Category Archives: Childcare By Judy

Time Off…

Posted on by

Well…we WERE going to go away for a couple of days…but every time I thought about taking time off, I remembered how much needs to be done right here…and the old balance of work then play which is like the essence of my life, becomes so dramatically lopsided, it destroys any real delight in leaving town…even for the beach.

So…this morning Terry and I dragged ourselves upstairs to our bedroom of many years and dug out what has become a storehouse for kids moved away; stuffed toys I can’t part with; computer collectibles; the books that don’t fit anywhere else; travel equipment; furniture that is in need of mending; exercise and gym equipment; pictures and frames without walls…well you get the idea.

Actually it’s been like that for twenty years, so today, when we started going through this amazing pile of junk, it was no wonder a car load went to M Teresa’s and another pile was created for my grandson that was once his father’s; and books were moved downstairs, pictures were stacked for later examination…and I started to think about what you save and pitch as the kids get older and move away.

I have terrible trouble throwing away old friends…those are stuffed toys that were once so treasured by one of the little “houseselves.” If it has a face on it, I usually give it to someone else to give away, because I’m a nut job and can’t do it myself. There is something really odd and beautiful and emotionally gripping about the worn face of a doll or stuffed toy. Personally, I have all my stuffed toys from my own childhood, and as I get older their faces bring me a lot of joy, soooo I keep them.

Today, I went through a very deep closet whose contents belonged to my son. I found his boyhood stamp collection; his boy scout camping gear, prizes, awards and regalia. I found a hundred books stacked and in boxes. I found funny old clothes he used to wear. I found pictures and other keepsakes and games that brought all those years back.

I found the college books that belonged to my eldest daughter and among those books were shoes and trinkets…more memories. And memories are sweet. Yes, they are gone now, and living their lives with their own families, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

I found a lot of the wooden dressed character dolls I made for the younger children…Molly and Anne, and I held them back to look at later. They are made of clothespins carefully cut and wired together and dressed complete with bloomers, aprons, hats, dresses, and all decorated with lace and beds.

Older kids are funny about that stuff…they don’t want to pitch it themselves, but they sure don’t want to drag it home. How often we think to save things for our children’s children…and how often they don’t want it, and maybe that’s a good and independent thing. Things really don’t last; they grow old like we do…

So now that the clutter is mostly cleaned out of the closets, it’s time to create a new room. Luckily, it’s a big spacious room with hardwood floors and a lot of dark cabinetry at one end. Going to paint it a dark cherry color with driftwood appointments…because that will give me something to do at the river…lots to do…lots to do…tables to be made…blinds out of slender washed branches…drawer pulls of washed wooden knots…lots to do…

It’s important to let go of children so they can go live their lives…but at the same time, it’s important to have your own life and fill it with all the things you wanted to do as a young mom and couldn’t because all your time and energy needed to be spent on your children. It’s important to do a job you like that has growth and also creates memories you can grow old with.

So for a couple of days, it’s time to clean and paint and re-create. Not recreate, but re-create. No, I didn’t go to Florida; I stayed home and worked, and you could say, poor Judy, but Judy has a real life working every day, so these things like rooms and collecting driftwood too often get pushed to the sidelines…except for today… when it was tons of fun.

This is hoping that everyone who reads this will enjoy every part of his or her life…and will in turn teach their children to do the same. Life doesn’t end when your children walk out the door…that’s just part of the great story you build every day. Enjoy every day…


Obedience and Disobedience…That is the Question…

Posted on by

I was talking to Terry the other evening about this and that, and our conversation drifted over to scripture, and as we began to talk about the New and Old Testaments, I finally realized why the New Testament is so much more difficult to teach children than the Old Testament, I mean duh!

