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IMPORTANT INFORMATION.
By reading this site, the reader acknowledges their personal responsibility in choices for mental health for themselves and their children, and agrees that the AYCNP or anyone associated with this site, bears no responsibility for one's personal decisions in choices for mental health. Anyone coming off medication should do so gradually rather than abruptly, and under a doctor's supervision. Anyone experiencing thoughts of suicide should seek support.
This is a great book that is used effectively in the classroom, simple and direct, to teach children not to lie.
First saw this book in a first grade classroom. Great ideas for parents and kids. Great concept!
Comical book for children, When the TV Broke issues forth in simple illustration and verse that life does go one (even for kids), when the TV is gone. HMMM, give you any ideas? Great book for kids, great lesson for adults too!
The media accentuates and hastens the sexuality of young girls. Dianne Levin, Ph.D., notes how everything from the Disney Channel, Barbie, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and Bratz, is affecting children.
How to overcome ADHD without medication. This 96 page book gives practical ideas on how parents and educators can help children to overcome symptoms associated with ADHD, without a prescription. Proven methods, many references, footnotes, bibliography, index, recommended reading and agencies.
A wonderful book for parents, teachers and principals, to help them to realize the tremendous impact "scary" TV and movies can have on a child's emotions and psychological profile. R-rated movies and G-reated movies, as well as everything in between, can leave a deep emotional footprint on a child. What do parents need to be aware of? Since television and movies are a reality today, what can parents do?
Dr. Cantor discusses these thoughts simply and insightfully.
A noted child psychiatrist, Scott Shannon, MD, has written a wonderfully insightful book on child psychology/psychiatry. This book should be in every parent's library.
A complete medical reference for parents and well read book by medical doctor Barton Schmidt. He describes, also, the effects that violent movies can have on a child and cautions parents.
BBC Produced: Planet Earth Videos/DVDs.
Excellent nature videos spanning the globe. 11 Part Series, some of the finest nature photography every. Rare footage, spectacular scenery and easily digested facts, nature's secrets revealed. Good for every age, from the earliest Disney kids, to seniors. Kids will enjoy it more than Disney and adults will be fascinated.
This is a great book for young children, with a wonderful lesson. Beautiful illustrations. Great for 1st Grade or Kindergarten.
One Grain of Rice is a favorite book for children. It teaches a captivating (math) lesson, and one of shrewdness. Theme is developed in India. Recommended for a gift to kids.
Wonderful photographs, and most interesting children's nature book from 2nd Grade Charter School Classroom. Ecology, nature.
See here for more children's science books. Carefully selected by science teacher.
A nice early childhood book for children from the classroom.
Do you want to entertain your child and at the same time teach him or her to have a positive attitude? This classic book for children is just that! He or she will never forget, "I think I can, I think I can!!!
This is a wonderful story of integrity for older children or young teens. A little girl rises above Nazi persecution.
This is a beautiful CD of soft classical music good for babies, preschool, and even for stressed adults!
Teach a child to play the piano! This helps them learn to enjoy beautiful music, to have self respect, and to have wholesome recreation.
Electric
Acoustic:
Electric:
SAFE EYES:
An excellent program tested by the AYCNP, to protect children and teens on the internet. Exellent for screening inappropriate YouTube content, controlling Social Networking sites and monitoring web use. Easy to install, use, modify.Sponsors
USE THIS COUPON CODE FOR 20% DISCOUNT: WMH
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Page last updated: July 24, 2010
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Parenting advice and tips, 24 Steps in Positive Parenting
Child psychology and children's mental health made simple.Children, controlling the media, protecting children from media violence.
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Positive Parenting Photo:Steve Evans from India and USA.
Children in Tajikstan. Wikimedia Commons.
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1. Balanced attention to diet and nutrition: low sugar, low carbohydrate, no soda, within reason. Light on the fruit juice. No sugared fruit juices. Junk food snacking only on special occasions.
Media:
2. Cut down on
TV,
movie and
video game activity as much as is possible.
3. Take video games and television out of the bedrooms.
TRUCE has a great site on children, parenting and the media. Good, balanced guidelines on TV, media, violence, sex.
4. Keep the computer in a public place in the house. and keep an eye on how much computer time is being spent and what sites. Talk to your children about it.
Parenting Tips:
Parental internet control software, while not necessarily 100% fullproof, can protect children from unwholesome or hurtful websites, and parents can monitor what sites their children have gone on, and control the time on the Internet.
