(Photograph: my youngest son Jack and his grandfather (mine). This photograph defines success to me).

We have brought up five kids, my children’s father and I. I had my first child whilst I was still at school, and the others came in rapid succession when I was at University (our last child, Georgina, was a luxury, she came much later).

Of course, we didn’t have maids.

Our family became something of a minor celebrity in Asia, where we moved to ten years ago. My youngest child couldn’t read properly until she was 8, and I was anti tuition. It was an alien concept to me, these hours of additional studying, just to make sure our kids get higher marks in exams than other similarly hothoused (but not necessarily smarter) kids. What in the blazes for??

So we opted out of the gold rush and taught our kids how to plant bananas instead.

My children’s father did not come from a rich background, so we were not insouciant because of the privilege of wealth. His father was a bus-driver who had to hold down three jobs at one stage to keep the family housed, clothed and fed. My mother-in-law was a cleaner. They lived in a house that was sub-divided and rented out. Not many boys from my children’s father’s school went on to further education. He was one of those who did.

I am glad he did not push our children to succeed academically, despite having his life changed because he passed exams and had opportunities that he would not otherwise have had. I am glad he did not think that there is anything wrong in his children becoming a bus driver, because his father was one. I am glad that he emerged from his financially poor childhood with the realisation that one can be financially poor, but still be happy and fulfilled. He often says, the best prize to him about having the opportunity was that he met me.

So we brought our children up against the tide. I am sure many people think we are insane, thus it is nice to read a new research and listen to a TED talk that corroborates what we have always believed in (http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2014/09/be-more-successful/). In a nutshell, it is about a child’s happiness. This thesis is by Shawn Anchor, on the subject of happiness and success. This happiness thing is a big deal these days – prominent professors of economics have published research on it. Check out the Centre for Economics Performance at London School of Economics – lots of research here on the subject of happiness.

Happiness? Eh? Shouldn’t parents be more worried about good exam results to lead to that place in that prestigious university, so that big-name employers chase Ah Boy/Ah Girl with that important job that guarantees success for life?

Happiness brings success. Not my words, but Shawn Anchor’s (a view shared by various psychologists in the field). Shawn looked at a low socio-economic school in Chicago where academic grades were below average, yet a couple of students have skyrocketing grades. That was enough to pull my interest, as my children’s father went to a similar school.

So are these students genetically more intelligent? I can’t comment, as I do not know them personally but one thing I know for sure, my children’s father is not that intelligent. Anchor believes that intelligence and technical skills only predict 25% of success. The other 75% is optimism, social connection and the way you perceive stress. Bingo!

Optimism

Anchor’s definition: the belief that your behaviour matters in the midst of challenge. Yes, it is the mindset. Does your kid crumple into a heap and is paralysed when life deals him with a blow?

My children’s father always tells our kids, “Don’t worry, be happy.”

I have to rein in the Asian Tiger Mum in me sometimes. “Waaah, doan worry??? Got Chemistry exam tomorrow, wor, Ah Beng!”

As proof that mums are always right, the afore-mentioned child dropped a grade or two for entry to the degree course of his choice. But with his father’s eternal sunshine burning forever bright in him, he took the train to Southampton and asked for his place on the highly competitive engineering degree course.

“You will drop out,” his pessimistic mum predicted. “It’s a tough course, and I won’t be around to nag you. The bottom line is, you have to convince me that you really want it before I help you financially.”

Now, I hate to be the sort of person who rains on others’ parade, but I believe that it is my duty to provide this second son of mine with reality check and ask for some sort of insurance before I spend my money.

He did provide it, in his own way and on his own terms: he went out to get a sponsorship for the three years of his degree course. And his masters degree.

Was this child of mine super-intelligent? In one word, No. Much as I, like all parents, would like to believe that my children are superhumanbeings.

Social connection

Anchor’s definition: whether or not you have depth and breadth in your social relationships.

The first thing I thought about when I read this sentence was oh no, networking and all that rubbish. But no, the author of this study actually meant one’s ability to form meaningful relationships.

It reminded me of the tale that my children’s father often tells. He left South East London and went for his further education in my hometown. He shared digs with a mad Greek called Georges Tsimoupoulous, who he is still pals with almost 40 years later. That was bad enough, but at that time, by coincidence, a bunch of Gibraltarian boys from his hometown was also at the polytechnic. So they did very little studying, a lot of drinking and even more womanising. His enduring memory is throwing someone’s final thesis out of the window from the third floor of the Engineering building in Anglessey Road.

“How did you pass your exams?” I was aghast.

“Oh, we bought notes from the Chinese students who spent the full three years in their rooms swotting and eating instant noodles,” he said winsomely.

