Suicide: Maybe Not As Wrong As You Think

Suicide: Maybe Not As Wrong As You Think

[Warning: People who are easily offended should not read this essay. Some find this subject sensitive.]

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he

resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself. 

- Archibald MacLeish, American poet and librarian (1892-1982)

Heaven forbid that anyone dares to resign himself from the belief set of the herd and think for himself. He becomes a pariah, a self appointed renegade, perhaps worse. Especially so if the person decides to end his own life. What right does he have to do that?

What right does he lack to be denied that choice?

One of the most widely held beliefs across cultures holds that suicide is wrong. Yet when you ask why of anyone who believes suicide is wrong, most replies are lame, at best, totally lacking in logic and, at worst, a violation of the principle of freedom of choice we claim to value so highly.

This essay brings a personal perspective to the topic and is not intended to advocate either way as to the ethics or wisdom of suicide. Except to say that suicide is the ultimate personal choice, though a selfish one as a person prepared to end his life considers no one but himself. I am not feeling suicidal, though I confess to having thoughts of dying during periods of depression in the past.

We claim, at least in Western countries with which I am familiar, that freedom of choice is a value we hold dear. A woman or man can choose to be a parent or not by taking birth control measures during sex. If she becomes pregnant, the woman (in most Western countries, most jurisdictions) has the choice to abort or to carry the child full term. These are critically important life choices we can make. Each makes, ends or prevents a life. Laws support these choices, even when religions may oppose those laws and their practices.

Surely the choice to end one's life is the ultimate indicator of freedom. If we consider thoughts of suicide to be the work of an insane brain, let's remember that insanity is not illegal.

Our governments do not hesitate to send young men and women in the military or police service into violent situations, even into war zones. Whether decisions to do so are made by a governing party, the head of state, a mayor or chief of police, one human chooses whether another human will be sent into situations where the latter's life could end. In effect, we allow one person to send another to death, should it come to that. We claim that we don't want death and provide protective devices to the person at risk, but isn't that like providing free condoms to prostitutes?

In many parts of the world, the militaries of dictators receive orders to shoot to kill at unarmed demonstrators who give no indication they plan to riot. These situations often precipitate riots, in reaction. The leaders who gave the orders never present themselves for trial for murder, most find safe haven in other countries even if they lose their battle for control. Do the countries that provide safe haven not effectively condone the murder of innocent, unarmed people who disagree with the regime? The safe haven countries always consider themselves to be upstanding and righteous democracies, protectors of human rights.

Paramilitaries, little more than armed gangs who want a change of leadership in their respective countries, sometimes kill innocent people who have nothing to do with the cause they fight, simply as indicators of their strength against the heads of state. As I write this, nearly 1000 innocent and unarmed civilians died in Ivory Coast for exactly that reason, to persuade President Laurent Gbagbo (who lost power in a democratic election) to step down.

So far as we know, Adolf Hitler took his own life in his final stand in a bunker in Germany. We know that many Germans and some people in several other countries grieved. Do most of us care about those who grieved? Many would regret that Hitler took his own life simply because they wanted him to stand trial and to be executed under more formal and official circumstances.

During the same war, Japan committed far more atrocities (and more detestable ones) than Germany. Japan's emperor was not held to account. He admitted that he would no longer claim to be infallible, but suffered no further consequences. Rich people in other Western countries rushed to invest in both Japan and Germany after the war, making them the economic power houses they are today. Neither Germany nor Japan were made to suffer shame as a result of what their leaders and their militaries did to destroy lives and to severely harm the lives of many millions of people who almost died but managed to survive. For Western democratic governments, the self interest of their corporations trumped any feelings of loss in so many countries.

In the pre-historic past when the human component of the world was comprised of many tribes, most of which battled with neighbouring tribes at least once each generation, losing a member of the tribe to suicide would have been a physical loss of one fighter, but also the damage to morale of the rest of the fighters. In tribes, suicide was forbidden, except in some cases in some places where suicide was a form of retribution for loss of honour. Modern day taboos against suicide merely extend the moral dictates against suicide though the original reasons for the censure vanished over time.

Religions, whose primary function has always been control of behaviour of their followers, picked up on the suicide taboo. Restrictive rules of behaviour help to unify followers of a religion and to help members distinguish themselves from the "others." In general, the stronger the rules of a religion, the more devoted and committed its followers are to its survival and its spread to others as yet uninitiated. When one member of a religious community ends his life, the rest close ranks to either support and protect those family members who are left or to isolate and ostracize them from the community. Either way, the unity of the group gains strength.

Religions, by their nature, dictate morals. Yet other than for reasons of self interest, a religion has no valid reason to oppose suicide among its members. Indeed, more than one cult in recent decades has ended when the leader announced that its members would all "go to Glory" together. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. Jewish rebels at Masada ended their own lives in 73 CE rather than submit to execution by the Romans, according to Jewish/Roman historian Josephus.

In recent years, where we have more people living longer, thus more people suffering the pain and devastation of disease for more years rather than dying sooner without drugs and other medical interventions, we have more people wanting to end their lives rather than endure the final stages of terminal illness. Our societies insist that these people must suffer as long as medical science can keep them alive. A doctor or nurse who fails to keep to that standard may be accused of assisting in suicide, which could result in loss of licence and criminal charges.

A mother or father who simple can't bear seeing their child suffer in great pain and devastating emotional stress as a result of a terminal illness will be imprisoned for taking that final step. Euthanizing a dying pet dog or cat is considered merciful, but euthanizing a person warrants criminal prosecution and penalty.

What is the reason for the taboo against suicide? Set aside all the propaganda we have been taught, all the preachings from religions, all the self interested (self protection) from doctors for a moment. What is a real and valid reason to oppose suicide?

We know that for most suicides someone or a few people will suffer. Do they suffer guilt that they did not offer help when a depressed loved one wanted to end his life? Do they suffer the loss of someone they cared about, more than if the person had died of natural causes (in other words, death is inevitable, it's a matter of date). Or do they suffer because of the shame of having had someone with "that curse" or someone who was "overcome by the devil" in the family?

Thankfully, suicide bombings by Palestinians have been fewer in recent years. I vividly recall recorded interviews with the families--especially  the mothers--of Palestinian suicide bombers in the past. They claimed their sons were heroes, martyrs, role models for others of their families. They were happy that their sons (usually sons) had gone to heaven in Glory and would be welcomed there as heroes by God. Were they mentally ill or did they simply have different ways of thinking from people of other cultures?

Our old ideas about a boy growing to become a man--a man with particular cultural values and beliefs--and about a girl becoming a woman are coming apart. No longer can a mother believe with certainty that a young son will grow up to be a man these days, given surgery for transgendering. Nor can she even know that the lad will not one day join the gay community. If our concepts of life have changed that much, it's not much of a stretch to change our beliefs in the morality of suicide.

Let's also consider the role we play--or don't play--in slow suicide. Smoking tobacco has been proven to cause many diseases, yet it's not illegal to smoke or to sell or buy cigarettes. Tobacco manufacturers put chemicals that are poisonous and harmful to the health in their cigarettes, yet selling them remains legal and governments collect tax revenues happily. In Canada, my home country, 25 percent of adults smoke cigarettes. While the number is dropping for older adults, it's rising among teens. There is a lesson there that is not being taught or learned.

Almost every packaged food has chemical preservatives that manufacturers claim are safe, but testing only takes place over a few years. No tests exist for long term consumption of chemical-laden foods over, say, 40 years, despite the fact that our bodies tend to react and break down under severe stress such as bad food over that number of years. People are said to just die young. Before their time, but was it?

Our governments encourage us to eat fresh foods, garden foods, produce sold fresh in our markets. Yet almost every piece of food on those shelves has multiple applications of chemical fertilizers. And pesticides, whose sole purpose is to kill animal life smaller than us. As I recall from reading murder mysteries, poisons accumulate in the body over time. What will kill an insect today may help to destroy us 40 years from now if we keep eating the same stuff.

[Before reviewing and rewriting this essay, I stopped to wash two windows in a closed storage room in my house. Cluster flies had swarmed into the room, so I put an insecticide strip in there to kill the flies. As I opened the door to the room I saw a dead mouse curled up in the middle of the floor, no flies. As it was obviously too young to have died of old age, the little dude must have died from inhaling the insecticide. This kind of strip used to be placed in hospitals, nursing homes and restaurants in the past, though I believe that practice has stopped now. A mouse is a mammal, albeit a small one, and you are a mammal, albeit an unsuspecting one. Connect the dots.]

