Boy with Autism Recovers After Gluten-free Casein-free Diet
Many parents know that diet and environment can change children’s behaviour. In this video a mother and Dr Kenneth Bock discuss how a gluten and dairy free diet helped her son recover from autism.
Dr Bock recommends also that children and families avoid chemicals, pesticides and other possible contributors to autism such as phthalates in plastic.
‘Growing Greener Children’ is a great first step comprehensive resource for parents wanting to adopt a healthier lifestyle.
If you change the beginning of the story you change the whole story is the message from Dr Dimitri Christakis talking on TEDx about media and children.
Typically the age children in 1970’s started watched television regularly was 4 years, now it’s 4 months. The typical child under child of 5 years is watching 4-5 hours a day.
Dimitri’s talk clearly outlines the effects of too much television on the child’s developing brain.
Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, EDC’s, include Bisphenol-A (BPA), PCB’s, phthalates and agricultural pesticides that are in everyday items such as plastic water bottles, shower curtains, beauty products (including nail polish, hair spray, shampoo, deodorants, and fragrances), vinyl floor coverings, and more. The joint study highlights a range of health problems associated with EDC’s including breast cancer in women; developmental effects on the nervous system in children and attention deficit hyperactivity in children.
Theo Colborn, Ph.D., President of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange talks about chemicals, parents and dreams of the future for our children.
Theo asks ‘Where are parents going to get information to help understand the myriad of factors in the environment and the effect on their children’. ‘Growing Greener Children’is such a resource for parents.
… as things stand we’re all being used as guinea pigs in the great test of new product safety.”
-Mark Bittman, The Cosmetics Wars, The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2013
Mark Bittman’s article on cosmetics testing in The New York Times highlights the fact that personal care product makers don’t have to prove that the ingredients in their shampoos, toothpastes or other cosmetics are safe before you use them.
The Environmental Working Group (E.W.G.) offers a database of more than 79,000 personal care products, from soap to lip plumper ranked by level of hazard. The database is an excellent way to find out what is in you and your children’s products.
In Australia the Green Party have created a new poll to understand parents perspectives on early childhood education and care. The Green Party has said it’s time to hear what parents thought about childcare.
Is Western education superior? We have an institution globally that is branding millions and millions of innocent people as failures. They are the in-between people and they are falling through the cracks of an in-between world. We have moved from wisdom to knowledge and now we are moving from knowledge to information. We have moved from wisdom to knowledge and now we are moving from knowledge to information. Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden is set in Ladakh and examines the long-unquestioned assumption that the western model of education and schooling improves lives wherever it goes.
“For the child…it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow…. It is more important to pave the way for a child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts that he is not ready to assimilate.”
Rachel Carson
“First and foremost, our job as heart-centered educators must be to understand the potential of each ‘seed’ we are nurturing. The great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals said it well: ‘The child must know that he (or she) is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn’t been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him (or her).’ Supporting the miracle of each child’s uniqueness does not lend itself to standardization. It is not ‘convenient.’ It may seem easier to find a one-size-fits-all way of delivering and assessing learning, but if we pay attention, the natural world will help us realize the futility of trying to do so. Nothing in nature, including human beings, can be completely ‘standardized.’ (1)
We need to advocate for an education based on the understanding of our children’s uniqueness. This is a fundamental right of every child.
A beautiful and powerful song about identity and connection to country from Shellie Morris and the Yanyuwa Borroloola Song Women.
Singing Yanyuwa Identity – Shellie Morris, the Yanyuwa Songwomen and the Gondwana National Indigenous Children’s Choir perform ‘li-Anthawirriyarra’ at the Sydney Opera House for the DEADLY AWARDS 2011. This chorus is a traditional/contemporary collaboration born from saltwater people their Yanyuwa identity and connection to the country. It involves the traditional singers, Shellie Morris and children from Borroloola . Waliwaliyangu li-Anthawirriyarra li-Yanyuwa Calling from island to island.
A must watch segment on ABC TV’s Catalyst program on plastic waste and our environment.
Plastic Oceans
Oceans are silently choking on our plastic waste. Plastic and synthetic materials are the most common types of debris in our oceans and are having horrific impacts on marine wildlife and systems. As an island continent ‘girt by sea’ marine debris is of particular importance for Australia. Creatures get entangled in plastics and drown and ingested concentrated toxins from plastics pose a threat to the health of the food chain. Plastics also transport and introduce species into new environments. Anja Taylor catches up with the CSIRO research team spearheading the Marine Debris Survey, a world-first study of the plastics around our coastline.