If you think about it, the OT is the child of the NT. It’s the foundation for the basic tenets of how to honor and obey God. Every story in the OT is about obedience and disobedience. It’s about heroes and those who failed and about how each hero mastered his life and the quest at hand and became a figure to admire and revere thousands of years later.
If you think of the OT as the years during childhood, you see the story of Adam and Eve establishing obedience for the first time, just like the slap on the paw we give to just toddling children. No! No! is established. As we move to the story of Noah, we learn that through disobedience, all is lost, and by obedience all is saved along with our family and friends. This helps to draw our family closer in the eyes of the child, and the fact that the family pets are involved is also a good lesson on responsibility toward creatures less that we are.
As we move to the Abraham story, we are reminded that trust in God is essential. The Moses story is about friendship with God, and how we are able to have that if we work hard enough at the obedience ideal. It’s about responsibility toward others and how we are here to learn and then to guide others towards goodness.
David’s story is one of championing his people, defender of the faith, defender of good…and he is rewarded as perhaps God’s favorite.
Job is a story of friendship as well. It’s Job’s story of unbreakable love for God no matter what the Devil does. We are growing up!
As Scripture is read, the child of the OT grows into the man or woman and is ready for the next step…the New Testament and the adult world.
We are established now, and can listen to the message of Christianity with more complex issues and more a more complex agenda. “Why” is not a question for children under six because they don’t have the cognitive skills to answer. So we deal in lots of “whats.” The OT has a great supply of “whats” and a lifetime of answers like “because it’s good.” Obedience…
We know how to establish ourselves with God from the OT, and when we move over to the NT, it’s time to establish ourselves with others. We learn how to treat others, how to behave ourselves with others, and how to live peacefully in the world of those who are not so inclined to have a relationship with God.
We glean what is important, what is necessary and we go about doing in a righteous frame of mind.
So where do children fit in? Since children are establishing themselves in the world, the OT is a wonderful teaching tool that helps them grow into adulthood with a balanced sense for the achievement of good and the disdain for evil. They need to hear these stories as a foundation to righteous living because without the collective bond of a people determined towards good rather than evil is a world that’s too dangerous for anyone. Fairy tales do the same thing, but without God. If God is important to parents, they will use the OT to establish a guide to life choices rather than fairy tales because fairy tales aren’t true and Scripture is.
Teaching the NT to children is done much like teaching the OT, it’s a story…listen and hear, and then, when the mind of the child develops, he can understand what he is supposed to understand. It’s a long process, a lifetime of thinking and being trained to think and doing and falling and doing and rising and doing whats and knowing why.

Thursday’s Thought

Posted on by

Just got back from Walmart…and as I was checking out, the two very very nice people working behind the counter actually asked me a question…now you know how I feel about questions…too few ask and fewer still listen…and I answered, “I work with children.”

It started right then” “Oh, I couldn’t work with children.”

“I don’t know how you do it.”

“You need a vacation because you work with children.”

“You must work very hard.”

Now if you know me at all, you will say, “She never does anything hard,” so I just smiled and thought, you work at Walmart and you’re saying those things to ME?

It never ceases to amaze me that people think working with children is so very hard. If you really think about it, working with forty people who have not yet reached the age of reason, who sometimes lose control of bodily functions…and sometimes can’t tell you when they need or want something isn’t frustrating, it’s hilarious…most of the time. I mean where else can you ask a client if he’s wiped or flushed or washed his hands when he comes out of the bathroom…lol.

Children don’t hate. They rarely seek revenge. They are usually lovers rather than brutes…and they learn…which is the best part of what I do.
Children have bountiful energy…I mean where else will your clients bounce off the walls ALL day every day and still have enough pizzazz and vigor to hug you, MMMMM?

Caring for other people’s children is actually easier than caring for your own. Since I started the Garden School, I’ve had my own grandchildren nearly every year. Because you know just what they are thinking and you’re really tied to them emotionally, you tend to over-ride the knowledge that spoiling them rotten is really a poor idea, and you do it anyway, and then you have to live with the results. Mostly, that means re-writing the gma role and letting everyone eat cake!

