CHILDREN

In 2011, the United Nations launched the Decade of Action for Road Safety (2011-2020) and urged all countries to organise programmes in the name of "UN Road Safety Week" from 6th-12th May. The theme selected for this year’s campaign is "pedestrian safety" with the aim of creating awareness around the world for the safety of youth on the road. It is dedicated to the memory of Zenani Mandela, the great granddaughter of Winnie Madzikela and Nelson Mandela who was killed in a road accident on 11th June 2010. This campaign aims to spread awareness on pedestrian rights and safety which…

I stepped into a very caustic conversation some days ago. Four moms I know were having some kind of semi-heated discussion. One of them was a working women and the other three were stay-at-home mums. I believe the conversation started when one of the moms who went to work reprimanded her child for hitting another. One of the moms informed her that this was a regular occurrence. The child came down most days with the maid, who settled him down with his toys and parked herself in a corner with her phone, while the child hit other kids, bullied and…

A library is a place where a child learns on his/her own and grows. But most government run schools and other low income institutions in the country lack a library, thereby denying children an essential part of education. Pratham Books, a Bangalore based non-profit trust, that has been publishing low cost yet high quality story books for children in multiple Indian languages since 2004, hopes to make the magical world of a library a little more accessible to children. For this, it invites applications from NGOs interested in receiving a unique product called 'Library-in-a-classroom'. The 'Library-in-a-classroom' is a wall-mounted library…

“My son doesn’t drink milk,” “My child doesn’t eat vegetables,” “My daughter won’t eat anything other than biscuits..” - sounds familiar? A common complaint that most parents have is that their child doesn't eat (enough). There are even instances of parents requesting the pediatrician to prescribe some supplements or health tonics that will increase the child’s appetite. Most of the times these are not required as parents just wrongly assume that their child isn't eating enough - just because the portions children eat are too small. Keep in mind that they are kids and will not be able to eat…

A small but significant monetary gesture came from a concerned group of children from Indiranagar wanting to do something for their deprived counterparts of EWS. They approached ActionAid to doing something memorable for the deprived homeless children. Consequently, a children's summer camp 'Chinnara Loka' was planned for 28 May and 29 May, 2013.Around 35 children participated from the EWS homeless community. The two days were spent in singing, painting and games which were designed to bring out their talents. Ananth, cultural child rights activist facilitated this programme. ‹ › $(document).ready(function(){ $('.carousel .carousel-inner .item').first().attr('class', 'active item');});We, the organisers were not surprised…

When I quit full-time work to bring up the babies, I often wondered how difficult or impossible would it be to get back on the career track. Eight years and two brats have taught me how nonsensical that thought was. If you are a full-time mom (and all moms are full-time, whether working or staying at home), you have skills that are valuable in any and every work area. They just haven’t been discovered yet, or else every headhunter would be hunting for new recruits among moms. Here’s why essential, everyday mommy skills would be an asset in any job.…

The Supreme Court guidelines for school bus safety will come into effect from May 1, 2013. But it is no consolation for the family of the three-year-old who was knocked down by his school bus in June last year, or for the six-year-old girl from Chennai who fell to death through a hole in the floor of the bus.School bus accidents are so common in India that they often don't make more than a single column in newspapers. Yet parents are surprisingly silent about safety issues and reluctant to take on schools on this issue. Almost all parents I spoke…

People who participate in community gardening have a significantly lower body mass index (BMI), as well as lower odds of being overweight, than their non-gardening neighbours and siblings. This is according to a study by Dr Cathleen Zick (Professor of Family and Consumer Studies) and her colleagues from the University of Utah, USA, published on April 18, 2013 in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). The study concluded that "Community gardens may be a valuable element of land use diversity that merits consideration by public health officials who want to identify neighborhood features that promote health." More details of…

So the hot topic of discussion in my seven-year-old's PTM recently was about bad words. One parent explained that his son had been using few unsuitable words off late and discussed the approach that he was taking. Soon all of us were talking of the same thing - the S word, the I word, the F word - that seemed to have made their presence felt in our children's lives, despite all our best intentions. Chiding children always is not the solution. File pic. Where do our children, mostly between 6 to 8 years old, pick these words up? Television…

The final exams for the academic year are coming to an end at last, and there is a palpable sense of excitement in the air. The summer vacation is tantalisingly close, beckoning with the prospect of long, homework-free hours for the children. Trek through forests in Sharavati valley. Pic: Meera K Over the years, summer holidays have lost their impromptu simplicity. Even as children gear up for the vacation, parents are at their wits’ end. Thanks to their busy schedules, working parents barely get to take some time off to visit their ancestral towns or even for a quick touristy…