Some sports, such as American style football and boxing, depend heavily on banging of heads. Research has shown the each concussion brings a person closer to death or irreversible brain damage. Yet we not only play these sports as children, we watch them avidly and encourage more hitting among professionals in our own adulthood. Are the participants in these sports really not risking death, meaning gearing themselves to die, which is a personal choice of potential suicide?

Do millions of people watch car races, downhill skiing and snowboarding events at least partly because they believe they may witness the death of one participant? Is participating in such events suicide (though we prefer to sanitize it by calling it sport)? Did the inexperienced luger from Georgia die during the Vancouver Olympics due to suicide, in effect, because he wasn't up to the challenges involved with an Olympic level event? How many times did you watch video reviews of his head hitting that post? It was sad, but nothing in the rules of Olympic luging changed to prevent it from happening again. Nothing will stop television networks from replaying the video until viewer no longer want to watch instant death.

Slow suicide, such as by engaging in harmful behaviours, or faster suicide, such as by participating in risky sports, hold established places in the lives of millions of people. They are called sport, not suicide, because there is money to be made from them. In a sense, suicide (or at least life-risking behaviour) is accepted by society in many forms. Why not the one where it's a simple, straightforward choice?

We should also consider the one factor that overrides all others in the minds of many people regarding suicide: its irreversibility. A depressed person who wants to end his life, but is prevented in some way from doing so, will likely "recover" and be glad he did not die. Not being allowed to die at the time of his choice does not take away from his suffering when he wants to die. Life is full of "IFs". It's not realistic to live your life based on all possible IFs. Terminal cancer and terminal stages of other diseases are not reversible either. We want to change that because people in those conditions do not necessarily want to die. But what if they do want to die?

Murder is irreversible. That means ending the life of another person, not your own, but it's still legal if a government does it in war and illegal if you make your own individual decision to do it. Murder in any form is, ultimately, a personal choice to end a life. The commission of any crime is, in a sense, irreversible in that a criminal record follows the convicted person who does something uncharacteristic and rash in a moment of ill-considered action. It affects every day of that person's life. Psychological damage from a brutal childhood, a bad marriage, rape or even from financial bankruptcy are irreversible. Yet as a society we do little or nothing about preventing them, or even reversing them if that is possible.

Irreversibility as an argument against suicide works only if it is used in isolation, forgetting that most important decisions in life are effectively irreversible. Many people live in abusive marriages because they believe they have no viable way out. If murdering the partner is not an option and you can't afford to live on your own and you don't have the skills to survive on your own, living with the constant threat of abuse becomes irreversible in the mind of that person. Irreversibility is not, on its own, a valid argument against suicide.

Suicide is the ultimate example of personal free choice. If we lack that choice, we are not truly free. However, when someone wants to make the choice of suicide, in many cases it means that society has allowed the conditions of that person's life to degrade to the point where he no longer wants it to continue. Pointing the finger of blame means little if no one knows for certain how to avoid the problem.

Is this life choice confusing? Of course. Then why not let the individual sort it out himself and make his own decision? The alternatives are to provide coping strategies for people with severe problems and intervention strategies for people who can't cope. But that means society must change to support the individual, including poor and broken people as well as the rich and powerful. That isn't happening now in any country in the world.

Could we actually get to the point of encouraging, or at least accepting with equanimity, suicide for some people? That would mean that we would actually have to put into practice the lip service we pay to the value of life. That would mean that we would have to actually physically and emotionally care for others that we only give a passing nod to now. That would mean that we would have to provide each child with the tools he or she would need in life to be able to cope with life's stressors and downturns. That would mean that we would have to provide support for those who need it, when they need it, and how they need it. And that support would have to be unstinting and offered with confidence and assurance rather than with shame.

That would make the world a very different place.

Here's a suggestion that the author of the quote at the beginning of this essay claims would make me a dissenter: Let's make those changes anyway.

If the world is really going to improve on our watch, let's not just act like politicians and talk about improvement while doing nothing to implement it. Let's actually do it. When you look at the changes suggested three paragraphs above this one, none would be costly, none would be hard to do, none would take long to implement. Let's get started.

That would make the world a very different place indeed. In your lifetime and mine.

Bill Allin wrote Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents, which also includes a simple, effective and shockingly cheap methodology to implement the kinds of changes recommended above.

Learn more at http://billallin.com/   

Your Momma Should Have Known

Your Momma Should Have Known

"Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes...The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work."
- Carl Zimmer

Nothing against your mother. The point is that your mother and everyone's mother should have been taught what you are about to learn, before you were born. The news is recent, but the information itself has been around since the beginning of our existence.

Caution: What you are about to learn may change what you think about life and how you understand the sometimes mysterious behaviour of others. You won't be asked to convert to any way of thinking. It will simply help you to understand.

Human behaviour, or human nature if you will, may present the greatest mystery and challenge anyone has ever faced. For examples, men ask "What do women want?" while women wonder "What makes men tick?" Neither is a huge mystery, it's just that we haven't taught each other what a few of us already know.

The study you will read about could not have been conducted on humans. At least not on living ones. You will soon understand why. It was conducted on rats. And on the brains of people who had recently died, some from suicide. Just to make it more enticing, love has a great deal to do with it.

In humans, love is a mystery. The word has more definitions than just about any other in the Oxford English Dictionary. The problem is that we can't get a handle on exactly what love is. Yet, in our own lives, we tend to quantify love. We don't measure love as such. We measure loving touch.

In general, we touch those we love more than those we don't love. When the romance of the early months of a new relationship filled with lots of loving touch fades and the touching reduces to little or nothing, we say that love was lost. People leave legal relationships seeking more and better love, but what they really seek is more loving touch. We tend to equate touch with love. We measure how much others love us by the amount they want to share loving touch with us.

Not so easy to test in a science lab. Especially when ethics intervenes when we want to prove that people change for the negative when they lack sufficient touch of others. Many labs have turned to rats as substitutes. The similarities between us and rats in these tests may make you uncomfortable, but they are real.

In one family of rats the mother was allowed to lick the fur of her babies, often and extensively. In another, the mother hardly licked her babies at all. As adults, the two groups of rats turn out very different. In the neglected group, the rats were easily startled by unexpected noises, they were reluctant to explore new places and their bodies produced lots of hormone when they experienced stress.

The licked and loved rats were not easily startled, showed great curiosity in exploring new places in their environment. And they "did not suffer surges of stress hormones," according to Carl Zimmer.

They did not suffer surges of stress hormones. I do. Like many others, I lack the gene that should cause my adrenal gland to produce a hormone that neutralizes the effects of epinephrin (commonly known as adrenalin), the chemical produced by the adrenal gland to prepare us for action in times of sudden stress, known as the fight or flight response. In other words, when my body senses stress, I not only get the surge of adrenalin but it hangs around in my bloodstream for hours, even for days.

Why do some people suffer severely from stress--even to the point of thinking about or actually committing suicide--while others seem able to handle stress with relative ease? The rats in the experiment above and in hundreds of other labs may show us the answer. The rats--and at least some of us--may not be able to handle stress as well as others because our brains and bodies are not prepared for what amounts to prolonged chemical warfare on us. Self-induced chemical warfare.

Two families of molecules control when our genes turn on and off, which ones and for how long. One, the methyl group, essentially plugs the path for genes to express themselves by producing proteins. The other, coiling proteins, wraps our DNA into spools so tight the genes can't become active. If either is too successful or lacking, something can happen with gene expression (or may be prevented from happening) that will affect our health and even our lives.

Our experiences can rewrite these two, collectively called the epigenetic code. Most of the writing or behaviour patterning is done before we are born. However, strong experiences after we are born--even extraordinarily strong experiences as adults--can rewrite the code.

Differences between the brain of the licked rats and the neglected ones were found in the hippocampus. The glucocorticoid receptor gene--the one that controls how long adrenalin stays in the bloodstream--for example, was capped off by methyl groups in the neglected rats and they had fewer receptors than the licked rats. Thus the neglected rats had fewer ways to stop adrenalin from doing its thing when it was no longer needed. They were permanently stressed out.

Neurobiologist Michael Meaney, of McGill University, and colleagues followed his rat studies by studying the brains of people who had recently died. Twelve had committed suicide and had suffered abuse as children, 12 had committed suicide but had not suffered abuse and the final 12 had died of natural causes. The suicide people who had suffered abuse had cortisol receptors capped by methyl groups and had fewer receptors, as they had found with the rats. Abuse in childhood had caused them to be permanently stressed as adults.