Other people’s children are more of a puzzle, a constant series of questions and possibilities, and there is where the delight comes in. Years ago, I was hired at the local newspaper as a columnist because I could get into a kid’s head and figure them out and I could put a decent sentence together that most of Evansville loved reading. It went National…it was fun and you can see those columns by Googling Judy Lyden. But that ability to understand children as whole developing human beings stays with me. And that is probably what keeps me loving the job. I understand…

Understanding a child means figuring out what he’s thinking and why. Then, to befriend the child and get him to trust you, you meet the child on a level HE will understand, and do it honestly without guile and without a traitorous agenda. Children need to know that you are on their side and that you ALWAYS keep your promises not only to them but to the people they love.

“Don’t you get upset a lot?”

“Rarely with a child.”

So…if you want to work with kids and do it well you need the following:

A big heart
A smile
An understanding that kids are mostly good
A sense of humor


What do you need to leave at the door?

Any dishonesty
Any grist
Any desire to oppress
And your frown

See? I never do anything hard…lol

Dr. Seuss Day on Friday…

Posted on by

Celebrating Dr. Seuss this week. He was a wonderful writer who dedicated a lot of his life to children. Here’s a little biography to read. We will be dressing up as our favorite Seuss characters on Friday.

“OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!
THERE IS FUN TO BE DONE! THERE ARE
POINTS TO BE SCORED. THERE ARE GAMES TO BE WON.”
Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

TM & © 2002-2004 Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P. All Rights Reserved.
Site developed by Tortus Technologies, Inc.

Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to the world as the beloved Dr. Seuss, was born in 1904 on Howard Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. Ted’s father, Theodor Robert, and grandfather were brewmasters in the city. His mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, often soothed her children to sleep by “chanting” rhymes remembered from her youth. Ted credited his mother with both his ability and desire to create the rhymes for which he became so well known.

Although the Geisels enjoyed great financial success for many years, the onset of World War I and Prohibition presented both financial and social challenges for the German immigrants. Nonetheless, the family persevered and again prospered, providing Ted and his sister, Marnie, with happy childhoods.

The influence of Ted’s memories of Springfield can be seen throughout his work. Drawings of Horton the Elephant meandering along streams in the Jungle of Nool, for example, mirror the watercourses in Springfield’s Forest Park from the period. The fanciful truck driven by Sylvester McMonkey McBean in The Sneetches could well be the Knox tractor that young Ted saw on the streets of Springfield. In addition to its name, Ted’s first children’s book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, is filled with Springfield imagery, including a look-alike of Mayor Fordis Parker on the reviewing stand, and police officers riding red motorcycles, the traditional color of Springfield’s famed Indian Motocycles.

Ted left Springfield as a teenager to attend Dartmouth College, where he became editor-in-chief of the Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth’s humor magazine. Although his tenure as editor ended prematurely when Ted and his friends were caught throwing a drinking party, which was against the prohibition laws and school policy, he continued to contribute to the magazine, signing his work “Seuss.” This is the first record of The Cat in the Hatthe “Seuss” pseudonym, which was both Ted’s middle name and his mother’s maiden name.

To please his father, who wanted him to be a college professor, Ted went on to Oxford University in England after graduation. However, his academic studies bored him, and he decided to tour Europe instead. Oxford did provide him the opportunity to meet a classmate, Helen Palmer, who not only became his first wife, but also a children’s author and book editor.

After returning to the United States, Ted began to pursue a career as a cartoonist. The Saturday Evening Post and other publications published some of his early pieces, but the bulk of Ted’s activity during his early career was devoted to creating advertising campaigns for Standard Oil, which he did for more than 15 years.

As World War II approached, Ted’s focus shifted, and he began contributing weekly political cartoons to PM magazine, a liberal publication. Too old for the draft, but wanting to contribute to the war effort, Ted served with Frank Capra’s Signal Corps (U.S. Army) making training movies. It was here that he was introduced to the art of animation and developed a series of animated training films featuring a trainee called Private Snafu.

