Leave home—or we’ll sue

By Patricia Treble - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 0 Comments

Shooing adult kids out of the family nest can be stressful for parents. One Venetian couple is so frustrated by their freeloading 41-year-old son that they’ve taken the unusual step of siccing a lawyer on him. “We can no longer go on like this,” the unnamed father complained to Andrea Campi, their lawyer from a local consumers’ right association, who then told Italian media. “He has a good job but still lives at home. He demands that his clothes be washed and ironed and his meals prepared. He really has no intention of leaving.” Life has gotten so desperate, the father said, “my wife is suffering from stress and had to be hospitalized.”

The son has been served with a legal letter telling him to move pronto—otherwise the parents will go to court. He isn’t alone in being reluctant to leave home. Italy’s National Institute of Statistics reports that nearly half of all adult offspring under the age of 40 still live with their parents. It’s partly because many work on short-term contracts and can’t find permanent positions, but also fussing mothers have raised a generation of mammone (mummy’s boys), dependent on such dedicated, and free, 24/7 housekeeping service. Even a cabinet minister, Renato Brunetta, admits his mother made his bed until he was 30.

Go away, media. You're jerks and I hate you.

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:19 AM - 69 Comments

Getty Images; Reuters; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Authors have devoted entire books to trying to decipher and understand Stephen Harper. But is he really that complex? I’d say his pattern of behaviour over recent years has given Canadians a rather clear sense of who he is.

He’s the only leader of a G8 country who also happens to be a seven-year-old boy.

Skeptical? The proof begins atop the prime ministerial head. A seven-year-old boy has the haircut of a seven-year-old boy. So does Stephen Harper.

But it goes beyond that. Let’s examine the behavioural characteristics of a typical seven-year-old—as taken from a variety of child development resources—and see how our PM checks out.

— Your seven-year-old may be rude, critical and impatient.

Hmm. Sounds vaguely familiar.

— He is the centre of his own world and tends to be boastful.

Canada’s back, baby. It’s back because of me. I MADE CANADA BACK!

— Generally, he is rigid, negative, demanding; he exhibits tantrums.

Okay, this is starting to get uncanny.

Continue…

A child obesity problem?

By Erica Alini - Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 3 Comments

Xue Jun/ChinaFotoPress/CP

Chinese children’s ever-wider waistlines are sparking fears of a Western-style obesity epidemic in the People’s Republic. While less than five per cent of China’s overall population is obese, levels of obesity among children have risen by 156 per cent between 1996 and 2006. The country is still struggling with childhood undernourishment in poorer, rural areas, but in the booming northern and coastal regions, overweight children number 12 million.

The problem is particularly hefty in big cities, where a traditional culture that equates “fat baby” with “healthy baby” meets Western imports such as sedentary lifestyles and Kentucky Fried Chicken. In Shanghai, over one-third of school-aged children are overweight or obese, according to estimates. China’s one-child policy has also led families (particularly grandparents) to spoil and overfeed little ones, say experts. Officials and concerned parents are taking a drastic approach to the problem, including military-style fat camps and one-hour-a-day mandatory physical exercise in schools.

Militant 7-year-old vegetarians

By Julia McKinnell - Monday, February 22, 2010 at 10:39 AM - 129 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

In the film Mommie Dearest, Hollywood legend Joan Crawford tries to force her adopted daughter to eat a piece of meat. “She negotiates everything like a goddamn Hollywood agent,” Crawford complains to her housekeeper. “Christina, eat your lunch. You are not getting up from this table until you have finished that meat.”

Two years ago in Vancouver, Carolye Kuchta’s six-year-old daughter Celia declared that she would no longer eat meat; her son had once made the same adamant pronouncement. Kuchta, a meat-eater, would never force her kids to eat meat but admits she had misgivings about the potential health risks of a meatless diet, and that switching to accommodate her kids’ food preferences was “pretty inconvenient at first.”

“Of course, as parents, we think it’s just a fad—like when Maxwell wanted to sleep on the floor in a tent forever, and that lasted a week.” Maxwell’s vegetarianism lasted six months. Celia was a different story. “She announced at the table one day that she was vegetarian, and that was it, there’s been no going back.” Celia turns nine in March. “She feels it’s her mission in life to help the planet and protect nature.”

