Well derr, see below...................
How about this wrinkle.
Houses last like 100+ years normally.
How much mercury will be contaminating a house over 100 years with CFL bulbs. Say one broken bulb every 4 years......
that is 25 light bulbs worth if mercury polluting the place. Who wants to raise their kids in that??
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/19/green-shock-cfls-more-dangerous-than-first-thought/
Green shock: CFLs more dangerous than first thought
posted at 8:32 pm on March 19, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
The compact fluorescent lightbulb has plenty of supporters in the environmental movement, even while concerns have grown about their disposal. CFLs contain mercury, and when the glass breaks, it spreads the toxic dust in the area. Boosters had previously dismissed concerns over the issue, but now researches worry about the collective effect their massive disposal will have on landfills once they start failing in large numbers:
Compact fluorescent light bulbs, long touted by environmentalists as a more efficient and longer-lasting alternative to the incandescent bulbs that have lighted homes for more than a century, are running into resistance from waste industry officials and some environmental scientists, who warn that the bulbs’ poisonous innards pose a bigger threat to health and the environment than previously thought. …
As long as the mercury is contained in the bulb, CFLs are perfectly safe. But eventually, any bulbs — even CFLs — break or burn out, and most consumers simply throw them out in the trash, said Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and editor of the journal Environmental Research.
“This is an enormous amount of mercury that’s going to enter the waste stream at present with no preparation for it,” she said.
Even a single CFL could provide toxic levels of exposure for mercury. One contains five milligrams of mercury, which would be enough to contaminate 6,000 gallons of drinking water. Low-mercury models have about one-sixth of the amount, but that’s still enough to contaminate 1,000 gallons. It makes the CFL one of the most toxic components of a household, one that causes kidney and brain damage when people get exposed to enough of it.
What happens when an incandescent bulb hits the floor? Simple: sweep it up, and try not to step on a shard of glass with bare feet. Here’s how people need to handle a broken CFL:
1. Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more.
2. Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.
3. Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
4. Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.
5. Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes and place them in the glass jar or plastic bag.
6. Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.
7. Immediately place all cleanup materials outside the building in a trash container or outdoor protected area for the next normal trash.
8. Wash your hands after disposing of the jars or plastic bags containing cleanup materials.
9. Check with your local or state government about disposal requirements in your specific area. Some states prohibit such trash disposal and require that broken and unbroken lamps be taken to a recycling center.
10. For at least the next few times you vacuum, shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system and open a window prior to vacuuming.
11. Keep the central heating/air conditioning system shut off and the window open for at least 15 minutes after vacuuming is completed.
Er, that’s quite a commitment for a lightbulb. I have several of these around the house, and I had no idea that a break could require such an intense cleanup. Like others who bought these products, I hoped to save a little energy and drive down replacement costs.
And guess what — I can’t even throw these in the garbage, broken or unbroken. As MS-NBC reports, Minnesota requires that I take any CFLs to a disposal center certified to handle them. I didn’t know that until tonight, and I have no idea where such a center might be. It does make sense, though, considering the disposal issues involving mercury.
In other words, we have opted for a product that has much more impact on our environment and could turn households into toxic-waste sites to replace a product that uses a little more energy, a change driven ironically by environmentalists. What’s next — lead containers to replace Tupperware?
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Friday, March 7, 2008
polygamist asshats
put this in usa is going to sh8t catagory
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MThlZGU3MmI1OTAyNWM3ZTUyN2JlMDMxOGM1YWNhZDM=&w=MA==
March 07, 2008, 8:00 a.m.A Polygamist State of MindUnacceptable behavior in New York.By Lisa Schiffren
Big-city tabloids love puppies, kittens, almost-naked women, and babies. It’s a cliché of downmarket journalism that editors should take any opportunity to print pictures of any of the above. So perhaps my fear of creeping sharia practice right here in the Big Apple constitutes reading too much into what could be a perfectly innocent story in this past Sunday’s New York Post, accompanied with a full page of pictures, about a Malian immigrant named Moussa Magassa and his pair of two-month-old infant sons.
