Childcare

On attachment, ADHD, ADD and screen time.

Dec 09, 2023

It’s been a while since I published a piece from Amelia.

She was one of my primary mentors in the early days of waking up to childhood vaccination.

We share a deep dislike of doctors and pediatricians, and we both agree that far more blame and responsibility needs to be laid at their feet than most dissident voices are prepared to do. It’s usually government or industry or parents…doctors seem to get a pass.

She introduced me to Dr Levy and Vitamin C.

Anyway, I’ve learned a lot form her and am grateful she has been a part of my journey so far.

She recently wrote to me with a couple of detailed emails about childcare that she has now turned them into the article I’m publishing below.

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As you know, I’m now primarily interested in the following question: What else have they lied to me about?

It looks like childcare is another enterprise burdened with untruths.

Of course, it would be, it has all the ingredients.

Its government funded or subsidized. That right there should be proof positive that it will come with its own government funded propaganda.
It has huge amounts of private capital engaged in the enterprise.
Its workforce is “educated” in a manner that is highly ideological and politicized.

Government, industry, and ideology…what more do you need to create an ecosystem not aligned with reality or truth.

Amelia mentions Biddulph in her piece. I read “Manhood” about 20 years ago and was stunned by its depth of insight. I would tell women I knew that they should read it as a “operating guide” for men. I think it’s a classic that holds up today even better than it did in 1995 when it was first published.

In recent times I’ve been especially interested in childcare but through the lens of childhood vaccination. Amelia again gets the credit for making me realise the impact of the No Jab No Play laws.

No Jab, No Pay or Play - Lies are Unbekoming (substack.com)

No Jab, No Play: You need to think about this for a moment, the “play” is deceptive. It suggests it’s about kids playing with other kids, and for sure there is a component of that, but it’s not the 80% pareto of the subject. It should be called No Jab, No Job.
If you are a two-income family, as the majority of the country is now, and you have a child that you cannot send to child-care or day-care, because they have not been injected with aluminium, then who is going to look after that child so the mother and/or the father can go to work and make a living? If one of them, most typically the mother, is FORCED to stay at home, then she is FORCED to leave her JOB. So, No Jab just became No Job, which fits in perfectly with the above government definition “preventing the person from working”.
So, let’s be very clear please, the National and almost all State governments are engaged in the financial abuse of Australian unvaccinated families. It seems that TAS, ACT and NT are the only holdouts regarding No Jab, No Play (Job). I find the ACT very interesting as that is where all the Canberra politicians and public servants live and work, and obviously the unvaccinated children of the Federal administrative state get a pass from the coercion, discrimination, and abuse.

After all it is simple – if vaccinations fully work, then vaccinate your kids and don’t worry about those who don’t, and if they don’t work then making them mandatory will do nothing. Either way, mandatory vaccinations are pointless, possibly even harmful and come at a huge cost to civil rights and informed choice. - Dr. Stefan Aeberhand, 2015 submission to VIC government

Correct. In California the only options are homeschooling or moving out of state. Doctors can go to prison for 4 years for writing medical exemptions, so they don’t. Democrats hate the unvaccinated. – Larry Cook @stopvaccinating

If my wife and I had our time over again, we would have done the childcare thing differently, especially with our son who I think we sent to childcare too early. I can blame circumstance at the time, but I think if I’m being honest, we could have worked harder to find other solutions.

With thanks to Amelia…for everything.

Childcare

My trifecta when raising my sons was: no jabs, no screen time (not even Pingu DVDs – what a cruel mum!) or time spent with professional carers until the year after their third birthday, when they went to a preschool for two short days each week during school term.

The highest priority for many women is to raise their young children at home or in a home like setting. Some are forced by circumstances to ignore it. Some women choose to prioritise their careers and financial ambitions and choose to put their children in childcare facilities.

Apart from the fact I loved spending time with my boys, I knew children’s brains double in size in their first two years and if they don’t experience security, lots of love and empathy during those years so much could go wrong for them in later life.

Harry Harlow conducted famous, and cruel, experiments in which he sacrificed a few monkeys to teach the world about the needs of babies.

Psychologist Harry Harlow Biography

Prevailing thought during Harlow's time suggested that paying attention to young children would "spoil" them and that affection should be limited. Harlow's work instead demonstrated the absolute importance of developing safe, secure, and supportive emotional bonds with caregivers during early childhood.

Many experts at the time also believed that feeding was the primary force between the mother-and-child bonds. Harlow's work suggested that while feedings are important, it is the physical closeness and contact that provides the comfort and security that a child needs for normal development.

John Bowlby, another famous psychologist, also taught the world about their needs. Other psychologists have continued their work and teach mothers about ‘Attachment’ and ‘Attuned’ parenting of babies.

Do you remember the Romanian orphans who were adopted by Westerners in the 1980s? Here is what researchers found had happened to their brains.

Romania’s Forgotten Children: Sensory Deprivation Revisited

‘The time spent in institutions before adoption into families in the United Kingdom varied between 3 and 41 months. The researchers showed that in the group of young adults who had been adopted into British families, there were changes in brain volume linked to their early life deprivation which were statistically associated with lower IQ and greater attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms. Importantly this research has shown that structural brain changes in adulthood can be associated with the duration of deprivation experienced at a very young age (Mackes et al., Citation2020). Hence, despite the best efforts of charities operating in Romania such as Health Aid UK, the very early experiences of neglect and emotional deprivation in these groups of children have enduring and lifelong effects.’