Another group studied suicide victims and people who died natural deaths and found methyl groups blocking the gene that produces the protein BDNF in the Wernicke area of the brains of the suicides. Environmental influences--everything after birth, including human interaction--can also affect adults.

Neuroscientist Eric Nestler, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, examined the brains of mice that had been put through so much stress in conflicts with other mice that they were depressed. He found differences in an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved with the brain's reward system and helps to set values on things based on the pleasure derived from them. He found the DNA in that part wound tightly with coiling proteins. Nestler's group found the same kinds of epigenetic changes in the brains of depressed humans who had recently died.

Brain changes caused by coiling proteins and methyl groups should be able to be reversed, once we learn how. Nestler injected HDAC inhibitors into the nucleus accumbens parts of the brains of depressed mice to loosen the coils of DNA. Ten days later the mice were less hesitant about approaching other mice and other signs of depression were absent.

These studies suggest that previously intractable human troubles such as depression, suicide and a wide range of problems associated with constant stress (including those that impact the immune system) may be correctable. More study is needed and testing on humans will be tricky, maybe even risky at first.

Any change to the brain is risky. But it may be do-able. Medical science is still in the very early stages of learning about our most complex and sophisticated organ.

Soon taking a DNA sample of a newborn baby will be routine. The sample will be examined for variations from expected norms so the child can have a genetic adjustment made and avoid genetic problems and weaknesses that are an unfortunate part of life today.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy children right from birth. This book shows us how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

[Primary source: The Brain, by Carl Zimmer, Discover, June 2010]

One Step Back from the Edge

One Step Back from the Edge


A person should not have to learn the most important lessons about life from experience. Most of them can be taught, if we know enough to teach them to our children.

Not knowing those lessons, not knowing how to cope with the adversities that life throws at every one of us, means we must suffer pain. Not just the pain of each tragedy, but also the pain associated with the stress of having a severe problem (or a bunch of them) and not knowing what to do about it.

My sister didn't know. She smoked herself to death from cancer at age 54, never understanding why she had to live alone, on welfare, never having anyone she could trust or depend on. Never having a friend in her life. Never having any happiness in her marriage because she didn't know how. Never being able to hold a job because she didn't realize employers need skills and employees who can get along with each other.

Her children don't know. Her daughter, my niece, at one time displeased with me because I told her about lies her mother had told about her and about me, suggested that I should kill myself. Her son, my nephew, joined an extreme religious cult where he feels loved and respected.

No doubt my father chose a remote rural area to rent the apartment above a general store when I was a baby because he didn't want his family to suffer the indignities he had suffered as a child. He and my mother didn't know that children learn from each other by playing together. I rarely saw any other children and never played with one until I was nearly six years old.

My parents understood that parenting consisted of providing food, shelter and clothing to their children. And punishing them when they did something wrong. It never occurred to them to teach a child what the child needs to know to avoid getting into trouble. My parents didn't teach their children anything. Except how to eat with a knife and fork and how to use toilet paper.

My mother, who never worked a day after she got pregnant with me, eventually needed to hire a cleaning lady once a week because she couldn't keep up with dusting, cleaning and laundry. No one knew why. Chronic fatigue syndrome, now recognized as a widespread problem, was just called laziness in those days. My mother never talked about it.

The same way she never talked about why she chased me around our house at couple of times when I was 10, brandishing a broom and threatening to kill me if she caught me. I hadn't a clue about why she was angry. But I didn't let her catch me either. I couldn't spell "menopause" let alone understand what it meant. All I knew was her words.

My father, a naturally clever man who never managed to pass grade nine, found considerable success in business. He became an alcoholic because he had no idea how to cope with the stresses associated with his business success.

He adopted the advice of someone he worked with as a young man. It was: Never learn how to do something if you don't want to do that thing. My father disliked working with his hands. One of his employees, a mechanic, bought him a simple screwdriver one day because he thought my father should be able to tighten a screw himself. My father never taught me any skills. He didn't have any mechanical skills or interest in learning to do things with his hands. He never used the screwdriver either.

My father's father had a thriving florist business until the First World War destroyed it. My father was five years old when his father committed suicide.

Suicide is not genetic, but it tends to run in families. I didn't want to become an alcoholic or to kill myself, though I knew no coping skills because I had never been taught any. By anyone. Lacking coping skills, I now know, is the leading cause of alcoholism, suicide and many other severe problems.

As I knew nothing about being a father, in fact I was afraid of little children, I avoided having much to do with my own children when they were young. Their mother raised them through those first few critically important years of their lives. She taught them everything they knew. They became everything she was.

She believed that success at work was more important that success as a parent. She believed that money was the sign of success. That's what the society we lived in taught. She left our kids with me when they were about ten years old and went out to be successful as a school principal and a savvy investor. She had money, a great car and an impressive house. She had taught those values to our children.

She died of cancer at age 44, having spent her last year alone, at home, rarely receiving a visitor. Neither her children nor her business friends had anything more to gain from her, so they abandoned her. When she died, our daughter didn't even hold a funeral because she thought no one would come.

After their mother died, our children decided they wanted nothing more to do with me. They wanted money and I didn't have much. I didn't believe that money was the most important thing in life. They thought I was stupid. My daughter told her children--whom I was never allowed to see--that all their grandparents were dead. Only one was.

Sitting on a loading dock on a break from my first summer job at age 15, I overheard two men talking. One said to the other, "I never have conversations with young people under age 25. They never know enough to talk about." As I thought about that, I realized that he was right.

I had no skills or hobbies. I had learned nothing from books or newspapers. In fact, I could barely read. I didn't have friends I could learn from. My teachers repeatedly told my parents I was lazy. It never occurred to them that I couldn't read. It never occurred to them that I had a learning problem caused by restriction of blood flow to my brain at birth--I was born breech. I can think as well as anyone, but I do it slower and my capacity to learn at any one time is more limited than most.

I have a very mild form of cerebral palsy, undiagnosed until recently, as a result of that birth problem. When I went to school, every kid was either good, a trouble maker or lazy. My teachers had little trouble placing me in that third category. In reality, life in schools is little better for kids with problems today. "Special needs" is a category for kids with severe and fairly easily recognized problems.

I passed through high school without ever reading a book all the way through. I received a certificate after a three year course at college without ever having read a book all the way through. I passed through teachers college without having read a book all the way through.

I went to York University, in Toronto, and received my B.A. without ever reading a book all the way through. I received a Master of Education degree from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto, without ever having read a book all the way through.

That's survival. That shows how a person can learn to cope with challenges and problems if they learn how in time.

I also taught elementary school for 17 years, around the same period I was taking university courses. A few times the children I taught were reading books for reading assignments that I had not read myself. I was functionally illiterate. I didn't know that because no one had told me.

In fact, I was functionally illiterate until after I left teaching and had started my own business with my wife.

Although I had written long papers in my university and post graduate courses, most of what I wrote had come straight out of my head, not from books. I discovered how to snatch quotes from relevant texts without actually reading those books. I only started to learn how to write something that people other than professors would find interesting in the late 1990s.

In 2005, my book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems was published. A social problem is any problem that is experienced by enough people in a community that it becomes a community problem. Like drugs, violence, addictions and so on.

I found solutions to problems most people believe are unsolvable, consequences of the way life is in the 21st Century. How? Because I wasn't tied to what others had written in books. Books by so-called experts who told how tragic social problems are but offered nothing in the way of solutions.

The solutions begin at home. They begin when each child is born. They begin when a child is taught what he or she needs to know, when they need to know it.

That begins when young adults know about children and how they develop. It begins when adolescents and young adults learn the skills of parenting.

That's the message I want to take to the world.

Here's one comment written a few days ago by a member of one of my internet groups, directed to me:

"During all these years as, member of the group had the I privilege evidence that you are extremely cultured and have an excellent text.

With you I learned an enormity of things. And reading your mensages I know sail that for all the areas of the knowledge."

That was written by a friend in Brazil, one I know as Maita. "Maita" in Portuguese, means "little mother."

Maita's real name is Maria Alice Baptista de Oliveira. That's Dr. Oliveira, a pediatrician with decades of experience at bringing babies into the world and teaching mothers how to look after them.

Maita is one of many people, some of whom are medical doctors, some professors, people in every field of life including factory workers, who live on six continents, who believe that there is a better way to raise children than most of us have been using over the past few thousands of generations.

It's a complex world we live in. A complex world creates complex problems. Those complex problems require solutions so complex they are unmanageable.

The only way to change anything is to prevent the problems from arising in the first place.