The adorable babies, each one shown being held by his mother, are noteworthy because a year ago — March 7, 2007 — Moussa’s house in a Bronx neighborhood full of West African immigrants burned, tragically killing four of his children (as well as another woman and her child). Mayor Bloomberg attended the funeral and went all out to comfort the bereaved and mitigate the family’s suffering. As the city joined Mr. Magassa in mourning such a grave loss, it slowly became clear that, in the building he owned, he had been housing his two wives and their offspring. This seemed a little shocking at the time, though no one was rude enough to point out that polygamy isn’t legal in New York — or anywhere in this country. Those convicted of bigamy in New York can be sentenced to four years in prison.
A couple of weeks after the fire, the New York Times ran a front-page story explaining that there is now a full-blown culture of polygamous West African immigrants, most of them here illegally, who keep importing young, mostly illiterate, and therefore powerless brides from the villages of Mali, Senegal, and Guinea. It’s all very hush-hush.
The women involved may be miserable, but they cannot risk complaining, since they can easily be divorced, kicked out of the community, and stranded. Because they are here illegally and their marriages are not valid in the United States (though they can serve as grounds for deportation of a polygamous husband), the women effectively have no rights. So they often put up with brutal conditions. Among other things, sharing a cramped New York apartment with 11 kids and another woman is far more likely to lead to, say, domestic violence than living in neighboring huts in a traditional village.
The Times’s exceptionally well-researched story said that social-service workers have learned not to make an issue of polygamy in handing out benefits and guiding applicants, legal and otherwise, through the bureaucratic mazes of the welfare system. Doctors at hospitals turn a blind eye. The men speak for their wives. By quoting women who have left such marriages after abuse and misery, the story suggested that perhaps polygamy wasn’t quite as benign a multi-culti variant of our own cozy little practices as was being portrayed. Suffice it to say, however, that the story caused no changes in New York’s policies.
In any event, now that a year has passed since the fire, the Post decided to catch up with Moussa Magassa and his family, which is growing again. Manthia, 36, the mother of the four dead children, gave birth on January 4 to a son. Aisse, 25, gave birth to twins the very next day at the same hospital. (One of the twins, the girl, died a few weeks later.) But Mr. Magassa’s family is also growing in another way: Lo and behold, in the interim, he has taken an additional wife — and now lives with all three. The new, youngest one is named Niekale.
I am trying to think like the liberal legal scholars, anthropologists, and activists, and consider honestly — not just as a matter of my bourgeois, Judeo-Christian, American, female prejudices — what the merits of polygamy might be, now that my neighbors could be practicing it with impunity sometime soon.
To be sure, in the Post’s pictures of the Magassa women, none of them look happy. In their chadors, with their full faces revealed, they look sad and resigned, while their graying husband appears to be chortling with glee. Advocates for polygamy tell us that it breeds sororal feeling among the wives, and while it may engender normal human jealousy, it also provides domestic support and more hands to lighten the load at home. But I am wondering how that goes in the Magassa family.
After all, with two wives out of commission due to pregnancy, it would have been up to the newest one, Niekale, to do the housework, take care of the others’ offspring, and service the lord and master in bed. Would that be a sexual triumph? Or an unpleasant burden? And what of the other two? It’s bad enough to know that their beloved husband impregnated both of them within days of each other. That sure could make a girl feel just a bit less special when she should be glowing with pregnancy. Knowing that the babies are an assembly-line production might shatter the kind of emotional high that I, for one, cherished when producing my own babies, with their father there in the delivery room — not shuttling off to visit yesterday’s batch.
The Magassa arrangement illustrates perfectly the benefits and drawbacks of polygamy. As a utilitarian matter, polygamy produces more legitimate offspring from a given male, since he can impregnate many women simultaneously.
The Magassas got three new lives in a matter of two days, bringing the total number of children up to nine. Back in Mali that would have been useful labor on the farm. In New York, of course, it’s a cost that taxpayers may end up bearing.
The drawback is also apparent. Whatever the current feelings of the participants, such marriages are not love matches. According to the Times story, the women do not come to them freely, nor is any wife an equal partner with her husband. She has, at most, one-third the status that he does — usually much less — and little or no bargaining power. Given the customs of their culture, even when these women are allowed to work outside the home, they are often forced to turn their earnings over to their husband, leaving them essentially working as slave labor.