Michael Leunig has drawn poignant cartoons about the experience of children in childcare. ‘Me time’ career women in politics and journalism expressed disapproval. Steve Biddulph explained in his book ‘Raising Boys’ and in articles and interviews that male children suffer from being put in childcare institutions to a greater degree than female children.

We know what it takes to raise men who don’t rape, so why don’t we act on it? (smh.com.au)

“We must picture a small newborn boy lying in his cot asleep and ask ourselves: what is going to decide whether they will grow up to be a predator or a loving and respectful man. The answer is a sequence of developmental stages that are fraught but entirely manageable if we apply what we know.
First, a baby boy has to be treated with tenderness. Boys’ neurological development has been shown by scientists such as the University of California, Los Angeles’ Allan Schore to be hampered by their slower development, making them prone to separation anxiety and damaged attachment, and in many ways not suited to the modern world where we hurry and stress ourselves. Empathy is a quality that has to be experienced in order to become a part of us. We learn little by little to be tender and keep our hearts open, so that we can feel for others and never want to harm them.
Damaged men come disproportionately from both ends of the socioeconomic scale – the poor and stressed victims of an unfair society, and the overprivileged but time-poor who tend to not spend a lot of time with their children.
Fathering plays a key role. Most of how we acquire our social roles comes from example. If we have a dad who is respectful, loving and tender towards our mother. Who teaches us patiently and with good humour to be kind and co-operative with each other. Who never hits us or shames us, who helps us to not freeze our hearts when they are inevitably wounded. Then even by primary school age, you will see boys who are safe and kind to be around.
Some parents don't really raise their children, they just manage them, says psychologist and parenting expert and author Steve Biddulph. "Oddly, this is particularly a feature of the very affluent parent," he says. "If I was a child in Australia now, I would want to be born in the middle."

'Rich kids are emotionally neglected': lunch with Steve Biddulph

“If you're born into a poor family, the stress on parents makes life very difficult, he says, but the children of the very wealthy face a different kind of stress.
"These are rich kids but they are neglected. It's an odd combination of high expectation but low emotional connection. Expensive private schools I consult to tell me this all the time — the job of parenthood has been abrogated to others."

ADHD and ADD

These are two relatively new mental health diagnoses. In layman's term ADHD is a form of hyper arousal, you are easily distracted because you are alert to changes in your environment. ADD is a form of hypo arousal, you are zoned out, zonked, your eyes are open but 'nobody's home'.

What causes some children to develop ADHD or ADD? We become hyper alert in dangerous situations, it helps us survive. Fortunately, most of us don't encounter danger often. If we spend a lot of time in our early years in what we perceive as a dangerous situation, will being hyper alert feel normal? If we coped with that situation by ignoring everything around us, will being zoned out feel normal?

I wonder, do a high proportion of children who grow up in war zones develop ADHD and ADD? And is institutional care stressful for animal species in which the young are normally cared for by their mother, who is supported by a small group of family members? Can it induce permanent changes to the brain and behaviour?

An Experimental Psychologist would conduct an experiment, perhaps using young monkeys. How would monkeys develop if, for up to 5 days a week and up to 12 hours a day, they were put in groups of 30, with 5-6 unrelated adult monkeys caring for them, which were chosen because they were 'good with' baby monkeys? Would some of the baby monkeys display ADHD or ADD like behaviour later in life? This sort of study costs a lot. I doubt grants would be available, as in the Western world sending children to childcare facilities in their early years is considered the right, or a beneficial and harmless, thing to do.

Studies investigating the impact of too much screen time on young children have been funded:

Screen time and developmental health: results from an early childhood study in Canada

This study found that children who spend more than an hour a day on screens (like watching TV, playing video games, or using computers) are more likely to have problems in several areas of development compared to children who spend an hour or less on screens daily. The three areas of development studied, where statistically significant differences were found, were:
1.    Social competence: Children with more screen time were 60% more likely to have problems in social skills.
2.    Language and cognitive development: Children with more screen time were 81% more likely to have difficulties in language and thinking skills.
3.    Communication skills: Children with more screen time were 60% more likely to have communication problems.
The study also looked at whether family income affects these outcomes but found no significant interaction between income and screen time. The results were adjusted for factors like child demographics, family income, and other health behaviors to ensure they were not influencing the outcomes.

Perhaps that is because parents, rather than politicians, can be blamed for giving young children too much screen time.

Neurofeedback

There are many ways in which we, as loving parents, can unintentionally harm our children. I don't think ADHD and ADD are connected to vaccines or chemical pollutants. (I know one unvaccinated boy who struggles with ADHD, his older unvaccinated brother doesn't, both went to a childcare facility several days a week for much of their first three years.) As always, I like to learn about solutions to problems and neurofeedback looks good to me.

The detractors, some of whom may earn money from companies which produce ADHD/ADD drugs, say it doesn't work. The supporters say it does. Electrodes attached to the skull of a person, often a child, and they are linked to a computer game. In an example I read about years ago, if the electrodes detect that the brain of the gamer has gone into hyper alert mode, the fish on the screen floats to the surface of the pond. If they detect the gamer has gone into hypo alert mode, the fish sinks to the bottom. The gamer's goal is to keep the fish swimming along and the game helps the gamer become more attuned to his/her state of arousal so they can learn to recalibrate, learn to maintain a state of normal arousal which enables them to concentrate on a task.

Male suicide and violence

Following the point Steve Biddulph’s made boys need to experience lots of love and empathy to be able to love themselves and empathise with others. It would be interesting do a statistical analysis on the young Australian men who commit suicide and violence. I wonder, is there a statistically significant association between these tragic outcomes and spending extended periods in childcare facilities?

Lies are Unbekoming

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