Childcare guru: little youngsters ought to not stay overnight with absent parent

Penelope Leach believes little children shouldn’t be taken away overnight from the parent they are attached to. Photograph: Alamy

Quite small children whose mother and father separate ought to not stay overnight with the absent father or mom, according to childcare guru Penelope Leach in a book that is presently causing controversy ahead of publication later this week.

Leach says divorce, which is now the fate of nearly half of all marriages, is also typically about the interests of the mothers and fathers, with the kids regarded as property to be shared in between them. Her guide, Household Breakdown: assisting youngsters hang on to each their dad and mom, seems at divorce from the child’s point of see, she says.

But her assertion that young children below the age of four, normally residing with their mother, could suffer emotional and developmental harm if they sleepover at the residence of the absent mother or father, typically the father, has attracted powerful criticism from some psychologists who say there is insufficient proof to substantiate it.

In an interview with Tory MP and former children’s minister Tim Loughton on the internet site of her publisher, Unbound, Leach says: “You get situations where kids are paying a week in mum’s residence and a week in dad’s home and all kinds of horrible arrangements. I get in touch with them horrible because we do know that they are desperately wrong for kids, who require the safety of a spot known as property and who, when extremely little, shouldn’t be taken away overnight from what is normally the mom – the individual they are attached to.”

It is understood she relies on a examine published in Australia in 2010 by McIntosh, Smyth and Kelaher, which was the basis for a report by the Australian Association for Infant Psychological Health. It stated that “the shared overnight care of young children less than four years of age had a significantly adverse influence on the emotional and behavioural nicely-currently being of the youngster. Infants under two years who lived one particular or a lot more overnights a week with both parents had been significantly stressed.” Older youngsters underneath four exhibited better ranges of problem behaviour, the report stated.

But Adrienne Burgess, joint chief executive and head of study at the Fatherhood Institute in the Uk, stated the study’s findings are out of line with other study on the situation and the authors themselves declare their function has been misrepresented. A consensus statement from above 100 professionals, published in the US this 12 months, had taken concern with the Australian findings. “Policymakers and selection makers should recognize that depriving youthful children of overnights with their fathers could compromise the top quality of creating father-kid relationships,” explained the statement signed largely by members of the American Psychological Association.

“Penelope Leach appears to be unaware of the [Australian authors"] most current place, let alone the furore that has been going on in the academic globe,” she explained.

Leach’s see that infants and modest youngsters form just a single powerful attachment is out of date anyway, says Burgess. “Youngsters produce multiple attachments,” she said. “There will be some attachments exactly where they invest much more time with one particular carer than yet another, but all these attachments have an influence – constructive or adverse.”

Dr Tara Weeramanthri, consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust, explained that youngsters have a hierarchy of attachment figures, who incorporate grandparents and other carers as properly as dad and mom, rather than getting connected to just one particular person. “When sick or distressed, they want the man or woman at the leading of the tree as it were, so if mother was the principal carer, that would be mom,” she stated. Nevertheless, “I would not share the view that youthful youngsters should not devote the evening at the father’s residence , in which the couple have separated.

“It is clearly important that visits are managed and supported by both mothers and fathers rather than the youngster being caught up in a predicament exactly where there is acrimony. “Each and every mother or father has to work to help the child’s partnership with the other mother or father, by preparing and speaking to them about it and it is greatest if the check out are component of a routine rather than erratic and tiny youngsters could want to consider a favourite toy, this kind of as a teddy.”

Dr Nigel Sherriff, senior investigation fellow in the centre for well being analysis at Brighton University and a member of the British Psychological Society, stated the suggestion that overnight stays need to not be permitted “goes against the investigation proof which strongly suggests that constructive father engagement in the early many years prospects to higher social and educational outcomes”. He extra that the idea of a exclusive attachment to one man or woman – usually the mom – was “hugely outdated now”. The theory grew up in the 1950s, publish-war, when guys came back without having jobs and there have been attempts to persuade females that they should stay at home with the kids. “All the evidence [today] suggests it is about the good quality of the relationship to the care giver and not whether it is in a distinct area or with a diverse care giver,” he stated.

Childcare guru: little youngsters ought to not stay overnight with absent parent

The "Saatchi Bill": can a PR guru cure cancer?

Till this week the Bill essential that there must be “plausible motives why the proposed remedy might be effective”. But it did not need scientifically plausible reasons. To quacks, faith healers, fools and conmen (and sadly even some experienced physicians) virtually anything is plausible, which includes meridians, spirits, water memory and laying on of hands.

In any case, plausible theories can be, and have frequently proved to be, spectacularly and fatally misleading. Laying infants to sleep on their stomachs (so they really don’t ingest vomit) was a plausible idea that resulted in 1000′s of cot deaths. Dozens of other half-baked ideas – providing oxygen to premature babies or steroids for brain injury – have taught how persuasively unsafe credible notions can be.