And those nine children, at least some of whom are American by birth — what do they learn of being free citizens in a democracy from the values they imbibe in this familial structure? The boys become autocrats; the girls become servants. They will never be free men and women, equal and responsible. It’s a longer argument for another day, but allowing this barbaric import to thrive in the U.S. will undermine all the advances that women have made in the past 150 years with regard to education, financial independence, and political and sexual equality. Polygamy, like slavery itself, cannot co-exist with true democracy.
It’s time for the Magassas to be sent home, and for an example to be made so we can avoid the situation the French find themselves in. France has so many people living in polygamous families — somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 — that politicians are powerless to rein in the practice, since the polygamists can vote and riot, and they have the critical mass in their own neighborhoods to elect their own representatives. Nor do they assimilate. If we allow the same thing to occur here, the next thing you know, parts of the United States will live under sharia law. Failure to prosecute is an invitation to just that.
— Lisa Schiffren is a writer and GOP speechwriter living in New York.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MThlZGU3MmI1OTAyNWM3ZTUyN2JlMDMxOGM1YWNhZDM=&w=MA==
March 07, 2008, 8:00 a.m.A Polygamist State of MindUnacceptable behavior in New York.By Lisa Schiffren
Big-city tabloids love puppies, kittens, almost-naked women, and babies. It’s a cliché of downmarket journalism that editors should take any opportunity to print pictures of any of the above. So perhaps my fear of creeping sharia practice right here in the Big Apple constitutes reading too much into what could be a perfectly innocent story in this past Sunday’s New York Post, accompanied with a full page of pictures, about a Malian immigrant named Moussa Magassa and his pair of two-month-old infant sons.
The adorable babies, each one shown being held by his mother, are noteworthy because a year ago — March 7, 2007 — Moussa’s house in a Bronx neighborhood full of West African immigrants burned, tragically killing four of his children (as well as another woman and her child). Mayor Bloomberg attended the funeral and went all out to comfort the bereaved and mitigate the family’s suffering. As the city joined Mr. Magassa in mourning such a grave loss, it slowly became clear that, in the building he owned, he had been housing his two wives and their offspring. This seemed a little shocking at the time, though no one was rude enough to point out that polygamy isn’t legal in New York — or anywhere in this country. Those convicted of bigamy in New York can be sentenced to four years in prison.
A couple of weeks after the fire, the New York Times ran a front-page story explaining that there is now a full-blown culture of polygamous West African immigrants, most of them here illegally, who keep importing young, mostly illiterate, and therefore powerless brides from the villages of Mali, Senegal, and Guinea. It’s all very hush-hush.
The women involved may be miserable, but they cannot risk complaining, since they can easily be divorced, kicked out of the community, and stranded. Because they are here illegally and their marriages are not valid in the United States (though they can serve as grounds for deportation of a polygamous husband), the women effectively have no rights. So they often put up with brutal conditions. Among other things, sharing a cramped New York apartment with 11 kids and another woman is far more likely to lead to, say, domestic violence than living in neighboring huts in a traditional village.
The Times’s exceptionally well-researched story said that social-service workers have learned not to make an issue of polygamy in handing out benefits and guiding applicants, legal and otherwise, through the bureaucratic mazes of the welfare system. Doctors at hospitals turn a blind eye. The men speak for their wives. By quoting women who have left such marriages after abuse and misery, the story suggested that perhaps polygamy wasn’t quite as benign a multi-culti variant of our own cozy little practices as was being portrayed. Suffice it to say, however, that the story caused no changes in New York’s policies.
In any event, now that a year has passed since the fire, the Post decided to catch up with Moussa Magassa and his family, which is growing again. Manthia, 36, the mother of the four dead children, gave birth on January 4 to a son. Aisse, 25, gave birth to twins the very next day at the same hospital. (One of the twins, the girl, died a few weeks later.) But Mr. Magassa’s family is also growing in another way: Lo and behold, in the interim, he has taken an additional wife — and now lives with all three. The new, youngest one is named Niekale.
