My friend Mark Brown in Bermuda recently put me on to a 2012 study that was published in an American Psychological Association Journal on the psychology of popular media culture. It shows a bi-directional relationship between TV watching or video game playing and impulsivity control and attention span issues.  This means, without the jargon, that more time spent playing video games or watching TV is correlated with attention/impulsivity issues, and that those with these issues tend to be more attracted to video games.

The study postulated a number of theories for why this might be the case but leaned quite heavily in favour of two specific factors. The first they called the “excitement hypothesis”. It notes, quite logically, that video games are exciting and fun, as opposed to many of the more mundane tasks of daily life and especially more engaging than traditional schoolwork, particularly for those students who find it difficult to learn and stay on task. The study states: “the greater the contrast between electronic media content and work or school tasks, the more difficult it could become to focus on work or school”. Now granted you don't need to undertake a formal research study to figure this out - "watching TV is more fun than doing homework!", but it's always nice when research corroborates common sense!

The second theory was categorized as the “displacement hypothesis”.  This theorizes that time spent “with TV or video games might simply displace time that would have otherwise been spent on other activities that would have allowed for greater development of impulse control.” In other words, because watching TV or playing a video game does not require excessive self-control, it may actually weaken one’s ability to exert self-control over time. If this is actually the case, then the content of the media shouldn’t make any difference – Sponge Bob or Animal Planet should have the same effect!

So what does this mean for parents and educators? Should we, as good Luddites, be taking the axe to our television sets, iPads and computers? Not really. The research however is a good reminder that what we might use on occasion as an engaging or distracting strategy with our kids, could be counter-productive in the long run. The secret, as always, is balance and moderation. There is nothing inherently wrong with a student watching television or playing on the computer as long as it is monitored, not so much for content perhaps, as for duration. Other recreational activities requiring more self-control and focus – reading, bike riding, playing ball, etc. can reinforce a child’s self-control mechanisms and make them less distractible.

My grandmother always used to say that watching too much television was bad for you. Turns out, she was right!

This has been a tough few months. The Sandy Hook Elementary shootings in Newtown, Connecticut and now this senseless attack on innocent bystanders, including children, who were celebrating the achievements of friends and family members in the Boston Marathon. The responses worldwide were a mix of shock, and outrage and profound sadness. Here at home, the debate heated up quickly around whether or not we should be concerned over the "root causes" of the tragedy. Two philosophies were on view - the "way to stop crime is to build more prisons" world view versus the "way to stop crime is to address the root social and economic causes" perspective. One approach puts a finger in the dyke while the second tries to lower the water level - short term and long term thinking. Knee jerk versus thoughtful response. Interestingly it was a former teacher who espoused the second, more thoughtful and nuanced approach.
Teachers understand a fundamental truth about society, that there is no quick fix. The children who act out in class can either be isolated and punished, or worked with so that we adults can understand what is going on in their lives and how we  can help them to address their challenges in a more productive and positive way. Sometimes, as happened horribly last week in Boston, the crime is so heinous that the global response to the individual and his act is unreservedly punitive, and rightly so. However, the next thoughtful step, after dealing with the perpetrators, is preventative. How do we stop another young person from going down this self-destructive and socially disastrous path? What were the underlying causes and conditions that converged on that street, at that moment in time? Any high school history student gets the concept of causation drilled into them. There is a hierarchy of causes from obscure and far removed to immediate and irrelevant. In the Boston case, the fact that the accused young men immigrated to the United States was a factor - but not one that would inevitably lead to these horrible choices, any more than the decision to purchase a pressure cooker was the ultimate cause. So while the politicians scramble to demonstrate "leadership" and take firm action, and the families and the city mourn; what can we, as educators and parents, take away from this awful tragedy?
 
Ultimately, this is a story about alienation, not from a country or a set of values, but an alienation from humanity. Every day we see children who are lonely, or ostracized from their peers. Students who lack the social skills both to integrate into larger groups, or the confidence and generosity of spirit to open up their "clique" to someone who is a little different. Many schools, ours included, place a great emphasis on social-emotional learning. We dedicate a team of counsellors and three hours of class time a week to explore the issues that keep us from connecting positively one from the other. For children who lack some of the basic interpersonal skills to get along we run facilitated, integrated play groups every day at lunch so that our less able "novice" players can pick up verbal and non-verbal cues from "experienced" socializers as to how to interact effectively with other people. You can't prevent terrible things from happening. But maybe schools can make a difference, one child at a time.

As parents, we live in a busy and stressful world, but we have to be mindful to set aside significant time each week for interpersonal interaction around the home - playing games, doing chores together, taking walks, going to the park or the aquarium, or simply sitting down for a family meal. The more we can stay connected with our kids at home, and they can stay connected with their peers at school or at play, the farther we move them away from the personal isolation and alienation that are bound to end in personal, if not societal, tragedy.