That's what Turning It Around is all about.

Until recently I have been experiencing stress--not at a controllable level but at a primal level beyond the control of my conscious brain--stress that has taken me to the edge of sanity and suicide. I have stepped back from that edge. I survived. Again.

Stress can be the cause of many physical diseases and organ failures. But it's also an effect. Stress results when a person lacks the emotional resources to cope with problems in their life. Knowledge about stress and the coping skills needed to avoid it are teachable. Teaching them is easy, cheap and would not meet any resistance because it helps whole communities.

I want to teach people the skills they need to cope with problems that seem insurmountable, that seem beyond their control. That begins with teaching children, right after they are born.

That's who I am. That's what I do. If you want to help spread the word, you are welcome to join us. It doesn't cost anything. All you have to do is talk to people. It's that easy. But nothing will change until we get enough people talking to each other about this.

Lots of people are talking about this, but it's a big world with lots of problems.

As adults we don't necessarily always learn from our experience. Some of us make the same mistakes over and over, causing ourselves and others around us a great deal of grief. However, life lessons we learned as children usually stay with us and shape our lives.

Teaching children what they need to know about life and coping with it are as important as learning to read and do arithmetic. We need to teach the children. They want to learn. They want to know about life.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know what children need and when they need it, rather than what adults believe children should be forced to learn.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

When Should Children Be Taught Certain Facts and Skills?

When Should Children Be Taught Certain Facts and Skills?

In response to an article I wrote recently about teaching information, facts and skills to children much earlier than most adults think is advisable and possible, one of my readers wrote to ask me to elaborate on the "when." When to teach children what is a critically important question, yet one that is seldom asked.
The following was my reply to her.
............................

Many adults believe that timing of information given to children is extremely important. They think that if the timing of wrong, it may harm the child's mind or morals. This is wrong in every possible way.

Teaching a child about drugs, for example, does not open the possibility that the child will adopt the taking of drugs. The whole purpose of teaching the child about drugs is to inform them about what harm can come to them by taking drugs other than under the supervision of a medical professional. Teaching a child about sex between man and woman does not encourage the child to experiment with sex prematurely. Despite these widespread beliefs, there is no evidence that early teaching about drugs, sex or any other matter that a parent should be teaching to a child affects the mind or body of the child as a result of being taught prematurely.

Despite parent supervision of internet use by children, the truth is that this is impossible. Kids are resourceful and will find ways to circumvent restrictions by the parents. One way, for example, is simply to visit a friend's house, someone who does not suffer such restrictions. In other words, information on every possible subject is available on the internet. However, some of this information is wrong and some (in its wrongness) does harm. Consider how many adults have been fooled by urban legends and so-called Nigeria scams.

A parent should be teaching life skills about all subjects when a child is young. How young is too young? You know your timing is wrong when the child shows no interest in the subject, gets distracted easily. THAT is the only criterion for premature teaching. The child, not the parent, should choose when he or she is ready to learn about a subject.

Innocence in children is admirable if you want them to never grow up. But they do. Children who have been kept innocent by their parents tend to become ignorant adults. Ignorant adults don't know what to do and when to do it. They have few coping skills when life throws them a bad curve, such as a personal assault on their person, a home invasion, divorce or death of a loved one.

Children learn about life in the womb, even before they are born. They have the ability to learn a language (a sophisticated and complex cognitive process) even before they can walk. Studies show that children study language before they even have the ability to make use of that learning through their own speech. Children have the ability to understand the most complex information we can give them at a shockingly early age.

If mistakes are make with early teaching, they would be with the adult, not with the child. The adult (usually parent) might not teach well for the learning style of the child. Imagine a parent using the lecture style of a university professor with a child of two years. No matter how fact filled the lecture might be, the child will not be interested because young children learn by doing more than by listening. They learn language by listening, but that has an incentive because the child wants to participate in family conversations. For most matters to be learned early by a child, they can learn is easier by doing something.

I most cases, children learn while they play. Play is their form of work. A parent can teach a child in the context of play. Make it a fun and enjoyable situation. Because kids want to learn, teaching them something that is given them as if imparting a secret is also a fun learning style. They often want to believe that they know something other kids don't. And they should be in that situation at least once in a while.

Let's take a teaching example. How many facts might a parent possibly teach a child about sex? Let's say 50 facts. A child of three years has no need for or use for 50 facts about sex. The child will not be interested in learning 50 facts. But he might be interested in learning a few of them. It stops being fun for a child to learn when the learning becomes memorization. A child has learning limits. Those limits are more of total accumulation at any given time than of their ability to understand something.

How many lies do parents tell their children so that they can avoid teaching them the truth? A parent may tell a child that a new baby is delivered by a stork or an angel from heaven. The child will know that is wrong. The child sees the mother grow in the belly, then return from the hospital, with baby in arms, much thinner. Which does more harm, telling the child that babies begin with the joining of sex organs (every kid has a set) of mother and father, or telling the child a lie? Believe me, telling the lie to a young child makes the child mistrust information from the parent.

A lie told to a child by a parent, no matter what the intent of the parent, is a lie to the child, a lie that undermines the trust the child has in the most important adult in his or her life. A "white lie" is a lie and it's understood as a lie by the child.

The message a child learns from a lie by his parent, no matter what the nature of the lie, is "I'm a bad parent who can't cope with teaching you the truth, so I am making up this lie. We're stuck with each other, so live with it." Children recognize lies and diversionary tactics far more readily than most adults realize. They don't know what to make of a lie, what to do about the fact that their most important source of information about life has lied to them. The child will still love the parent, but trust between them will have been undermined.

Children can handle truth at any age, even as young as age one year. No child knows what to do with a lie told by a parent, no matter how well intentioned it was. A child's life revolves around trust, and since the young child's life revolves around parents, for a parent to lie to a child to avoid telling the truth helps to destroy that environment of trust between them. It shatters the child's life.

Bad parenting does far more harm to children than teaching them too early has ever done.
Please consider these thoughts carefully. Put them into action yourself and tell other people you know. There is nothing private about this information. You and they are not too young to learn. Nor too old. There is no young age limit to learning just as there is no upper age limit.
Invite others you tell to join our group.

Children, more than adults, are built to learn. They are learning factories. Young children process an alarming amount of information daily, far more than adults do and far more than most adults realize.

Do not hesitate to write back with more questions.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know when, what and how to teach critically important information and skills to children so that they can grow up healthy and truly well balanced.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

What a Child Learns From You

By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic Americaneducation. ... From television, the child will have learned how to pick alock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long,get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety ofsophisticated armaments.
- Russell Baker, columnist and author (b.1925)

Some will read that quote and think it ironic. Others will think it sarcastic. Some will consider it pessimistic.

Yet what the quote missed is a child's main source for life information: parents. The quote is not wrong, just inadequate to convey the message.

While Baker had the age right ("by the age of six") he missed something extremely important, critically important about what a child learns in his first five years. In his first five years of life, a child learns what life is about.

You may think that age five or younger is too young to understand what life is about. Especially what the extremes, the best and worst of life, are about. While that is generally true, a young child gains his sense of the values that he will carry through his life from his parents. The life values of parents tend to be passed along to children, in so many varied ways that they can't be enumerated.

Let's say a young child is with her father in a store. The child doesn't pay attention to what the father buys or speaks about with the clerk. Back in the car, she overhears father saying to mother that the clerk gave him back five dollars too much and that he didn't return that money. That brief experience might leave a mark for a lifetime.

Children learn by example, as most of us know. Many parents don't know how important their role modelling is. A young child whose parents use drugs is highly likely to use drugs or alcohol when he grows up. Kids need to learn what life is about and we tend to not teach them until they are older, "old enough to understand." It doesn't work like that. They learn about life by taking markers from their parents, sample experiences they generalize into life lessons.

The little girl whose father kept the five dollars will generalize the experience to accept that it's all right to steal from someone, especially if the person doesn't know about it. A general belief that dishonesty is socially acceptable may not happen with a single incident. The child has no idea that the clerk will have to make up the money from her pay when she cashes out at the end of her shift. Nor might the child care. The kid is interested in what the parent does because the whole purpose of parenting is to teach actively and to be role models passively and the primary objective of a child is to learn about life from her parents.

For most children, their parents are their life for the first two years. How the parents act is how they come to believe that life is. At the time of life when their brains act like sponges to find examples to help them understand what life is about--their main purpose in life in their first few years--what their parents do is treated as a model for what they should do. They want to be adults, as all children do. They accept the values of their parents because they are desperate to learn what values adults have.

