Teachers need to Teach...

and parents need to bloody parent.

This article from today's Times has my eye balls rolling. It is not the job of a teacher to 'inform' parents that their children are overweight or obese. Surely a parent with a set of eyes can notice things like that for themselves.

'"I would like to see teachers being more proactive," Prof Moyna said. "I think it's important that primary teachers stand up and be prepared to measure this on a regular basis. It's something that could be incorporated into PE [physical education] or biology lessons and would only take 30 seconds."

Is he for real? 30 seconds of what? Measure what exactly? Measure fat? Measure reactions? Measure tape worms?

Imagine lining up a group of children, taking their heights and BMIs on a regular basis and then labeling each child. 'Sorry Mikey, BMI of 30, you need to lay off the rice crispy buns. NEXT!' Imagine how that child would feel? His self esteem? How much of his self worth would be tied up in BMI Day.
I have no doubt there is a growing problem of obesity in this country, but humiliating children is not proactive or a step in the right direction. Teachers should teach, end of. And not be expected to solve social problems.

Drunk and Stupid.

You probably wouldn't drive a car drunk, you probably wouldn't fly a plane drunk, you probably wouldn't turn up to work drunk, you probably wouldn't even go your child's school drunk.
So why is it that the parents of three tiny toddlers, aged one, two and six thought it was a-okay to become so drunk on holiday in Portugal that they passed out, leaving the chidlren initially in the hands of complete strangers and then in the temporary care of the Portugal's Child Services?

"On Friday night the parents( from Northern Ireland) had been drinking at a nearby bar with a happy hour until 8pm where a pint of lager costs just €1.'

The husband collapsed in the hotel reception while his wife staggered into the bar with her children and fell into a chair, the barman said. A second barman said: "I don't think they meant to drink that much but when they tried to stop I think they just couldn't.''

Dr Villas-Boas said his children's home was called at just after midnight and asked to provide emergency shelter for three children whose parents were drunk.

The youngsters were given a quick hospital check-up in Faro then arrived at the home at about 5am on Saturday morning. At just before 11am the home received a fax from the on-duty public attorney for Faro saying that the children should be returned to their parents."

Said the doctor,

""They returned from somewhere and the father fell immediately asleep on the sofa. The mother was then by the elevator, holding the two-year-old girl. She was about to fall but she was held up by a Spanish lady tourist. Then the mother passed out and vomited."

The parents then very sheepishly turned up the NEXT morning to collect their offspring. Their major concerns? Did the media know about it.
Seriously what a pair of gobshites. Firstly if you can't NOT drink yourself into oblivion when you're on holiday leave your children with someone responsible at home. Secondly, this couple were staying at an apartahotel, which is a hotel made up of small self contained apartments, it is HIGHLY possible that they might have made it back to their apartment before they passed out, leaving their children to fend for themselves. I mean for fuck's sake. Can you imagine? what might have happened if that was the scenario? A six year old charge of two babies?
What the hell is wrong with these people? Most of us like a drink, and most of us will get blotto at some point in our lives, especially if we're on holiday, but only a fucking idiot would act so irresponsibly when minding three children. There is really no excuse for it. And the meedja should be the very least of their concerns.

Children, not just for christmas.

I often wonder aloud (and here) why people bother having children at all if they are not going to raise them properly, and by properly I mean provide shelter, food, stability, love, rules, mental well being and total commitment to their upbringing. I mean, when you look back over that list it's not exactly rocket science. Nothing above and beyond the call of duty all parents take on board.
Right?
But then every now and then a story comes along that leaves me astounded at the callous attitude some people take towards their children, the lack of empathy and love is staggering. Last night I watched a disturbing documentary about China where traffickers bought and sold children as though they were nothing more than livestock. There was no compassion and no other underlining process to their decision making only what they could get for a child of a certain age. One of the traffickers had even sold his own youngest son, reasoning that the older boy he'd had would 'find his way back'. It was a heartbreaking piece of television I can tell you. I watched that man talk about the best 'type' of child to traffic and how he was just an 'agent' and I wondered how a person such as he could even be created. To have not even a shred of humanity or heart, never even to consider the human misery he inflicts. It was unbelievable.
Then I got up this morning and-coffee in hand- scanned through the morning papers. And lo and behold there in the guardian comes another story of parental ball dropping.
Observe.

"A Dutch couple living in Hong Kong yesterday found themselves at the centre of an international controversy after they gave up their daughter for adoption seven years after they adopted her themselves.
Raymond Poeteray, 55, who has worked as a Dutch diplomat for more than 20 years, and his wife, Meta, adopted Jade, an ethnic Korean girl, when she was four months old.

