Child Neglect
I haven't written in detail here about the work I do to help to train doctors, nurses and other medical professionals in Communication Skills, but it's always interesting and I think it's vital.
One of the projects I'm involved in, which is some inter-professional education workshops for final year and postgraduate health and social care students, has just been awarded the Highly Commended category nomination at the British Educational Research Association Awards 2007 and I'm dead chuffed - I didn't devise these workshops, but I do help to deliver them, and they always seem to be rated very highly by the students.
This week, in an interesting sidestep from this work, I have been asked to be involved in a conference on Child Neglect. This is a subject which very much interests me since I used to teach in a school where finding a child who wasn't being neglected was a rare and beautiful thing.
So I've been reading up on it a bit. Now - as is, you would think, obvious - children who are neglected in early childhood find it very hard to catch up later and, indeed, if they're not spoken to enough they can miss the "window" for learning speech and never really learn to speak properly at all.
The popularity of all the various television programmes about parenting skills - such as Supernanny - surely demonstrates that many parents - even those who generally cope well - are keen to learn new techniques that will help them to bring up their children.
And at the bottom of the heap are those parents who have been so badly parented themselves that they haven't the foggiest clue what to do.
So here's a suggestion that to me seems so obvious that I can't see why it doesn't happen.
Why don't we teach parenting skills in schools? To everyone - because there's often some kind of daft idea that clever middle-class children don't need it. Any kind of parenting skills classes are reserved for low-ability kids (or whatever politically correct name we choose to give them).
No, everyone should do a basic course on child development and childcare. The brainier kids would pick it up quickly: others might take longer: everyone should do it. Nobody should leave school without passing a basic test in it.
Ah, but there's limited time in schools, and there are other subjects more important, aren't there, otherwise we'd be doing it, wouldn't we?
Like what? What on earth could be more important?
One of the projects I'm involved in, which is some inter-professional education workshops for final year and postgraduate health and social care students, has just been awarded the Highly Commended category nomination at the British Educational Research Association Awards 2007 and I'm dead chuffed - I didn't devise these workshops, but I do help to deliver them, and they always seem to be rated very highly by the students.
This week, in an interesting sidestep from this work, I have been asked to be involved in a conference on Child Neglect. This is a subject which very much interests me since I used to teach in a school where finding a child who wasn't being neglected was a rare and beautiful thing.
So I've been reading up on it a bit. Now - as is, you would think, obvious - children who are neglected in early childhood find it very hard to catch up later and, indeed, if they're not spoken to enough they can miss the "window" for learning speech and never really learn to speak properly at all.
The popularity of all the various television programmes about parenting skills - such as Supernanny - surely demonstrates that many parents - even those who generally cope well - are keen to learn new techniques that will help them to bring up their children.
And at the bottom of the heap are those parents who have been so badly parented themselves that they haven't the foggiest clue what to do.
So here's a suggestion that to me seems so obvious that I can't see why it doesn't happen.
Why don't we teach parenting skills in schools? To everyone - because there's often some kind of daft idea that clever middle-class children don't need it. Any kind of parenting skills classes are reserved for low-ability kids (or whatever politically correct name we choose to give them).
No, everyone should do a basic course on child development and childcare. The brainier kids would pick it up quickly: others might take longer: everyone should do it. Nobody should leave school without passing a basic test in it.
Ah, but there's limited time in schools, and there are other subjects more important, aren't there, otherwise we'd be doing it, wouldn't we?
Like what? What on earth could be more important?
posted by Daphne at 3:15 pm
3 Comments:
Perhaps there is a worry that teaching parenting skills will encourage the students to try it all out in Real Life.
I used to work for ChildLine - there are a LOT of young people out there who would benefit from such a course...
Like what? What on earth could be more important?
Hmm, good point - maybe only proper sex ed and the use of contraception!
I'd go...
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