For various reasons, a child will sometimes understand that what a parent has done is wrong. Neglect or abuse of the child, for example, might make the child determined to be just the opposite with his own children when he grows up. However, history shows that a majority of children who were neglected or abused become parents who neglect or abuse their own kids. The acorn doesn't fall far from the oak.

Ironically, bad behaviour by a parent may be picked up more readily than good behaviour. The reason is that parents behave well and properly most of the time, whereas bad behaviour is so different from the norm and so rare that a child will pick up on it. The child, wanting to fill in the gaps in his understanding of life values he seldom has opportunities to learn, will see some action or hear some words by a parent and generalize from them. One tiny example of bad behaviour (believed to be tiny by the parent) becomes a life lesson to be utilized later by the child.

If you are the parent or grandparent of a young child, everything you do may be scrutinized by the child and generalized as an example of a life value or lesson. The admonition "do what I say not what I do" doesn't work with kids. They take their first examples more from behaviour of parents, less what the parents say.

If you are the parent or grandparent of a young child, you are a living example to that child of what life is. Lessons learned later may change that, but most times the later lessons do not stick the way role model lessons from parents stick.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers who want to know what a child needs and at what time he or she needs it. It teaches people how to treat parenting responsibilities with a professional attitude.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

What's Paris Hilton Up To?

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.
- Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (1920- )

I can imagine Dr. Szasz reading this quote again with his tongue stuck so far into his cheek that his cheek goes red, chuckling at his wit until he nearly falls off his chair. I would if I were in his shoes.

Let's examine it more carefully. At first blush it seems to say that modern industrial societies (those whose corporations control social norms, usually with the blessing of their respective governments) want to keep people in a childlike state of mind for as long as possible. Then when they realize that they are no longer kids (around age 40-45 in many cases), they have a brief period of adult behaviour and thinking before their bodies ease them into old age.

In the cottage area where I live, people flock from the Toronto region on weekends where they promptly stock up on the marijuana supply they will need, then fuel up their all-terrain vehicles, personal watercraft and chain saws so they can act like the wild teenagers most never were. These people are mostly men, all with at least some white in their hair, what's left of it.

Their great fear (perhaps loathing would be a better word) is growing old. In their attempts to recapture their youth, most completely miss playing out the mature, responsible adult stage, the one that most of us would consider the age of people who would control the governments of their country and operate businesses and industries that keep people employed and the economy moving.

To ensure that they are not considered "age inappropriate" to their children and teenage kids, they supply the young generation with the same toys (downsized for the younger ones) that they use themselves. Thus the kids don't care if their dads act like teenagers because they have the same adult toys as their parents.

Can these (formerly called) middle age men provide good role models for their children? By not taking responsibility for the welfare of their own lives (take that where you will), they provide no good example for their children to follow. An example, yes, not a good one. If anything, what they eat and drink and otherwise consume (drugs, for example) silently but effectively teaches the kids that the need for taking responsibility for the safe and fulfilling conduct of their lives is not necessary.

Obesity is rampant in this generation, as it is in the younger ones, because they eat mostly prepared foods (bolstered by chemical preservatives, loaded with fat, salt and sugars). They spend almost all of their time with their knees bent into a sitting position. Standing is limited, walking is rare, genuine exercise is not in evidence. Generally speaking, if it burns gasoline or produces alcohol, it's good.

Meanwhile, these aging children take advantage of the tolerance our bodies have for abuse and misuse. They do this through their "adult" years, until the body can't take any more and breaks down. Heart attack, cancer, osteoporosis, the usual effects that visit a body that can't take the wildness of teenage life for decades in a row.

Now they turn to prescription drugs to get them past pain, high blood pressure and cholesterol, brittle joints and atrophied muscles. With more and more people living to the century mark these days and most living into their 80s and 90s, that makes for a very long period of old age.

Are they ready for it? Sure, they have their pensions, insurance plans and investments in place so that they can pay for whatever therapies they need, for decade upon decade. One insurance company touts a "Freedom 55" plan, likely for those who won't be healthy enough to work until a more reasonable age for retirement.

What happens to that period of mature adulthood in between childhood and old age, the one that Dr. Szasz said societies are trying to shrink? Look at how often CEOs of large corporations are in civila court, in prison or in debt and look at the people we have running our countries to see that we seem to have no mature adults (or not enough) to run either our corporations or our governments. Look at how many people follow the misadventures of Hollywood tabloid types, apparently loving the fact that they don't get into as much trouble as Paris Hilton any other of the tabloid stars.

The "serious" adults compare themselves to wealthy people who manage to make themselves public figures without any qualifications other than the fact that they are rich and they can commit outrageous deeds. ("You're fired!")

I have no idea how wild and careless Dr. Szasz may have been in his younger years. I do know that now he is a wise observer of life.

Might he want to be president of his country, the USA? No. He's not that dumb. Beside, he has devoted his life to healing, not to killing.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise children who will be well balanced adults who can take the responsibilities we need them to take to guide their country and the younger generations.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

This Is Who Controls Your Life And The Lives Of Your Kids

Men are born to succeed, not fail.
- Henry David Thoreau, American author, poet and philosopher (1817-1862)

Well, heck, that sounds simple enough.

So why doesn't it work?

Because to succeed, a person must have the tools to succeed and the attitude that the goal is possible. In other words, a person needs a good work ethic, something to do and the means to do it.

Easy again.

But most people settle for less than what they are capable of, then either overwork to benefit their employer or underwork in the mistaken belief that only partial success at work does not equal only partial success in life.

If the original statement is correct, then why are most people not feeling successful, fulfilled and personally complete?

We don't teach to success of the individual. We teach success for the nation. We teach that success for corporations is good. We teach that our working to keep corporations successful is good. We teach that spending every bit of income we get is good, that it should make us happy and keep the economy rolling.

But we don't teach to individual success. That is, we don't teach to success of the individual on a massive, nationwide scale.

What we do teach individuals is that they should have the skills to satisfy employers sufficiently that they will keep us employed. We almost never teach entrepreneurial skills because that would be counter to the benefit of corporations.

Ask most teens why they will continue with their education past high school and you will hear "so I can get a good job" more than any other answer. In other words, "so that I can get a good paying job." Hopefully, one that will not disappear when the employer downsizes because it has not forecast future markets correctly and has lost money, so needs to cut staff to show more profit or minimize losses to satisfy its shareholders.

We don't even teach our children what it means to be successful, other than that they will be happy being constant consumers. Which few are, really. Again, ask a teen what it means for an adult to be successful and the answer will most likely be related to a secure job with good income (with which to buy lots of stuff).

It's not my purpose to teach you what success is. I know what it is for me. But it took me a few decades of searching to learn.

You need to learn what success is for you. What it really is. What it really means to lead a fulfilling life.

Then teach it to every kid you know.

Schools don't do this. Their purpose is to train employees to be good workers and consumers.
Corporations control the curriculum. If you doubt this, check the name brands on all kinds of products in today's high schools and even in grade schools. Including in text books.

First you must learn what success in life really is. Then teach it to others, both adults and children.

How many people, on their deathbeds, have claimed that they should have worked harder or that they should have spent more of their money in order to make their own lives and the lives of their family members better? Corporations want us to believe that we should follow that line of unthinking.

Learn, then teach. It's what we are supposed to do. Corporations took that responsibility from us because we walked away from it ourselves.

When you teach children what is meaningful in life, don't report it to your employer. The employer won't like that. Just do it in private.

A recent study (actually several of them) showed that large corporations were set up to be sociopathological (amoral, capable of violence or spreading fear without feeling guilty). It's part of their corporate ethic.

This is the power that will control the destiny of your children unless you change what your kids believe.

If you don't like it, do something about it. Talk it up. Social change happens only when enough people believe that children should be taught differently. Every socially acceptable norm of today was once a radical idea. Then people talked about it.

So talk. It's easy.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to have a time scale, content and methodology for teaching children what they need to know to lead successful lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

What Our Kids Need To Survive

Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.
- Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister (1804-81)

We humans are naturally inclined to gather into clusters of individual living spaces, whether hamlets or cities, when doing so means we can produce more food than we need to survive. But we aren't naturally inclined toward any particular form of order (government) or forms of cleanliness, other than we don't usually foul our own nests.

Order and cleanliness must be taught if they are to be followed. If they are to be followed by everyone, they must be taught to everyone. That means to every child.

That's where modern societies fall down, badly, tragically. So long as most people get the main parts of the society's messages as they grow up, everyone assumes that every child gets the messages.