Continue…

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 5, 2010 at 11:28 AM - 38 Comments

Keith Martin says there’s already a framework for addressing maternal and child health internationally. And, as luck would have it, he helped write it.

Last summer, at the pre-G8 Conference on International Health in Rome, parliamentarians from around the world developed a concrete work plan to reduce maternal mortality called, “Strategic Investments in Times of Crisis.” This was given to the G8 and G20 leaders at their meeting a few days later.

The plan called for strategic investments in people’s access to primary care: basic surgical facilities, medications, a full array of family planning options, diagnostics, adequate nutrition, clean water, power, and most importantly, trained health care workers. With these assets in place, most obstetrical complications could be treated, along with 80 per cent of the medical problems one encounters in the emergency departments of developing countries. This includes major killers like gastroenteritis, which causes 2.2 million deaths per year, pneumonia, 2.1 million, malaria, 2 million, and HIV/AIDS, which claims more than 2 million lives per year.

Singing with glee

By John Intini - Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 10:45 AM - 2 Comments

As well as being a member of the choir backing up Dead Man’s Bones in Vancouver last month, Jane Ag­yeman was picked to perform a solo, a cover of Cher’s Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down). Fully aware of who the packed house had paid to see – the band is fronted by Academy Award-nominated actor Ryan Gosling – Agyeman wasn’t expecting much more than a polite response, like at an elementary school concert, she says, when “the crowd claps because it’s mandatory.” So it came as a bit of a shock when the club erupted with applause following her four minutes alone in the spotlight. And the Georgia Straight’s review of the show, while generous to Gosling, credited the Grade 11 student at North Vancouver’s Carson Graham secondary school with having “turned in the night’s most killer performance.”

Being upstaged by a kid from the choir is something Gosling has been setting himself up for this fall. On the band’s self-titled debut, which came out last month, Dead Man’s Bones is joined by the Silverlake Conservatory of Music’s children’s choir. And at every tour stop, the band selected a local chorus, painted the members’ faces like ghosts, and took them on stage as backup. When asked by a journalist from Pitchfork what they hoped to achieve by including the kids, Gosling offered a rambling, but poignant response: “You know when you’re a kid and you get crayons and papers and just draw whatever you want and it’s just a bunch of messy lines, but to you it makes sense, and then they put it on the fridge? From that point on, you’re always trying to get back on the fridge. We wanted to get back to that place before we were trying to make the fridge. We wanted to work with people who hadn’t been affected in that way yet.”

The guys in Dead Man’s Bones aren’t the only ones trying to capture a bit of that magic. Aside, perhaps, from Whoopi Goldberg’s turn in Sister Act, choirs have never been more centre stage in pop culture than they are right now. The soundtrack for Where the Wild Things Are features Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and 16 untrained children’s voices. A Grade 5 chorus at New York City’s PS22 regularly captures the YouTube generation’s attention (12 million views and counting) with covers of modern-day pop songs, and counts Beyoncé, Rihanna and Lady Gaga as fans. The Choir, an award-winning BBC reality show about a choirmaster who tries to turn inexperienced, and often reluctant, students on to song, has proven incredibly popular in the U.K. (TVO is airing all three episodes of season one on Jan. 1). And then, of course, there’s Glee. Fox’s massive hit, about a high school show choir, has 8.6 million tuning in every week. And the show’s chart-topping music—including covers of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ and Beyoncé’s Halo—has sold more than 2.6 million downloads on iTunes. At the risk of being stuffed in a locker for saying it, choirs are, well, cool.

Continue…

Mum’s fine, Dad’s an absolute mess

By Monique Polak - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 2 Comments

It’s not just moms whose feathers droop when their offspring fly the nest. It’s dads, too. In fact, with more and more dads playing an important role in their children’s upbringing, many modern fathers take it hard when their children leave home. Some suffer even more than their wives do.

Serge Bouharevich is still adjusting to the fact that his children, Ali, 25, and Yuri, 21, have left the family home in Montreal. “It’s been easier for Annie,” Bouharevich said of his wife Anne Soden, a lawyer. “Her work is much more structured than mine. I was a quasi-house husband,” said Bouharevich, 56, a video producer who works mostly out of a home office. Continue…

Children's mental health often overlooked

By Cathy Gulli - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 at 4:49 PM - 10 Comments

More than half of parents report that their child’s pediatrician doesn’t ask if they have any worries about the mental and emotional well-being of their kid.

