Monthly Archives: January 2008

Guns

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From Education Watch International

Monday, December 31, 2007

Why boys should be allowed to play with toy guns

Report from Britain

Playing with toy weapons helps the development of young boys, according to new Government advice to nurseries and playgroups. Staff have been told they must resist their “natural instinct” to stop boys using pretend weapons such as guns or light sabres in games with other toddlers. Fantasy play involving weapons and superheroes allows healthy and safe risk-taking and can also make learning more appealing, says the guidance. It conflicts with years of “political correctness” in nurseries and playgroups which has led to the banning of toy guns, action hero games and children pretending to fire “guns” using their fingers or Lego bricks.

But teachers’ leaders insisted last night that guns “symbolise aggression” and said many nurseries and playgroups would ignore the change.

The guidance, called Confident, Capable and Creative: Supporting Boys’ Achievements, is issued by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It says some members of staff “find the chosen play of boys more difficult to understand and value than that of girls.” This is mainly because they tend to choose activities with more action, often based outdoors. “Images and ideas gleaned from the media are common starting points in boys’ play and may involve characters with special powers or weapons. “Adults can find this particularly challenging and have a natural instinct to stop it. “This is not necessary as long as practitioners help the boys to understand and respect the rights of other children and to take responsibility for the resources and environment.”

Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes says ‘imaginary games are good for their development as well as good fun’ The report says: “Creating situations so that boys’ interests in these forms of play can be fostered through healthy and safe risk-taking will enhance every aspect of their learning and development.” It cites a North London children’s centre which helped boys create a “Spiderman House” and print pictures of the superhero from the internet. This led to improvements in their communication, ability to develop storylines in their play and skills in drawing, reading and writing.

The guidance is aimed at boosting boys’ achievement. They often fall behind girls even before starting school and the trend can continue throughout their academic careers. Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes said: “The guidance simply takes a commonsense approach to the fact that many young children and perhaps particularly many boys, like boisterous, physical activity.” “Although noisy for adults such imaginary games are good for their development as well as good fun.”

But Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “The real problem with weapons is that they symbolise aggression. “The reason teachers often intervene when kids have toy guns is that the boy is usually being very aggressive. We do need to ensure, whether the playing is rumbustious or not, that there is a respect for your peers, however young they are.”

Chris Keates, general secretary of the The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) union said: “Many parents take the decision that their children won’t have toy weapons.”

Research by Penny Holland, academic leader for early childhood at London Metropolitan University, has also concluded that boys should be allowed to play gun games. She found boys became dispirited and withdrawn when they are told such play-fighting is wrong.

Cooking for Very Young Children by Judy Lyden

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The whole point of cooking for very young children is to balance what they will eat with what they should eat at times that fit into the family schedule.

Easier said than done especially when children get caught up in the bad habits of twenty-first century life. Establishing meal time is probably the hardest one thing for young families to do because no one is quite certain what we are doing when. It’s no wonder we have run away illness, obesity and few expectations for manners.

Establishing times when the family is fed are important today as they have always been because meal time is the nutrition zone of family health. Health is complimented by certain food components that build strong bodies, and if the food is not offered, the children can’t eat it. Health and vitality don’t come from snacking. So begin your search for the balance of what children will eat and what they should eat with times for eating.

Finding things that children like is not impossible even for picky eaters. At breakfast time, children should have a grain product, milk, and a fruit or vegetable. Juice works well. That grain product can be a favorite cereal, a piece of toast, a muffin, pancakes, waffles, biscuits, or even a pastry. The idea, of course, is to get a regular time established and then experiment with different foods.

One recipe I use for pancakes and waffles is:

2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1/4 cup cooking oil
2 cups milk or milk to desired thickness

Muffins begin the same way. Add 1/2 cup sugar and 1 cup less milk.

What I find is 95% of children like this recipe. It’s plain, simple, and there is nothing to startle the taste buds. If making pancakes at home with little equipment, use as flat a frying pan as possible, wipe the bottom with oil or lightly spray cooking spray. Heat the pan to about 3/4 of the highest heat you have, and when the pan is hot, make one pancake at a time. The pancake is ready to turn when bubbles form and burst.

These are basic, simple recipes that will last in a refrigerator for nearly a week if covered.

To these simple recipes, it’s important to begin to change the recipe slightly and add the nutrients we need to make the simple foods we are making superbly good for you. By moving from white flour to whole wheat PASTRY flour, you are making the bulk of your food a much healthier choice because white flour is an obstacle to healthy eating. Pastry flour can be purchased at the grocery store in the special flours department.

Bread products are supposed to fill you up, and cleanse your digestive tract. White flour clogs instead of cleans, so beware of eating it.

Once children and other family members have made the switch from white to WW pastry flour, it’s time to make sure that the oil you are using is one of the healthy ones. I use Canola oil. Olive oil is a great oil, but a little weird in pancakes.

Changing from regular milk to soy milk will make pancakes and waffles much lighter. It’s worth a try.

Now for the fun part. It’s time to add some things that will make your pancakes, waffles and muffins a really excellent start. Try adding wheat germ, flax seed, whole oats, berries, raisins, dark chocolate chips, applesauce, pumpkin, nuts, and coconut. Try adding spices like ginger and cinnamon.