And they assume that every child gets the same messages in the same manner and with the same effectiveness.

These assumptions are all wrong. Every one.

When members of our communities mess up, such as by breaking laws, having unwanted children they can't or won't support or breaking down emotionally due to excessive stress our only solutions are to punish them or fill them with drugs.

This lesson is not hard, but we aren't learning it. We're screwing up and paying more each year to make up for the messes we're making. Anything we want everyone to know and to follow must be taught to every child or adolescent.

That's it! We can't depend on every set of parents to teach their children the same lessons because they don't know the lessons themselves. If you doubt that, check out how many adolescents are in prison, are homeless or are in gangs because they can't make it on their own.

I am not aware of any government that does not pass laws. I am as well not aware of any government that has a systematic method for ensuring that laws that it passes are taught to the members of the public to which they apply. That doesn't make sense.

I am aware that in many jurisdictions of the world, ignorance of the law is not accepted as an excuse for breaking it.

In the western world, cleanliness is taught. Some would say to a fanatic extent, given the obsession we have for buying cleaning products that are far more powerful than necessary and that harm the environment when they leave our homes. But disease born from unclean and unhealthy environments is in decline. No so in all parts of the world, as we know from the spread of bird flu.

Since we leave the teaching of cleanliness mostly to corporations these days, of course they teach us to use their products. Only later do we learn (the hard way) that their products have done considerable harm to the environment (air, water, land). By then they have moved on to entice us with products that are "cleaner" and "greener."

Our governments and our education systems take no responsibility for teaching either laws or cleanliness beyond what is minimally necessary to get them through the day. They leave that to our media, which means to our corporations.

We have only one way to ensure that every child learns the same lessons that we expect them to follow as adults. That way is to put what we want them to learn on school curriculum.

In the United States today, over ten percent of adults are either in prison or have criminal records. That's the highest in the world, per capita. But even other countries such as Canada, the UK and Germany aren't far behind.

We also need to teach our children one other kind of lesson. We need to teach them how to cope when their lives get messed up and they might turn to breaking the law, to drugs, to suicide, to abuse or to obsessions such as overwork. They need to know what to do when they realize they have a problem that causes them to get involved with some form of anti-social behaviour.

Let's begin with you. Have you taught your children all the laws they need to follow? Have you taught them how their lives (and probably yours) will be destroyed if they turn to counterproductive measures such as drugs, alcohol or overwork?

Have you taught them what to do with packaging when they have consumed its contents on the street? Judging by the streets of most cities, not every parent has taught that lesson.

The only way to ensure that family-friendly and community-friendly practices are followed is to teach them to every child. Every child.

Will schools have time, given how busy their teaching schedules are already? Yes. They will get the time they gain when they don't have to deal with misbehaviour and lack of attention because their kids want to be taught what they really need but aren't getting.

Oh, yes, kids know that they need to know lots of things to function properly and in a healthy manner as adults. They aren't sure what those things are. They know naturally that they need to be able to cope in the society they will enter as independent adults soon. They don't know how to do that.

Most know that they aren't getting all of what they need. It upsets them terribly, though they tend to demonstrate their frustration in different ways than adults do. Kids misbehave when they aren't getting what they need in life. When they misbehave, we call them brats. They don't know what else to do to get our attention. We punish them.

Don't wonder what's the matter with kids these days. Wonder instead how so many manage to join the mainstream as adults when finding out what they need to know is so hard for them as children and adolescents.

Do you know what laws your national government passed in the last year, laws you will have to obey or find yourself in court? Kids won't either. And they have no way to find out if we don't provide ways for them to learn.

Do you know where to turn when life gets too much for you? Suicide? Drugs? Abuse? That may not be you, but it's what a shocking percentage of people do.

Being the clever and resourceful person you are, you likely can answer these questions positively. Not many can.

Talk about it.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teaches who want to equip their children with what they need to know to survive and thrive as adults, instead of struggling along on what they learn in school now.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Intellectual Obesity And Information Diarrhea

The internet and technology associated with it have opened access to quantities of information unparalleled in human history. No emperor of Rome, monarch of the British Empire or ruler of any other empire has ever been able to acquire information the way anyone with a computer can today.

A friend wants to buy a garden tractor. He is able to research many different brands, compare quality and durability within brands of each manufacturer and among the various brands available on the market. Having selected a few for further research, he accesses several blogs and forums to learn about the experiences of users of each and gets warning about what to avoid. Then, trailer behind his van, he can pick up the best buy he has made by playing each seller against the others.

Not long ago I was contacted by a college student from Australia as a source for material she was researching on a topic on which I have expertise. Others, strangers every one and representing six different continents, have contacted me for information and advice about problems they have experienced. To them, I am accessible due to the internet.

However, this unprecedented access to information by millions of people comes at a cost. That cost is time, as a researcher must wade through mountains of information that is more advertising and propaganda than fact, and that takes time. Google can only point to sources, not to the most factual and succinct sources.

Children use the internet to learn about all sorts of topics. The media warn us about the dangers of pornography and adult web sites for kids. And they caution parents to monitor the activity of their children on social sites like Facebook.

But the media can't help children or parents to distinguish between factual information and political propaganda, religious come-ons, sites that outright lie about the products they sell, warranties on products they sell that aren't worth the paper they could be (but aren't) printed on, or "research" that could better be described as personal hobby than oriented to scientific method.

In short, the internet is the greatest source of trash information in human history.
Yet children and adults read this stuff. If it's well written, readers tend to become believers. Form, rather than factual substance, gives it street cred.

As television viewership declines, reading of material on web sites increases dramatically. This contributes to what retired Canadian educator Jim World calls intellectual obesity. Kids and adults can have heads crammed full of misinformation, trivia that may be attractive but serves them no good purpose (think the style and content of supermarket tabloids) and opinions-turned-beliefs on topics about which they have very limited verifiable facts.

In general, schools don't teach how to distinguish between facts, lies and propaganda, whether on the internet or on television. A small part of one course I took years ago focussed on political spin, editorialized news sources and propaganda. It may have been the best time I ever spent in school. Most people never get that experience, so they become prey for the wolves of the internet. Internet wolves know their sociology.

Humans being subject to human nature, the more they know, the more they want to tell others. Rumour and unsubstantiated fact has always been a part of human dialogue. But it could usually be distinguished as rumour and ignored or treated accordingly.

Today we have kids and adults who believe the most outrageous things because they read it on the internet. In North America, over half of all adults use the internet as their primary source for news and information. With a few rare exceptions, most of it is not subjected to scrutiny the way newspaper and television news reports are.

If US President George W. Bush could use newspapers, radio and television to spread lies about weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist in Iraq, then use the lies to start a war, what could happen when the unfiltered internet is used to brainwash people in every country of the world about the lies or misinformation its sources want to spread?

Don't call it information diarrhea if the term offends you. But let's not pretend that the internet is a source of verifiable facts. It's not. Most web sites are supported by companies or organizations with something (product or idea) to sell or individuals who want their ill-considered and often poorly formulated thoughts to be recorded for posterity.

Do we need more laws to protect us? No. The present plethora of unenforced and unenforceable laws on the books now prove that method doesn't work. More laws just make the bad guys get smarter to avert and avoid them.

The only way to protect people from misinformation and religious or political propaganda on a global scale is to teach children how to identify fact from fiction, truth from propaganda, sham from gem. That means changing part of the curriculum in high schools.

The other day I discussed with a friend the twice in my life that I have used skills I learned from two years of trigonometry in high school. I struggle today to comprehend how the average person could use calculus in their lives when they can't tell truth from lie, don't know how to think for themselves and believe everything that is carefully presented as if fact by a politician.

Being able to tell fact and truth from what is not is an essential life skill. If it's not taught in schools, most people will not learn it. They will be potential victims waiting to be victimized. This has always been true, but never more important than in this 21st century.

This world does not need any more victims or people who are too stupid to distinguish between truth and lies. We need to teach every child.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to make their children savvy about the ways of the world that could make them victims if they can't protect themselves.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

What We Miss Most

When you are eight years old, nothing is any of your business.
- Lenny Bruce, comedian (1925-1966)

It's a good laugh line for a comedian. Just about everyone remembers that when they were eight years old nobody wanted to include them in adult affairs or conversations. And the adults in Lenny's audience likely did the same with their own kids.

I remember a man I overheard speaking to another man, when I was about 15 years old, saying "I don't bother trying to have conversations with anyone younger than 25 because they don't know enough to hold a decent conversation." It impressed me so much I decided to learn enough to be able to hold a good conversation by the age of 25.