Note: I do not condone that sort of behaviour, but this man became very good at what he does – he won a coveted place to do research at the National Maritime Museum, despite his high jinks, and interestingly, Anchor found that students who live in the library and eat meals in their rooms do not perform better. They are more likely to suffer burnout.

Hmm, I don’t know about burnouts, but one thing I know (by logical extension) – these students suffer from personality deficit disorder or some sort of a zombie affliction. Nah, I wouldn’t employ them.

Stress

Basically, what you see as stress is a block to success.

What I see is parents (and often school) adding on to a kid’s stress.

I do find it hard to say “Don’t worry, be happy” about weak exam grades, but I am glad I have a partner who grins about it and makes comments such as “Isn’t she magnificent” irrespective of what she achieves or not achieves on a piece of paper (and here is the surprising piece, she achieves, more often than not).

This is one thing I have observed: some stress is good, but if you get the ingredients right, that sort of organic stress comes from within a child who wants to do well, rather than out of fear of letting the parents down.

Pleasingly, the author of this quoted study mentioned that those who perceives stress as enhancing, ‘a challenge instead of threat’, are more likely to see an improvement in their levels of engagement at work.

Now, this is the piece in the study that pleases the yogi in me: the author found that by providing social support to others, his students at Harvard are doing better for themselves too.

So teaching your child to genuinely help others rather than view their peers as competition is a good thing. Strange as it may sound. It starts with teaching your child how to make friends, and how to appreciate those friends, especially those who are different and annoying.

In conclusion, it ain’t that difficult to raise a child. What that is difficult is getting rid of parental ego and unrealistic expectations. Now everybody, please download the song “Don’t worry, be happy” and sing it at the top of your voice with your children. It works 😉

My six ways of raising a happy child:

1. Enjoy your child – find things to do with them that are not goal-related

2. Talk to each other on car journeys

3. Find time to do nothing

4. Play the yogi laughter game – lie on each other’s tummies and laugh non-stop for 1 minute – at least once a fortnight

5. Thank your child for the small things he/she does for you

6. Spend time outdoors in nature, much as you may dislike it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo4OnQpwjkc

A few days ago, I saw a post about an online First Aid course. Upon completion of the program, which has no minimum age requirement, ‘students’ will be awarded a First Aid certificate.

The doctor in me freaked out. Big time. Especially when mothers are signing their children up, in the mistaken belief that Little Johnny / Little Janey can learn how to save lives in the real world after sitting in front of the computer screen for a few hours.

In this technological age, we can do most things online, ranging from controlling your lighting on remote to killing people. But to learn First Aid online?

99% of emergency life-saving skills are practical in nature. The theory is simple enough. Here it is, in a nutshell:

D = Danger. Ensuring that the casualty and First Aider are safe.

R = Response. Is the casualty responding to voice and/or touch?

A = Airway. Is there a blockage? Can you clear it?

B = Breathing. Is casualty breathing clearly?

C = Circulation. Is there a pulse? Is the beating? Is there major hemorrhage from somewhere?

It’s known as DR ABC. It’s easy enough to teach children. I am all for children learning First Aid, but in the real world, and with practical, hands-on experience and a lot of drilling. My fourteen-year-old daughter ran a First Aid course for children, and 75% of the course is getting kids to actually do things. Because much of of First Aid is confidence and drill, not theory. I have taught First Aid courses to clever adults, and many of them – well versed in the theory – froze in a simulated scenario.

So how realistic it is to expect an 8 year old to be proficient First Aider? Imagine this scenario. As you are crossing the road with your child, a car knocks you down on a lonely stretch of road and the drives off. The impact of the car shatters your thigh bone, and the fragments pierces your femoral artery. You fall to the ground, hitting your head and you lose consciousness. Your head wound starts bleeding profusely. The fall also causes you to choke on your tongue.

Following DR ABC to the letter, Little Johnny should drag your inert body away from the road, out of danger. He should then check on your response, clear your airway to resume your breathing, before making a judgment call to stem arterial flow from your thigh rather than the dramatic blood loss from the head wound. Seriously, even if your little darling is a superhuman being, can an eight year old realistically do all these?

I, for one, would prefer to teach my Little Janey life-saving skills in the real world. I would teach her to be safe first and foremost. In the scenario above, she should leave the casualty behind and get herself away from the road. There is not much point in having two dead bodies. Little Janey should learn to walk facing the traffic and flag the next car down for help in the safest possible manner instead of sacrificing her own life trying to drag a dead-weight adult off the danger zone, a futile task in most cases.

