Archives: October, 2006

The BBC reports that the charity ChildLine celebrates it’s 20th anniversary this week.

For those who don’t know, ChildLine is a free helpline for children and young people in the UK.

Children call about:

*Bullying: 18%
*Family tension: 13%
*Physical abuse: 11%
*Concern for others: 8%
*Facts of life: 8%
*Sexual abuse: 7%
*Pregnancy: 5%
*Health: 4%

and here are some ChildLine Facts:

*More than 4,500 children call daily
*It takes on average £38 to counsel a child
*Has over 1,380 volunteers
*The annual cost of one volunteer counsellor is £3,762
*Three times as many calls from girls than boys

Stephanie Costa@flickr

I hope you have all had fun taking your little ones out trick or treating (if you go in for Halloween).

At the rate my doorbell is ringing I am worried that I will run out of treats!

A little girl from up the road came to the door in the same costume as this one on the right - brilliant!

If you want to be able to sit and relax in the company of young kids you need to know they are safe. Some ideas for child-proofing your home include:

1. Put covers over electrical sockets
2. Fit window locks
3. Invest in a stairgate
4. Attach cupboard catches or locks
5. Use a “finger shield” to prevent doors closing on little fingers
6. Turn saucepan handles towards and the back of the cooker and use the back rings
7. Keep medicines, alcohol and cleaning products out of reach
8. Avoid using tablecloths to prevent toddlers pulling things down on top of themselves
9. Move furniture away from windows to prevent kids climbing up and out
10. Never pass a hot drink over a child’s head and keep hot drinks out of reach

According to the Daily Mail, children inherit their facial expressions as well as their features from their parents.

Previously it was thought that facial expressions were just an example of children copyng their parents’ expressions. However, research from the University of Haifa in Israel have found otherwise.

21 people were tracked as they thought about things that made them feel different emotions eg happy, sad, concentrating hard. The results showed that even the blind people in the study adopted similar expressions to their parents.

It might explain why you can often tell people are from the same family even if they don’t look alike.

Source: Personal Robot Research Centre

According to this news story Japanese engineers have now invented a robot that can track your children as they move around and send a photo of them to your mobile phone on demand.

The futuristic robot also has an inbuilt mobile phone. When a parent calls it will locate the child and start to play with them. Parents can also send text messages and talk to children using PaPeRo’s inbuilt microphones and speakers.

cobalt@flickr

In Toronto, Canada a new safety program was launched for children today. Instead of educating chidren in the traditional way about “stranger danger”, kids are encouraged not to go anywhere alone. [For full report see this page]

The Buddy System was developed by Child Find Manitoba and Honeywell Canada. It involves the child always ensuring that a relative or friend is with them. There is an interactive online animation to educate Grade 1 children about the new Buddy System which is being provided free to 20,000 schools across Canada.

However, Lianna McDonald, executive director of Child Find Manitoba says that the:

There seem to be two sides to Halloween. One being little kids, dressing up and having fun, the other being blatant commercialism and anti-social behaviour.

So taking the dark side first, here’s the not uncommon view of one besieged mum:

I loathe Halloween. Every year that night comes round and I know what will happen. Early on you get a few cute younger children all excited and dressed up with parent in tow eager to collect a sweet or two. Then, after a gap of an hour or so you start to get big groups of teenagers in no costume other than horrific mask shouting and banging on the door demanding “cash or food”. Ignore them and you get your home attacked, open the door and you get nothing but arrogance or cheek.

This is a little gothic, but with some data from infoplease.com, has put up a map of where school shootings have happened across the world in the last ten or so years, from Dunblane to the more recent Amish School shooting in Pennsylvania. Depressing stuff.

I’m rubbish at taking photos. Quite seriously rubbish. For a while I thought it was just my not having a snazzy digital camera and having to make do with weird yellow boxes called things like “funpix”. Then a while ago I borrowed Vicky’s digital camera , all set to get snapped up by Magnum, but nope. The pics were still appalling.

So I’m keen to try out these tips on how to take a better photograph over at the Dandelife blog. Along with advice like going easy on the flash, and a section on how to shoot (pictorially) children, the guy says that

ricardovillela@flickr

Mom.Salary.com has just evaluated the job of a stay at home mom (although it must also apply to stay at home dads):

If paid, Stay at Home Moms would earn $134,121 annually.

We found the job titles that best matched a mom’s definition of her work to be (in order of hours spent per week): housekeeper, day care center teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, CEO, and psychologist.