Professional help and education:
5. Pursue tutoring,
coaching, mentoring in school. Personal assistants also can be of help. Inquire about it.
6. Pursue any other one on one programs in the public schools or public library such as reading tutoring that are available.
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Reading ability is higher for children who spend less time watching television and movies. Less TV and movie time is directly proportional to better reading ability. Studies have demonstrated that children who watch R-Rated movies consistently have poorer grades than children who do not.
7. Communicate with your
children's teachers regularly-visit often and attend meetings.
Children's Mental Health Checklist for Parents and Educators.
Wholesome Recreation,
Music and
Art:
8. Provide wholesome recreation for you children during the week and weekends.
9. Consider enrolling your child in
art lessons.
Ideas to help a child develop interest in art
This is a nice link for printouts on drawing flowers for children and teens Drawing Flowers Off-site link
10. Buy how to books and supplies for your children on art. and decorate your home likewise.
11. Try to weed out any comic books or games that have
occult or spiritistic overtones, or that are violent. This is true also of music. Encourage lighter, mellower
music rather than heavy alternative music, gothic, heavy metal, grunge, hard core, or hard rock with spiritistic influences. Keep tabs on how much time is spent.
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See Blogging Archetypes and Stereotypes Project (Julia Shin & Jung Eun Chung): Modern Princess for some interesting observations on Disney and Barbie Princesses. (off-site link).
Photo: www.wikipedia.com
Disney movies have been described in terms of "horror movies for children," made with the "highest illustrative art". Disney Princess movies, while projecting an image of delightful fantasy for children, also contain scenes of violence and terror. Because characters are well developed, as well as containing deeply emotionally bonding characters, children can become emotionally attached to these fantasy characters. For some sensitive children, especially girls, overindulgence in Disney and similar fantasies can be a contributing factor in some mental health disorders, especially when it is combined with other powerful media influences, or when real emotional attachments are lacking in the life of a child. (Neubauer, P.)
Also, stereotypes of extremes, totally evil characters, versus, portraits of light and heroism, can contribute to a child's developing an "all or nothing" way of thinking with regards to their evaluations of people. Some researchers have expressed concerns over the portrayal of the mentally ill in a stereotypical negative fashion, "nuts, crazy, evil, etc.," in the majority of Disney films. This can lead to a prejudiced and stereotypical view of the mentally ill, a fear of the mentally ill, or to a negative self image if the child, later in life, develops some form of mental illness, which nearly 50% of Americans will at some time in their lives.
Overindulgence in
movies as a child, can contribute, for some preteens and teens who are genetically pre-disposed, towards
depression or
ADHD.
Parenting Tips: Don't indulge your children in Princess products and culture.
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Gregory Fouts Off-site link
An excellent reference for studies on media's effects on the psychology of adults, teens and children, as well as information on some Disney studies, and eating disorders.
Gregory Fouts, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
University of Calgary
Alberta, Canada
See also page:
The Psychology of Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana and pop-music for girls
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| 12. Enroll your child in piano or violin lessons. Help them to widen out in their
musical taste. Introduce them to a diversity of music.
Many children enjoy learning to play a musical instrument. Learning to play the piano, or in some inner city schools, the violin, is a wonderful skill for a child to master. Some children who learn to play the violin in school play beautiful little pieces in as few as four months.
Discipline and Support:
13. Provide loving but firm discipline for your children. Be consistent. Positive parenting means never disciplining in anger. Children, especially as they get older, need to be reasoned with. Explain why a course is good or harmful, rather than just laying down rules. This will help a child and teen to see that you really care about them, and are working for their happiness.
14. Make sure your children have good companionship with suitable friends.
15. Keep up on your child's activities when they visit other children. Communicate with their friend's parents about your child's special needs.
16. Plan day trips to art museums, aquariums, zoos or places of historical interest.
Outdoor activities:
17. Exercise, walk, camp, hike, visit local parks or lakes for recreation.
18. Get a pet or fishtank. (It teaches responsibility and giving, it's a nice hobby with nice lessons to be learned.)
Sleep and Precautions:
19. Make sure your child is getting to sleep at a regular and reasonable bed time and don't resort to medicine to help him to sleep. (it can create a vicious cycle.)
Parenting Tips: Keep the TV and other electronics out of the bedroom. Make sure that the child is calm an hour or two before bedtime. Video games and movies before bed will ensure that the child cannot sleep. Parental controls on the television, with shut off times, and controls on ratings can be effectively used by parents.