Maurice Saatchi invited me to discuss my issues with him three months ago and graciously accepted that the Bill should be amended (a) to keep away from opening the flood gates to quackery or to buccaneering experimentation on vulnerable sufferers and (b) to supply for the essential value of disseminating final results.

Meanwhile, the magnificence of the Saatchi marketing and advertising machine has overshadowed the truth that bulk of the health-related research local community has given that come out against the Bill such as the NHS Wellness Research Authority, the Academy of Healthcare Royal Colleges, medical research charities such as Cancer Analysis United kingdom, the Basic Healthcare Council, the Health care Safety Society the British Pharmacological Society, pioneering surgeons like Michael Baum and senior lawyers including Robert Francis QC.

To his wonderful credit score Maurice Saatchi has been listening. His new edition is to be published on Thursday and it will embody fundamental modifications. For a begin it will exclusively exclude research – the very issue it was touted to be liberating. And, thank heavens, it will now call for consultation with appropriately competent colleagues, like any appropriate multidisciplinary staff. Of course if appropriately competent medical professionals and multi-disciplinary teams are all outdoors the scientific consensus, as is the situation in dubious clinics in Switzerland and Mexico for example, even downright quackery would be covered by this clause. But over all the revised Bill is very likely to retreat from its founding principle, which was to insulate medical professionals from widespread law. It will now particularly acknowledge that practically nothing in the Bill is meant to cease individuals suing physicians for negligence.

In essence then, the revised Bill will just allow physicians to do what they can do previously, which is to consider out final-ditch remedies. But there will be an advance. Even though it is not however in the one particular-and-a-half-webpage draft to be published this week, his personnel have produced me a “copper-bottomed” guarantee that Lord Saatchi will make further amendments to seek to acquire benefits of all these desperate measures and will disseminate results.

Given that a lot more perform is to be accomplished possibly the Bill could nevertheless be turned to a lot greater benefit. I have proposed to Lord Saatchi that he could rebalance the Bill to tackle the real difficulty of healthcare litigation. This is the 99.99 per cent of claims that have practically nothing to do with innovation but drain the well being services of £2.25 billion a year, are of severe concern to clinicians, create a burden on legal support and cause a excellent deal of individual distress. Claims towards surgeons and doctors assortment from the spurious, sometimes whipped up to a froth by greedy lawyers, to the tragic, which broken patients at times discover hard to pursue but all of them are hugely costly and a massive distraction. The legal expenses can dwarf the actual damages awards and they extremely frequently deter well being authorities from challenging questionable claims.

Claims must initial go to mediation or arbitration with some correct of appeal to an ombudsman. The ombudsman’s selection would be binding but in flip he or she could, if a case was believed to be particularly serious or of public importance, refer the matter to the courts.

There are very good precedents for legally binding arbitration, and the ombudsman technique is nicely-established and extremely regarded. But in any case the principles of reconciliation and escalation would be a big advance on the damaging adversarial process we now have. And it could conserve the NHS a 10 figure sum every year.

Meanwhile a Bill which promises to free us from pointless restraint, and is riding the surf of a brilliant publicity campaign, misses the massive picture to resolve a problem which is largely just a single of perception.

The "Saatchi Bill": can a PR guru cure cancer?

Anti-GMO Guru Mike Adams: NaturalNews.Com Option Well being "Snake Oil Salesman" Runs "Most Anti-Science Site On The Web"

He just may be the most influential—and scientists say the most irresponsible—voice in the crusade to demonize GMOs and undermine the advances of modern medicine. You may not know him by name but he is a titan in the booming alternative lifestyle business, running dozens of websites promoting ‘natural’ products, many of them bogus or dangerous, which he relentlessly hawks online.

His name is Mike Adams, the self-proclaimed Health Ranger, and his central hub—what amounts to his personal blog and general store—is NaturalNews.com, which offers a potpourri of offbeat theories about politics, science and health.

Adams site is the cyberspace version of the water cooler gathering spot for crackpot conspiracy theorists of the far left and right. His byline: “never trust official stories”.

Adam’s latest crusade: the world’s governments are covering up the fact that the doomed Malaysian Airlines jetliner was pirated safely to a desert hideaway by Iranian hijackers, and is now being refitted into a stealth nuclear bomb.

In recent months, Adams has claimed that high-dose Vitamin C injections, which he conveniently sells, have been shown to “annihilate cancer” (doctors warn high doses of vitamin C can be dangerous); that measles and mumps are making a comeback because vaccines are “designed to fail” (he’s an anti-vaccine campaigner); and that fluoridated water causes mental disorders. He is also an AIDS denialist, a 9/11 truther, a Barack Obama citizenship ‘birther’ and a believer in ‘dangerous’ chemtrails.

