Details will be announced shortly but if you are interested or know anyone who might be send us an email to auckland@fatherandchild.org.nz, phone us on 09 525 1690 or send us a letter to Father & Child Trust, PO Box 11931 Ellerslie, Auckland.

Daniel Brown TV3 13th July 2010

Brendon Smith on TV3 13th July 2010

“It’s not easy to get dads to ask for help, or even admit that they need any help,” says support worker Brendon Smith. “We’ve produced magazines before, there’s some great books for DIY fathers on how to be a dad. You might say that the DVD, music & the interviews, it fills that gap.”

“In Your Hands” video from TV3:

Dan Brown is also featured in the NZ Herald where he talks about the DVD and Dave Owens talks about his motivation for creating it.

Parenting: The Teenage Mind; From The Archives: Hungry Fro Dad; The Mother Myth; 100 Days; A Lifeline For Babies; A Vision For Boys; Book Review: Fatherhood Hands-On

Contents:

• Parenting: The Teenage Mind
• From The Archives: Hungry For Dad
• The Mother Myth
• 100 Days
• A Lifetime For Babies
• A Vision For Boys
• Book Review: Fatherhood Hands-On
  

Next: Parenting: The Teenage Mind

By Harald Breiding-Buss

There are few issues where parents’ opinions are as divided as over encouraging (or discouraging) competition and achievement in their children.

For some, competition is the root of all evil for children, especially when encouraged early in life. Things should be about the joy of taking part and having fun along the way, not about winning or losing.

Competitiveness, they would say, is the source of much grief and destroys friendly relationships between children.

For others, competition and personal achievement are the core to creating a grounded personality. Without achievement and competition, life becomes a meaningless string of ‘fun’ experiences, and older children especially are cast adrift by a hollow quest for the ultimate fun experience.

Schools are equally divided.

Our neighbourhood primary school runs with the motto ‘pride in achievement’, a statement many schools would find too bold. However, many schools not only have their own everyday uniforms, but special uniforms and equipment for sporting events.

One P.E. teacher at the school my children go to told me that he is reluctant to enter students into inter-school athletics at High School level, because the competition between schools is so fierce, and many hire highly professional coaches to make sure their students do well.

On the other hand there is an increasing number of ‘alternative’ schools who quite consciously opt out of a competition model in education in favour of a ‘cooperation’ model. Christchurch, for example, has ‘Tamariki’, ‘Discovery’ and Rudolf Steiner schools, all applying an alternative model of education.

A while ago I saw a bumper sticker proclaiming ‘a kid in sport stays out of court’.

That statement has statistics in its favour: very few youths having to stand before a judge for various misdemeanors are involved in sports clubs, or competitive sport in general. This seems to go for both, boys and girls. But what is behind this concept?

Is it just a matter of keeping them busy?

Competitions are actually great bonding exercises, and not just between the members of a team. Even in individual sports such as tennis many close friendships have been formed out of an initial desire to beat the other person.

Perhaps more importantly they are great family bonding experiences. You simply cannot help feeling proud if your kid has won something, as a member of a team or individually.

Kids will bask in that pride, and it is this moment of closeness and the great feeling that comes with it that will spurn them on to keep doing it. The disappointments, too, bring you closer.

Competition is often a part of family life as well. Video games are something where siblings often compete, or where children compete with their parents. I was genuinely shocked when my older daughter first beat me at some Playstation game, and it has been downhill from there.

Conveying pride in our children’s achievements includes some subtle messages, which quite possibly are responsible for that ‘grounding’ effect that proponents of competitiveness cite in their favour.

Most of all it shows our children that achievements are important to us.

It is important to us to be good at something, and it implies that being good at something makes us feel that we are useful members of society.

It is something that will be acknowledged by others, and others may come to us for advice about something we’re good at.

This is quite an essential part of a functioning community, and it embeds us in it. Even if you’re good at something that is not really of direct benefit to the community—such as sports—it gets acknowledged nevertheless.

And how often have you come home with your child after a sports game to announce to the rest of the family that ‘we won’ or ‘we lost’. It was not the All Blacks that lost vs France in the World Cup—it was us!

These things are obviously more important for older children than for younger ones. For pre-school children, competitiveness more often than not is bad news.

This is because young children are much more defined by their attachment to caregivers, which is an absolutely crucial component of their development.

If they feel they need to earn close moments with their parents through being better than another child, it will kill the emergence of traits such as altruism or empathy.

‘Community’ means nothing for a pre-schooler, whose world revolves around himself and his family.

Nevertheless, even pre-schoolers quickly cotton on to the idea of achievements, and dad especially has a lot to do with it. Dads tend to give praise a little less freely than mums, but often react rather exuberantly for really big achievements.

It seems to go against our grain as men to praise something that we don’t really think is that good for the sole purpose of making someone else feel good. After all, the time will come where that someone will have to be weaned from the idea that absolutely everything they do is ‘great’.

While all children and young adults are better educated than ever before, there is a widening gap between boys and girls.

Has removing barriers to girls’ education led to increased barriers for boys education? Or are girls just naturally smarter than boys? Brendon Smith investigates.