I am trying to think like the liberal legal scholars, anthropologists, and activists, and consider honestly — not just as a matter of my bourgeois, Judeo-Christian, American, female prejudices — what the merits of polygamy might be, now that my neighbors could be practicing it with impunity sometime soon.
To be sure, in the Post’s pictures of the Magassa women, none of them look happy. In their chadors, with their full faces revealed, they look sad and resigned, while their graying husband appears to be chortling with glee. Advocates for polygamy tell us that it breeds sororal feeling among the wives, and while it may engender normal human jealousy, it also provides domestic support and more hands to lighten the load at home. But I am wondering how that goes in the Magassa family.
After all, with two wives out of commission due to pregnancy, it would have been up to the newest one, Niekale, to do the housework, take care of the others’ offspring, and service the lord and master in bed. Would that be a sexual triumph? Or an unpleasant burden? And what of the other two? It’s bad enough to know that their beloved husband impregnated both of them within days of each other. That sure could make a girl feel just a bit less special when she should be glowing with pregnancy. Knowing that the babies are an assembly-line production might shatter the kind of emotional high that I, for one, cherished when producing my own babies, with their father there in the delivery room — not shuttling off to visit yesterday’s batch.
The Magassa arrangement illustrates perfectly the benefits and drawbacks of polygamy. As a utilitarian matter, polygamy produces more legitimate offspring from a given male, since he can impregnate many women simultaneously.
The Magassas got three new lives in a matter of two days, bringing the total number of children up to nine. Back in Mali that would have been useful labor on the farm. In New York, of course, it’s a cost that taxpayers may end up bearing.
The drawback is also apparent. Whatever the current feelings of the participants, such marriages are not love matches. According to the Times story, the women do not come to them freely, nor is any wife an equal partner with her husband. She has, at most, one-third the status that he does — usually much less — and little or no bargaining power. Given the customs of their culture, even when these women are allowed to work outside the home, they are often forced to turn their earnings over to their husband, leaving them essentially working as slave labor.
And those nine children, at least some of whom are American by birth — what do they learn of being free citizens in a democracy from the values they imbibe in this familial structure? The boys become autocrats; the girls become servants. They will never be free men and women, equal and responsible. It’s a longer argument for another day, but allowing this barbaric import to thrive in the U.S. will undermine all the advances that women have made in the past 150 years with regard to education, financial independence, and political and sexual equality. Polygamy, like slavery itself, cannot co-exist with true democracy.
It’s time for the Magassas to be sent home, and for an example to be made so we can avoid the situation the French find themselves in. France has so many people living in polygamous families — somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 — that politicians are powerless to rein in the practice, since the polygamists can vote and riot, and they have the critical mass in their own neighborhoods to elect their own representatives. Nor do they assimilate. If we allow the same thing to occur here, the next thing you know, parts of the United States will live under sharia law. Failure to prosecute is an invitation to just that.
— Lisa Schiffren is a writer and GOP speechwriter living in New York.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
interesting parental perspective here
wonder if the islamic immigrats go to classes?
Since they kill their teen daughters, I'm guessing they don't follow the corporal punishment rule.
http://www.thelocal.se/10282/20080305/
Swedish parenting: Back to a traditional future?
Published: 5 Mar 08 14:09 CETOnline: http://www.thelocal.se/10282/
Four years on from the start of the great “curling” and “helicopter” debates, the issue of parenting is back in the news. This time round, the focus has switched to the unprecedented popularity of state-sponsored parenting classes. Peter Vinthagen Simpson takes a closer look.
Kid-friendly Sweden aims to better record with parenting classes
(7 Jan 08) In the spring of 2004, Sweden was awash with debate about the growing prevalence of so-called “curling parents”. Drawing an analogy with the sport of curling, the phrase refers to parents who rush ahead of their children, frantically sweeping their path clean of even the most minor obstructions.
The phrase was coined by Danish child psychologist Bent Hougaard in a challenge to the perceived status quo. Parents had become slaves to their children, who ruled the roost, rejecting adult authority in all its forms.
The discourse was joined later by “helicopter parents,” a term describing parents who pay very close attention to their children, hovering around them at all times.