Poeteray told the South China Morning Post that the adoption had gone wrong. He said that his family was "trying hard to deal with it".
He added that his wife was receiving counselling following the decision to give up Jade. "It's just a very terrible trauma that everyone's experiencing," he told the newspaper. "I don't have anything to say to the public. It is something we have to live with. My foreign ministry knows about my situation. I have also been in touch with the Hong Kong government and they have been very helpful to me and so has my own employer." The couple have been heavily criticised in the Dutch press and by the South Korean community in Hong Kong who are trying to find a new permanent home for Jade.
A spokesman for the South Korean consulate in Hong Kong said the couple had found it difficult to raise the little girl because of "culture shock".

"[The Poeterays] now have their own children," the spokesman said. "They decided it was difficult to raise [Jade] because of cultural shock. They said she's not willing to eat their food. That's one of the reasons. It's a strange reason. She was raised from a very early age. It's a very uncommon case. It's a difficult situation for us to understand."

The Korean community in Hong Kong has been asked to find a family to adopt Jade, who has been in foster care in Hong Kong since leaving the Poeterays. The case is complicated as her residency status is uncertain; she is neither a naturalised Dutch citizen nor a resident of Hong Kong. She goes to school in Hong Kong and speaks Cantonese and English but not Korean.

Since adopting her the Poeterays have had two children of their own."

Honestly, having raised a child for seven years as your own, how on Earth could you turn her over to strangers? How could you walk away from her, knowing her future is so uncertain, to deprive her of her family, her home, her siblings, her sense of self? Just what makes a person place so little value on a child like that?
The Poeterays are not peasant farmers trying to eke out a living in a backwards rural place, they are educated, wealthy Europeans. And yet instill a far greater nose wrinkling disapproval in me that the scummy trafficker who tells it as it is and doesn't try to disguise his avarice.
These people don't deserve to have children, certainly the poor children don't deserve to have them as parents.

Where does the buck stop again?

What do you make of this story?

"THREE girls who were imprisoned by their mother in a house littered with their own excrement for seven years may never recover from the ordeal, experts said last night.

The girls were shut away from the outside world, existing in almost complete darkness, playing only with mice and communicating in a made-up language.

When they were discovered, their home in a smart, upper middle-class suburb was filled with waste and excrement a metre high. The floor was corroded by mouse urine.

The case has stunned Austria, still reeling from the Natascha Kampusch kidnapping, and authorities were struggling last night to explain how such a horror story could have gone unnoticed.

The girls' ordeal was apparently sparked by their parents' divorce, after which their mother, a 53-year-old lawyer, suffered a breakdown. But she won custody of the girls - then aged 7, 11 and 13 - and withdrew them from school, claiming that she would give them private tuition at home.

Her husband, a local judge, was not allowed to see them once, despite his claims for access reaching court nine times.

The girls, Viktoria, Katharina and Elisabeth, were rescued only when police broke into the house after a neighbour, who had reported his suspicions several times, threatened a local council official with a lawsuit.

Although that was in October 2005, and the three have been in a specialised therapy centre since, the scandal was only revealed at the weekend.

The mother is now being held in a special remand prison branch for the mentally unstable. She will appear in court in a few weeks on charges of grievous bodily harm and torture and faces between five months and five years in prison.

She had ensured that the blinds were constantly shut, and that all but one light bulb had been removed in the house. When the three girls were released, they had white skin and could not endure exposure to natural light.

The mother was said to have been summoned to court nine times during the seven years after complaints by the father and neighbours, but officials never found a reason to investigate the case more closely.

Waltraud Kubelka, a therapist who is now treating the three girls, said that their psycho-social and physical development was "catastrophic".

"In the first weeks after their release they were hiding under a bench in the kitchen (in the therapy centre) because that was the darkest spot. They could not endure light."

Okay, at first reading this story shocked the hell out of me. I thought of the poor girls emerging from the darkness as the police kick down the doors, terrified and half blind.
But after reading it again I have nothing but questions.
Firstly, whither the father? What does it mean he was not alllowed see his girls again? How was this possible? Custody does not mean ownership. Why did he leave it up to the courts? Why did he not kick the bloody door clean off his hinges and demand to see his children?
I wonder about the made up language bit too. If girl were in school at 7, 11, 13, chances are they spoke fairly well already, why would they forget and revert to using a non-language? What happened to them? Were they not allowed speak?
What of the mother? Does she not have family, a sibling, cousins, parents? If her break down was as bad as they say how did the family function at all? Who shopped for food? Who paid the bills?
Why did the courts not insist this woman attend? Why did they not send an officer of the court to speak with her when she did not attend even one of the nine court dates?
How can three girls effectively disappear for 7 (!) years and no one do anything at all about it?