I always thought our local kindergarten was a wonderful place. It had lovely woman teachers and a large sunny playground. I was always happy to help them put the lid on the big sandpit, pick up tools by the workbench, listen from the back corner as the last mat-time story was read aloud.

Occasionally the kids would crash a trolley and I’d get an incident report, but I figured that was a sign of progressive risk taking, a good trait for 4 year-old boys, surely.

I met another dad at the back of the room, his boy played with ours and yes, he had noticed them ‘mis-behaving’ a bit. I remembered seeing the boys mucking around on the mat during story time, not annoying but not listening either.

Later I managed to ask my son about it and he quickly replied ‘Oh you mean that story, about the big mother bunny. We’ve heard that one before.’

I mentioned this to the other dad and we agreed that while there was a huge art area and costumes for Africa their selection of wooden blocks and Lego was a bit dated.

I was about to ask one of the teachers, when she told me how this year’s fundraising money was for new rugby, basketball and soccer balls, fancy new Lego and big books with dinosaurs or tractors.

It worked! Though the boys eventually broke out to a playground across the road, they loved that kindergarten.

Our first year primary teacher was amazing with boys. She used motorcycle design legend John Britten as a role model and accepted live wetas as news. It was a shame, though, that the only regular male seen during school hours was the grumpy caretaker.

Men have effectively evacuated the learning professions. This “feminisation” of schools is said to have begun after WW2.

It is claimed that returning servicemen were given preferential treatment, some oblivious to their own dis-abilities, resulting in many frustrated female teachers eventually asserting their abilities on merit, the net effect being a steady push of men out of education.

As women began to dominate the classrooms, many traditional, competitive teaching methods, including some competitive sport were banned.

Boys who were noisy or dominant were seen as taking the teacher’s attention away from the more readily attentive girls. Earlier initiatives to ensure girls were not marginalised in schools had been successful, but they also uncovered gender differences in learning which in our country seem to have been forgotten.

An international study from Scotland found that girls are not generally brighter than boys, they tend to fill the middle ground.

The ‘average’ girl works harder and achieves better grades than the ‘average’ boy, but it is boys who more often top classes, yet simultaneously fill most of the low performer ranks.

In some countries, gender specific learning methods are highly rated, but here in New Zealand we have been leaning on the teachers.

In one of his last acts as education minister, Nick Smith commissioned an ERO report into gender differences in learning. He also announced including men as target groups for ‘teachnz’ scholarships, a plan that was quickly abandoned.

Time magazine recently reviewed boys vs. girls performance throughout the USA, including everything from preschool achievements to university degrees and lifestyle outcomes like teenage pregnancies, drug and imprisonment rates.

Early teaching apparently recorded little differences, but during the 70’s and 80’s, boys’ outcomes had changed. The number of male students needing reading assistance, falling in grades and having behavioural issues was increasing, but teachers were also celebrating improved outcomes for girls.

As Time magazine noted, early intervention policies with community backing identified at-risk students, investigated their family situations and provided support according to needs. Many boys stepped up with that extra attention and rapid improvements followed.

As a result the gap has been reduced in the USA but girls still outperform boys.

Learning styles may have a lot to do with it. One study, comparing teaching methods in different countries, found that Japanese students, who regularly rated highly in international comparisons, were being taught in entirely different ways, using a discovery method.

Students are presented with problems they can’t solve given all the tools they have learned so far. They start thinking about what they need to solve it, and some of this happens in working groups, some of it in the whole class.

As the groups progress, the teacher provides the extra tools and the information the students need, bit by bit. The students get the thrill of learning.

This is almost the direct opposite of the style used in our schools, where the tools or a story are given first and practised through exercises. At early primary level, a large part of teaching consists of listening and copying, and provides very little challenge .

The Japanese method appeals to a sense of exploration and adventure. The thrill of solving a problem offers the kind of short-term reward that keeps children interested in learning.

For boys , who are often seen bored at school and engage in unnecessary risk taking, such an approach would focus those energies in a more positive way.

Society needs those problem-solvers. If we are faced with a burning building, somebody has to solve the problems of finding and rescuing people without a handbook.

The police, many computer jobs, construction and management – all have a strong element of problem-solving, needing fast analysis of the problem and action. All these professions are dominated by men.

Since the last ERO report on Boys vs. Girls there have been several conferences, research papers and reviews. One of these said that the current monotone approach to schooling should be expanded to enable more new and innovative methods.

This means giving principals more discretion to make decisions about what is taught in their schools, how schools spend the funds they receive and what works for the needs of particular pupils.

Diverse approaches to schooling are a vital part of bridging the gap between the achievement standards of all students.

As long as our educational bureaucratic framework seems inflexible it will remain up to local teachers and determined dads to ensure that neither rigid teaching methods nor old stereotypes deter their boys or girls from achieving their full potential in NZ schools.

The Brain Angle

Learning and gender expert Michael Gurian (Author of 2007 book “The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life”) has taken modern brain-scan based approaches to identify why and how boy-girl differences affect learning styles.

