I'm halfway through Oliver James' book, "Affluenza," an interesting read on the esoteric affects of materialism on mental health. I read the follow-up book (Selfish Capitalist) first and found them both extremely challenging. I'm at a point in the book where he interviews a woman from New Zealand, who moved to Seattle, had a baby and now wants to leave her partner to move back to Auckland. Her son is attached to his father and dislikes any kind of separation from his mother. The mother wants to leave the father to avoid her depression but hasn't considered the ramifications to her son's emotional future. She says it's better for her son's future. Instead of examining her own issues, she's quite happy to take her two-year old son away from his father, half-way across the globe. An act that will most likely not alleviate her symptoms of depression.
The point Oliver drives home is the importance of having a single, responsive care-giver for children, at least until the age of three. Children need undivided attention at all time.
What would it look like to raise a child in an age of immediate-connectivity? If Facebook and Twitter are slowly becoming the standards for communication, what's next? Without sidelining the positive aspects of social networking - we need to consider how this is going to affect our children. Or, in case you haven't thought about it - your children will mirror your patterns of behaviour, whether good or bad.
Susan Greenfield, a writer, 'brain researcher' and Professor in Pharmacology at Oxford, is speaking at a lecture at the Opera House in Sydney on the 4th of October:
Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Baroness Susan Greenfield: Does Online Networking Harm Children’s Brains?
I wonder if the question of ethics will be raised. It will surely leave me with more self-examination. Which leads to more writing. So, you will be hearing about it soon. If you're interested in attending, the link is on the right column of this blog.