Session Notes

WebMD

Dec. 13, 2011 — Girls and young women who are vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) appear to be no more likely than those who are not vaccinated to engage in sexually risky behaviors, a CDC survey finds.

After all of the drama, handwringing and false guilt about teens being given a free pass to have sex via safety from only one of oh-so-many sexually transmitted diseases, it turns out that the only thing this vaccination manages to do is keep children from dying of one sexually transmitted disease.

And, actually to the contrary of the above, it seems to at least be correlated somewhat with a rather high willingness to insist on condom use in women.

The best schools

The students could not go from their vague discomfort to a rational ethical conclusion because they have never learned traditional philosophy of ethics. Therefore, their objections have no force and, for all that they sense injustice, they will likely do very little good in the world. And the “accept everyone, accept everything” assemblies they attend unwittingly feed the problem: They learn to accept gay rights in North America and stoning gays in Afghanistan.

For centuries, the Church (Protestant and Catholic) was the center of moral thought. She defined goodness, ethics, morality and truth and, as dubious as some of the definitions may have been, they were societally accepted – though they were founded on very little in the way of rational thought and mostly based on the writings of ancient teachers.

And, the years passed and the faith slowly changed. More and more the basic concepts of grace and freedom became a tired footnote to a reconstituted law we used to control people. The strident hostility she formerly displayed towards the Gnostic ideas that regarded the body as bad and the spirit as good were replaced by a bland acceptance of such. The ancient and even enlightenment ideals of God calling humanity to heal and change the world for good slowly became replaced with a cosmic vending machine of the Divine which is purchased by an ever changing subset of moral requirements.

And, society responded. The more educated did what the Church had long since ceased to do – read the Bible – and rejected us because the strange Judaism, Gnosticism and New Age Movement based beliefs we were now following in no way resembled the teachings of Scripture. The less educated simply looked at us in the hard cold light of reality and judged us to be idiotic. And, they were both right.

And, with us went our morality.

But, the Church had no fear. Our laws safely projected our moral system and a societal acceptance of virtue – thus, the acceptance of our morality was not really that necessary. So, we continued with our passivity, pulled back into our stained glass hidey-holes, repeated the writings of long dead thinkers and acted like everything was fine while we continued to do nothing to alter our refusal to actually think about what we believe.

But, little by little, something was changing. While our laws still promoted most virtues, the society quietly forgot truth could even exist – and the law started to seem silly. And, a Church promoting anyone’s law – especially long dead people’s laws – began to seem absurdist, and MOST WORTHY of strident censure themselves.

So, then we finally get here: We arrive at a place where a class full of high school students no longer can look at a culture where women are property, can be executed at will, have their noses hacked off and may be abused by their husbands or families as a matter of course and conclude that this is not a good thing to be happening.

Why? Because way back when, we decided it was a good idea to stop thinking. We decided we would base our teachings on dead guy’s thinkings instead of founding them on anthropology (The study of what it means to be human) and we decided our stained glass hideouts would attract people in all by themselves.

And, ultimately, we decided to quit engaging culture and thought.

The ironic reality is that when we quit engaging and thinking, even secular thinkers are waking up and realizing that thinking basically seems to have ceased – right along with the ability to stand up for much other then not standing up for much of anything other then seals and trees – especially that which may suggest that some things simply do not fit well with our Anthropology.

And, starkly and significantly absent from an article that so clearly grasps the problem, is even the remotest grasp of anything but a plan to go back to teaching a set of rules that these students should then accept and make moral judgments on the basis of.

And, we’re still waiting for the Church to stand up…

Scientific American

For example, subjects were asked if they’d administer harmless but painful electric shocks to another person. They chose to shock those fully clothed significantly more often than those exposed above the waist. So if you’re looking for sympathy, maybe show a little skin.

After years of church and society ranting about how a woman showing a little skin is the woman dressing for a rape, it turns out the opposite is true. Men and women who show a little skin actually elicit sympathy, not predation, from others.

Doesn’t it also seem rather interesting that the schools which treat children in the most severe ways also tend to be those which have the most stringent uniform demands…

Smithsonian Magazine.

“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”

When Ros and I were looking at schools to place our daughters in, we did a lot of research and found that there is literally only one school in Calgary (Charging about $14k/child/yr) that would publicly state: “We are responsible for your child’s education. If your child is not learning it is our problem. We ask you sit your child down to do homework, but please do not assist. If your child can not complete the homework assigned, we want to know.” Apparently, in Finland, it’s national education policy standard.

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

But, here we pressure and torture our children by grading them against each other and shaming them when they show up at the bottom of the pile:

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

And, our failure rates speak for themselves:

Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.