I certainly didn't consider including my own children in conversations I had with my wife when they were that age. They weren't interested anyway.

I was wrong.

My kids were wrong, but maybe because of our practice of excluding our kids from adult conversations they just got used to how things were.

It's the sole purpose in life of a child to learn what it's like in the adult world they are enter within a few years. The young of every species has that same purpose.
If we, as parents and grandparents, don't include kids in our conversations, they miss out on opportunities to learn from us.

What we don't teach with intention, kids learn by our example. If our parents didn't talk about sex or even indicate that they had sex with each other, they likely didn't say much to us about the subject. We learn the hard way, probably the way our parents did. There's a pretty good chance that we and our parents both missed out on much of what we could have had and done if we and they had known more.

In turn, our kids miss out if we don't know what to teach them and how.

Kids most often follow the examples of their parents when they reach the age of majority and have to choose a political party to vote for. They have overheard discussions among their parents that led them to the conclusion that one party is better than the other(s). Most parents don't even indicate to their kids that voters have more than one choice. The young adults vote the way their parents would.

We're forced to learn too much the hard way. We make too many mistakes on stuff where there was no reason we shouldn't have known better, stuff that someone should have taught us.

Why should a child learn a foreign language and trigonometry in school if that child will never use it as an adult, but that child never receives proper instruction about how to make and keep friends, how to be a good spouse in a marriage or how to be a good parent?

We fail at friendships, marriages and parenting. We never get a chance to fail at speaking the foreign language or using trig in most cases, but that's just as well because we likely forgot most of it since we had no use for it.

Do the arithmetic. Which is more important, knowing how to make and keep friends, how to have a compatible marriage and how to be a good parent or how to speak a foreign language and do trigonometry?

That's not to put down learning languages or trig, only to state that we have other more important needs that our parents, our grandparents and our teachers seldom or never address.
We accept this because "That's the way it has always been done." It's clearly wrong, so does that mean that many generations of our ancestors were wrong? It's a sharp edged pill to swallow, but, yup, they were wrong.

When we chose to exclude ourselves from the natural courses of nature in our modern world, we didn't compensate for the important lessons that nature teaches to every other species on the planet. We miss some of the most important lessons in life. Parents don't know them so they can't teach what they don't know. Or they are reticent about teaching what they learned themselves by doing and making mistakes.

No matter, we have sports, drugs, other addictions, abuse, volunteering, exercising and lots of other ways to compensate for our lack of knowledge about important human subjects.
That won't change until some of us decide to change it. The longer we wait to change the system by teaching kids what they need to know as adults, the bigger the job will be.

It could all change in a flash if school curriculums were changed. That's not hard because curriculums change almost every year to some extent.

Doing nothing is easier. Except the problems keep getting worse.

Maybe we should talk about this subject more.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers that provides material that all kids should know but that most never get at home or in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Why So Many Kids Go Wrong

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
- Albert Camus, French writer (1913-1960)

Well, I do, Albert, so where are you so I can refute your statement?

Seriously, Camus was right, some people do go to extensive lengths to be considered normal by others. But why?

We are social animals. As such we have standards, mores and rules/laws by which people must conduct their affairs so that our society does not descend into chaos. When we deal with a clerk in a store, for example, we have an idea of what to expect from that person, as the clerk does for us.

Two or three decades ago (depending on the location) a movement began to make people in wheelchairs have access to every building they may need to enter. That made sense for a medical building, for example, because someone in a wheelchair would certainly need to visit a doctor eventually.

People in wheelchairs wanted to be treated like everyone else and have access everywhere someone with two working legs would have. To them, normal meant having the same rights or access as those who could walk.

Striving to be normal goes much deeper than that. A child who is socially underdeveloped may work very hard to be like the rest of the kids, but that child can never be "normal" in a social setting. The child may seem to be a loner, may stutter, may remain quiet with others around, may agree with the leader of the group most often, will likely not do well with schoolwork, but try as he or she might they will not be able to be like the others, normal in a social setting.

Being socially underdeveloped as a child carries through adulthood, sometimes through life itself. Many socially underdeveloped kids eventually learn the social skills their peers did as children, whereupon they can interact in social settings like others, thus be "normal." That catching up socially requires a huge amount of effort, something Camus says that few understand.

Certainly the peers of a socially underdeveloped child don't understand. They consider the kid weird or strange. They nitpick to find faults with the child that may not exist in reality so they can talk about the odd one in their own "normal" groups.

Often a socially underdeveloped child will be bullied by another socially underdeveloped child. Bullies are classic cases of social underdevelopment, perhaps with a touch of maldevelopment. They need social interaction with peers, but have no idea how to achieve it. They want to be normal, but can't, so they lash out at the weakest among them, which is usually another socially underdeveloped child. The same happens with adult bullies and their victims.

Children who are underdeveloped emotionally have similar adjustment problems. They tend to be punished for their deficiencies and the resulting behaviours, as socially underdeveloped children are as well. What we don't understand in odd or strange children usually causes them to violate social norms, thus we punish them to teach them how to act normally.

Yes, we punish children and adults for being socially and/or emotionally underdeveloped and acting out because they can't cope with their inability to be normal with their peers.

By punishing them as children we ensure that they will not likely rise to the level of development of their peers because they will believe that it's impossible for them to be normal. They will always feel left out, different.

Almost every adult in a prison is either socially or emotionally underdeveloped or maldeveloped, or both. At that age they have been broken for so long that society could not afford to do the necessary psychological repairs, so we put them behind bars and forget about them. Pretend they don't exist in our society. Call them bad, social offenders.

It may be true that most children are born with the same potential. That potential is very different among them by the age they enter the school system because of their different opportunities (or lack thereof) to develop socially and emotionally as well as they do physically and intellectually in the intervening few years.

Trouble begins in the school system. Teachers are not only not granted permission to work to develop children's social and emotional skills according to the curriculum, they may be denied permission (in most classroom settings) by the administration. "There isn't time." "Stick to the curriculum."

By the time kids enter school, many parents believe they have taken their children as far as they need to socially and emotionally, so they leave it up to the school to carry on. The school can't do much in most cases.

Every socially or emotionally inappropriate behaviour of adults can be traced back to social or emotional (or both) deficits when they were children. No one wants to do this and few will try because it upsets everyone who prefers to deny any responsibility for underdevelopment or maldevelopment of social miscreant adults, when they were children.

Society can manage social and emotional development of children the same way it manages intellectual and physical development. In fact, plans to do this are fairly easy and very cheap to implement.

Before anything can be changed, we must admit as a society that we have children who are not receiving assistance with their social and emotional development. Then we can put programs in place to train parents and teachers how to fulfill the rest of their respective roles in raising a child.

Talk about it.

Bill Allin is a sociologist, retired teacher and author of the book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, as well as the fountain of inspiration for programs related to the TIA program.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The Secret Of Love

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
- François Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire), letter to Count Schomberg, August 1769

As admirable as Voltaire's reasoning ability was and as impressive his observations about human nature, I wonder how he reached the conclusion that animals know nothing of the power of life.
An avowed dog person for most of my life, I became servant to a household cat some 18 years ago. Since then my wife and I have had two other cats, one of which has epilepsy and has gone deaf.

The most impressive--dare I say shocking--lesson I have learned in my years of observing the behaviour of cats is that they are remarkably similar to humans in their needs. I don't mean just the needs for food, shelter and security, which all living things share.

Our cats do hear our grandmother clock strike because it gongs on the hour and half-hour. It means nothing to them because neither the ticking of the clock nor the gong itself serve any purpose toward satisfying their needs.

What does a clock add to our lives? At most it serves as a reminder that we must perform actions, usually in the service of others. Cats can be altruistic at times, but they are clearly not into servitude. Cats would have disappointed Pavlov.

Our cats know when they want to be fed because they are hungry. If they aren't hungry, they don't care if food is available to them or not. They don't overeat, nor do they eat in front of the television. They will, however, eat as a form of comfort, if their problem is not of a severely emotional nature.

They clearly know when they need to be touched (petted). Not only do they make their needs known to the petters, they allow little to stand in the way of their satisfying that need when they have it, if humans are around. They prefer petting from the humans they know, but will accept it from strangers who happen around at the right time.

Humans do not do that. We seldom know when we need to be touched by another, even though it's a need so fundamental to us that regular lack of touch can alter our personality.

