Tag Archives | Children

Prescribing Mood Drugs For The Symptoms Of Childhood Poverty

By on October 16, 2012 in News 11

New York Times on the growing trend of doping up poor kids suffering from academic and social issues, since it’s apparent we’re not going to improve their surroundings:

When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools.

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians.

… Read the rest

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Money Will Movitate The Digital Tracking Of Schoolchildren

By on September 13, 2012 in News 44

There’s money to be made in the cattle-style tracking of kids with RFID-chip IDs, and so the practice may become widespread, Wired writes:

Two schools at the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when classes began last Monday. Like most state-financed schools, their budgets are tied to average daily attendance. If a student is not in his seat during morning roll call, the district doesn’t receive daily funding for that pupil. But with the RFID tracking, students not at their desk but tracked on campus are counted as being in school that day, and the district receives its daily allotment for that student.

There appears to be dozens of companies who…offer their RFID wares to monitor students in what is still a tiny but growing market. Among the biggest companies in the market: AT&T.

About two dozen health and privacy advocates who signed an August position paper blasting the use of RFID chips in schools.

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Woman Faces $600 a Day Fine for Giving Free Lunches to Poor Children

By on August 21, 2012 in News 29

Picture: Beau Wade (CC)

This is tyranny.

Gil Spencer reports for the Daily Times:

In a summer of surprises, the biggest one for Angela Prattis was being treated like a criminal for handing out free lunches to the children in her neighborhood.

Her strangely considerate behavior earned her a visit from a Chester Township official who told her to knock it off.

“He told me to shut it down,” Prattis said. “He said it was a zoning issue.”

She was told she needed to apply for a variance to serve lunch to her neighbors’ children. The application would cost her $1,000. And she was threatened with a fine of $600 a day for every day she continued to allegedly violate the township’s zoning law.

God bless the Chester Township zoning board. What would the good citizens of that municipality do without its protection from the scourge of unlicensed lunch givers?

… Read the rest

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Texas Gun Range To Host Children’s Birthday Parties

By on August 13, 2012 in News 13

Gotta start ‘em young. Via Yahoo! News:

A new gun range opening this summer in Lewisville, Texas, will have two rooms available for hosting children’s birthday parties. Owner David Prince tells WFAA that the Eagle Gun Range will be available for children as young as eight years old.

“The age limit is eight years old. You have to be tall enough to get above the shooting table,” Prince said. “They’re not gonna be left unattended. Parents are gonna be one-on-one, or if there’s not enough parents we’ll have range safety officers here to show them how to do it safely.”

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Houston School Districts To Use Electronic Cattle Tags On Children

By on June 5, 2012 in News 11

Photo: ken ratcliff (CC)

In a sense, it’s positive that we at least care about our children’s whereabouts as much as prized livestock. The Dallas Morning News writes:

Two school districts in the Houston area have begun monitoring students whereabouts on campus by issuing them identification badges with radio frequency identification technology – the same technology used to track cattle.

The Spring school district in Houston has distributed the ID badges to about 13,500 of its 36,000 students since December 2008. The Santa Fe school district, about 30 miles south of Houston, began using the badges this year.

School officials say the devices improve security and increase attendance rates, a figure that’s important because some school funding is tied to attendance. ”It feels like someone’s watching you at all times,” said Jacorey Jackson, 11, a sixth-grader at Bailey.

… Read the rest

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Christians Fight for Their Children’s God-Given Right to Bully Gay Kids

By on April 6, 2012 in News 62

INRIWrites Erin Gloria Ryan on Jezebel:

Despite the fact that there’s scant evidence in the Bible that Jesus was an asshole who commanded his followers to bully gay children to death, a group of American Christian parents seem to think Christ has called upon them to act like jerks. That’s why they’re actively working against the passage of anti-bullying laws at the state level — they believe that by making repeated, ongoing cruelty illegal, lawmakers are interfering with their Jesus loving child’s right to point out that homosexuality is wrong and bad and hellbound.

