The madness of teaching 4 year olds phonics, reading and writing

Sometimes you just feel like the whole world is going mad. How did we end up here?

In the last few weeks there has been a storm brewing. It turns out that in 2006 the UK Labour government introduced the Childcare Act 2006 which no doubt includes some sound aims.

In it however, it includes a duty to implement the Early Years Foundation Stage framework. What this does is legally require providers of care/teaching to 4-5 year olds to lead them in adult led play and teaching to learn the basics of reading, writing and phonics, from age FOUR.

My four year old daughter is currently very happy doing NONE of this and I am very happy that it is this way currently. Childhood, it seems, where you are free to play and hence free to learn according to your desires and abilities, ends at 4 according to the government.

"We… must… produce…. more…. robots…." I can hear them thinking it. "More parents at work!" "Start teaching the children when they are babies they need a head (Sure) start". "Boost productivity!" "Increase GDP!" "Fight off the threat from China!"

What a load of utter nonsense. There are going to be a lot of seriously outraged parents writing to a lot of MPs and a lot of very well respected, long established, and good-performing schools threatened with closure unless the government realises that it cannot dictate to everybody how their children are educated when there is no evidence of any problem.

With this in mind, I have started the Save Childhood website with a view to organizing campaigning around this theme of the Early Years Foundation Stage, and maybe in future the longer term issues with assessment and testing in later years, and the frankly horrendous proposal to fine children who are not in further education or training if they have left school before 18.

Alastair Darling… I left school at 16 willingly, to work full time. How dare you propose that I would not be able to do the same again if I were a child now – shame on you.

Tricia Anderson, midwife and friend

Today has been very difficult. We said goodbye to Tricia Anderson at her funeral at a lovely woodland burial ground. It was an incredibly moving occasion for all those present, I doubt that I will ever be at the funeral of a more loved and globally-respected person.

Tricia was an independent midwife of international renown, and we were lucky enough to have her as our midwife for the birth of Amy our first born. We had a wonderful natural birth in a birthpool in the sitting room of our small Victorian terraced house, opposite the railway station with traffic humming past, although it was a Sunday morning so we didn’t notice. She was so incredibly warm and comforting, we could not help but trust her completely. She was so humble that at the time we had no idea how important she was to the midwifery community in the UK and internationally, let alone an accomplished singer, poet, artist and public speaker and campaigner.

She was someone who made a real difference to the world, and quietly but tirelessly worked to improve the lot of women, babies and families worldwide. When we met her we began to realise the tragedy of the loss of birthing and breastfeeding knowledge from all our families since the increasing medicalization of birth in the last few decades. Some people now are two or even three generations away from a true natural birth in the family, so how can we expect new families to see that there is so much wrong with birth as it is experienced now? There are so many aspects of modern hospitalized birth that defeat the natural physiological processes of birth, resulting in increased interventions. This excellent Tricia quote sums it up:

Let us bring them into harsh rooms with bright lights. Let us make them lie on their backs on hard narrow beds. Let us tether them to machines so they cannot move. Let us make them stay silent and make no noise with their pain. Let us expose their most private parts and threaten them with cold steel. Let us make them push their babies upwards, against the pull of the earth…In these conditions, labour swiftly becomes unbearable and pain relief becomes a woman’s only hope… This is not the natural cry of a woman in labour bringing a child to birth, although if you have only ever witnessed childbirth in a medicalized setting you might be forgiven for thinking so. This is the screaming plea of a tethered animal in pain. [Source: http://rixarixa.blogspot.com/2007/08/pushed.html]

I can only hope that the work of the many midwives in the UK to prevent the idiotic demolition of the independent midwifery services by the UK government succeeds. If it doesn’t, this will be a tragedy that is hard to comprehend.

Tricia was a rare person – charming and witty but never flippant, spiritual and "alternative" but  grounded in the real world. Her working method was rigorous but happily acknowledged that sometimes things work even when it doesn’t seem like there is the science to back it up.