While Ted was continuing to contribute to Life, Vanity Fair, Judge and other magazines, Viking Press offered him a contract to illustrate a collection of children’s sayings called Boners. Although the book was not a commercial success, the illustrations received great reviews, providing Ted with his first “big break” into children’s literature. Getting the first book that he both wrote and illustrated, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, published, however, required a great degree of persistence – it was rejected 27 times before being published by Vanguard Press.

The Cat in the Hat, perhaps the defining book of Ted’s career, developed as part of a unique joint venture between Houghton Mifflin (Vanguard Press) and Random House. Houghton Mifflin asked Ted to write and illustrate a children’s primer using only 225 “new-reader” vocabulary words. Because he was under contract to Random House, Random House obtained the trade publication rights, and Houghton Mifflin kept the school rights. With the release of The Cat in the Hat, Ted became the definitive children’s book author and illustrator.

After Ted’s first wife died in 1967, Ted married an old friend, Audrey Stone Geisel, who not only influenced his later books, but now guards his legacy as the president of Dr. Seuss Enterprises.

At the time of his death on September 24, 1991, Ted had written and illustrated 44 children’s books, including such all-time favorites as Green Eggs and Ham, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, Fox in Socks, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. His books had been translated into more than 15 languages. Over 200 million copies had found their way into homes and hearts around the world.

Besides the books, his works have provided the source for eleven children’s television specials, a Broadway musical and a feature-length motion picture. Other major motion pictures are on the way.

His honors included two Academy awards, two Emmy awards, a Peabody award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Monday’s Tattler

Posted on by

This is the first day of a three week play extravaganza. Every child will participate in the play, have lines to learn and lines to offer at the play. It’s a wonderful fun play about St. Patrick…a musical comedy with singing and snakes and lots of fun lines. We hope the children really enjoy this. We do the same spring play every year and make a lot of changes in lines to suit every year’s group of children.

Play lines will go home this week once we have chosen the leading rolls.
Congratulations go to our newly elected President, Alexis, and Vice President, Logan. Good choices. These are really great kids who will really add to our year.
As our health game finishes this week, we will add some self discipline activities. These are part of good mental health.
Please continue to watch for ill children. Children who need OTC medication in the morning should not come to school.
Have a great week!

Monday’s Tattler

Posted on by

It’s President’s Day and we will be in school. We are hoping that every parent checks their child’s throat this week BEFORE coming to school. We have had several cases of strep throat. Some children breeze through this as if there it is nothing…and some people become very very ill. Miss Lisa was so sick, her health was compromised for two weeks. It’s simply a matter of looking at your child. If your child is puny enough in the morning that he or she needs over the counter medication, he is obviously not well enough to come to school.

A headache in the morning means something is incubating. A child should not wake up with a headache.
Profuse green mucus running from the nose means your child has an infection. Keep him home.
If your child has a rash around his mouth, it could be impetigo which is caused by either a Strep infection or a Staff infection…he needs to be seen by a doctor.
A fever at 10:00 a.m. means he was given medication when he awoke and is ill and mommy knew it and sent him anyway.
If a child becomes ill by 10:00 a.m., there will be a school safety fine of $25.00 and your child MUST be seen by a doctor BEFORE coming home.
This is your duty as a parent. Your child’s health is your responsibility, and illness is not one of those things that we share.
This week at school, we will be talking about what it means to be the President. We will talk about the great presidents. We will talk about what a president does. And then we will give the children an opportunity to run for Garden School President. The campaign will be this week starting on Tuesday, and our vote will be on Friday. Your child is welcome to bring campaign posters and give-a-ways like pencils and candy.
On Wednesday, Mr. Terry will turn 70. We will have a party for him on Tuesday p.m. at snack time.
Wednesday begins Lent. We will have the children make a “bona opera” which is Latin for a good work. This good work will be sent home and parents are encouraged to support your child’s good work the forty days of lent.
If you do not have a red sweatshirt, please let Miss Judy know because I have ordered them and they will be in on Tuesday.
Have a great and healthy week.