I guess that I had it wrong. It had seemed to me for the longest time that technology and the internet made us the most connected generation in history. I can Skype my mother in Ontario, or chat face to face with my grandchildren in Winnipeg. Through Twitter and Linkedin and Facebook, I can stay connected with my friends colleagues around the world. And, even when we go out to walk the dog (and maybe stop off at Starbucks!) my wife Rheanne and I can Facetime our boys at home to make sure that everything is alright.

You can’t be more connected than that! Can you?

Last Saturday morning, I was reading something on my laptop; Rheanne was catching up on her favourite TV show on her ipad; and our boys were playing games on their minis. We were all in the same room, but we might as well have been in separate houses. To give credit where credit is due, it was Rheanne who pointed out that unlike in the past we rarely sat together to watch television or a movie, instead we used whatever stolen down time that we could find to catch up on news or programming that we had missed, and the only times that we really connected as a family was when we could factor technology out altogether. Dinner conversations, trips to the playground, walks in the park, a visit to the aquarium, even driving to and from school, have become critically important family times when we can look each other in eyes and actually communicate. A recent road trip holiday to Southern California was less about rest and relaxation than it was about reconnecting as a family and having a truly joint experience.

We live in an era of “electronic town halls” which, as Neil Postman points out, bear little resemblance to their eighteenth century face to face counterparts. He calls them a “packaged, televised pseudo-event”. Information is disseminated through robo-calls or email “blasts”. Thoughtful, well-written letters to the editor reflecting on the issues of the day have been replaced by vitriolic on-line “comments” which make pronouncements, or try to score political points, without any pretence of attempting to engage in a meaningful dialogue on a topic or news story. We share “personal” stories on Facebook – in a kind of “look at me, look at me” attempt to publicize the fleeting and often mundane happenings of our day to day lives, and many of us work hard to appear clever or profound throughout the day in 140 characters or fewer on Twitter.

With so much of society permanently on “send” it is hardly surprising that cyber-bullying has become the vehicle of choice to torment and isolate vulnerable children and adults. Nor is it a shock when one political party elects a new leader, and their opponent immediately launches an electronic smear campaign to attack them. In a nation of multi-taskers and short attention spans – the sound-bite is king!

We now really do live in McLuhan’s “global village”. It is our challenge to insure that it is not a village made up of individual, isolated e-huts but rather a place where we can still hold on to the human dimension of our personal relationships. A place where we all stop before we press the send button and ask ourselves – “would we say this to a real person’s face, or have we become a dehumanized society that takes shots at each other’s impersonal avatars and screen names”?

Technology can bring us together, or drive us apart. It’s up to us to choose.

Most people will have read or heard about Malcolm Gladwell’s book: The Outliers. A great deal of ink has been dedicated his observations on cultural norms and testing; the “!0,000 hour” benchmark for excellence; etc. What people are less likely to discuss is his findings with respect to month of birth. It was Gladwell’s thesis, based on looking at professional athletes, that children born in January had a natural advantage over children born in December. Not that there was any real significant difference between the December 31st baby and her or his New Year’s Day counterpart but rather the gap was artificially created by our bureaucratic decision to determine entry ages (for school, for sports teams, etc.) based on an arbitrary December 31st cut-off date. Consequently, a class of children entering kindergarten in September of any given year would have a potential differential of actual ages of a whole twelve months. The four year old December babies walking in the door were put next to their five year old, January born friends and expected to perform and behave at the same level.

In professional sports, Gladwell found that there were double the number of January born players in the NHL than there were December ones. Again, imagine coming to practice with a year’s growth disadvantage compared to other players. The older, bigger competitors tended to get more ice time, more intensive coaching and more reinforcement. Consequently the gap widened, rather than narrowed, with age.

To come back to the educational example, my last school had multi-age groupings of primary students (3-6 and 6-9). The children remained in the same class with the same team of teachers for three years. The result was a nice blending of ages and stages that allowed both the older and younger students to progress with their peer groups and by Grade 1 it seemed that most of the age related differences had disappeared. But was that really the case?

Let me jump for a minute to another piece of research. Last week, after examining test data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, The New York Times reported that at some point in their lives, 11 per cent of U.S. children aged 4 to 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD. That's up 53 per cent over the last decade. A discussion on the CBC noted that there have been similar jumps in the rates of diagnosis here in Canada as well. However, last year a British Columbia study with the reader-friendly title of “Influence of relative age on diagnosis and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children” uncovered some interesting statistics when looking at trends from 1997-2008 in B.C. As is typical in Canada, the annual cut-off date of birth for entry into B.C. schools is December 31st. Consequently, the children born in December are typically the youngest in their grade. The researchers decided to determine the co-relation between relative age within a grade on the incidence of diagnosis with ADHD as well as the difference in the tendency to prescribe medication to treat ADHD between children born in December and those born in January.