[Visit Mike Adams: Facts and Profile for more background]

But his most heated attacks—and the ones that generate the most traffic and business on his websites and what has made him a oft-cited hero of anti-GMOers—are directed at conventional agriculture, crop biotechnology in particular.

In a recent screaming but typical headline, Adams claimed that research at his Natural News Forensic Food Labs—another of his bizarre websites—has turned up unequivocal evidence that corporations are intentionally engineering “life-destroying toxins” into our food supply, with genetically modified corn as one of the chief ‘weapons against humanity.’ His recommendation: buy the natural products that he sells and rid the world of GMOs.

Considering Adams’s conspiratorial bent, he takes every opportunity to bash genetic engineering, promote junk science studies, spread innuendo and play the corporate greed card. No one would characterize his views as nuanced. “Monsanto’s products cause death,” he writes in a typical post, calling the seed and chemical company a “pusher” for selling “poison” and blaming it for the impending “destruction of humanity.”

His evidence: like many dedicated anti-GMO ideologues, Adams hypes discredited fringe research, such as the maize cancer rat study by French scientist Gilles-Erich Séralini. Adams’s sensationalist account claimed that the GMO corn caused “horrifying cancer tumors.” The study, roundly criticized by mainstream scientists when it was first released, was since retracted by the publishing journal because of its inconclusive results and shoddy data. But Adams’s “reporting” had long since done its damage. His article on the Séralini research was shared more than 81,000 times on Facebook.

Adams frequently goes personal in his attacks. “From the top company executives to the bottom of the corporate ladder,” he writes, “people who work for Monsanto are engaged in promoting a sickening, unprecedented evil that’s spreading across our planet like a black slimy cancer tumor.”

He is also a major promoter of GMO labeling, which he believes would stigmatize GMOs, undoubtedly pumping sales of his alternative universe of food and health goods. After the defeat of the Washington state labeling Initiative 522, Adams, issued what bordered on a lawless ‘call to arms.’

“The failure of 522 … shows that democracy itself doesn’t work,” he wrote on another one of his blogs, Dark Politricks. His solution? Go rogue. Adams called on anti-GMO activists to adopt “asymmetrical warfare tactics such as guerilla warfare. … To beat them at that game, you have to take off the kid gloves and go for their throats.” Based on Adams history, the call may not have been metaphorical.

Adams is quite open about his business model: play on fear to make as much money as possible. To dispel any doubts about his real motivations, in 2008, he bragged publicly in his self-published book, The 7 Principles of Mindful Wealth, that his operating philosophy was “Getting past self-imposed limits on wealth… Karma doesn’t pay the rent. Good karma isn’t the recognized currency in modern society: Dollars are!”

To peddle the alternative nostrums that have helped build his fortune, Adams operates a string of fringe health scare sites, including prenatalnutrition.org, expectant-mothers.com, NewsTarget.com, HoodiaFactor.com, EmergingFuture.com, SpamAnatomy.com, VitaminFactor.org, CounterThink.com, HealthFactor.info, JunkScience.info, BrainHealthNews.com, LowCholesterolDiets.DietsLink.com, PublicHealthNews.org, PharmaWatch.info, HomeToxins.com, PoisonPantry.org, DepressionFactor.org, webseed.com and ConsumerWellness.org.

Promoting terrorist scares is Adams stock and trade. In 1998 he launched the Y2K Newswire promoting apocalyptic claims of impending software disaster whileoffering sales of emergency preparedness products and foods. Following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, he wrote, falsely, that the Japanese radiation, “spans oceans and continents” to panic his readers into buying useless “FDA approved” potassium iodide treatments and storable uncontaminated super foods that he shamelessly sold on his site. That got him a mention on the sin qua non of conspiracy programs, the wacky Alex Jones Show, which Adams had previously guest hosted—further stoking his notoriety among the fringe set.

Anti-GMO Guru Mike Adams: NaturalNews.Com Option Well being "Snake Oil Salesman" Runs "Most Anti-Science Site On The Web"

Anti-GMO Guru Mike Adams: NaturalNews.Com Different Health "Snake Oil Salesman" Runs "Most Anti-Science Site On The Web"

He just may be the most influential—and scientists say the most irresponsible—voice in the crusade to demonize GMOs and undermine the advances of modern medicine. You may not know him by name but he is a titan in the booming alternative lifestyle business, running dozens of websites promoting ‘natural’ products, many of them bogus or dangerous, which he relentlessly hawks online.

His name is Mike Adams, the self-proclaimed Health Ranger, and his central hub—what amounts to his personal blog and general store—is NaturalNews.com, which offers a potpourri of offbeat theories about politics, science and health.