Possibilities by Judy Lyden

Posted on by

What makes a restaurant great? A zoo great? A town great? The managers all see the endless possibilities and work to bring about those dreams until they are not dreams but realities. As I watch Newburgh get bigger and bigger, I remember it as a population of 500 and much of the downtown abandoned. But in the thirty eight years we have lived here, the population is probably 10,000, there is a cancer center, a hospital, a strip shopping center with a Walmart, the old part of town is vibrant, there is the largest concession of baseball in the country, and the school system is outstanding…because people brought the possibilities of their hearts and minds to Newburgh.

Dreaming is a great past time…I fully recommend it. But dreams should never stop with a passing thought. Dreams need to be worked on until they are reality.

I once thought it would be a wonderful life to own a bed and breakfast retreat way out in the country. Just think of all the possibilities… a hobby farm where people could come and live the life…gardening, breeding and raising animals, putting food by as an art, cooking, quilting, knitting in the winter, building things, walking and exploring nature, riding animals… beautiful occasions…the list just goes on and on. Wrong house, wrong location, wrong husband…so there had to be a compromise.
I once thought it would be fun to have a little boarding summer camp…same possibilities with more sports and more work! So the compromise was the Garden School.
When I wrote my first novel, I wrote it for college. My professor was very happy with the first chapter and told me that I had fulfilled my senior thesis obligation…five hundred pages later, I agreed. There were these absolutely wonderful characters…John of Gaunt, third son of Edward III (1350- 1399) and I had traced his life for fourteen years. I even got his household journals in Middle French and poured over them for weeks. Then I created Anne…the perpetual thorn in his side…now was I going to just abandon them on page 22? What WERE the possibilities? Thousands…so five hundred and 25 pages later…it was finished.

There are possibilities in every possible dimension of life. Look at your closet, at your refrigerator, your living room, your next occasion…the possibilities are astounding. As I walked by the river this p.m., I realized all the possibilities of having my very small front garden have the addition of carefully picked driftwood so that certain plants would be shaded when necessary, and have things to grow near, in and on. Not too much…just a piece at a time…can’t wait to see the possibilities.

Raising children is no different. What are MY child’s possibilities. What are his or her interests and how can that be guided toward the endless possibilities that mean productivity in their adult lives. My own son was interested in lots of things like stamp collecting, soccer, dangerous activities like swimming across the river…and then the love of his life took hold in high school…physics.

“Mom, I’m going to build a nuclear accelerator in my room.”

“Go ahead.”

“I need lots of copper.”

“Go to the hardware store, but if you plug it in and my house explodes, I will kill you.”

“Mom, it’s perfectly safe.”

It was extremely safe aside from the copper wires I’ve pulled out of the carpet for twenty years. But the possibilities were all there to offer him an opportunity to grow as an inventor, a developer, a man with ideas who was not afraid to try.

“I’m going to learn Arabic,” said Anne at age seventeen after informing a restaurant owner that she would be cooking for him. He said he would give it a week, and she lasted seven years.

“Go ahead.”

“I will need books.”

“Get them.”

And she did get the books and she does…know Arabic.

Providing opportunities to children begins with Legos, with glue, reams of paper, colored pencils, dolls, trucks, sand, fabric, sports equipment, lessons, books, and so many things we take for granted as everyday childhood supplies that find their way to the bottom of the toy box.

Remember, these ordinary supplies are new to children, and children need to have an abundance of them be able to explore ideas and possibilities that will make their dreams come true. So make a place for their supplies and encourage your child to play, create, invent, explore and develop.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to ask questions, and give those special words of support.

“You did what?”

“I swam across the river and back.”

“You idiot.”