Children almost never come to mommy demanding to be held. They may come, but they don't ask in words. The closest they come to asking is when they hurt themselves. Being held by mommy when they hurt does nothing to help the hurt, it's a way of (an excuse for) demanding to be touched without using words (we don't use words to express that need, sad to say).

Voltaire says that animals have no idea of death. I disagree. When our epileptic cat has a petit or grand mal seizure, he wants to be alone in an enclosed area, secure that he won't explode all over the place. However, for days before and after the seizure, he seeks touch and comfort many times each day. He knows when he will have a seizure, days ahead. He seeks the security he wants and needs ahead of time.

People seldom know they are about to have an epileptic seizure until it happens, or maybe just a brief period before. Cats are more sensitive to their bodies. Most of the time they do what they must to heal themselves. Only their owners insist upon taking them to vets.

For months before our oldest cat died, she came to me many times each day, to sit on my lap or to cuddle in the crook of my arm as I lied in bed napping. This was uncharacteristic behaviour for that cat, though it isn't for the epileptic one now. I don't doubt that they would know when the end of their life is near. Maybe they don't dream of heaven, but who knows?

Voltaire's reference to the clock striking, of course, refers to the death knell, not to the regular striking of a gong or ticking of the pendulum. His point is that we make much of a charade of death, most of which serves no real purpose but to make the grieving ones feel worse.

My point differs from Voltaire's in that I want us to pay attention to the characteristics and needs of animals that we share with them, but that they do better than us.

We know that dogs and cats love to be petted. We call them pets for that reason. They need touch and they demand it from those who can best provide it. To a dog or cat, brushing the fur is nothing more than another way for them to be touched.

We need to recognize our own need for touch. Life without touch is not easy and life with a decreasing amount of touch from a loved one is even harder because we feel the lack of touch and our increase in need. The death of a spouse may be hardest on those who benefitted most from loving touch from the dead mate for many years.

Hospitals (not all) and nursing homes have found the benefits of having people with pets visit so that patients can touch them. Nurses stroke their patients and touch them more than ever in the past because it helps the patients to feel better, even to heal faster in some cases.

Voltaire's quotation was not about animals after all, but about satisfying our own real needs instead of trying to play act unnecessary stuff while ignoring what is really important.

Now, while you think about it, go give someone you love a hug. Do it several times a day if you can. Don't miss a day.

One of the mysteries of love is that we can't measure it. Think not? Most of us, without being aware of it, measure how much others love us by the amount of loving touch we receive from them.

Remember, it's not just the amount of touch we receive from others that's important. It's just as important to those we love that we give loving touch to them so that they can keep track of how much we love them. It works both days. We measure love by the amount of touch we receive, they measure love by the amount they receive.

Now you can understand why the so-called Empty Nest syndrome of parents whose children have grown and left home can be so severe. And why people who consider divorce do so because their partners and they have "grown apart."

Love is an emotional word we use to describe our basic need for loving touch. Celibate nuns and priests receive little human touch, but when they devote their lives to God and to prayer the parts of their brains that trigger the feel-good response activate the same way that ours does when we are hugged by a loved one. Loving God fully can give people the same physical effect as receiving loving touch.

So, have you hugged someone yet?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow balanced and well loved children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Abe Lincoln's Best Advice

"A child is a person who is going to carry on whatever you have started. He is going to sit where you are sitting and when you are gone, attend to those things which you think are important. You may adopt all the policies you please, but how they will be carried out depends on him. He will assume control of your cities, states and nations. He is going to move in and take over your churches, schools, universities, and corporations. Your books are going to be judged, accepted or condemned by him. The fate of humanity is in his hands. So it might be well to pay him some attention."
- Abraham Lincoln

"He is going to...attend to those things which you think are important."

What do you think is important? Did you (Do you) consciously, proactively, knowingly teach those things to your children?

Surprisingly, most people don't. Children, to a great extent in their first six years and to a slightly lesser extent during the following five years, form and reform concepts of their world frequently. Not your world, but the one they perceive with their senses and conceptualize with their minds.

Their entire existence rests within the concept they form of their world, usually based on what they observe from their parents, what they are taught by their parents and how they are treated by their parents. If their parents have extensive social skills, the kids will pick them up whether the lessons are taught formally or not. They will fare better if the parents teach pertinent social skills (such as how to make and keep friends, how to treat casual friends and classmates) rather than requiring the children to pick them up vicariously.

What children don't learn by watching is emotional skills, knowledge to advance their emotional development, especially in a small family with only one child. These kinds of skills--how to cope with life's problems and downturns--need to be taught and learned through experience and lessons from parents.

Will your child "assume control of your cities, states and nations" and "take over your churches, schools, universities, and corporations" as you move on, the way Lincoln said? Yes, but only a very few of them will. Those who receive a balanced upbringing, with equal emphasis on intellectual, physical, social and emotional development will have the ability to assume leadership roles.

Don't the smartest ones reach the top? Not usually. The people who reach the top of situations such as Lincoln described have had thorough and balanced development in the four streams listed in the previous paragraph, but they also have a great deal of drive and determination to excel. These they usually pick up from their parents, though other sources (mentors) are possible.

Most people in our various societies are drones that get by with sufficient knowledge and skills in what they need to know and do, but know little else beyond that. An architect may not be able to sort recyclables on trash pickup day. A factory worker may know how to change a flat tire, but not how to economize on fuel efficiency and eliminate as much pollution as possible from his vehicle.

We all depend on others to do for us what we can't or don't know how to do ourselves. Mostly we don't do these things because we never learned how. We weren't taught by a parent or grandparent. Most of us know very little and can do very little beyond what we do for a living and what we do as hobbies.

We can't do what we never learned how to do. Most of the fundamentals of what we can do we learned from our parents, either by watching them or by learning from lesson they taught. Or we were prompted by them or some experience we had.

As children we depend on our parents to help us form our world. If they don't help with that (and many don't do it actively and knowingly), we grow up with many misconceptions, misinformation or ignorance about many subjects we should be able to get by with.

Sadly, there are few classes where parents can learn what they need to know and do to be parents and what they need to teach their children to help them with their various kinds of development. Every parent tries to do their best, but few know what they need to know.

Maybe you could get together with some others of your neighbours and encourage your board of education or school administration to launch such a program.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents who want to know what their children need and when they need it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Small Childhood Experiences Can Become Fears Later

"Too many folks go through life running from something that isn't after them."
- Anonymous

All phobias, almost all fears (except bullying and abuse) and almost all worrying fit within this statement.

The reality is that most of us have almost nothing worth worrying about or warranting our fear. Worry is, at best, non-productive use of our energy and fears are harmful both emotionally and physically. Why do we do these destructive things to ourselves?

We have a natural instinct for fear, which social scientists call apprehension. Recent research suggests that it may even be associated with part of our genetic code. Going back to the days before homo sapiens emerged and for many years after our species began, we had good reason to be apprehensive of animals and situations that could kill us or cause us severe harm.

While that kind of apprehension is less critical today, it still exists for people in some neighbourhoods where violence and personal assaults are more common than in most places. It's also wise for us to avoid such things as hot stove elements, driving while drunk and teasing free-roaming dogs we meet on the street. We have a need for caution, but usually not fear.

Most children today are inadvertently taught fear by their parents and their schools. In the name of safety, children are made aware of dangers that could befall them when they are not supervised by adults. In order to make their point in a fashion that will be remembered for as long as the children live, parents and teachers may exaggerate the harm that could come to the children. That exaggeration is remembered by some and it becomes fear or phobia.

Some children incorporate frightful experiences they have watching movies into their psyches. A movie where is cobra attacks a movie character might develop years later into a fear of snakes. A movie about escape from a prison through a tunnel might develop into a fear of enclosed spaces (claustrophobia). A movie about a dog that attacks humans might develop into a fear of dogs.

A parent who fears insects or spiders can easily pass that fear along to her children by role modelling.

When people, especially as children, experience frightening events then do not have an adult they depend on to discuss the situation with them to help them to put their experience into perspective (you don't need to fear cats or tall buildings), these events could easily develop into fear later.

Getting rid of a fear or a phobia as an adult is very difficult. Discussing every possible circumstance in which a child has experienced fear that could develop into real fear later is challenging and a burden for parents and teachers, but the long term benefits to the children are immeasurable. It simply needs to be done.

Sometimes parents need to put themselves into the positions of their children and imagine what their recent experiences could mean to them later in order to understand whether some intervention is necessary at the time to prevent an exaggerated form of fear later on.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to prepare parents for the enormous job and responsibilities they have that many know too little about.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/