Making changes does not have a rush formula. It all takes time. One of my pickiest eaters at school began with a hatred of anything even resembling a muffin, and today he doesn’t even ask what it is. When I tell him we are having muffins, he’s thrilled. It just takes time.

Adding a topping to food sometimes helps make new things more palatable for children. There is nothing wrong with using peanut butter, cream cheese, regular cheese, jam, jelly, butter or home made syrup as an incentive to eat. Homemade syrup is made by boiling two cups water to one cup sugar for three minutes. To the syrup, you can add any flavor you want. Cinnamon syrup is delicious and I find children will eat it.

Next time, Lunch.

Taste Buds – Something to Trust?

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Here’s a question posted on World’s Healthiest Foods. I thought it was interesting considering all the New Year’s resolutions we make.

QUESTION: Can I rely on my taste buds to tell me what my body needs?

ANSWER: Yes, if you work at it, you can rely on your taste buds to tell you what your body does and doesn’t need. For most of us, however, trusting our taste buds is something that we will have to learn how to do, not something we can do right away. Here’s why:

Our Taste Buds Detect Four Basic Flavors

First, when it comes to our body chemistry, we don’t have taste buds for avocado flavor, or olive oil flavor, or strawberry flavor. Our taste buds are designed to detect only four basic flavors: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Because we don’t have taste buds for specific food flavors, our taste buds can’t tell us directly which foods we need and which ones we don’t. Sometimes we might crave something sweet, and find out that our bodies were telling us that our blood sugar was low, and that we needed to eat some sugar-containing food to raise up our blood sugar quickly. This kind of situation, however, would be the exception and not the rule. Most of the time when we crave something sweet, our blood sugar level is normal, and we’re just in the mood for a treat.

All Our Senses Enjoy Food

Second, the taste of a food is not determined exclusively from the reaction of our taste buds. The smell of a food, the visual appearance of a food, how we expect the food to taste, and how often we’ve eaten it previously all affect what we actually taste. (So do the medications we take.) When we sit down to enjoy a meal, it’s not simply a question of our taste buds detecting four basic flavors. It’s all our senses that enable us to enjoy our food, not just our taste buds.

Children Know Best

Some very interesting research studies of young, pre-school age children have tried to determine just how much our taste buds can be trusted. Children in these studies were selected because of their known, pre-existing vitamin deficiencies. For example, one study looked at children who were known to be low in vitamin D. These children were given a choice of several foods, but only one of the foods was high in vitamin D. For example, given a choice of orange juice (no vitamin D), soda pop (no vitamin D), and cod liver oil (high vitamin D), most of the kids actually chose cod liver oil! In other words, they seemed to be able to trust their taste buds. Many other studies, however, have repeatedly shown that even at a very early age, children tend to prefer the foods that their parents or brothers and sisters eat, and that the opinions of their family influence the way food tastes to them.

In addition, by the time we get to be adults, we’ve seen thousands of food commercials on television; we’ve accepted responsibilities that can make our week highly stressful; and we’ve had years and years of eating without trying to foster an awareness of our body’s reactions to food and and what it needs.

What Adults Should Do

How can we learn, as adults, to trust our taste buds? This task requires us to get back in touch with food. How can we get back in touch with food? First, we have to give our taste buds a rest from all of the artificial flavors and artificial textures that are characteristic of processed food. We can’t get back in touch with food unless we know what real food actually tastes like! The recipes on this website focus exclusively on real food. They are not only free from artificial flavors or textures of any kind, but they are also created exclusively from whole, organically-grown foods. Whole, organically-grown foods will get you back in touch with real food and its taste. On the World’s Healthiest Foods, we also emphasize careful handling and preparation of all foods. The taste of real foods can be destroyed if the foods are not handled and prepared well. Getting back in touch with food means visiting the produce section of the grocery store and our own kitchens a little more often.

Practical Tips

If you’ve had a hectic, stressful day where you didn’t even get to sit down to lunch, and you stop at the gas station on the way home to get gas and see a bar of chocolate on the way out, you’re in a very poor situation to trust your taste buds. In this kind of situation, your taste buds are going to tell you that a bar of chocolate is exactly what you need. But it isn’t! What we all need is to respect ourselves and take the half hour lunch needed during our day to nourish our bodies with real food. But our taste buds can’t tell us that.

At the other end of the spectrum, if we’ve made most of our day’s food selections form the World’s Healthiest Foods, and we have taken time during the day to nourish ourselves with these foods, the opinion of our taste buds becomes much more reliable. Which sounds better? The Oriental Chicken Salad or the Seared Tuna Salad? Under this different set of circumstances, if it’s the tuna that tempts our taste buds, perhaps our cells are more in need of omega 3 fatty acids found in fresh tuna. If the Oriental Chicken Salad sounds better, perhaps our taste buds are calling out for the sulfur compounds in the cabbage and scallions. The World’s Healthiest Foods give us a starting point for trusting our taste buds. We have to do the rest, by getting back in touch with these foods on a day-to-day basis.