Adams site is the cyberspace version of the water cooler gathering spot for crackpot conspiracy theorists of the far left and right. His byline: “never trust official stories”.

Adam’s latest crusade: the world’s governments are covering up the fact that the doomed Malaysian Airlines jetliner was pirated safely to a desert hideaway by Iranian hijackers, and is now being refitted into a stealth nuclear bomb.

In recent months, Adams has claimed that high-dose Vitamin C injections, which he conveniently sells, have been shown to “annihilate cancer” (doctors warn high doses of vitamin C can be dangerous); that measles and mumps are making a comeback because vaccines are “designed to fail” (he’s an anti-vaccine campaigner); and that fluoridated water causes mental disorders. He is also an AIDS denialist, a 9/11 truther, a Barack Obama citizenship ‘birther’ and a believer in ‘dangerous’ chemtrails.

[Visit Mike Adams: Facts and Profile for more background]

But his most heated attacks—and the ones that generate the most traffic and business on his websites and what has made him a oft-cited hero of anti-GMOers—are directed at conventional agriculture, crop biotechnology in particular.

In a recent screaming but typical headline, Adams claimed that research at his Natural News Forensic Food Labs—another of his bizarre websites—has turned up unequivocal evidence that corporations are intentionally engineering “life-destroying toxins” into our food supply, with genetically modified corn as one of the chief ‘weapons against humanity.’ His recommendation: buy the natural products that he sells and rid the world of GMOs.

Considering Adams’s conspiratorial bent, he takes every opportunity to bash genetic engineering, promote junk science studies, spread innuendo and play the corporate greed card. No one would characterize his views as nuanced. “Monsanto’s products cause death,” he writes in a typical post, calling the seed and chemical company a “pusher” for selling “poison” and blaming it for the impending “destruction of humanity.”

His evidence: like many dedicated anti-GMO ideologues, Adams hypes discredited fringe research, such as the maize cancer rat study by French scientist Gilles-Erich Séralini. Adams’s sensationalist account claimed that the GMO corn caused “horrifying cancer tumors.” The study, roundly criticized by mainstream scientists when it was first released, was since retracted by the publishing journal because of its inconclusive results and shoddy data. But Adams’s “reporting” had long since done its damage. His article on the Séralini research was shared more than 81,000 times on Facebook.

Adams frequently goes personal in his attacks. “From the top company executives to the bottom of the corporate ladder,” he writes, “people who work for Monsanto are engaged in promoting a sickening, unprecedented evil that’s spreading across our planet like a black slimy cancer tumor.”

He is also a major promoter of GMO labeling, which he believes would stigmatize GMOs, undoubtedly pumping sales of his alternative universe of food and health goods. After the defeat of the Washington state labeling Initiative 522, Adams, issued what bordered on a lawless ‘call to arms.’

“The failure of 522 … shows that democracy itself doesn’t work,” he wrote on another one of his blogs, Dark Politricks. His solution? Go rogue. Adams called on anti-GMO activists to adopt “asymmetrical warfare tactics such as guerilla warfare. … To beat them at that game, you have to take off the kid gloves and go for their throats.” Based on Adams history, the call may not have been metaphorical.

Adams is quite open about his business model: play on fear to make as much money as possible. To dispel any doubts about his real motivations, in 2008, he bragged publicly in his self-published book, The 7 Principles of Mindful Wealth, that his operating philosophy was “Getting past self-imposed limits on wealth… Karma doesn’t pay the rent. Good karma isn’t the recognized currency in modern society: Dollars are!”

To peddle the alternative nostrums that have helped build his fortune, Adams operates a string of fringe health scare sites, including prenatalnutrition.org, expectant-mothers.com, NewsTarget.com, HoodiaFactor.com, EmergingFuture.com, SpamAnatomy.com, VitaminFactor.org, CounterThink.com, HealthFactor.info, JunkScience.info, BrainHealthNews.com, LowCholesterolDiets.DietsLink.com, PublicHealthNews.org, PharmaWatch.info, HomeToxins.com, PoisonPantry.org, DepressionFactor.org, webseed.com and ConsumerWellness.org.

Promoting terrorist scares is Adams stock and trade. In 1998 he launched the Y2K Newswire promoting apocalyptic claims of impending software disaster whileoffering sales of emergency preparedness products and foods. Following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, he wrote, falsely, that the Japanese radiation, “spans oceans and continents” to panic his readers into buying useless “FDA approved” potassium iodide treatments and storable uncontaminated super foods that he shamelessly sold on his site. That got him a mention on the sin qua non of conspiracy programs, the wacky Alex Jones Show, which Adams had previously guest hosted—further stoking his notoriety among the fringe set.

Anti-GMO Guru Mike Adams: NaturalNews.Com Different Health "Snake Oil Salesman" Runs "Most Anti-Science Site On The Web"