Not only do they spend less money, the children spend even less time cooped up in school pretending to learn:

Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers. Teachers use the extra time to build curriculums and assess their students. Children spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of winter. Homework is minimal. Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

And, the teachers are highly respected as well — to say nothing of very highly trained at Government expense:

Practically speaking—and Finns are nothing if not practical—the decision meant that goal would not be allowed to dissipate into rhetoric. Lawmakers landed on a deceptively simple plan that formed the foundation for everything to come. Public schools would be organized into one system of comprehensive schools, or peruskoulu, for ages 7 through 16. Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions. Besides Finnish and Swedish (the country’s second official language), children would learn a third language (English is a favorite) usually beginning at age 9. Resources were distributed equally. As the comprehensive schools improved, so did the upper secondary schools (grades 10 through 12). The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers.

Essentially, you stop treating teachers like they are idiots, they develop pride in their work and make it their mission to help children learn — instead of just putting on a tolerable performance so they keep their jobs:

Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive. In 2010, some 6,600 applicants vied for 660 primary school training slots, according to Sahlberg. By the mid-1980s, a final set of initiatives shook the classrooms free from the last vestiges of top-down regulation. Control over policies shifted to town councils. The national curriculum was distilled into broad guidelines. National math goals for grades one through nine, for example, were reduced to a neat ten pages. Sifting and sorting children into so-called ability groupings was eliminated. All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind. The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”

So much so that they no longer even need government supervision — they want to excel from the depths of the pride in who they are and the honor they receive from society.

Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s PISA scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade.

Oh, and it’s not just some European thing where that people group somehow does better either. Though, it just may have something to do with a national policy of treating everyone fairly decently:

It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.

And the moral of the story is: Take care of people, treat them with respect and give them the tools to do their jobs and they will take pride in their work and give you one of the best education systems in the world. Don’t be a dick to children, make sure they get to spend lots of time being mothered, feed them, make sure they are healthy and unstressed and they will learn better then most of the world.

Whodathunkit???

Well, certainly not our brilliant and fearless leader — who is busy exporting both our worst educational failures and the associated testing systems to the rest of the world…

American Psychological Association

CPS involvement did not improve long-run outcomes, a 2010 study found. Such involvement sometimes harms children by taking them from their families unnecessarily – which, in my office’s experience, happens more than 100 times each year in the District. These removals traumatize children and devastate families.

I wish I could disagree with the study, but, while I have always followed the code drilled into me at least once every month of my training and constantly by every brief of the laws I am under, about 2/3rds of the time, I ended up wishing I had not. Most of the time, it’s like watching an episode of some sort of absurdist sitcom entitled, “The invasion of the mental munchkins.”

The same is true when adults report rapes etc. It’s been my experience that less then 2-3% of the offenders ever see a night in jail – while the victims get to experience a system that pretty much torments them for months and leaves them tormenting themselves long after. I’d say that the majority of the PTSD symptoms that later emerge are not the result of the rape but, rather, the result of police and social services stupidity.

As sad as it is to say, it’s getting so therapists need to issue guidelines for reporting to them…

Just a few of the things that are never taught in the ivory castles of education by those who epitomize the statement that, “Those who can, do, the rest teach,” to say nothing of even being remotely grasped by the legal system…

via HugoSchwyzer.net.

So many adults are fearful that telling kids that sex is pleasurable will simply encourage young people to have it before they are physically and emotionally ready for the consequences. Better, they imagine, to emphasize that it’s important to wait and to stress the risks. But as it turns out, centering pleasure is a great way to minimize the chances that a teen will be pressured into doing something that they don’t want to do.

When we tell girls that sex is something people do when they love each other, it sets them up to believe that sex is sacrificial. So when Jassie falls in love with Bobby, and Bobby pushes for intercourse, she’s conditioned to focus on “giving it up” for him rather than on thinking about what feels good for her. The more she’s taught that her pleasure matters, the less likely she’ll be coerced into going farther than her body is ready to go. “It’s supposed to feel good”, she may remember, “and right now, being rushed and pawed doesn’t feel good. So I want to stop.” Centering pleasure gives young women a power that centering love doesn’t.

The same is true with boys. When we teach them that sex is about feeling good, we remind them that it isn’t about “losing it.” We think of adolescent boys as hormone-addled horndogs, and many of them are. There are some pretty damn horny teenage girls too, though we’re less comfortable acknowledging that. But what drives so many boys to focus on having heterosexual intercourse isn’t the pursuit of pleasure for either themselves or their partners. It’s the longing to “become a man” or to “score” in a competition that’s really about winning praise and validation from other men. Pleasure becomes less important than being a “stud” in other boys’ eyes. That’s not a lot of fun.So Cooper got it exactly right. While there are other reasons why people have sex, the desire to give and share pleasure is perhaps the most basic. And the more we center pleasure in our discussions with children, the more we equip them to say no to what hurts, what’s coerced, and what’s unwanted. And the more we empower them to say “yes” only to what feels good.

