Generation Z: when it comes to behaviour, not all digital natives look alike

Gradually over the past few years, the once-ubiquitous discussions about millennials are being replaced by an interest in the new kids on the block: generation Z – or, to give them a recently assigned alias – “Zoomers”.

According to most reckonings, to be genZ means you were born some time between 1997 and 2012 (although this varies depending on who you listen to – some estimates say the youngest Zoomers were born as late as 2015). GenZ is defined by the influential Pew Foundation as being:

More racially and ethnically diverse than any previous generation, and they are on track to be the most well-educated generation yet. They are also digital natives who have little or no memory of the world as it existed before smartphones.

But as with previous generations, the temptation is to lump this generation together and assume they all respond to similar experiences, attitudes and behaviours no matter where in the world they grow up.

https://theconversation.com/generation-z-when-it-comes-to-behaviour-not-all-digital-natives-look-alike-155694

 

COVID-19: How Much Sense Does It Make to Vaccinate Children and Adolescents?

The sugar cube was given to all the children at school on a little spoon. All you had to do was stand in line in the auditorium, yet you felt like you were part of something bigger: It was possible to avert an invisible, sinister threat simply by swallowing a sugar cube. There was even a government slogan to go along with it: “Vaccination is sweet. Polio is terrible.”

The anti-polio campaign in West Germany lasted almost two decades. But now, more than a half-century later, a mass vaccination campaign of children and adolescents could make a return. Only this time, it’s against the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen and the pandemic it has caused – a disease whose horrible consequences do not have to be drilled into children through advertising copy. They’ve already had a year of their lives robbed from them.

Vaccinations had been scheduled to begin at the Feodor Lynen Secondary School in Planegg, a suburb of Munich, on May 21. Pupils were to be vaccinated “individually in classrooms” by doctors, says Agnes Schmidt, an administrator at the school. The plan had been to give everyone over the age of 16 a dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The school’s parent-teacher council supported the idea – finally, it seemed, someone was thinking about younger people.

For the time being, though, a historic reintroduction of school vaccinations won’t be happening in Germany. Politicians and doctors attacked the plans as premature and the project was cancelled.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/covid-19-how-much-sense-does-it-make-to-vaccinate-children-and-adolescents-a-09ced17a-b4b4-40aa-a5fe-73c8a89c9e2b

 

Becoming a Parent During the Pandemic Was the Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done

In early March last year, I was heading home from a work happy hour on the subway when I realized that a woman was staring at my belly. She looked at my waist, where my coat was belted, and then at the floor, and then at my waist again, and then she very tentatively offered me her seat. I was four months pregnant. (I’d also eaten a lot of fried food at happy hour, in lieu of drinking.) I felt pitifully grateful to this woman at the time, and I ended up thinking about her a lot in the following months. She was really the only person—apart from my husband, my obstetrician, some nurses, and my doormen—who ever saw me pregnant. My mother didn’t. My siblings didn’t. My best friends didn’t either, or my co-workers, or any other kindhearted strangers on the subway. After the second week of March, I stopped going anywhere apart from occasional doctor visits and walks around the city. In July, I gave birth to twins, and then I stopped going anywhere at all. “You take those babies home and you keep them there,” the head nurse at Weill Cornell Medicine told me, and that is exactly what I did.

Having a newborn is isolating all by itself. You go into the hospital as one person (uncomfortable, hopeful, terrified) and you come home as another, as someone yanked into hour-by-hour survival mode, physically torn open and nearly hallucinating from lack of sleep. None of this is conducive to seeing people, apart from the ones you trust the most. In my case, all of those people were 3,000 miles away in England, a pandemic travel ban preventing them from crossing the ocean. The emotional, hormonal, and psychological transformation a person goes through when they become a mother is called matrescence. It represents a fundamental shift in your sense of self. But humans are social creatures—we tend to construct our identity not only around the things we know or feel about ourselves, but also around the ways in which people respond to us. My babies are almost eight months old and I can count on one hand the number of people we’ve spent time with since they were born. Other than my husband, not a single person I love has really seen me being a mother. This new person I’ve become since I gave birth is a person virtually no one knows.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/03/isolation-becoming-new-parent-during-pandemic/618244/

 

Educație sexuală, la pachet cu responsabilitate: La clasă și în spațiul public

Imaginează-ți că ești părintele a două fete, una într-a VII-a și cealaltă cu un an mai mare. În același an, afli că ambele sunt însărcinate și că sarcina e prea avansată ca să mai poți interveni cumva. Ce-ți trece prima oară prin minte?

Diriginta băiatului tău de clasa a VII-a te sună înaintea unei excursii și te anunță că a aflat de mesajele deocheate pe care el și colegii lui și le trimit: despre prezervative și cu ce fete ar putea să facă sex. Cum discuți cu el despre asta?

Pune-te în pielea unui profesor de gimnaziu care vede la ore o fată de clasa a VIII-a însărcinată. Ai discuții cu elevii din clasă sau te prefaci că nu s-a întâmplat nimic?

