November 16th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Here’s an original story I told at the Speakeasy Lounge Club in Westport last Saturday night.
Good News from Another Universe
Not exactly high-fidelity since I forgot to take the recorder out of my pocket–but I hope you like it.
Thanks to Dermot and Steve for a great night of music, fun, and smart people. The next event is being held on Saturday, November 20th. See their Facebook page for details.
September 28th, 2010 § Comments Off
Imagination…is the healthy child’s most precious possession, the bedrock of their ultimate identity as autonomous and well-adjusted adults.
Why then, one might ask, does society lay siege on imagination? For that is how things stand today.
To begin with, falsely believing abductions and child murders to be everyday dangers, we have put in a host of needless restrictions on children’s lives, preventing them as a result from experiencing much nature (or life indeed) beyond the bite-sized chunks dolloped out to them on screen or in museums.
We allow advertisers (even on RTE, to our shame) to exploit children by making them feel self-conscious for not having Object X or looking like Celebrity Y.
You can read the full text of this article I wrote for the Mayo News, by clicking the link below:
Keegan – The (Almost) Lost World [Mayo News]
Flickr image by …Tim
May 30th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Our kids have great books in their bedrooms, most of which they have read or we have read to them. Here’s how to accumulate books your kids will be grateful for:
1: Never buy a book by a celebrity
2: Never buy a book that is a numbered part of a series
3: Never buy a book that is tied-in to a movie or TV product
4: Let your kids buy (or borrow) whatever they want.
No celebrities, no series, no cameras: remember these rules of thumb and you will have yourself a powerful tool to help you when next you are standing in the bookstore, facing the 90% garbage that most booksellers offer our children. (Is any other group of consumers treated so badly?)
With these rules, you can quickly gather a pile of quality books to choose from: books that got onto that bookshelf largely on their own merits.
An objection could be made that most kids’ classics, The Jungle Book, say, or the Harry Potter novels, all had movies made of them. But, caveat emptor: the books under these names in stores today are often a shabby mixture of movie screenshots and insipid ‘retellings’. And look out for ‘abridged versions’: more grown-up stupidity dressed up as concern for children, the poor dears. The best place to find the original classics is in the library or by reference to the publisher: Puffin Books is one imprint I trust for editorial commonsense.
Rule #4 is vital of course: if they are doing the choosing, children should always be allowed to choose what they like, without any comment from parents.
Rules are made to be broken so, for instance, I would make an exception to #2 for the likes of Tintin and to #4 for material that is patently unsuitable and likely to disturb e.g. adult horror stories.
flickr image by mwoodard
July 9th, 2009 § Comments Off
One of the great things about having children is that it gives you the opportunity to return to childhood classics–and also read the books you’d like to read now if you were an 8-year-old. There’s many more we got through at bedtime than these of course, but these are stand-outs:
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner. Revisiting a favourite from my childhood. [AmazonUK]
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit. Wonderfully funny–and witty too. [AmazonUK]
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night by Allan and Janet Ahlberg. Cervantes for the under-10 set. [AmazonUK]
Just William by Richmal Crompton. Misadventures of spirited boy prone to scrapes: a masterclass in comic writing. [AmazonUK]
Stig of the Dump by Clive King. Again, revisiting a favourite from my childhood with the alibi that I am reading to the kids. [AmazonUK]
The Unlucky Day by Richard Scarry. Disaster comedy puts credit crunch in perspective: imagine cold pickles for dinner in flooded home! [AmazonUK]
Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. A young boy finds friendship with mysterious children in the garden, a place transformed when night falls and midnight strikes… [AmazonUK]
May 29th, 2009 § 6 Comments
As Facebook friends and Twitter followers already know, I’ve been commenting a lot on the appalling revelations contained in the Ryan Report into Irish Institutional Child Abuse (I prefer the word Persecution for what happened). The original injury, bestial in the depths of its depravity, was made even worse by the intransigence, to this day, of the Religious Orders who controlled the institutions in which the children suffered.
Irish blogger Damien Mulley has helpfully pulled some of the evidence produced by victims into a slideshow: this, mind you, is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
August 13th, 2008 § Comments Off
Another interesting revelation from the UNICEF report on Child Well-Being in Rich Countries I wrote about previously is that books are not valued in many wealthy and successful countries.
Below is a chart from that survey showing the Percentage of Children age 15 reporting less than 10 books in the home. It’s hard to generalize (even for me!) based on these figures so I will just confine myself to noting that the paucity of books in over 10% of Irish homes should be a real cause for concern for parents, children, educators, and community leaders here.
Unfortunately, despite Ireland’s literary tradition and love of the English language–whether spoken, written, or sung–our libraries are generally lamentable.
It may surprise you to hear that their equivalents in Las Vegas, where we previously lived, were infinitely superior in every way than their oddly impoverished Irish counterparts. (See comparison figures below).
On top of this, booksellers here are not what they were (vide , for one, the stock-gutting of Waterstones on Dawson Street), we love television, and the public transport system is poor: together all conspire to reduce opportunities for people to read good books. Children, meanwhile, are not read to at night, and when they are taken to bookshops find either “franchise books” (which may or may not be good) and celebrity tie-in pulp, which is generally not.
Quite reasonably they conclude more fun will be had online or playing console games.
So, what are we going to do about it? Read to your kids every bedtime. Let them see you enjoying books. And maybe embarrass your local bookseller into thinking beyond Harry Potter, Madonna, and Enid Blyton
The figures from the two library systems: Las Vegas slightly outspends Ireland on library stock purchased [$5.47 to $5.10 per capita]. But the most telling characteristic, for me, is the non-stock spend: only 11% of the Irish budget is spent on stock. Las Vegas, by contrast, raises their stock-spend to 20%, almost double the Irish rate, while maintaining an ambitious expansion program to meet the needs of a continuing population influx. [Sources: Ireland; Las Vegas; and xe.net for currency rates]
August 6th, 2008 § 2 Comments
A recent report by UNICEF on child well-being in rich countries seems to vindicate our decision to raise the kids in Ireland.
Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.
The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.
However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.
One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.
(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)
Click on images above to enlarge data tables.
Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)
March 19th, 2008 § Comments Off
Recent riots in the Dublin suburb of Finglas and a teenage double suicide in my own county underline the responsibility we all have to help our young people grow up to become responsible, productive, and happy citizens. (Meanwhile, in my old home of Las Vegas, the radio station where I worked was hit by bullets following a post-school fracas across the street.)
The kids are not alright. An essay by Paul Graham examines adolescent unhappiness: his thesis, in a nutshell, is that because of the way we organize Western societies now teenagers are denied the experience of real and meaningful work in their teens. Money quote:
If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.
But the problem is not that we choose to institutionally educate our children: the problem is how we teach them.
The trick is to teach our young their subjects as meaningful tools to live a better life. Literacy, numeracy, history, geography, and creativity can all be taught in a practical and useful way that has (and is perceived by the children themselves to have) direct benefits for themselves and their community.
Would the children of Finglas be so quick to destroy their environment if they had actually worked, through school, to determine it, say by planting trees or contributing to planning decisions? I do not think they would.
Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular: paulgraham.com, Feb, 2003
Image: ‘Halt’ by New York Observer on Flickr