In recent months, parenting in Sweden has again been under the microscope, with some 20,000 parents turning to state-sponsored parenting courses for help last year. But the courses are controversial and experts fear a traditionalist backlash.
Critics argue that the courses signify the return of shaming and the naughty step. Advocates however contend that the courses, which focus on behaviour, work.
Is Sweden, proud of a more “enlightened”, cooperative approach to parenting, losing faith in itself and rediscovering a more “traditional”, hands-on approach to raising its children?
Lars H. Gustafsson, paediatrician and author of several books on children and youth, is critical of the broad application of parenting courses and writes that many of the methods taught in courses such as Komet and Cope are not suitable for the average family. Many of the methods are designed for families with serious problems and could be counterproductive when applied universally, he argues.
“I want to emphasize that I am positive to the idea that parents should meet and discuss parenting, but there should be more of a menu of courses that parents can choose between. It is the content that I react against. There is an important distinction between treatment therapy for families with serious problems and the majority of parents that can manage perfectly well,” says Gustafsson.
Agneta Hellström at Cope, just one of the courses available to parents in Sweden, argues that attitudes have changed over the past thirty years and that state-sponsored courses are not as controversial as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.
“The courses are offered to parents and not imposed upon them. In my experience there has been a professionalization of parenthood. In the same way that the owner of a boat wishes to learn to sail, parents wish to learn to develop in their new roles. The courses are very much part of an 'empowerment programme' and it is the parents and not the course leader who shape the content.”
Gustafsson agrees that the courses are not as controversial and parents are less sceptical towards authorities today. “They should be though,” he warns, adding that “the recent vigorous media debate is perhaps an indication that there remains a healthy scepticism to being told by society how to be a parent.”
He reacts against the behaviour focus of many of the modern courses and would like to see courses focused more on “interplay,” “teamwork” and “parental dialogue.”
“Along the lines of a French language study circle.”
Methods such as “time out” and ignoring the child have been the focus of much of the debate. The “time out” method is argued by Gustafsson to be reminiscent of the “room arrest” that was once common in parenting. “Room arrest” was cited by the government in 1979 as an example of what could be considered a “prohibited violation of the rights of a child” and thus equivalent to the use of corporal punishment and thereby prohibited by the new legislation.
Sweden was the first country in the world to outlaw the corporal punishment of children, in 1979. In fact the right of parents to beat their children was removed in 1966.Hellström argues that the “time out” method has been misunderstood. The method, she emphasizes, should be used selectively and only to “break a vicious circle,” in extreme cases, such as when the child is hitting another child. “Time out is part of the 'positive reinforcement' taught in Cope's courses and does not mean room arrest,”
Hellström explains. “It is important that parents remain in control.
Time out is a so-called 'sharp tool' - a means of breaking a more negative situation and reinforcing a positive one,” she adds.
It was not until after the end of the Second World War that physical punishment and shaming began to be questioned as methods of parenting in Sweden, Gustafsson writes in 'The return of the naughty step.'
Children's author Astrid Lindgren created the characters of Pippi Longstocking, Emil, Madicken and Ronja and was influential in embedding new attitudes towards children and parenting in the Swedish popular self-identity that led to a re-think in the 1970s and early 1980s.
“I was part of the process to develop parenting courses in the beginning of the 1980s. The thought was that we would develop a three-stage process taking the child up to school age, but financial concerns came in the way. Even then we were careful to avoid the word 'education' and we went for 'parent groups' instead,” Gustafsson tells The Local.Hellström argues that today's parents are not familiar with the 1970s tradition and seek “concrete, pedagogical methods for improving their daily lives with their children.”
One such “concrete” method is the so-called “balance of trust.” Deposits are made, in the form of praise, gold stars or “quality time” and, later, withdrawals in the form of punishments. Hellström emphasizes that it is important to consider what we mean by punishment.
“If I turn off the TV because it is time for my child to get to bed is that really a punishment? - It doesn't fit the Swedish definition.”
Hellström compares this “balance of trust” to an employment contract that most adults at some point enter into. “Built on an agreement and most importantly, renegotiable”
The National Institute of Public Health (Folkhälsoinstitutet) has developed parenting courses in a Swedish cultural context. Sven Bremberg at the institute explains to The Local that “foreign” methods such as “time out” have been consciously omitted from its new parenting course material which has an emphasis on “warmth and limits.”