Monday’s Tattler

Posted on by

This week is Valentine’s Day on Tuesday. We will need for you to send forty Valentine’s Day cards that are signed but not addressed on Tuesday morning.

If it is snowing, and schools are called, we will do Valentine’s Day on Wednesday.
There will be a party for the kids on Tuesday at 3:00. Parents are welcomed but it’s not mandatory. If you are coming, please bring a treat to share.
School will dismiss at 4:00 for everyone.
We will be continuing our health game this week. We will be studying fruits and vegetables as our “energy foods.”
For school closings, go to WFIE channel 14.
Have a great week!

What Have We Lost and Gained? by Judy Lyden

Posted on by

As I was taking a nice long walk by the river today, I started to think about things and came back again and again to how much things have changed in my remembered years. As I thought about conversations I’ve had with my young teachers and some of our parents, I see a really see saw of good and not so good in the lives we all live.

I remember a time when you went to the library to look up information you wanted to know because it was interesting to you. You borrowed a stack of heavy books and dragged them home for two weeks and poured over them and made notes with a fountain pen and binder paper. Then you dragged them all back again for another stack.

We now have an ability to get information from the Internet at a moments notice. We can find out just about anything from who bought a certain piece of property, to how many calories there are in the chocolate covered beetle we ate at the last fair. We can find out who is who and why they are who. We can find out the answers to our children’s homework, why you can’t go to Saudi Arabia if you’re Jewish, and what it means to be a Catholic…
But what have we lost? In the grand scheme of information, have we lost the ability to be educated and only “informed?” Have we lost the desire to read whole books in our wild scramble to collect what is essentially useless information? Do we know more or less? Is our Weltanuchaung wider and more complete, or sadly lacking?
I remember twice a year, I would put my best dress on, my Mary Jane’s, my dress coat and go with my mother down to the ferry and ferry across to San Francisco for a day of shopping, lunch out at Blum’s with both my parents, and ended the day with a huge Golden Gate Bridge dessert made from ice cream and wafer cookies. Sometimes we would go to a very very rare movie; it was a vacation day and treasured.
Today, we can shop on line, buy nearly anything we want, and we can have it delivered overnight. We can pay with a card, get deferred payment on money back cards that earn us vacation dollars by punching in a number or even clicking once to buy. We can watch any movie we want anytime we want.
But what are we buying? What are we watching? And are these things treasured? Has the joy of Christmas buying and wrapping only turned into a mind boggling chore? Do we dread someone’s birthday because it means endless shopping for something they “don’t” have? Have we lost that human contact with local shop owners? Do we know from whom we are shopping? And do we actually “watch” a movie or just have it on for the distracting noise?
I remember eating out a lot as a child because my parents were very modern. We ate abalone and whole jalapeno peppers, and tiny bay shrimp. We ate Polynesian food at a place called Tiburon Tommy’s and it included tiny sweet spareribs and egg rolls. Every year we waited for strawberries, peaches and grapes to come into season. You got cake on your birthday, and ice cream as a really special occasion treat, and soda pop was a Shirley Temple at the restaurant. We ate pizza once a week at another place and few of my friends knew what a pizza was.
Today, people can and do eat out any night of the week. We can have out of season food every day. We can eat, chocolate, ice cream, soda, chips, pizza and strawberries every day.
But what have we lost? While we take grapes for granted as a year round fruit, we have lost the ideal of cooking and have substituted carry out as the ideal for food. We have gained weight, lost general good health, lost the desire to try new things, and have decreased our longevity. We are the first generation who will not outlive our parents.
We can travel anywhere with a click of our mouse. If you even said those ten words to someone I grew up with back then, he or she would have thought that you were telling a story filled with imagination. Today I heard from Facebook that my son is going to Saudi Arabia. He travels all the time. He was in Switzerland last week, and he will be in Southern California by the end of the month. He lives in Germany. Travel is instant, and people do it all the time.
In a George Bernard Shaw production years ago, I heard a statement, “Travel narrows one.” Terry and I laughed at the statement years ago. How funny that someone would even say something as completely stupid as “travel narrows one.” But has it become narrowing? Is it as exciting today as it was years ago? Or has travel become a chore, an invasive, abusive chore that is dreaded by those who have to do it over and over again.
I’m a writer, so I “rarely take my body with me when I travel…” and for many who do travel, they would laugh at that statement today much more readily than “travel narrows one.”
When I was a little girl, I had a doctor who was kindly, cared about us, made house calls, and chatted with my mother for what seemed to be hours. When I was a young woman, I had a doctor I adored. She was, for me, my safety zone. She is still a friend.
Today, I put off going to the doctor as if it’s a death sentence. It takes years to make those appointments. Only the bitterest and most sleepless nights will drive me forward…and what have we lost? Routine medicine has taken over personalized medicine. The idea that we are being lined up like cattle to be shot, wormed, numbered, and stamped sends chills up my spine. One must have the doctor read your name on the file before you can be confident the doctor even has the right patient.
In the gush to have everything done now, have we lost the personal touch? Have we lost that “wait and see” kind of medicine that got you through without a pill and without a quick fix that takes the rest of your life to repair? Are we saturated with medication? What happened to a hot bath and a nap to fix a headache? What happened to a little brandy and someone to talk to to save you from taking a Xanax? What happened to the idea that we can fix type two diabetes with diet and exercise? What happened to building a body that could withstand chronic illness?
With all the marvelous developments we have been blessed with over the years, are we really taking the best advantage we can and benefiting or are we grabbing defeat at the hands of victory? It’s probably a crude combination. Personally, I love the Internet, my Kindle, buying all those out of season foods, and shopping on line…I just hope I don’t take those things for granted.

