kiwipete

Balloon boy story a hoax...

The mother of the so-called 'balloon boy' admited it was all a hoax - they just wanted their own reality TV show. But the boy blew it! The parents may well have made a fortune out of such a show.

There are 200 children on reality and other TV shows right now. If they are being exploited as some claim, it is despicable!

Out of every tragedy comes sunlight...

Out of every tragedy comes sunlight. A little hero emerges from the shambles of disaster.

A ten year old New Zealand girl on holiday in Samoa when the deadly tsunami struck the southern coast beach a few weeks back, received a special award in NZ last week.

Remembering her primary school teacher's lesson on tsunamis, she recognised the characteristics of the tsunami. When she saw the water receding rapidly, she ran up and down the beach screaming, "tsunami', and undoubtably saved many, many lives.

What a clever and resourceful young girl. And she didn't go to school just to eat her lunch either.

NZ anti-smacking legislation may be vindicated by American research...

I sometimes turn some of my more controversial letters to the editor in Wellington into posts on my local blogs. I will find a link to the legislation for your interest. This legislation caused a lot of controversy because some groups, fundamentalist churches amongst them, claimed it was interference by a nanny state into the rights of parents.

I never took a public stand on this issue, preferring to sit on the fence and wait for some reaction. Sadly this issue had some affect on the NZ parliamentary elections and subsequent defeat for the three term Labour led Government last November.

At a time when the ultra rightwing Act Party New Zealand is seeking to overturn and revoke the so-called "anti-smacking legislation" in New Zealand, new research has emerged from the United States that the smacking of young children by their low income minority group mothers has set off a few explosions within American society.

The research from Duke University which has been published in the journal of CHILD DEVELOPMENT revealed the study of 2573 toddlers and has found that for poor children, early and frequent smacking by the age of one year, is not only common, but made these children more aggressive by the age of two years, and by the age of three years their socio- emotional development had slowed dramatically.

They also found that low socio-economic mothers are more likely to have started smacking a fussy and irritable baby by the age of one year if the mothers are depressed. Boys were yelled at and smacked more often than girls, and the poorer the family, the greater the likelyhood children would be punished at an earlier age.

The collective results suggest that the causes and effects of smacking are bound tightly together, making it very difficult to interpret the particular influences of poverty, genetics, gender differences and culteral expectations.

The American Academy of Pediatrics strongly recommends against corporal punishment.

This research put into a New Zealand perspective would suggest the so-called anti-smacking legislation in this country should not in any circumstance be revoked or even amended. It has also been reported that very few so-called good parents have been prosecuted. So why would you want to break something that is actually working?

http://blogevolve.com/blog/huttriver12