Tag Archives: Family

Commentary

Attention Deficit Disorder? The disorder is with lack of parental attention

3 Comments

From Stuart Schneiderman.

Excerpt:

A month or so ago David Goldman, aka Spengler, wrote an extraordinary column about how America is failing its children.

America is a country that likes to solve problems. If children are a problem America has a solution. Or, I should say, American science has the solution.

If children are in trouble, cognitive neuroscience and child psychiatry are at the ready to solve the problem by changing their brain chemistry.

I have often praised the interesting work being done by cognitive neuroscience and its adjunct field, behavioral economics. I have also warned, to the extent that I can, against an overly mechanized view of human behavior.

Many neuroscientists replaced the mind with the brain, free will with determinism, and reason with irrational emotion.

Cognitive neuroscientists are so caught up in their discoveries, so drunk with their newfound power and prestige that they now claim to have all the answers to all the questions.

Of course, most psychiatrists today are gaga over the power of pills. Compared to the psychoanalytic therapy they had been offering, medication seems to represent a step in a better direction. Still, in many cases it is a step too far.

Therapists used to believe that it was all in the mind. Now they have gone to the other extreme, thinking that it’s all in the brain.

Whatever the cause of the problem with American children, America, Spengler writes, has been trying to solve it by prescribing pills and technology.

Imperiously, perhaps even tyrannically, it has diagnosed 10% of America’s children with one or another form of attention deficit disorder. And it has filled classrooms with computers, the better to make learning fun and creative.

But now, Spengler reports, physicians and psychologists are beginning to recognize that Ritalin and Adderall are not as effective as we like to think, and that, over time, these amphetamines are actually harmful.

If you’re a parent, then you should read the rest. He gets quite judgmental and exclusive – and that’s a good thing!

News

Green beret dies trying to save his two daughters from house fire

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From MSNBC.

Excerpt:

A Green Beret recently home from Afghanistan died trying to rescue his two young daughters from their burning home near Fort Bragg in North Carolina early Tuesday. The girls were also killed in the blaze.

Edward Cantrell and his wife escaped from the 2 a.m. blaze by jumping from the home’s second floor, the Cumberland County sheriff’s office said. Cantrell then wrapped himself in a blanket and re-entered the burning home in Hope Mills, about 10 miles from the Army base that is home to the Green Berets and other Special Forces units, sheriff’s spokeswoman Debbie Tanna said.

Cantrell, 36, was trying to reach 6-year-old Isabella and 4-year-old Natalia, who were trapped in second-floor bedrooms, Tanna said.
“He never made it back out,” Tanna said. Firefighters found their bodies inside the home, Tanna said.

[…]Cantrell was a member of the 3rd Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg. He held the rank of chief warrant officer 2, said Lt. Col. April Olsen, a spokeswoman for Army Special Forces Command. It was not clear when he served in Afghanistan.

[…]Louise Cantrell, 37, is being treated for smoke inhalation at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center, reported FayObserver.com.

There’s something about marriage that brings out the best in men.

News

Melanie Phillips: the UK should reform the Child Benefit to favor marriage

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Dina send me this UK Daily Mail article by Melanie Phillips.

Excerpt:

I would say that Child Benefit itself was always a really bad idea, and real reform should get rid of it altogether.

This is because it rewards the wrong thing. It incentivises having children, whereas the state should only incentivise having children in circumstances which are advantageous for society. Since Child Benefit is awarded with the birth of every child regardless of circumstances, it has put rocket fuel behind Britain’s astronomical rate – and rising – of fatherless children born to elective lone mothers.

The rationale for this is, first, that welfare benefits should be focused on solving child poverty. This totally ignores the fact that lone parenthood is itself a major cause of child poverty; and no less important, that even more than material goods children desperately need their fathers.

The second great cry that went up when Child Benefit was first introduced was that benefits for children should be given to the mother alone, because men are feckless no-goods and would only blow such money on drink and fags. And then people were surprised that young men felt marginalised and felt no need to anchor themselves to a wife!

The unmentionable fact is that Child Benefit has been a disaster and should be replaced by incentives for marriage in the tax and benefits system — incentives which in turn do not penalise single-earner households. But that, of course, would require courage to face down the shibboleths of the left.  And that is one thing that the Cameron government shows a near-pathological aversion to displaying.

UK conservatives aren’t very conservative.