Brain Food

Posted on by

By Alan Greene from the Center of Ecoliteracy:

(This is an excellent article and well worth reading.)

What’s on your child’s plate today?

It is my strong conviction that children deserve a healthy breakfast to start the school morning right and a healthy school lunch to fuel their growing and their learning. I have come to believe that nutrition plays a key role, by providing them with a critical physiological foundation to help them succeed in school. Behavior and academic performance are significantly affected by the quantity and quality of the foods we provide children during the school years.

Today in the United States, one in six children suffers from a disability that affects their behavior, memory, or ability to learn. We spend more than $80 billion each year to treat neurodevelopmental disorders. Diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) alone up are up 250 percent since 1990. How much of a role does modern food play in this increase?

Children’s brains are built differently depending on what they are fed when they are rapidly growing. Healthy brains are about 60 percent structural fat (not like the flabby fat found elsewhere in the body). As the brain grows, it selects building blocks from among the fatty acids available in what the child eats. The most prevalent structural fat in the brain is DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), one of the omega-3 fatty acids. DHA is also a major structural component of the retina of the eye. A large number of studies have suggested that low DHA levels are associated with problems with intelligence, vision, and behavior.

DHA is the most prevalent long chain fatty acid in human breast milk, which suggests that it’s intended for babies to consume a lot of it. Studies have shown that babies who have not gotten DHA in their diets have significantly less of it in their brains than those who have. My point here is not about the superiority of breast milk, but that growing children quite literally are what they eat. When you think about this, you begin to feel differently about “cheap” food.

Iron is another nutrient that is essential to optimal brain function. Here’s a very interesting study reported in the December 2004 Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine – the first to connect children’s iron levels and ADHD.

Between March 2002 and June 2003, 110 children from the same school district in Paris, France were referred to a university hospital to be evaluated for school-related problems. Researchers analyzed blood samples from the 53 of these children who met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, and from 27 of the children who did not. The average ferritin (iron) level in the non-ADHD kids was normal, but the average level in the children with ADHD was about half that of the other children. Fully 84 percent of the children with ADHD were iron deficient. And the lower the iron levels, the worse the ADHD symptoms – worse hyperactivity, worse oppositional behavior, and worse cognitive scores.