Sunt situații reale care au apărut în școli din România. Pornind de la existența unor astfel de exemple, în ultimii ani, activiști, politicieni și o parte a părinților au cerut introducerea educației sexuale în școli – numai în 2015, peste 60 de ONG-uri au semnat un apel către Ministerul Educației pentru introducerea materiei printre orele obligatorii. Asta nu s-a întâmplat însă, pentru că mereu a intervenit rezistența unor grupuri conservatoare; Asociația Părinților pentru Ora de Religie ori Coaliția pentru Familie, sprijinite de Biserica Ortodoxă Română (BOR), sunt doar câteva dintre organizațiile care au blocat astfel de inițiative.

https://www.dor.ro/educatie-sexuala-responsabilitate-scoli/

Educație sexuală, la pachet cu responsabilitate: La clasă și în spațiul public

 

Against ‘The Family’

Whose families matter? As the clock ticks down on the first Trump era, conservative concern-trolling has given up on original thought and is just playing the hits. This week in America, haunted Stepfordian battlebot Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed as Supreme Court Justice, with a farcically undemocratic mandate to give the Christian Right everything their shrunken, spiteful hearts desire. Meanwhile, with less fanfare, thirty authoritarian governments signed what amounts to a declaration of war on women’s reproductive rights, in the name of ‘strengthening the family’.

The ‘Geneva Consensus Declaration’ sounds reasonable at first. It claims to be about promoting ‘women’s health’ alongside ‘the essential priority of protecting the right to life’. The name even sounds a bit like the Geneva Convention, which most people associate with such wet liberal notions as compassion and basic human decency.

What it’s actually about, though, is male power over women.

Let me explain. The most important part of the Declaration emphasises that ‘there is no international right to abortion’. It reminds us in the same breath that ‘women play a vital role in the family’.

https://pennyred.medium.com/against-the-family-aeea76769512

 

30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact

For his first three years of life, Izidor lived at the hospital.

The dark-eyed, black-haired boy, born June 20, 1980, had been abandoned when he was a few weeks old. The reason was obvious to anyone who bothered to look: His right leg was a bit deformed. After a bout of illness (probably polio), he had been tossed into a sea of abandoned infants in the Socialist Republic of Romania.

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In films of the period documenting orphan care, you see nurses like assembly-line workers swaddling newborns out of a seemingly endless supply; with muscled arms and casual indifference, they sling each one onto a square of cloth, expertly knot it into a tidy package, and stick it at the end of a row of silent, worried-looking babies. The women don’t coo or sing to them.* You see the small faces trying to fathom what’s happening as their heads whip by during the wrapping maneuvers.

In his hospital, in the Southern Carpathian mountain town of Sighetu Marmaţiei, Izidor would have been fed by a bottle stuck into his mouth and propped against the bars of a crib. Well past the age when children in the outside world began tasting solid food and then feeding themselves, he and his age-mates remained on their backs, sucking from bottles with widened openings to allow the passage of a watery gruel. Without proper care or physical therapy, the baby’s leg muscles wasted. At 3, he was deemed “deficient” and transferred across town to a Cămin Spital Pentru Copii Deficienţi, a Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children.

The cement fortress emitted no sounds of children playing, though as many as 500 lived inside at one time. It stood mournfully aloof from the cobblestone streets and sparkling river of the town where Elie Wiesel had been born, in 1928, and enjoyed a happy childhood before the Nazi deportations.

The windows on Izidor’s third-floor ward had been fitted with prison bars. In boyhood, he stood there often, gazing down on an empty mud yard enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. Through bare branches in winter, Izidor got a look at another hospital that sat right in front of his own and concealed it from the street. Real children, children wearing shoes and coats, children holding their parents’ hands, came and went from that hospital. No one from Izidor’s Cămin Spital was ever taken there, no matter how sick, not even if they were dying.

Like all the boys and girls who lived in the hospital for “irrecoverables,” Izidor was served nearly inedible, watered-down food at long tables where naked children on benches banged their tin bowls. He grew up in overcrowded rooms where his fellow orphans endlessly rocked, or punched themselves in the face, or shrieked. Out-of-control children were dosed with adult tranquilizers, administered through unsterilized needles, while many who fell ill received transfusions of unscreened blood. Hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS ravaged the Romanian orphanages.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/can-an-unloved-child-learn-to-love/612253/

 

Why are American kids treated as a different species from adults?

At the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, kids clamber over one another in an enormous anthill maze. Carpeted, encaged in wire mesh, consisting of layers of looping and overlapping low tunnels, the Limb Bender, as it is called, spans a storey and a half, and usually contains anywhere from two to four wailing toddlers stuck in its dead centre. Eventually, while a crowd of parents politely holds back snickers, the mom or dad of one of the stuck babes valiantly begins belly-crawling his or her way upward, hissing with as much mustered sweetness as possible: ‘Come down, Callie.’

In his book The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (2008), the anthropologist David Lancy introduced the idea of the neontocracy: a type of society, unique to WEIRD countries (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic), in which children are the most valued members. In a neontocracy, the bathtub fills up with toy ducks, the living room is slowly smothered in gadgets, and there is no upper limit on the amount of time and energy adults must pour into the project of childhood.