How realistic is it to expect an eight year old to be able to clear blocked airways? I was in an airplane recently when a fellow passenger choked on a piece of meat. A panicked call went out for a doctor on board to identify himself to the flight attendant. By the time I reached the casualty, another doctor was already there, performing the Heimlich manouvre.   The doctor was an Australian male, with burly forearms locked tightly around the casualty, trying to dislodge the small piece of meat using the standard protocol. Without much success. I took the decision to put the casualty in a head-lower position – with the help of three men – before using a metal spoon to pry open the casualty’s jaw and retrieve that piece of meat. I could not have managed this on my own, and neither could your eight-year-old superhumanbeing child.

So please, dear parents, be realistic. And teach your children real life-saving skills. Teach your child how to get help. A survey of 757 parents which was carried out by Mumsnet, the UK’s largest Internet community for parents, showed a woefully small number of children actually know how to dial for help. Teach your child how to call the emergency number from a locked smartphone, give your address coherently and describe the incident as accurately and as succinctly as possible. Drill your child regularly. Constantly raise his awareness when it comes to safety. Because when it comes to children, this is what actually saves lives, not theoretical First Aid courses.

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1177515/Listen-little-girl-saved-mums-life-calling-999.html

We live in an over-medicated society where people are getting more ill, instead of better. Each day when I open my Facebook newsfeed, and I read posts by mothers moaning about their children’s coughs, colds, fever, congested chests. Again. And often, accompanying these posts are photos of sorry-looking children (passive, cowed and victimised) and the medication that they have been prescribed with. Being ill has become a state of play, for both the unthinking parents’ monkey brains and the pharmaceutical industry. A whole generation of children is accepting that illness is normal, and the solution is taking sick leave and swallowing drugs. Hello, this is all part of growing up.

Do you know that doctors and hospitals make money from selling medicines, dear parents?

Analgesics are popped into the mouth like sweets these days. There is medication for fever, coughs, colds, congested chest, you name it, and you can be sure that a pharmaceutical company somewhere has thought about it (and exploited modern society’s desire for instant effortless cure). The majority of medicines found in the home are useless. Harmful even, in the long run, because apart from breeding resistant bugs, we rob our bodies of the vital opportunities to learn how to overcome infections. Indeed, we are de-skilling our body’s defence system by mollycoddling it with false friends.

The fact that your body is sick means that there is something not quite right about it at the moment. And it is for a reason. It is out of balance with its environment, resulting in the outbreak. For example, if your child is often ill with fever or other little ailments, it means that he/she is not able to fight common infections. So instead of medicating your child, may I suggest that you do an audit, which is to say find out if your child nutritional intake is sufficient to balance the needs of his growing body? Is he having enough rest? Is he drinking enough fluids? Is there an underlying serious issue that’s causing the recurrent outbreak? It could be emotional, as more and more children in our pressurised society is suffering from stress early, and illness is one of the ways the child manifest the stress or unhappiness that he is feeling. Medication for fever is not going to solve the real problem for the long term.

In fact, research has shown that parents over-reacting over little ailments by over-medicating their children can cause a rise in immune-related diseases, some serious.  Antibiotics, analgesics and hand sanitisers are most emphatically not meant to me part of our normal lives.

If your child’s daycare centre has frequent outbreaks of the highly infectious hand-foot-and-mouth disease, arming yourself and your child with crazy quantities of anti-microbial hand sanitisers is not going to help. Some hand sanitisers are carcinogenic. Far better to insist that the daycare centre establish a clear protocols to prevent future outbreaks, because you are then dealing with the problem, rather than loading your child’s body with more toxins. The general practitioner, Dr. Rosemary Leonard wrote that we are breeding a ‘dangerously clean generation’, and she sees a rise in immune-related disorders, such as eczema, asthma, hayfever and food allergies.

Of course, I am not advocating that you just leave a sick child be. We, the parents, have to manage the illness with wisdom and with these four facts:

(1) Keep a fevered child’s temperature down by regular sponging him and wearing loose cotton clothes. Let him rest in a room with cool ventilation.

(2) Ensure that your child is hydrated.

(3) If the illness persists for more than three-four days, take your child to a reputable emergency unit/trusted doctor, and seek explanations. You may have to insist on tests.

(4) Look out for other symptoms, such as blotches (which could be indicative of meningitis) and rash.

(5) If your child’s condition worsened, then it is straight to the emergency unit as soon as possible.

For our children’s sake, we must begin taking responsibility and stop subcontracting their health to outside parties, who often do not have your children’s best interest at heart. Wake up to the reality that popping pill does not help. It may even kill. We may seek to cure or prevent all illnesses with disinfectants, antibiotics and cleanliness, but Nature has found a way to get her own back. There are more sick children today than there ever was. Don’t raise a victim.

Stay tuned on my piece on Energy Medicine.