Tricia elsewhere on the web:
http://www.saveindependentmidwifery.org/images/stories/pdfs/practising-midwife-feb-07.pdf
http://birthinangus.org.uk/index/news-app/story.23/title.-10-steps-pioneer (see links from there)

All I can say is, if you’re about to have or are planning to have a baby – get the facts - read some natural birth books. This isn’t hippy stuff, its the actual physical process that is intended by nature, that current methods fight against.  Personally I always thought that going to hospital was for when something was wrong with you. Since when was birth a problem to be solved?

…but this is where the really tough part about birth comes in. There’s life at stake. Fear and litigious tendencies make us feel risk-averse and with this mindset natural birth can seem like you are not doing the best for your child. The trouble is that this is assuming you know the risks of an un-natural hospital birth. I bet you don’t. Ask questions, then ask more questions. Then do what feels instinctively right. It’s a journey to be travelled, but it is a wonderful one.

Yahoo Kids! encouraging kids to eat crap food?

I’m against censorship, but we all know controls are needed when it comes to children. In fact in the UK at least, advertising regulations for ads targeted at children are getting increasingly strict - especially when it comes to junk foods. We are after all becoming nations full of obese children doomed to an early death, according to many reports.

I was in London the other day and noticed a lot of Cadbury chocolate adverts for Dairy Milk bars, along the lines of  "There’s a glass and a half of milk in every bar". This is a very disturbing ploy for which the ASA should be punishing Cadbury – effectively trying to sell their awful chocolate (which it has been argued can’t be called chocolate due to the high level of fats relative to cocoa) as a "healthy" food on the basis that most people, incorrectly, believe cow’s milk to be a healthy food product.

The conspiratorial side of me wondered if there was a joint promotion going on between the Dairy Council and Cadbury to do what is effectively promotion of both products.

Instead, I happened on a link of sorts. Yahoo appear to be in the beta testing phase of a new service called Yahoo Kids! One presumes this is to protect children from all the potentially offensive and/or insanely boring parts of Yahoo – or you could argue its to collate as much marketing information on children as possible… there is a caveat at the footer of their pages about collection personal information.

Anyway, I found the Food and Eating section. Oh the horror. Take out a couple of entries from oxfam about chocolate and tea, and you have direct links to:

• 4 (yes you read correctly, four) Cadbury chocolate sites, presumably "educational" in nature
• The British Egg Information Service – hey we all need more cholesterol
• Kellogg’s – those bastions of sweet cereals
• A site selling sweets
• The Dairy Council’s website – cow’s milk is for… cows
• Ribena – mmm more sugar
• Walkers – makers of crisps (who notably -do- make unsalted crisps)

There’s a couple of minor information sites there too, but that’s the section so far. No doubt Yahoo! will say it is early days yet, but I have this one question:

How long will it be before advertising regulations on children’s junk foods are extended to places where children will be given false "educational" material on the web?
You can bet this tactic is in use elsewhere on the web, where frankly pathetic people are paid to find sites like this to list links to the "educational" content they are providing to suck kids into their products.

Fight to save independent midwives in the UK

Don’t you just love democracy. Rather than voting FOR things we seem to always have to vote AGAINST them for some reason. Stupid decisions are made for us and then we have to fight tooth and nail to stop them coming into force.

The UK government is on the verge of destroying independent midwifery. There is an excellent article on the issues and about the unique services provided by independent midwives. It is nothing to do with wanting private care over state provided care, it is all about giving birth back to women and their families rather than medicalizing all births without a second thought.

Both of our daughters were born at home in our living room in the same "home made" birth pools, in a terraced house in a city center. Amazingly most people consider home birth to be something odd rather than something done the way it is "meant to be". Birth is not something to fear, and it certainly shouldn’t involve mandatory hospitalization!

We were lucky enough to have fantastic independent midwives to support us and provide the information and caring environment my wife needed to have completely intervention free healthy births.

Please sign the online petition on the Prime Minister’s website to try to stop this daft regulation killing off independent midwifery completely by requiring insurance that just doesn’t exist for midwives, as the risk is deemed too high and yet independent midwives in general have better outcomes than hospitalized births.