Further inside the Children’s Museum, kids climb into huge, clear-plastic wind tunnels, shrieking as their hair stands on end. They scramble up rope nets; roll magnets along magnetised slopes; spin a deep-backed wheel filled with copper sand; creep into a completely black room roiled by simulated thunder, chucking handfuls of glass beads onto tables to evoke the sound of rain. If they get bored with that, upstairs there’s a jacuzzi-sized tub of blue pebbles to scoop into windmills and, on the third floor, a waterplay area where they can float boats down channels or carve ice with blunt plastic knives.

When my husband Jorge and I first moved to Pittsburgh, I loved the Children’s Museum. There was nothing like it in Oaxaca, the city in southwestern Mexico where we lived when our daughter, Elena, was between the ages of one and two. I was amazed that I could take Elena there for a whole afternoon and relax as she fiddled with light sticks or sorted rocks into holes. It was like taking my hands off the steering wheel, being able to sit back and zone out as she explored, with the added bonus that all the sensory play and stimulation and exposure to other kids had to be good for her development, right? It felt like a healthy granola bar, sweet and indulgent and still promising flaxseed and fibre.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-are-american-kids-treated-as-a-different-species-from-adults

 

Coronavirus shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let’s start with education

Imagine mentioning William Shakespeare to a university graduate and discovering they had never heard of him. You would be incredulous. But it’s common and acceptable not to know what an arthropod is, or a vertebrate, or to be unable to explain the difference between an insect and spider. No one is embarrassed when a “well-educated” person cannot provide even a rough explanation of the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle or the water cycle, or of how soils form.

All this is knowledge as basic as being aware that Shakespeare was a playwright. Yet ignorance of such earthy matters sometimes seems to be worn as a badge of sophistication. I love Shakespeare, and I believe the world would be a poorer and a sadder place without him. But we would survive. The issues about which most people live in ignorance are, by contrast, matters of life and death.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/12/coronavirus-education-pandemic-natural-world-ecology

 

Italian lessons: what we’ve learned from two months of home schooling

Most of us in Emilia-Romagna, in northern Italy, remember the weekend of 22 February very clearly. To begin with there were just rumours – phone calls and messages flying around between friends – but then it was confirmed: all schools in the region were going to close for a week.

The decision was, in many ways, shocking. At that time, there had only been three deaths from Covid-19 in Italy, and only 152 reported infections. It seemed strange that education was the first social activity to be sacrificed. I guessed it was because it wasn’t perceived to be economically productive. Nothing else was closing: football grounds, bars, shops and ski resorts were still open for business, and no schools in any other European country had closed.

Still, to our three kids – Benny (15), Emma (13) and Leo (9) – the idea of a week off seemed like bliss. We had moved back to Parma from the UK three years earlier, and by comparison with the UK, education here seemed relentless. Many pupils go to school six days a week and there are no half-term holidays. But my wife, Francesca, who is Italian, and I were both worried. She works with Syrian refugees, which isn’t a job you can suddenly drop, and I had just been offered a 9-to-5 job, after 21 years of being freelance. We, like all our friends, suddenly had an acute childcare crisis.

The announcement had been so sudden that schools had few plans or resources in place to teach remotely. Italy spends a lot less on education than almost every other western country. Spending per student (from primary school to university) equates to $8,966 per annum, compared to $11,028 in the UK and $11,502 in Sweden. The under-investment is so serious that in December 2019, the education minister, Lorenzo Fioramonti, resigned in protest.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/24/italy-home-schooling-coronavirus-lockdown-what-weve-learned

 

Cosa succede in questi giorni nella testa dei bambini

All’inizio era sembrata una lunga vacanza, una lunga coda del carnevale. Si andava a spasso in bicicletta e si guardavano i cartoni anche al mattino. Poi la vacanza è finita di colpo, Milano ha cominciato ad apparire deserta, al parco non si poteva più mettere piede e se per strada si incontrava un altro bambino era proibito salutarlo con un abbraccio. I nonni poi, anche solo andandoli a trovare si poteva farli ammalare. E fu così che, nel giro di poche ore, la vita dei nostri figli è cambiata e loro si sono ritrovati, più o meno inconsapevoli, a disegnare arcobaleni da appendere alle finestre, mentre fuori sbocciava la primavera.

Ma in tutto questo sconvolgimento cosa è accaduto e sta accadendo nelle loro teste? Che cosa pensano, immaginano e sentono soprattutto i più piccoli, quelli che non hanno ancora sei anni, che non vanno alla scuola dell’obbligo e non sono stati investiti da programmi ministeriali da portare a compimento a distanza? Coloro che, come spiega la psicoterapeuta Chiara Gusmani, si trovano in uno stadio pre-astratto e non hanno quindi sviluppato la logica e la capacità di un pensiero ipotetico?

https://www.internazionale.it/notizie/claudia-bellante/2020/03/31/coronavirus-bambini