Wheelbarrows

Let’s be clear, everybody, and we do mean every single person on the plant, starts out life as a kind of ‘wheelbarrow’. Now wheelbarrows are empty and powerless vessels that are filled by someone else and pushed by someone else. This is not a bad thing, it’s a design factor. Humans, like no other creature, are created with very little ‘pre-loaded’ stuff – What we do have is an incredible faculty and capacity to learn and learn big!

However, as this is done over a long period of time and only done in connection, in relationship, to other human-beings, how you develop and grow heavily depends on who or what is filling you and pushing you and why.

Up until you hit puberty, you’re set up to learn by that input and instruction. Once you hit puberty, your learning, your input and what you let direct you begins to be determined more by you…. Ah, but how you were prepared (or not) for that stage is a huge factor in you making smarter, wiser, safer, and sound developmental choices. So, the question is, who or what is influencing you and is it the best? (Click here for more)

Details: Published: 03 April 2024; Hits: 634

Family connectedness, particularly at meal times – excellent protective factor: The scientists are catching up – Research confirms what all community minded and family valuing people know. Family togetherness is a key to not only better health and well-being, but also building resilience into the emerging adult – resilience that can make it easier for them to avoid the substance use trap. (https://worldresiliencyday.org)

“Eating dinner together at least 3 or 4 times per week has positive effects on child development and has been linked to children’s lower rates of overweight and obesity, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, depression, and eating disorders; higher self-esteem; and better academic performance. Eating family meals also has nutritional benefits. Families who eat dinner together eat more fruits and vegetables and fewer fried foods and sugary drinks. Family meals also help adults and children learn to like a variety of foods.” (Source: JAMA Paediatrics)

familyconnections

Details: Published: 17 January 2024; Hits: 632

Behind every alcoholic parent, there is a child of an alcoholic and, with over 7.5 million people in the UK showing signs of alcohol dependence, that’s an awful lot of children who will be affected by their parents drinking (one in five children, to be exact.)

When you grow up in the house of an addict, forced to take on the role of adult as you ‘parent the parent’, your childhood is characterised by chaos, unpredictability, and (lack of) control.

When you know that what is happening at home is wrong, that a child should not be in that environment (when your mother herself has told you so, yet continues to do it anyway), somewhere along the way you have to pretend that you don’t care, pushing the emotions away as far down as they will go. Because, as hard as home life is, you’re told that being in care will be harder, ‘and if social services get involved, that’s exactly what will happen…’, as she would remind you every time you’d shout, in between cries, that ‘it’s not fair.’

Having essentially been forced to remain silent for 18 years, left with no choice but to make numbness my default so as not to ‘slip up’, and the years after that forgetting that there was an alternative, it is only now, aged 22, that I am, slowly, opening myself up to emotion and it is interesting, in a word.

To be able to feel things that I have spent a lifetime not feeling.
To be able to feel something other than…nothing.

For complete story

Details: Published: 13 December 2023; Hits: 485

Big Tobaccos Playbook for Marketing to the Young: Campaign for Tobacco Free KidsTobacco companies are deploying a suite of tactics to reach young people and create an immersive, “surround sound” marketing effect on social media... For nearly 75 years, tobacco companies have understood the importance of influencer marketing. In 1949, Philip Morris outlined its marketing strategy for college students stating that they needed to: “‘get ‘em’ young, train ‘em right’ ” recognizing that college students “are widely copied by others. They set styles…[and] because they’re young and if we sell them, we have customers for a long time. ”

Details: Published: 11 December 2023; Hits: 821

The length of stay in intensive care varies greatly, from a few days up to a month. When taken home, for several months these babies may still experience signs of withdrawal.

This baby had tense and clenched muscles. She could not organise a suck pattern to feed effectively and required a feeding tube, and she would tremor and jerk so much she rubbed her chin raw on her blankets.

The nurses would take turns swaying and rocking with her for hours. This baby was medicated with morphine and gas drops, and was tried on multiple different formulas to help try to soothe her and settle her reflux.

Often it is the case that mothers with drug dependence really want to get off drugs and care for their baby. They love their children, but the truth is that their addiction has a strong hold on them. (for complete article https://newsweekly.com.au/newsweekly/addictions-littlest-victims/)

Also see

Details: Published: 27 September 2023; Hits: 579

“Decriminalisation creates too many practical difficulties for police officers to implement policy, and there are inadequately designed and resourced diversionary programs. At this stage, we do not believe a threshold has been met whereby community members can be kept safe through a process of decriminalising or legalising illicit ‘hard’ drugs including amphetamines, heroin, cocaine and MDMA. Hard drugs cause enormous amounts of harm to society, and the PANSW believes any more to make them easier to use will create further problems.” Police Association of NSW