Expert

The Health Care Bill

Toby — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:56:28 -0700

Greetings Dads,
What is the deal with the healthcare bill? There is so much from both sides, I cannot digest it. http://tiny.cc/prAbe Any Dr., Nurse, Hospital admin, medical salesperson, etc that would like to share an opinion? Is it true those in Washington are rebuffing this plan for themselves to stay on their current plan? If it is so good for the people, why not for them? I do not want sides, I want information please.
This is one of the biggest votes in history and I want to make sure that we (and our politicians) have all the data. Again, please do not use this topic to post your political opinions, forget about Red and Blue states - we need to be UNITED! I, and other Dads, need to hear from those inside the Healthcare system so we can make the best decision for out families.
Thank you for your posts.
Cheers,
Toby

Raising Boys with Purpose

tony — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:52:11 -0700

by Tony Chen

You may have seen that we here at Savvy Daddy have recently added a distinguished Panel of Experts. You can see their bios here, but basically these folks are profs, physicians, clinicians, and academics that are savvy gurus on topics relevant to us dads trying to raise great kids. These experts have been gracious enough to answer real questions from real dads - email me your questions (tony at savvydaddy dot com) and I'll be passing along the most relevant & compelling questions to them. Today, we are honored to present to you Michael Gurian, a NYT best selling author of 25 books about parenting children in our culture.

Dad Question: In your book THE PURPOSE OF BOYS, you mention that 85% of the world's Ritalin is given to boys in the U.S.? Why do you think that is the case?

Gurian: American families are confused about what developmental path boys ought to be on. Given what immense variety of boys there are, we become even more confused. We forget that boys are on a different developmental path than girls, maturing concentration and focus centers in the brain somewhat later, and needing some different kinds of care than girls do in order to fully direct their "boy energy" and find their gifts, abilities, success, focus, and discipline. Ritalin is a powerful drug that "fills in the blanks" for us when we don't know what to do with boys. While some boys do desperately need it, most boys (especially at seven or younger) don't. What they need is a three family system, and clearer direction toward success, purpose, service, and follow through.

Dad Question: What would you recommend I do if the teacher believes my 7-year-old son needs to be medicated?

Gurian: THE MINDS OF BOYS has a chapter that lays out five steps to take. Included in these are: get two opinions from two psychologists or neuro-psychologists trained in male brain development. 7 years old is VERY young to be medicating. Watch out. And remember, though teachers and pediatricians are brilliant people, they are generally not qualified to diagnose a boy (especially if just basing their diagnosis on personal observation) with a brain disorder.

Dad Question: I'm a little discouraged by how difficult it is going to be to raise my son well in this culture that "wars" against boys. Do you have any words of advice and encouragement for a young dad trying to raising purposeful sons?

Gurian: SELF-EDUCATION is key here. There is no "tip" or "magic bullet." Fathering and mothering both go best when we become educated on the developmental path of our child, AND THEN trust our instincts. THE PURPOSE OF BOYS and NURTURE THE NATURE are good tools for understanding. They and most educational tools will ultimately help a father set up a structure for child-raising, in tandem with mother and extended family, that provides: love, attention, discipline, direction. A couple things to add: even if you've been fathered or parented badly, you can re-educate yourself and then trust your instincts. The soul of the father is vast and deep and loving--we do our work as men and we come through with good instincts, at some point in life. Another thing to add: it is great if moms and dads DO NOT parent the same way. Don't worry if you are strong/silent but mom is talkative/emotional or you are talkative and mom is silent. It's great for a boy to have more than one approach to developing his own variety of gifts and approaches.

Dad Question: There is so much male-bashing and dad-bashing in the media. How do we counteract that in our homes so that our sons can grow up with a healthy self-esteem?

Gurian: To grow up with healthy self-esteem, boys need the care of mother, father, and five other strong mentors during boyhood and adolescence. Self-esteem is built through bonding relationships and task focus in a system of caregivers that is organized or "led" by the two parents, but then also expands beyond them. If you have set up this system for your son, you'll find that he can even go through times of abject failure (i.e. where it appears his self-esteem is crushed) and he'll come through fine. FAILURE IS GOOD FOR CHILDREN. We only fear that it will lead to long term downsides for boys when we don't have in place a system of many "families" caring for the boy. A final thing to add: as much as possible, a man has to MODEL health for his son, including healthy spiritual time. Do spiritual things with your son, like sitting by a river and praying/meditation (or whatever fits your spirituality or religion). Model self-care for your son. Admit your mistakes when you make them, and lead with your strengths when the boy needs your strength. Your sons will thank you later in life (and so will your daughters, too!)

