Features:

Suicide in New Zealand
The Killer Within
What plans are in place by the government and health services in New Zealand to combat one of the highest suicide rates in theWestern world? Mark Stephenson looks at the stats.

The Truth About Juice
Is fruit juice really so bad for you? Harald Breiding-Buss explains the science behind sugar-induced tooth decay.

Parenting Styles

In Brief:

Fatherhood Messes Monkey Minds

Researchers from Princeton University have discovered significant changes in the brain structure of male Common Marmosets on becoming a father.
Marmosets are a primate species where the fathers stay involved with their offspring.
The changes in brain structure are triggered by hormonal changes also found in human males with a pregnant partner.
Connections between neurons increased in an area of the brain responsible for memory and planning. Receptor numbers for the hormone ‘vasopressin’ also increased.
Some of these changes reversed once the young became independent, but could be observed again if a new one was born.

Focus on Men in Early Childhood Education

A report released on Mon 25 September by Early Childhood Education Researcher Sarah Farquhar has revealed that less than 1% of Early Childhood Educators in New Zealand are men.
In her report she calls for open debate on men in early childhood education to remove what she reports as inherent sexism and fears of paedophile accusations, in the field.
A day later, the Early Childhood Council Chief Executive Sue Thorne called for a Government-led initiative to encourage more men into the profession. She commented in a Christchurch Press article (Sept 26)  that many men felt unwelcome in childcare and that the paedophile ‘hysteria’ of the 1990’s had resulted in existing male educators leaving the profession and potential male trainees avoiding the profession.
Other researchers in the field however, have identified other barriers and suggest that the perceived public and media hysteria regarding sex abuse and paedopilia are actually masking the effect of  issues such as low pay, low social status of the work and perception of EC education as a ‘women’s career’ as barriers to men entering the profession.

Majority of Care Orders Awarded To Mothers by Joint Agreement

The first gender-based statistics released by the Family Court  since 1990 indicate that 65% of day-to-day care orders (previously custody orders) are awarded to mothers, 11% to fathers and about 12% to another party. 12% share the day to day care order.
Only 5.4 % of all day to day care orders are made by a judge at a defended hearing. The vast majority of parenting orders, 74%,  are reached by consent between parents. with the remaining 20.6% by a judge where only one parent attends. The new figures cover nearly half of  5865 parenting orders for the previous year ending June 2006.
Principal Family Court Judge Peter Boshier suggests the figures indicate that "Mothers and Fathers seem to be saying that they prefer it that mothers care for children in the vast majority of cases. ...In all probability what the Family Court is doing is mirroring social reality."
Judge Boshier pointed out that judges awarded 18.4% of day-to-day care to fathers in defended hearings, a higher percentage than the 11%  father care agreed to by consenting parents
The Department of Statistics stopped collecting gender data in 1990 when sole maternal custody was 74%, sole paternal custody 13 %, and joint custody 9%. The new figures were requested by the NZ Herald.

Father Contribution Understated - Study

A study sponsored by the Families Commission’s “Blue Skies’ research fund found that available family data in New Zealand understates the contribution of separated fathers.
Victoria University researcher Paul Callister and Massey University’s Stuart Birks examined family data collection methods in New Zealand and found they do not accurately describe the living circumstances of children.
“There is considerable diversity in parenting arrangements, and one major group is often overlooked. These are the children of separated biological parents who, to varying degrees, have two active parents and two households.”, says the study.
The study comes at a time when Statistics New Zealand, the government-funded but independent statistics department, is conducting a review of official family statistics with an eye on improving family data.
Callister and Birks also take issue with terms often used to describe family types in the media and official documents. They conclude:
“As well as there being gaps in data collections, the language of research and policy debates is lagging behind the changes in family types. Many of the words currently used, such as ‘non-custodial’ parent and ‘non-resident’ parent have connotations of exclusion rather than inclusion. In some situations this will reflect reality, but in others the terms are misleading.
“[…] While most researchers try to differentiate between single-parent households and single-parent families, the term ‘single-parent family’ can still be found in many research publications even when it is quite clear that the children involved have two active parents.”
Father & Child Trust has made a submission to Statistics New Zealand for their current review, emphasising that the lack of reliable data about fathers’ parenting contribution and situation may prevent necessary changes in the delivery of social and community services, and makes it hard for community organizations to obtain funding for working with fathers.

Editorial:

Dopey Attitudes

If you can tell how popular something is by the number of names invented for it, then cannabis is huge: pot, dope and grass are just a few, and all of them carry connotations of something fun, if slightly off mainstream. Who would use the ugly word ‘drug’ for something like this?
And yet, one major cause of  poverty we come across here at Father & Child Trust is rooted in cannabis smoking. By itself it’s expensive enough, but I haven’t yet met a cannabis smoker who doesn’t also smoke cigarettes.
Depending on the size of your addiction it will eat up an average weekly income within a matter of days, and it will take precedence over any bills. It’s probably also the main reason why some of our clients refuse to be referred to a budgeting service. They know exactly where the money goes.
Maybe you, too, know somebody who gets paid on Thursday and is out of money by Saturday although living a very moderate lifestyle and having few possessions.
Cannabis is not unlike alcohol in the way people think about it. Unlike alcohol it’s illegal, but nobody seems to care about that anyway. Like alcohol, it’s something you do for fun, something that is part of any good party. It’s also something that helps you sleep, something that helps you forget your problems for a while, something that you could stop doing whenever you wanted, right?
Like alcohol, cannabis is not necessarily something you get introduced to through your friends when you’re young. Just as likely it’s your own dad who’ll do you the honors, like he did when he first let you sit down with his mates for a drink. A rite of passage. We have seen boys as young as nine around here who have been introduced that way.
In other ways cannabis is more like smoking: people don’t need a reason like they (often) do for drinking. They do it when by themselves, and it tends to becomes a habit before it becomes an addiction.
Over time it rarely gets better. An unexpected windfall may be smoked away and the addiction raised to a new level. Just as with gambling and alcoholism, your relationship will likely break up over it and you may lose your job. Once away from the children, cannabis consumption often increases—the money in the bank is now all yours, and cannabis seems to help to get over the breakup blues.
Cannabis is a major factor  in many of our social issues, and in many cases where fathers have abandoned their children, in body or in spirit. I wish we wouldn’t be so relaxed about its prevalence and its status in the lives of Kiwis. The myths persist that it is not addictive and too many people fool themselves for too long. Young people, who just want to be cool, are easily caught out by it.
I also wish there would be more public debate over it, beside the issue of whether it should be illegal to smoke it in the first place. And I hope that at the end of such a debate, compassion would prevail over blame.

Harald Breiding-Buss

Parenting:

Consequences
with Ron Thow

One of the major functions of the Father and Child Trust  in Canterbury is conducting a parent education programme. This operates under the SKIPStrategies with Kids  Information for Parents – part of a positive parenting programme created by the Ministry of Social Development and operated by various organisations around New Zealand. Most recently the Trust has developed a Tantrum-Buster programme, designed to go into the homes of parents and offer practical advice on children’s behaviours that might be causing concern. Think of it as a male version of super-nanny and you aren’t too far off the mark!
Tantrums are one of those stages that even the most angelic child goes through. As part of the Tantrum-Buster programme I get to talk to lots of different parents and certain issues and behaviours tend to crop up on a fairly regular basis. One of the most common issues that comes up is deciding the difference between those developmentally normal, or expected behaviours, and those that signal that trouble might be looming on the horizon.
Children go through huge changes biologically, mentally and emotionally as they grow and often these changes aren’t gradual and smooth as they tend to be described in the parenting books.. The tantrums of the terrible two’s are a good example. This is a fairly common developmental stage.
At this point your child is learning that they are an individual and that the word ‘no’ that they have been hearing regularly can be used to drive Mum and Dad absolutely nuts (this is just an entertainment bonus for your child). Children form their own likes and dislikes as they soak up information and experiences like very short sponges. After all, there are important lessons about the world to be learned by pouring a glass of juice on the floor!
How we as parents react to these phases has a big effect on how embedded some of the behaviours might become. Reacting strongly to a tantrum and worse, giving in to it makes that tantrum a powerful tool in the a child’s arsenal. Ignoring it, and the attached demands, will mean that it tends to be dropped quickly as an ineffective option, allowing your child to move onto trying some other parent-controlling experiment.
Thinking about consequences
Children take many years to develop complex problem-solving behaviours and how effectively they do so is very much determined by the sorts of problem-solving strategies that their parents model for them. One important aspect of this development in children is thinking about the consequences of an action or a behaviour.
Younger children especially don’t really consider the consequences of their actions, they simply aren’t ‘big picture’ people, except maybe when it comes to impromptu murals on the hall wallpaper.
For most children drawing on the wallpaper is a sensible solution to having run out of paper. The younger the child, the more direct the response is likely to be to the problem. As children develop they become more socially aware and complex in their problem-solving and start considering alternative options based on their experiences. Of what has and hasn’t worked in the past.
In fact, recent developmental research suggests that young people may not fully capable of considering the full consequences of their actions right through to their late teens or even early twenties. Many in the 30 year-plus age brackets may find this a bit hard to accept as we remember how very responsible and grown-up we all were in our own teenage years.. Of course considering consequences is different from being responsible. Failing to consider the consequences of their intentions is a major underlying reason that most teens (especially males) tend to think that they are 10 feet tall and bullet-proof. Risk-taking behaviours of all sorts tend to peak in the late teens/early twenties and it often isn’t until mid/late twenties that young people start to think twice about the wisdom of some of their actions and the potentially lethal, expensive or legal  outcomes that might be attached to them.
So, with all that to look forward to, it is part of our role as parents to help our children to develop an understanding of the results of their behaviours as early and completely as we are able. One technique is to ’kickstart’ the process of thinking about consequences.. We parents need to talk our children through the process each time if we want them to understand the consequences of their behaviours. Then we are actually modelling the process for them, obvious huh?!. This process means that children tend to start thinking earlier  about different consequences, which in turn leads to the development of  better decision-making skills at a younger age.
This modelling is as simple as just having a conversation (at an age appropriate level of course) about what has happened and maybe a couple of different things that your child could have done to have a different outcome – simple things like explaining that felt or crayon is hard to clean off the wallpaper and that drawing on the wall will probably result in a punishment next time. Then you could ask about better places to draw and why they are more suitable. An important feature of these conversations is to ask questions, engaging your child in actively thinking about what might happen if they do different things. This also starts a habit of discussion with your child that will become really useful as they develop and their understanding of your expectations develops as well. And of course washable wallpaper, paint and pens make the whole process so much easier to be philosophical about!