He found that at high school level writing, girls on average:

• Use more words than boys
• Include more complex sensory details like color and texture, and
• Add more emotive and feeling details (“Judy said she liked him” “Timmy frowned”).

Gurian thinks this is due to higher blood flow in the verbal centers of the girls’ brains, more neural connections between the verbal and emotive centers and more blood flow in sensorial centres

A visual link to learning helps girls connect colour variety and other sensoral detail like facial expressions,. Boys recognise spatial activity and graphic clues more quickly.

In a boy’s brain, less of the “calming chemical,” serotonin, is present and they also have the ability to zone-out or doze during a lesson. This makes them seem both distracting and disrespectful.

When his specific teaching methods for both boys and girls were trialled at six Missouri schools, outcomes for both sexes improved markedly and discipline issues dropped by as much as 35%.

Linking words to maths has proven to be an amazing help, closing previous girl performance gaps in mathematics and sciences.

The current emphasis on cooperative learning has proven to prepare children well for consensus building and communications, but the elimination of competitive elements from the class has also robbed many boys and girls of the chance to shine and lead.

Next: Motherless Girls

The tides of opinon on whether or not boys really are inherently different from girls (and if so, is it nature or social conditioning) have ebbed and flowed for the better part of 50 years now. For the last 10 there has been a proliferation of books saying that boys are different, and in a world where education and health are dominated by females, boys miss out in those areas for that reason. As for the girls, feminist Sandra Coney explains girls’ huge lead in education by saying that their natural superior smartness is simply shining through now that barriers are removed.

Regardless of what causes the differences between boys and girls, trends are undeniable and dealing with them as a parent is quite real. The danger is that we fall into the trap of thinking “she does that because she’s a girl” or “that’s girl’s stuff, a guy can’t understand it”, when we look at our daughters. It can also be a cop-out – let’s concentrate on our sons; they’re the ones needing the role models, right?

Like boys, girls are quite dependent on a close relationship with their (natural) fathers. It has been shown that this relationship is the most important for girls’ development of a healthy sexual identity. Even more than for boys, father absence in the early years predicts bad outcomes: higher risks of teenage pregnancy, suicide, low self-esteem and low self-assessed happiness and quality of life.

Nevertheless as a society we are putting greater emphasis on the father-son than on the father-daughter relationship. Popular literature emphasises the point—as a culture we love the romantic notion of a boy following in his father’s footsteps, and there isn’t quite a similar image for fathers and daughters, or even mothers and daughters.

Men’s groups, a growing trend in New Zealand, unfortunately also focus solely on boys for their ‘men’s retreats’ and other events that foster the idea of male bonding, and introducing sons to other adult men. However, as for girls and fathers, a boy’s sexual identity is very strongly affected by his relationship with his mother. The vibes that we get through secure non-sexual relationships with the other sex are possibly more important for the formation of our sexual identity than the relationship we have with the parent of the same sex.

If the groundwork has been laid, father-daughter relationships often come into their own in the teenage years, and can become extremely productive partnerships. World tennis ace Steffi Graf is one example of a young woman whose career was ‘managed’ by her father, and there are many other examples in sport. At a time when a girl is trying to step out of the shadow of her mother, she might find it much less threatening to listen and talk to her father. Boys go through the same thing, and during the teenage years those same-sex relationships within the household can start to resemble war zones.

For young children, parenting experts tend to advocate a child-driven approach. Meaning: look what your child does, or wants to do, and follow along. It is a good way to find your child’s natural aptitudes and preferences, but the key to a child’s learning is the relationship with the person the child is learning from. Boys and girls find joy in doing something together with dad, regardless of what it is, and a ‘child-driven’ approach should not stop a parent from occasionally introducing their own activities that they like to do.

For all children it is important that they get some one-on-one time with either parent. Some studies have shown that men’s interaction with young children changes significantly once mum leaves the room. It may be a lack of confidence or worries that a more assertive parenting approach may somehow undermine the mother, but it seems that men talk more and are generally more responsive when they are around their children by themselves. This is invaluable time for a child to get to know their dad as the human being he is rather than the role he plays.

Most of us can remember stories from our own childhood where we basked in our father’s pride—or felt downcast by his disappointment. This, too, applies to boys and girls and depending on their personalities they develop different strategies to get the former and avoid the latter.

It is common for children to avoid competition altogether because they do not want to disappoint a parent (although they may never phrase it like that). It is hard to hide disappointment completely. Most of us try to cover it up with positive words (“great effort” – “how wonderful that you took part in it”), and that is important even if your body language disagrees.

If that is the case in your relationship with your child, it is possible that your child has to try too hard to get positive acknowledgement from you. Quality time is the answer to that: let them feel that you love them as they are in those special moments, so they can take your pride (and otherwise) in their achievements the right way.

It’s a classic weak point for fathers. From day one we like to brag. It is a rare father who does not tell me that his 6 months old baby is already ‘months ahead’ of the other babies he sees. We’re prone to try to put some of our own ambitions onto our children.

That’s not entirely bad, but it needs to be underpinned by a relationship that is genuinely loving towards the child as a person. Combine the two and father and child are an unbeatable team.