The stunning part of this study was that none of the children had iron levels low enough to indicate anemia. The iron deficiency was subtle enough that all tested normal on the hemoglobin or hematocrit blood tests used in doctors’ offices to screen for iron problems. I suspect that inadequate iron in the diet is also affecting the attention, focus, and activity of many children who don’t meet the full definition of ADHD.

When other researchers fed appropriate iron to children with ADHD, their test scores and ADHD symptoms improved.

Kids need more than isolated, individual nutrients to boost their brains and school performance. There are big-picture benefits to eating a balanced diet rich in fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and fiber.

Antioxidants include a large variety of compounds found in a large variety of whole foods. Antioxidants in foods have been linked to improved memory and brain function.

Even in the same food, antioxidant levels can vary depending on how the food is grown. Organic foods, on average, are about 30 percent higher in antioxidants than are their nonorganic counterparts. That means each organic serving may be packed with more valuable nutrients. Talk about extra credit!

Organophosphates are the most commonly used insecticides in conventional, chemical agriculture. These chemicals act as nerve agents, and have been linked to neurodevelopmental problems. Organically grown foods are produced without the use of toxic pesticides such as organophosphates. Choosing organic foods for children can immediately and significantly decrease their exposure to organophosphate pesticides. That’s good protection for the developing brain — it’s elementary.

Some are afraid that school children would have to eat unfamiliar or unappetizing foods in order to make a difference. Not so! A February 2006 study conducted by Dr. Chensheng Lu and colleagues demonstrated an immediate and dramatic ability to reduce organophosphate pesticide exposure by making simple diet changes in elementary school children.

The researchers conducted this study with typical suburban children. The elementary school kids began eating organic versions of whatever they were eating before. For example, if they typically ate apples, now they got organic apples. Only if there was a simple organic substitution available for what the kids were already eating, did they make a switch. The kids didn’t have to learn to like any new foods. Within 24 hours, pesticide breakdown products found in the urine plummeted! They continued this way for five days, with clean urine samples morning and night. Then the kids went back to their typical, nonorganic diets, and immediately the pesticides returned.

Researchers at the University of Southampton studied over 1800 three-year-old children, some with and some without ADHD, some with and some without allergies. After initial behavioral testing, all of the children got one week of a diet without any artificial food colorings and without any chemical preservatives. The children’s behavior measurably improved during this week. But was this from the extra attention, from eating more fruits and vegetables, or from the absence of the preservatives and artificial colors?

To answer this question, the researchers continued the diet, but gave the children disguised drinks containing either a mixture of artificial colorings and the preservative benzoate, or similarly colored drinks from natural food sources. The weeks that children got the hidden chemicals, their behavior was substantially worse. This held true whether or not they had been diagnosed with hyperactivity, and whether or not they had tested positive for allergies.

The Journal of Pediatrics reported that there is a more pronounced response to a glucose load in children than in adults. In children, hypoglycemia-like symptoms (including shakiness, sweating, and altered thinking and behavior) may occur at a blood sugar level that would not be considered hypoglycemic. The authors reason that the problem is not sugar, per se, but highly refined sugars and carbohydrates, which enter the bloodstream quickly and produce more rapid fluctuations in blood glucose levels.

Kids’ brains are high-performance engines, and if we want them to do their best in school, we need to provide them with clean, high-quality fuel. For growing children this means a balanced diet of delicious whole foods, grown in a nutrition-enhancing way without toxic pesticides, and prepared in an appealing manner that also preserves nutrients.

Solid science has shown that food affects kids’ memory, attention, and cognitive skills. Even whether or not they eat breakfast changes their test scores. What they eat, how their food is grown, and how their food is processed can all help their brains to operate at their very best. Let’s give our kids the edge they deserve.