“Bullying children is wrong and bad” may sound like the most basic tenet of human decency, but if you ask conservative lobbying groups like Concerned Women for America and Focus on the Family, making it a crime to taunt someone until they kill themselves is akin to interfering with religious freedom. According to AlterNet’s Katherine Stewart, conservative groups across the country have opposed various anti-bullying measures because they say outlawing bullying is akin to state endorsement of the homosexual lifestyle.

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The Right to Sell Kids Junk

By on March 28, 2012 in News 10

Froot-Loops-Cereal-BowlFood critic and blogger extraordinaire Mark Bittman makes the point that a Constitution protecting corporations’ right to inundate children with junk food is wack (especially because the obesity and other health problems it leads to will require health care, which the Constitution may or may not allow the government to provide), in the New York Times:

The First Amendment to the Constitution, which tops our Bill of Rights, guarantees — theoretically, at least — things we all care about. So much is here: freedom of religion, of the press, of speech, the right to assemble and more. Yet it’s stealthily and incredibly being invoked to safeguard the nearly unimpeded “right” of a handful of powerful corporations to market junk food to children.

It’s been reported that kids see an average of 5,500 food ads on television every year (sounds low, when you think about it), nearly all peddling junk. (They may also see Apple commercials, but not of the fruit kind.) Worse are the online “advergames” that distract kids with entertainment while immersing them in a product-driven environment.

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The Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood

By on March 16, 2012 in News 3

summerhill (8)I can’t even imagine what a childhood without advertising would be. Boston Magazine writes:

Susan Linn and her tiny but hugely influential nonprofit Boston nonprofit, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, have become a child marketer’s worst nightmare. Just ask Disney, Hasbro, Scholastic, and Kellogg.

The CCFC is concerned with two overlapping issues: the amount of time children spend in front of an ever-growing array of screens — TVs, computers, smartphones, tablets — and the marketing messages they are subjected to while glued to them. Under Linn’s direction, the group has taken on some of the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. It forced Kellogg to remove SpongeBob SquarePants and other cartoon characters from the packaging of foods that were light on nutritional value. It got Hasbro to shelve plans for a new line of dolls based on the sexpot pop act the Pussycat Dolls (“Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?”).

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Did Time-Travel TV Really Kill Two Chinese Schoolgirls?

By on March 15, 2012 in News 11

TVAnna North writes on Jezebel:

A Chinese newspaper claims two young girls committed suicide in hopes of traveling back in time like the characters on popular TV shows. Is this a real case of death-by-TV, or is it government propaganda?

The English-language site People’s Daily Online has the story, which apparently originated at the paper China Daily. Fifth-grader Xiao Hua (not her real name) apparently “realized she lost the remote control for a rolling door at her house.” So she decided to commit suicide. Her friend Xiao Mei (also a pseudonym) decided to die with her, “because they were the best friends.” She, however, had bigger concerns than a remote control: “She planned to travel back to the Qing Dynasty (1644—1911) to make a film of an emperor; and she wanted to visit outer space.” The two wrote suicide notes and then drowned themselves in a pool.

This sounds like a cautionary tale about parenting — if your kid thinks killing herself is a good response to losing the remote control, you might not be sending the right message about the value of everyday objects …

Read More: Jezebel… Read the rest

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Corporations Kidnap the Lorax and Use Him to Greenwash Dangerous Products

By on March 1, 2012 in News 17

Lorax MovieVia Common Dreams:

Environmentalists and child advocates are raising warning flags this week over the consumer-driven, corporate-sponsored ad campaigns and product tie-ins surrounding the movie version of Dr. Seuss’ ‘The Lorax’.  One of the most beloved children’s book authors of all time, Dr. Seuss published his environmental parable in 1971.

Generations of children have been moved by its powerful tale of how rampant greed and consumerism destroyed the forest of Truffula Trees and the Brown Bar-ba-loots, Swomee-Swans, and Humming-Fish that depended on them. But now, according to the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), the book’s powerful message is in danger of being crushed by a real-life landslide of corporate greed after Dr. Seuss Enterprises, Random House, and Universal Pictures produced the film and sold licenses for the various product agreements.

In a statement accouncing their new campaign to ‘Save the Lorax!‘ the CCFC writes:

For more than forty years, Dr.

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