This study by University of Michigan researchers puts in perspective how little attention is paid to the anxieties that plague children. They suggest that doctors often don’t ask because they aren’t equipped to deal with mental health issues.

Proof that a dialogue between pediatricians and parents is useful: among parents who do talk with a doctor about their child’s problems, 62 per cent seek additional help from mental health professionals.

Unfortunately, the report showed that many parents don’t know where to turn. They either couldn’t find a provider, the services were too expensive, or they couldn’t get an appointment soon enough.

Dumbed down

By Lianne George - Friday, November 7, 2008 at 1:00 AM - 62 Comments

For almost three decades, the Arrowsmith School, a small Toronto private school housed in a converted mansion on the edge of Forest Hill, has been treating kids with learning disabilities. When its founder, Barbara Arrowsmith Young, developed the school’s patented program in the late ’70s, it was with a first-hand knowledge of the frustration and stigma of living with cognitive deficits. Growing up, Young struggled with dyslexia. She had difficulties with problem-solving and visual and auditory memory. Finding connections between things and ideas was a challenge, and telling time was impossible—she couldn’t grasp the relationship between the big hand and the little hand. Traditional learning programs taught her tricks to compensate for her deficits, but they never improved her ability to think. “I walked around in a fog,” she says. But as a young psychology graduate, Young came across the brain maps created by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who studied soldiers who had suffered head wounds. Using these maps, she identified 19 unique learning dysfunctions and the brain regions that control them. Her theory was that a person can transform weak areas of the brain through repetitive and targeted cognitive exercises, and she was right. Today, this notion of brain plasticity—which she intuited three decades ago—is established wisdom in neuroscience.

Over the past decade, the Arrowsmith program has been proven so effective that schools throughout Canada and the U.S. have adopted it. In 2003, a report commissioned by the Toronto Catholic District School Board found that students’ rate of learning on specific tasks like math and reading comprehension increased by 1½ to three times.

These days, though, Young has noticed a new development: increasingly, she’s seeing a great many young people having difficulties with executive function, which involves thinking, problem-solving and task completion. “It looks like an attention deficit disorder,” she says. “The person has a job or a task and they start doing it but they can’t stay oriented to it. They get distracted and they can’t get reoriented. When I started using the programs, I really didn’t see a lot of this. I would say now, 50 per cent of students walking through the door have difficulty in that area.” The second thing she’s noticing is more frequent trouble with non-verbal thinking skills. These kids struggle to read facial expressions and body language—which can make dating and friendships, and indeed, most social situations, tricky. Continue…

The saddest of Madonna portraits

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 1 Comment

In the late 1800s, Edward Bok, the reform-minded editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, launched a crusade against, of all things, the parlour—that pretentious little room, as he saw it, reserved by the Victorians for formal Sunday teas and displaying their dead. Better, he thought, to banish the old-time hats and coats and the corpses in favour of a space for routine family life—call it, he suggested, the living room. The wordplay caught on, part of a trend driven by lengthening life expectancies that made death itself an unmentionable. “In the 19th century, sex was the taboo,” says Stanley Burns, an eye surgeon and medical historian. “In the 20th century, it was death.” Nowhere, oddly enough, was the shift more pronounced than in family photographs.

A hundred years ago, capturing images of dead relatives was de rigueur. Dad’s eyes were glued shut, his mouth closed, his limbs posed in such a manner as to suggest a quick catnap; in one famous example, the deceased sits with a newspaper clasped in his hands as though just nodding off. Widows wore lockets with the dead faces of their husbands, mothers the images of their dead infants—sometimes with open eyes painted in and rose tincture on their cheeks. Yet changing attitudes soon saw post-mortem photography go the way of the parlour.

Now, research suggesting that families benefit from photographs of deceased offspring has brought the practice back. “There’s that pivotal moment, especially after a stillbirth, where mum all of a sudden won’t remember what her baby looked like—and there’s panic,” says Mary MacCormick, head of the Canadian Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths. Memories of the traumatic days surrounding a difficult birth can also exaggerate a baby’s flaws, haunting parents for years. Hospital staff have battled these anxieties by giving families bereavement kits containing locks of hair, hand- or footprints, and Polaroids. Recently, though, so-called infant bereavement photography has become the domain of professionals.