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Infants who watch too much television showed marked increases in social regression.
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Time and Love:
20. Spend quality and quantity time with your child. Show lots of love and approval regularly. Be patient with your child's progress. Try not to be a perfectionist.
21. Take personal responsibility for your decisions and actions.
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Photos: www.wikipedia.com Music and concerts can effect a child's mental health.
Some children spend 24/7 on the ipod, music videos, Internet videos and concerts. For some, the long hours of stimulation is more than their minds can handle and it can contribute to chemical changes in the mind that overwhelming. Balance and moderation is needed.
22. Keep well-informed and well read on everything involved with your child's situation. Parents magazine often has good articles, as does Awake! magazine (non-commercial), in addition to many books that have been written. Be selective in which books you read on the subject of parenting.
23. Care for your family's
spiritual needs. Read the
Bible, Bible stories and pray with your child. Teach him to pray. Pray for your child. Build a value system in your child. Don't let
TV teach life's
lessons to your child. The Bible has many good guidelines for parents in being successful in raising children.
24. Keep hope alive and don't give up. Your positive attitude will reflect in your decisions and your dealings with your child.
Watching
Violence on Television does affect the
psychological profile of children:
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Wrestling Photos: Wikimedia Commons.
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The majority of 1st and 2nd graders have viewed or regularly view movies of extreme violence and sadism. This has potentially damaging effects on a child's emotional and psychological profile. See: Your Child's Health (1991) by Dr. Barton Schmidt for two chapters on children and violence in the media, extreme violence in films for children.
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This drawing reproduced from a first grader in Newark, NJ, reflects the type of movies that child dwell upon during an average school day.
Joel Nigg, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, Michigan State University states in his book, What Causes ADHD?
"Content" effects aggression and social development.
"Intelligent parents will prescribe less TV for their children."
Negative content is clearly harmful.
Watching television in children is:
1. Extensive in children
2. Can cause changes in behavior
3. Can lead to development of behaviors associated with
psychopathology.
Nigg, Joel, (2006).
What Causes ADHD? p.18, 283-286.
Nigg clearly documents that
films, television and video games of extreme violence can contribute to pathological behavior.
Clinical Study: Objective To test the hypothesis that audible television is associated with decreased parent and child interactions.
One clinical study was designed to determine the impact of television on young children with respect to children's language ability. While one might think that the viewing of television would increase a child's ability to understand and speak audible language, the study actually found that for every additional hour that a child was exposed to television, there was a decrease in 770 words (7%) that the child heard from an adult during a recorded session, as well as a reduction in the number and length of sounds and spoken words by the child with the adult.
Audible Television and Decreased Adult Words, Infant Vocalizations, and Conversational Turns - A Population-Based Study, Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, MPH; Jill Gilkerson, PhD; Jeffrey A. Richards, MA; Frederick J. Zimmerman, PhD; Michelle M. Garrison, PhD; Dongxin Xu, PhD; Sharmistha Gray, PhD; Umit Yapanel, PhD. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2009;163(6):554-558.
Pro-Wrestling
Violence in the media such as regularly viewing pro-wrestling, effects a child's perception of life. Sadistic scenes, although most children realize that it is staged, leaves on pre-teen children, a deep emotional scar and callousness towards harming others.
Some children in school have often times reflected a callous attitude towards violence, or imitate what they have seen on television.
Fantasy and Reality
Children often do not fully recognized the difference between fantasy and reality until approximately 9 years old.
3rd and some 4th grade children are still struggling with issues such as Spiderman and Superman fantasies. Many boys do not fully grasp that such characters are not real, until reaching 10 years of age. Kindergarten and 1st grade children, draw pictures of various degress of violence with guns and weapons, revolving around such fantasies as Spiderman.
"Walt Disney had a cunning formula: Use the highest illustrative art to make horror movies for kids. Next to Pinocchio (play hookey and you will morph into a donkey), Bambi is the most artful and potent-and the scariest of Walt's early features. Bambi is referred to as "a movie in which a child sees its mother shot and killed." Newsweek, March 2005).
Pornography and Children
As much as we would like to think otherwise, a large number of children are exposed to
pornography in their pre-teen years. This is more than just a pornographic pop-up or email that a child might come across, it involves viewing films of explicit sex, regularly looking through pornographic magazines, or viewing pornographic television and Internet.
