TOP 100 NEWSPAPER SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Woods to Take Indefinite Hiatus From Golf World No. 1 men's golfer makes decision as he attempts to repair his marriage after recent revelations of womanizing www1.voanews.com |
Thousands of Taiwanese protest China envoy's visit TAICHUNG, Taiwan (AP) -- Tens of thousands of opposition demonstrators marched through the streets of the central Taiwanese city of Taichung on Sunday, ahead of the arrival of a senior Chinese envoy for trade talks that some on the island fear could eventually lead to unification.... hosted.ap.org |
Leave families to nag in peace | Zoe Williams Boomerang children can sleep soundly. When it comes to meddling, Whitehall hasn't a clueParents are being advised on how to cope with "boomerang children" – offspring who come back even after you've thrown them out. (Indeed, the further you throw them, the faster they come back.) A manual published this week by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform advocates tough love, suggesting that beneficiaries of a full fridge and a clothing valet service will never leave home.I don't understand this. It is a badge of honour for young people to have nothing in the fridge but vodka and batteries. That's why they leave home in the first place, to get away from the incessant juice and cheese. People will travel continents to escape a mother who irons. You leave home because your parents vex and suffocate you with the assumption that you're six years old and don't know how to turn off a tap or answer the phone without swearing.All this is as old as time itself, surely. And yet more young people than at any time in two decades – 25% of men and 13% of women aged between 25 and 29 – are still at home. That is a massive social shift. Parents must have become exponentially nicer to live with. I blame the oestrogen in tap water. Or perhaps there's been a massive recession and graduate unemployment has gone up 44% in one year.Anyway, a few weeks loafing about looking in the fridge can so easily turn into a few months lying on the sofa; and before you know it, your young graduates are long-term unemployed, polishing off your Benecol. You need to get them moving again, but the manual stresses: "Don't nag – nagging can make young people feel more stressed and makes failure to get a job worse." This doesn't read at all like an instruction to the parent of an adult. How can an agency of regulatory reform know anything about my nagging technique, or yours? I might have 560 styles of harassment, each tailored for the appropriate family member and size of task.This always happens when you read tips from a government department striving to get into the crevices of personal space. It never convinces, because it can never be controversial. It has to take the most neutral line, because anything else would prompt scrutiny, and the first thing a scrutineer would say is: "What on earth are you doing on this territory, government department?"We all have unique relationships with our parents and children. So the very idea of universal behaviours and techniques that will work in every household is flawed. More than flawed, though, I believe that it actively, if only subtly, damages social cohesion. Every time you listen to a piece of advice – from "Don't iron" to "Use a low-fat spread" – and think, well, that's not me, I am morally opposed to low-fat spreads and I don't know how to iron, the effect is a miniature alienation: not just between oneself and the voice of authority, but also between oneself and one's peers. We all assume, if it's not us, then it must be most people, otherwise there would be no point saying it.All this – the meddling, the embarrassment (no department enjoys putting out manuals telling parents not to iron, surely), the obvious lack of meaningful impact, the waste of money (well, probably – but definitely a waste of paper), the breakdown of respect from the government to the family, from the family back to the government: all this, just to avoid saying "your situation has materially deteriorated because there's a recession and there aren't many jobs". I don't blame them, the truth is ugly. But maybe government departments should stick to VAT legislation – no chance of over-complication there.Parents and parentingFamilyFamily financesChildrenRecessionGraduate careersZoe Williamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Increasingly, the rarest experience in family life is undivided attention | Madeleine Bunting The capacity to listen, and other crucial human attributes, are being diminished by relentless technological expansionIn the two weeks leading up to Christmas, the crisis of environmental sustainability dominated every headline. Since the new year, a number of stories seem to raise disturbing questions about another kind of sustainability: the durability and quality of human relationships, and how we transmit to children the skills and values needed to conduct them. There have been a batch of stories about loneliness; we now have well-established evidence of rising depression rates and increased emotional problems in adolescence. In his fascinating book Loneliness, John Cacioppo, the American psychologist, argues that one-fifth of people are lonely.There is no shortage of explanations as to the causes of this unhappy fifth. Interestingly, two of the most popular – family breakdown favoured by the right and inequality favoured by the left – were largely ruled out in one of the most meticulous time trend studies of this growing malaise. The Nuffield Foundation's groundbreaking work on adolescence, which now spans 1974 to 2004, is unequivocal that young people in the UK now have a "significantly higher level of emotional and behavioural problems than 16-year-olds living through the 70s and 80s". But it dismissed "fractured" family lives as a cause and was clear that "increasing socio-economic inequalities are not the full explanation". It asks: "Has something changed about peer group interactions and non-family socialisation? Do young people spend their time in very different ways compared with their parents' generation? Do they spend less time with adults? Do