop their skills as well as knowledge, they will likely be moving upwards and onwards to more rewarding work with better pay.

ARTICLE:
Chronicle of Higher Education
Transfer Students Less Engaged in Campus Activities, Survey Finds
By Ben Terris
November 8, 2009

Not all transfer experiences are created equal.

So says the latest National Survey of Student Engagement, which for the first time compared data from students who had made “vertical” transfers, from community colleges to four-year institutions, and students who had made “horizontal” transfers, between four-year colleges.

“It’s important that we look at these two groups as distinct populations,” says Alexander C. McCormick, director of the survey. “After all, they change institutions for very different reasons and should therefore have different experiences.”

To view this entire article visit www.chronicle.com

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Educational Video Games Mix Cool With Purpose

CAROL’S SUMMARY:
Today’s generation of students loves video games and some companies are trying to put this passion “to good use.” In the article below, children “are playing educational video games as part of their school curriculum, in after-school programs or via the Web from home.” Sasha Barab, professor at Indiana University, created Quest Atlantis, a game that incorporates science. Barab states in the article, “Partly what I have to argue to teachers is that there’s value seeing that content bound up in a real-world story.” These educational video games are online for interaction and collaboration, use core subjects such as physics and math to finish a task or trial and work toward solving problems that relate to the real world. In Gamestar Mechanic players even have to defend their solutions to other Gamestar Mechanic players. Alan Gershenfiled, a former executive at Activision and the founder of E-Line Media, says “You’re essentially designing a digital system for others. That’s a very powerful 21st century skill.”

A New York City public school called Quest to Learn opened this fall and focuses on game-based learning. While this high initiative is a great start to engaging students in learning, how can traditional schools incorporate such educational video games in to their curriculum? How can publishers work to create content which truly involves students in creating their own learning? How will the role of teachers need to change to become a skilled facilitator given the scope of interactivity which technology provides?

ARTICLE:
New York Times
November 2, 2009
Educational Video Games Mix Cool With Purpose
By STEFANIE OLSEN

One of KC Phillips’s favorite video games is the Xbox shoot-’em-up Halo, because, he says, his dad taught him how to play it when he was younger.

Now 15 and a high school sophomore in Madison, Wis., KC views the game with a more discerning eye. Last year, he played Gamestar Mechanic, an educational video game that asks players to solve a set of puzzles in order to win enough power to design and create their own video games.

“Now every single time I play video games, I really think about how the designers built it and what mechanics went into it,” he said.

To view this entire article visit www.nytimes.com

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Kids Watch More Than a Day of TV Each Week

According to a Neilsen study released this week, children between the ages of 2 to 11, are watching more than a day a week of television, and older children watch an average of 3 hours and 20 minutes a day. Patricia McDonough, Nielsen’s senior vice president of insights, analysis and policy, says the increase in viewing is the result of “more programming targeted at kids” and extra media outlets such as video on demand. “When I was a kid, I had Saturday morning cartoons,” McDonough said. “And now there are programs they want to watch available to them whenever they want to watch them.”

Health Advocates

Children’s health advocates are alarmed by these findings which link excessive viewing to delayed language skills and obesity. Dr. Vic Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said, “The biggest misconception is that it’s harmless entertainment,” said Strasburger, who has written extensively about the effects of media on children. “Media are one of the most powerful teachers of children that we know of. When we in this society do a bad job of educating kids about sex and drugs, the media pick up the slack.” The AAP recommends little-to-no TV viewing for children four-and-under and less than 10 hours per week (about 1 ½ hours per day) for children in grades K-12. Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, said the way infants are exposed to media shapes their future relationship with television.

“Once you start hooking babies on media, it’s harder to limit it,” she said. “If we start children early in life on a steady diet of screen time and electronic toys, they don’t develop the resources to generate their own amusement, so they become dependent on screens.”

ADHD

In a 2004 study by Dr. Dimitri Christakis and his colleagues, they reported for the Journal of Pediatrics that early TV viewing (ages 1 and 3 were studied) is associated with attentional problems (ADHD) at a later age (age 7). The children studied watched a mean of 2.2 hours per day at age 1 and 3.6 hours per day at age 3. Specifically, Christakis reports that watching about five hours of TV per day at age 1 is associated with a 28% increase in the likelihood of having attentional problems at age 7. Further, in 2000, the American Psychological Association “publicly denounced the use of psychological techniques to assist corporate advertising to children. The average child watches over 40,000 commercials per year. In addition to potentially damaging a child’s self-esteem, many ads also likely contribute to health problems, given that the most common products marketed to children include sugared cereals, candies, sodas, and snack foods. A child’s diet heavy in such foods may contribute to the increase in the number of overweight children and the rise in diabetes, especially given the sedentary behavior of children.”

[Source: http://www.limitv.org/health.htm]

The Role of Schools

Schools can play a key role as a hub in their communities to inform families on these kinds of issues. In particular, school counselors, who are often at the forefront of these trends, can promote behaviors consistent with academic, emotional and social success. Questions to consider:

  • How can we as child advocates and educators better support counselors in their roles as leaders for promoting a healthy school community?
  • How can we spark an appetite among students for healthy alternatives to excessive media use, such as reading and extracurricular activities, while embracing the positive aspects of technology?
  • What do these kinds of addictive behaviors, including video gaming, tell us about our students and our responsibility as educators to prepare them to become critical and creative thinkers for the 21st century?

____________________________________________________________________________________________

ARTICLE
Los Angeles Times
by Matea Gold
Reporting from New York – More than an entire day — that’s how long children sit in front of the television in an average week, according to new findings released Monday by Nielsen.

The amount of television usage by children reached an eight-year high, with kids ages 2 to 5 watching the screen for more than 32 hours a week on average and those ages 6 to 11 watching more than 28 hours. The analysis, based on the fourth quarter of 2008, measured children’s consumption of live and recorded TV, as well as VCR and game console usage.

“They’re using all the technology available in their households,” said Patricia McDonough, Nielsen’s senior vice president of insights, analysis and policy. “They’re using the DVD, they’re on the Internet. They’re not giving up any media — they’re just picking up more.”

To view entire article visit
http://bit.ly/2aakJ5

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