The popularity of parental courses could be argued to be a result of a period of introspection by parents prompted by the curling and helicopter debates. So what of the children?
One might ask whether these parenting courses aren't more for the benefit of parents struggling to find a balance to “life's puzzle” in the high-stress, “I want it all” 2000s, than for their children. Children are one more piece of the puzzle needing to be effectively managed; squeezed in alongside a career, a rewarding social life and free-time activities. Hence the focus on controlling behaviour, or perhaps more accurately, output. Gustafsson agrees:
“The definition of normality has narrowed in today's society. That which was once considered normal is now considered to be deviant. Take sleep for example. Small children sleep badly, that's normal, but parents today live with such tight schedules they cannot run the risk of their child having a bad night's sleep.”
“I miss the children's perspective,” he concludes.
Since they kill their teen daughters, I'm guessing they don't follow the corporal punishment rule.
http://www.thelocal.se/10282/20080305/
Swedish parenting: Back to a traditional future?
Published: 5 Mar 08 14:09 CETOnline: http://www.thelocal.se/10282/
Four years on from the start of the great “curling” and “helicopter” debates, the issue of parenting is back in the news. This time round, the focus has switched to the unprecedented popularity of state-sponsored parenting classes. Peter Vinthagen Simpson takes a closer look.
Kid-friendly Sweden aims to better record with parenting classes
(7 Jan 08) In the spring of 2004, Sweden was awash with debate about the growing prevalence of so-called “curling parents”. Drawing an analogy with the sport of curling, the phrase refers to parents who rush ahead of their children, frantically sweeping their path clean of even the most minor obstructions.
The phrase was coined by Danish child psychologist Bent Hougaard in a challenge to the perceived status quo. Parents had become slaves to their children, who ruled the roost, rejecting adult authority in all its forms.
The discourse was joined later by “helicopter parents,” a term describing parents who pay very close attention to their children, hovering around them at all times.
In recent months, parenting in Sweden has again been under the microscope, with some 20,000 parents turning to state-sponsored parenting courses for help last year. But the courses are controversial and experts fear a traditionalist backlash.
Critics argue that the courses signify the return of shaming and the naughty step. Advocates however contend that the courses, which focus on behaviour, work.
Is Sweden, proud of a more “enlightened”, cooperative approach to parenting, losing faith in itself and rediscovering a more “traditional”, hands-on approach to raising its children?
Lars H. Gustafsson, paediatrician and author of several books on children and youth, is critical of the broad application of parenting courses and writes that many of the methods taught in courses such as Komet and Cope are not suitable for the average family. Many of the methods are designed for families with serious problems and could be counterproductive when applied universally, he argues.
“I want to emphasize that I am positive to the idea that parents should meet and discuss parenting, but there should be more of a menu of courses that parents can choose between. It is the content that I react against. There is an important distinction between treatment therapy for families with serious problems and the majority of parents that can manage perfectly well,” says Gustafsson.
Agneta Hellström at Cope, just one of the courses available to parents in Sweden, argues that attitudes have changed over the past thirty years and that state-sponsored courses are not as controversial as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.
“The courses are offered to parents and not imposed upon them. In my experience there has been a professionalization of parenthood. In the same way that the owner of a boat wishes to learn to sail, parents wish to learn to develop in their new roles. The courses are very much part of an 'empowerment programme' and it is the parents and not the course leader who shape the content.”
Gustafsson agrees that the courses are not as controversial and parents are less sceptical towards authorities today. “They should be though,” he warns, adding that “the recent vigorous media debate is perhaps an indication that there remains a healthy scepticism to being told by society how to be a parent.”
He reacts against the behaviour focus of many of the modern courses and would like to see courses focused more on “interplay,” “teamwork” and “parental dialogue.”
“Along the lines of a French language study circle.”