we parent differently from families in other countries or differently from the 70s?"The short answer to all of the above is yes. The most obvious driver of change is new media technology, which is dramatically re-shaping all kinds of human interaction. Raymond Tallis has coined the word the "e-ttenuation" of relationships to describe the consequences: faced with such an abundance of interesting choices, there is a reluctance to commit and a provisionalism which promotes grazing, keeping options open. Above all, there is a paradigm of contractualism: relationships are measured by the question "what's in it for me?" It is not technology per se at fault, but how it is used, and in particular how it combines with another equally powerful phenomenon – commercialisation; the assessment that everyone and everything has a price. It is the two combined which I would argue are so corrosive to our capabilities to create and sustain relationships of depth and durability.Last week's report by Jean Gross, an educational psychologist, that one in six children has difficulty learning to speak and listen, is the kind of story which gets likened to the canary down the mine shaft. It follows several reports with similar findings: children are turning up to primary school struggling to construct sentences, according to John Bercow's government report in 2008.The process of listening to someone and responding in speech is the most ordinary everyday task – and the most demanding of social skills. How we read facial expressions, body language and speech to interpret what has been said, and how that expresses relationships, is an immensely complex process. Listening is a huge, much underrated skill, requiring personal preoccupations to be set aside, if only momentarily, in order to be attentive to another.These skills are among the most important inheritance a parent ever bequeaths; if these are not being transmitted effectively in a significant section of the population, what is going on? Gross pointed to factors such as parents not having enough time with their children because of long working hours, and too much screen-based entertainment. The child needs you, "not expensive toys and big houses", concluded Gross.Children are spending on average six hours a day in front of screens – either computers or televisions. Interaction with their parents is subject to interruptions from mobiles and BlackBerrys as work spills into private lives. Increasingly the rarest experience in family life is undivided attention, being present as everyone juggles technologies: iPods and Facebook, BlackBerrys and landlines. Family life is no longer private, it's porous to all the networks outside it.IPods can be great, mobile phones very useful, and it's handy keeping up with people on Facebook. The problem is the quantity of this connectivity and its potential for addiction – how it is deliberately designed to draw people ever deeper. A majority of people can put boundaries on these pleasures – even Davina McCall, who has presided over a particularly addictive form of reality television, rations TV for her three children, we were told last week. But that requires a form of self-control, and deferred gratification – values which are profoundly counter-cultural and yet which psychologists argue are crucial life skills: you learn them if you are lucky enough to have parents who understand their importance and teach them by example. That's a lottery.The potential damage of the "telemediation" of everyday life is compounded by the fact that so much of screen entertainment is commercialised. It's a world increasingly structured around buying and selling; the average viewer sees 43 adverts a day compared with 33 a decade ago. The internet is permeated with desperate, intrusive salesmanship. Adults have slowly been allowed to develop the capacity to deal with advertising; children stumble into these network shopping malls bewildered. With a tin ear for this issue, the culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, announced last week to howls of outrage that the government will allow product placement in television programmes. Another precious bastion of public space beyond the tentacles of commercialisation is collapsing.If you want to glimpse how children are being groomed to operate in this commercialised telemediated space, go to Club Penguin. Kids are enthralled by its elaborate world of puffles and dojos; seduced on to a free site, the child is then confronted at every point by options reserved for fully paid-up members. The latter get to decorate their igloos and change the clothes on their penguin avatar. This is a game which trains children to understand how consumerism humiliates and excludes those who can't pay.Children graduate from Club Penguin to Facebook, where adolescents have found a whole new forum for their quest for selfhood. "Who am I, who do I want to be?": these staples of western individualism have found amplification on the net. As an article in the New York Times explored, social networking is curiously addictive as it feeds on adolescent social insecurities. One social scientist argued: "If you're watching the social landscape on the screen and if you're obsessed with your position in that landscape, it's very hard to look away."This is not a Luddite diatribe against technology, but an argument for how carefully it has to be managed if other human attributes, such as the capacity for commitment, are to flourish. The American academic Robert Putnam, in his influential book Bowling Alone, placed considerable blame on television for the decline in many aspects of civic engagement. We should be watching carefully for how a new generation of media technology might erode another area of relationship – the intimacies of family life, the nursery of our skills to speak, listen and build relationships.InternetRelationshipsChildrenFamilyBen BradshawProduct placementMadeleine Buntingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Indian prisoners get sentences cut for doing yoga Prisoners in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh are being offered reduced sentences if they complete yoga courses. news.bbc.co.uk |