Exposure to pornography can be through peers, the pornography of parents or parents of friends, unsupervised and unfiltered Internet use at home or at the home of friends. It can also be through late night TV, cable TV in the bedroom of the child, or through older siblings. One child was exhibiting sexual behavior toward other children in a Kindergarten class. The mother disclosed that he watched sexually explicit films with older siblings. The older siblings were 9 and 11 years old. One third-grader is representative of many, who had pornographic pictures on his PSP unit, showing it to his friends in the public school after school program. (Newark, NJ).
Pornography, as well as exposure to even sexual innuendo in movies for pre-teen children, worries them, confuses them, and often times, they have no one, with the exception of equally confused peers, that they can talk to about it with. By the time a child reachers teen years, he may already have a world of misinformation about sex in their libido, that has already become something of a way of life.
In one special education class of 8, at least 5 had already been exposed to and had questions about pornography, and specific questions related to things they had seen in pornography.
Pornography confuses a child and a teen, and can surface in difficulty behaving in class, preoccupation with sex, and inability to concentrate. It can also lead to symptoms associated with a number of mental health disorders, including depression and ADHD, and if a caregiver, or treating
psychologist or
psychiatrist is unaware of this aspect of mental health, it can result in inadequate treatment. Pornography can be part of the source of the child or teen's difficulty. For many youths who may be suicidal, pornography may be one of the aspects to consider.
Parents, then need to educate their children on the danger of pornography. Be careful not to have any porn in the house, or available in the house that might be accessible to children and teens, and to tighten up Internet use, not assuming that their children will not be exposed, no matter how good they might be.
Also, the lines of pornography are not so clear anymore, as a 12 year old girl talks about pornographic pictures of Gabriella from High School Musical and pictures she has seen of her kissing another "girl" on the Internet, and sexual semi-nude pictures of pop-stars, while researching a report. Sexy semi-nudes of Hannah Montana dominate the imagination and conversation of some 5th grade boys. Sexual imagery has become so prevalent, that the book
The Sexualization of Childhood explains how the lines of soft-porn have become blurred.
Children, then need to have positive visual images reinforced.
Art is a good thing for children to get involved in, as it can help them to learn self-control in their visual senses, develop focus, and fill their minds with positive images. Art can help many children to overcome symptoms of ADHD. See Daniella Barroqueira's article on ADHD and art.
Good free coloring book site for children:
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This page Tigers Off-site link
101 Absolutely Free Kids' Acitivities
About.com newsletter (off-site link)
Children and Parenting Advice References:
1. Fouts, G., Callan, M., Piasentin, K., Lawson, A. (June 8, 2006).
Demonizing in Children's Television Cartoons and Disney Animated Films. Child Psychiatry and Human Development. Vol. 37, No. 1. pp. 15-23.
2. Gostin, N. (March 2005). Tears for a Deer. Newsweek.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmnew/is_200503/ai_n13257163
It's got an adorable hare, a gangly fawn and one of the most disturbing death scenes in the history of animation. We're referring, of course, to the 1942 classic "Bambi," in which the hero loses his mom to the sharp crack of a hunting rifle. With the film out on DVD this week, parents will be wondering how to cope with the inevitable question: "Mom, are you going to die?"
3. Hallett, V. (October 31, 2004).
The Pain Behind Peter Pan -US News & World Report. U.S. News and World Report.
4. Lawson, A., & Fouts, G. (2004).
Mental illness in Disney animated films. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 49 (5), 165-169.
5. Levin, Dianne, Ph.D. Fantasy and Reality. Professor of Education, Wheelock College, Boston, MA.
6. Ornstein, P. (December 24, 2006). What's Wrong With Cinderella? New York Times Magazine. One mothers concerns with Disney and Princess Culture for little girls.
Demonizing in Children's Television Cartoons and Disney Animated Films.
7. Nigg, J. (2006). What Causes ADHD? New York: Guilford.
8. Olfman, S. (2009). The Sexualization of Childhood.
9. Parmer, N. (Sep/Oct 2004).
Disney Films may Teach Children to Fear the Mentally Ill by portraying characters as "crazy" and "nuts". Psychology Today.
10. Schmidt, Barton, M.D., F.A.A.P. (1991). Your Child's Health. New York: Bantam
Child Safety On Info Highway
Off site link
NetSmartz. Internet education for parents and children
Off-site link
Parenting Magazines:
Parents Magazine, Baby Magazine, Parent & Child
All have parenting articles of value for positive parenting.
Sponsors:
This page has been produced by AYCNP Please see here for more details about AYCNP.
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