They looked at almost one million children who were between the ages of 6 and 12 during the period of the study. The results are striking. Boys who were born in December were 30% more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and 41% more likely to be medicated than their January counterparts. Among girls the difference was even more stark. Girls born in December were 70% more likely to be diagnosed and 77% more likely to be prescribed medication than their January classmates.

The conclusion of the study was that some late year birth children had likely been misdiagnosed based on issues surrounding maturity rather than actual behavioural issues and raised concerns about the potential harms of over-diagnosis and over-prescribing.

What is the solution to this issue? Obviously changing eligibility dates won’t help. The disparity between December/January will just be moved to two other months (e.g. August/September). The real insight that both Gladwell and the authors of the ADHD study have provided us with is that as parents and educators we have to be more aware of factors such as birth month before we rush to judgment and either favour or penalize children because of accident of birth.

In the meantime, try to have your children in January or February. They will be grateful to you for the head start!

There is kind of a gauze that drops over your inner eye when you look back on your experiences in high school. The day to day grind, the hours of repetitive and seemingly (to an adolescent) pointless work on assignments, the memorization of information for examinations that was quickly and irrevocably forgotten soon after; the social ups and downs; being cut from virtually every team tryout (okay, maybe that was just me!) – all of the negatives, seem to be filtered out. In their place is a memory of a time of exploration and self-discovery; of sunny afternoons sitting watching the football team or perfect mornings balanced on the water in a rowing shell; of great dances and concerts; of field trips and ski excursions – no wonder Peter Pan never wanted to grow up!

As parents, we want our own children’s adolescence to be a modern remake of our own, but without the disappointments, challenges and inevitable heartbreaks. We want school to be challenging and exciting and engaging and safe. In short, we want to wrap our children in the same gauze (and maybe a little bubble wrap) that fogs our own vision of the past. But, as we all know, life is not quite like that.

At this time of year, many of our parents come in to meet about the process of transitioning out from Kenneth Gordon to a more mainstream learning environment. Their reasons vary.

Sometimes it is financial. There is no question that attending any independent school is expensive and although KGMS is less costly that many of the alternatives, it is still a financial stretch for almost any family.

Sometimes it is social. The gauzy backwards gaze remembers dances and pep rallies; hockey games and musicals; all of the bells and whistles that a small school like us can’t offer. As adults, our personal blinders don’t let us imagine high school without it.

Ideally, however, it is because they feel that their child is ready to take on the challenge. They have done their research, checked out local and specialized schools and are ready to take the plunge into the unknown. As a school, our role is to ensure that both the parents and the receiving team are fully aware of any special needs to be addressed or accommodations that might need to implemented to ease the transition process and set the student up for success. The result of such a meeting of minds might mean a smooth transition or conversely it could result in a decision to wait a bit longer. Whatever the outcome, the process hopefully fosters an informed choice.

For most of our parents, trying to overlay the academic needs of their children on top of the memories of their own high school experiences is a challenge. Rather than confidently predicting success for their child based upon the path that they themselves had followed, many parents see their own daughter’s or son’s future as an undiscovered country. It just doesn’t fit the pattern that they themselves know.

Andrew Solomon in his book Far from the Tree, tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so. His title is a play on the expression “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” which is usually a reference to children who are younger replicas of their parents. Solomon, by contrast talks about those of our children who do not fit that mold. They have fallen “far from the tree”.

Solomon’s…proposition is that diversity is what unites us all. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, [etc.]. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, as are the triumphs of love Solomon documents in every chapter.

He concludes that all parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. He notes that many families grow closer through caring for a challenging child and that most discover supportive communities of others similarly affected; some are inspired to become advocates and activists, celebrating the very conditions about which they once despaired.

We have amazing families at Kenneth Gordon. Families who are working hard to understand the learning challenges faced by their children and to develop the support and advocacy skills to make certain that they get the best possible academic programme. It is hard work for parents, and requires both dedication and perseverance. It also requires that all of the adults in a child’s life sit back and keep things in perspective. To admit, and then internalize the fact that the path that a student follows to adulthood might be a very different from the one that they remember.

To this end, it is important to recognize that not everyone takes the same traditional route through their years at school. It is this recognition that helps us to lift the gauze from our parental rear view mirrors, and acknowledge that some of our children will not have the same high school or post-secondary experiences that we had.  They will follow their own path, and one that may very well be far from the family “tree”.

The real excitement for us as parents and educators is in helping our children to begin their personal journeys to adulthood. I can guarantee that the result will unpredictable, exciting, rewarding, and very different from our own.