Have a question for Michael Gurian? Send your questions to me via email (tony at savvydaddy dot com).

How to Decipher New "Research"

tony — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:00:43 -0700

by Tony Chen

You may have seen that we here at Savvy Daddy have recently added a distinguished Panel of Experts. You can see their bios here, but basically these folks are profs, physicians, clinicians, and academics that are savvy gurus on topics relevant to us dads trying to raise great kids. These experts have been gracious enough to answer real questions from real dads - email me your questions (tony at savvydaddy dot com) and I'll be passing along the most relevant & compelling questions to them. Without further ado, our first Savvy Daddy Expert Panelist, Bob McMurray.

Dad Question: I feel completely overwhelmed at all of the new research coming out on infant development, and honestly, I'm growing increasingly skeptical of when news media reports on "breaking research." As a researcher yourself, what do you look for when you see new research? How do you discern how valid it is?

Bob McMurray, Language/Development Professor and Researcher
One of the most important things to look for in new research is how simple the story appears to be. Development is complex. Really complex. There's almost never a single thing that we can pinpoint as the "cause" of anything big like language or social behavior. On the other hand, the media has a hard time reporting on complex answers -- they really prefer the simple, single-cause studies. So that's most of what you're likely to hear from the media.

That's not to say that there aren't good studies being reported, or that sometimes there really are simple stories about development. But generally, you should raise an eye-brow to any researcher who claims to have a silver bullet regarding development.

Scientists are trained to hold lots and lots of things constant in our experiment, and only look at one thing at a time. It's an excellent way to really figure out what's causing what. But sometimes it warps our worldview (or the media does), in that we tend to assume that just because we found an effect of that single thing, it's the most important thing in the world. But in actuality, it's just one of a huge number of things that affect development.

Here's an example. We all know that breast feeding is preferred to bottle feeding (sorry to bring Mommies into this, guys!). It's good for bonding (for Mommies, at least, does nothing for us), better nutritionally, confers some immunities, and has lots of good micronutrients (like omega-3 fatty acids) that help with brain and eye-development. But in order to discover this, we had to run studies that kept everything constant except for whether babies were breast or bottle fed, things like the socio-economic status of the mom's, whether or not the dad is home, the birth-weight of the babies, etc (of course we cannot really control these things, but that's a topic for another post). When we find a small difference in cognitive abilities, then, we can can attribute it to the breast-milk. Hooray.

Funny thing is, many of us (by us, I mean us Daddies) were bottle fed. We turned out fine. What's going on? Two things. First, Well, even when you hold everything else constant, children vary. A lot. The studies, of course, are only reporting the average, not the individual kids. Second, all that other stuff that was held constant mattered! Those of us whose mom's fed us formula, were probably fed it because our pediatrician recomended it (that was the recomended practice in the 60s and 70s for many doctors). That means that we had access to health care, and our moms were the kind of moms that really tried to follow their doctor's advice. These things surely compensated for whatever we missed out from the breast milk.

The bottom line: lots of things contribute to healthy babies. But that's not what shows up in the media. What the media sees is "Breast is best", and then comes the extremists, who make every mommy with a bottle feel terrible. (be glad you don't have to be a part of this battle, Daddies!).

Here's another example. Genes. We live in a society in which the gene is king. We like to identify the genes for this and that trait, and we've mapped out every strand of DNA in the human genome (well actually for a handful of human's genomes). So naturally we're going to start seeing studies showing the language gene, or the intelligence gene. I've even seen studies reporting the liberal and/or conservative genes. It's kind of deflating -- all that work we put in to make our kids smart and successful, and it turns out that it's all set from birth. But here's the real deal: there is no gene for language, and there is no gene for intelligence. There are genes that are related to these things, but they may play only a small role, and the studies are designed to find the genes, not to tell us how important they are.

More importantly, all of these genes would do zilch without a body and an environment. We're now learning how genes themselves can be controlled by the environment (that is, whether or not a gene is expressed is determined by environmental factors). So genes are necessarily only a small part of development. Parents have a huge role to play. But the media, in it's relentless simplification of science doesn't report it that way. They just say that we've discovered the language genes. So be careful reading these claims.

So whenever you are reading media reports, look for complexity! Development is messy (particularly around meal-times) and complex, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong (or they were misquoted).

Have a question for Professor Bob? Send your development & language development questions to me via email (tony at savvydaddy dot com)