Methods such as “time out” and ignoring the child have been the focus of much of the debate. The “time out” method is argued by Gustafsson to be reminiscent of the “room arrest” that was once common in parenting. “Room arrest” was cited by the government in 1979 as an example of what could be considered a “prohibited violation of the rights of a child” and thus equivalent to the use of corporal punishment and thereby prohibited by the new legislation.
Sweden was the first country in the world to outlaw the corporal punishment of children, in 1979. In fact the right of parents to beat their children was removed in 1966.Hellström argues that the “time out” method has been misunderstood. The method, she emphasizes, should be used selectively and only to “break a vicious circle,” in extreme cases, such as when the child is hitting another child. “Time out is part of the 'positive reinforcement' taught in Cope's courses and does not mean room arrest,”
Hellström explains. “It is important that parents remain in control.
Time out is a so-called 'sharp tool' - a means of breaking a more negative situation and reinforcing a positive one,” she adds.
It was not until after the end of the Second World War that physical punishment and shaming began to be questioned as methods of parenting in Sweden, Gustafsson writes in 'The return of the naughty step.'
Children's author Astrid Lindgren created the characters of Pippi Longstocking, Emil, Madicken and Ronja and was influential in embedding new attitudes towards children and parenting in the Swedish popular self-identity that led to a re-think in the 1970s and early 1980s.
“I was part of the process to develop parenting courses in the beginning of the 1980s. The thought was that we would develop a three-stage process taking the child up to school age, but financial concerns came in the way. Even then we were careful to avoid the word 'education' and we went for 'parent groups' instead,” Gustafsson tells The Local.Hellström argues that today's parents are not familiar with the 1970s tradition and seek “concrete, pedagogical methods for improving their daily lives with their children.”
One such “concrete” method is the so-called “balance of trust.” Deposits are made, in the form of praise, gold stars or “quality time” and, later, withdrawals in the form of punishments. Hellström emphasizes that it is important to consider what we mean by punishment.
“If I turn off the TV because it is time for my child to get to bed is that really a punishment? - It doesn't fit the Swedish definition.”
Hellström compares this “balance of trust” to an employment contract that most adults at some point enter into. “Built on an agreement and most importantly, renegotiable”
The National Institute of Public Health (Folkhälsoinstitutet) has developed parenting courses in a Swedish cultural context. Sven Bremberg at the institute explains to The Local that “foreign” methods such as “time out” have been consciously omitted from its new parenting course material which has an emphasis on “warmth and limits.”
The popularity of parental courses could be argued to be a result of a period of introspection by parents prompted by the curling and helicopter debates. So what of the children?
One might ask whether these parenting courses aren't more for the benefit of parents struggling to find a balance to “life's puzzle” in the high-stress, “I want it all” 2000s, than for their children. Children are one more piece of the puzzle needing to be effectively managed; squeezed in alongside a career, a rewarding social life and free-time activities. Hence the focus on controlling behaviour, or perhaps more accurately, output. Gustafsson agrees:
“The definition of normality has narrowed in today's society. That which was once considered normal is now considered to be deviant. Take sleep for example. Small children sleep badly, that's normal, but parents today live with such tight schedules they cannot run the risk of their child having a bad night's sleep.”
“I miss the children's perspective,” he concludes.
Danish drinking age
Thought this was worth a post
http://www.cphpost.dk/get/105943.html
Despite a 2004 law change raising the minimum age for purchasing alcohol to 16 from 15, one in three 15-year-olds, and one in seven 14-year-olds say they have bought alcohol, according to a National Board of Health study. When confronted about their age, young drinkers say they either lie or tell store workers they are buying for an older person. Stores say part of the problem is that they are not permitted to ask customers to present a picture ID when purchasing alcohol. Stores can be fined up to DKK 10,000 for selling alcohol to an underage customer.
http://www.cphpost.dk/get/105943.html
Despite a 2004 law change raising the minimum age for purchasing alcohol to 16 from 15, one in three 15-year-olds, and one in seven 14-year-olds say they have bought alcohol, according to a National Board of Health study. When confronted about their age, young drinkers say they either lie or tell store workers they are buying for an older person. Stores say part of the problem is that they are not permitted to ask customers to present a picture ID when purchasing alcohol. Stores can be fined up to DKK 10,000 for selling alcohol to an underage customer.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
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