All I can add to this is that, just perhaps, we can then focus the rest of our energy on teaching them what a balanced relationship looks like, what it means to defraud another and what it means to only awaken that which the time has come for it to be awakened. In other words, empower them to really keep the hearts of everyone safe.

Via: The Atlantic

Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?

Ten years ago or so, I started seeing a phenomenon. A constant stream of clients began to come into the office who really did have perfect parents and had gone through perfect childhoods with that they described as, “Perfect Self Esteem,” – whatever this week’s definition of that is…

And, they had just ditched their second wife or husband.

What the linked article – well worth the really long read it is btw – misses is that there is a second tier of issue happening here that goes way beyond just the person’s ability to deal with stress, it has to do with foundational skills in relationships.

You see, while said perfect parents are running around and making sure that junior has the perfect life, they are not focused on each other, not locking their kids out of their room and making mad passionate love that properly disgusts their children, they are not making out in the living room until their teens want them to get a room, they never go out on dates alone and (GOD FORBID!!!) leave the children with a sitter, they never chase the kids out of the room to have a private, deeply emotional and intimate conversation (that the child overhears from around the corner anyway) and they have never demonstrated to the child the struggle it takes to make a real marriage work.

No, they are too busy raising the perfect child…

Enter stage left another perfectly parented child with perfect delusions from Hollywood about relationships and a marriage happens. And neither of them have any clue about even making a real marriage work – much less the romantic ideal. And, it blows sky high. And, we wonder why…

Then, in retirement acres down somewhere where the sun always shines, the two elderly perfect parents sit across the patio from each other wondering why they can’t even talk enough with each other anymore to discuss why junior and juniorette can’t seem to stay married. Some of them also wonder if that inability to talk has anything to do with why, lately, they seem to be pushing happy hour up to lunchtime…

via Californians for Population Stabilization.

In “Beyond Choice, Reproductive Freedom in the 21st Century,” he has written eloquently about reproductive issues and addresses the importance of spacing between births:

Women face huge risks to their health from pregnancy and childbirth. The biggest killer of women over time has been childbirth. When women die, their children are more likely to die as well.

Women have evolved to minimize these risks by planning and spacing their children and by limiting the number of children they bear.

In simplest terms for today, allowing space between the births of children provides the mother time to recover from pregnancy and childbirth, with all its related hormonal and physical changes. For children, it allows for sufficient time to be devoted to their nurturing.

Apparently this information is lost on the Duggars, but science often is at odds with fundamentalist thinking.

In spite of the rabid insanity of the source and my total reticence towards the idea of doing anything to support them, someone had to say it. One correction though: the above last word, “Thinking,” probably never did apply…

When I look at my own children through the lens of the psychological training I have, I am continually reminded at how far I fall short of the full parenting I wish I could offer them — simply due to the time demands running a practice in the area of sexuality and relationships. We decided to stop having children at two because I knew that adding a third child would mean my parenting of all of them would meet my own training’s definition of, “Negligent parenting.” I most willingly walked into the office of a surgeon for a vasectomy because I love my two kids too much to deprive them of the kind of attention, love, guidance and care they deserve.

Parents who have more time to devote to parenting perhaps can handle more — but not too many more.

To multiply that number by 10, well, let’s not sugar coat it. You are no longer even offering negligent parenting — you are not offering parenting at all and children are being raised by children. The local genius squad almost always has an immediate rebuttal of course: “But, there are so many people out there who are being abused in so many families. They, on the other hand, all look happy, it’s all working and, if it looks fine and loving, then who are you to assess their alternate arrangements of family so just butt out.” Ya, except parenting isn’t a question of relativistic post-modernism, it’s a question of science and we have hundreds of years of studies of what does and doesn’t work — 20 kids to 2 parents = kids simply don’t get parented — and kids need parenting.

What stuns me is how few people have actually had the guts to stand up and say it though — to find such, we have to go out to the crazy fringe because everyone seems to be too afraid to cease being jello and admit that there really is such a thing as, “Stupid,” and there really is such a thing as, “Smart.”

Turning your vagina into a clown car, ya, that’s one that absolutely HAS to be called for the stupid category…

Via: democracynow.org

Dr. Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing. [includes rush transcript]

All I have to add is: Thank you medical community — it’s SO about time!!!

via www.gizmag.com.

For some time now, it’s been one of those “well-known facts” that playing video games increases one’s hand-eye coordination… much to the consternation of parents and spouses trying to convince family members that their obsessive gaming has no redeeming value. Now, research conducted at the University of Rochester indicates that playing action video games also increases peoples’ ability to make right decisions faster. Ironically, an activity that involves sitting on the couch helps people to think on their feet.

Google’s expectation that certain employees have reached high level character development on World of Warcraft prior to becoming eligible for employment turns out to have been a pretty decent hunch…