Pause for breath (and play)

A few years ago, when my son was still at childcare, he had a friend I'm going to call Wendy. (I'm calling her Wendy, not to protect her identity but because I cannot remember her name). She was a bit older than him, maybe six or seven months, and at that age, that can still be quite a big deal. Certainly, she was vastly more accomplished. Before she was five, she could read and write in both English and Mandarin. If memory serves, she was learning the piano.

My son got on well with her and he was matter of fact about her achievements - which is more than could be said for his mother and me. We looked at him, we looked at her, we noted the feedback from his childcare teacher about what a bright little boy we had.

But though he recognised all the letters of the alphabet and could count to 50, he certainly couldn't read, let alone write. He could also sing better than his mother and dance so much better than me that I would wonder if we were genuinely related - but he wasn't learning an instrument.

I began to think we might be letting him down a bit. Luckily my wife did not. He needs time to just be a little boy, she said. She was right. These days he reads, writes and is doing well for a child in his third year of school. But he is often tired because he doesn't get as much time to just be a little boy as he used to.

He has a swimming lesson a week. Training for rugby, training for soccer, at least one game every Saturday. If he had his druthers, he'd be playing a third code of football as well, but that was a bridge too far. There are other things he wants to get involved in. He's keen on drama and wants to learn how to play the guitar. The P&C is going to organise a before school language program (French - don't ask), and he wants to do that too.

Right now, he's preparing for his first Holy Communion, which means an hour long meeting after dinner once a week a good 20 minute drive from our house. All of this is taking a toll - he's knackered. He hasn't been this tired since perhaps the end of his first year in school. His face is a bit smudged and he looks disconcertingly like one of these.

When the football seasons (I will never agree again to him playing two at once) end, cricket will be around the corner. But in the window between the two, he can start guitar if he's still keen.

Like all parents, we want the best for him - we want him to learn, to have experiences, to play sport with his friends. The trick is to make sure he has the chance just to be a boy. It's a big year for him and he'll never get it back. Neither will we.

Recently I read Carl Honoré's splendid "Under Pressure", then I got to speak to him on the show. Honoré became famous for an earlier book, "In Praise of Slow", and this new one is really about slow parenting. Taking your time, and making sure the kids take theirs. I read a lot for work and for pleasure too - but it's not often a book strikes such a chord. I think every parent I know should see this one.

Parlez-vous?

My wife, who grew up in Europe, can speak French. She has German too but her French is better, in no small part because she spent a happy year there between school and university. My own French is a sort of gesture. I can kind of follow it in print, I know some words but not enough to have anything more than the most rudimentary and stumbling conversation.

My version of French is a relic of 'learning' it three decades ago for two years. And damn near passing, I'll have you know. All this time later, French is still the fourth most taught language in Australian schools. German is fifth. Italian - probably the sexiest language in the world - is second. The top six actually looks like this:

1/ Japanese 302,780 students

2/ Italian 296,641

3/ Indonesian 214,760

4/ French 204,869

5/ German 128,133

6/ Chinese* 78,419

(*Chinese includes Mandarin and other, unspecified languages)

These figures are from 2005 but they're the latest available. They were included in a report for the Australian government from the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures Education at the University of South Australia. They cover the government and non-government sectors across all the years languages are taught in schools. What's wrong with that list?

Firstly, the numbers are small. Less than half of students learn a language. By the time they get to year 12, it's down to 13%. The overwhelming majority of the language teaching happens at primary school, with most program times taking less than an hour a week. No other OECD country puts in as little effort as this - in Finland all children study three languages throughout their school years.

Secondly, check out that list again. How relevant does it look, really? French is beautiful, Italian is sexy, German is not sexy but my word it is precise. There are community reasons for teaching Italian and historical reasons for teaching the other two. But that's where it ends.

This is the Asian century. By the time the five year olds beginning school now are mid-career, China and India will be (once again) two of the world's most dominant economies. Australian schooling, as it stands now, does almost nothing to prepare the kids for this.

So let's stop teaching a ridiculous 133 languages in our schools. 90% of students are doing one of the six listed above. Let's not dilute the resources in this way - let's teach six. Get all the States and Territories to agree on which six and do it. And let's make sure the six we teach reflect the geopolitical and economic realities we face. Let's make it:

1/ Mandarin

2/ Japanese

3/ Indonesian

4/ Hindi

5/ Russian

6/ One from Korean/Thai/Vietnamese

Let's work to encourage more language teachers - for starters give them HECS-free degrees in return for say four years of teaching. Let's also raise the status of languages in the rest of society - they're the key to the deep understanding of other cultures. Robin Jeffrey at the ANU has ideas on how to do both.

But here's the thing, we can have a lot more understanding for everyone (not all of our children will learn languages) by embedding Asian cultures into the rest of the curriculum - English, maths, sciences, history, geography. It can be done, it's vital that it is done and we need to start now.

There's good news and bad news about that. The bad news is that the Federal government - that would be the one headed by a Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister - is proposing to inject about $20 million a year into teaching Asian languages in high schools. That's bad news because, the old Howard government program, which was ended in 2002, tipped in about five times as much money every year.

The good news is there are some very smart people at the Asian Education Foundation and I think, gradually, they are going to win the argument.

Not Straight from the Budget Lock Up...

...More modern life really.

I got into the car this afternoon and my daughter, who is four and perhaps the most acutely verbal person on the planet, started telling me about her day. She'd been to the dentist for a check up, and been sufficiently calm that he'd done a proper clean of her teeth.

Personally I loathe this happening. I go along twice a year and get it done but find it uncomfortable to the point of not-being-able-to-wait-until-it's-over. There's pressure, there's abrasion, there's noise. A trained professional has his fingers in your mouth. What's not to not like?

Afterwards I feel stoical and - yes, my teeth feel amazing. So I was pretty impressed that my daughter had got through this. So was my wife. As a treat for being such a brave girl, she bought her a donut. And a milkshake. And when she got home, she was allowed a biscuit. That is the kind of top-quality parenting we provide.

So I got the full narrative about the dentist and the donut and the milkshake and the biscuit. She was particularly impressed with the biscuit, which features layers of things that our dentist would be horrified to hear about. She called it a disco biscuit and I laughed.

A few hours later I saw the packet. It really is called a disco biscuit. I was sure that meant something else. It took about one second on Google to confirm that suspicion. I can't help but think that someone at the large European retailer we bought the biscuits from has a sense of humour.

Sad at the Happy conference

I went to the Happiness and its Causes conference on Friday afternoon. By the time I had registered and found my way in I just caught the end of Stephen Post's presentation on why giving makes us not only happy, but healthy too. He'd been on the show the day before and he'd been absolutely terrific as a guest. He heads the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, which for completely explicable reasons makes me think of this guy.

After Stephen Post had finished we had 20 minutes of Steve Biddulph. Actually it was supposed to be 20 minutes, it was more like 30 minutes. The first 12 of it was comedy. I didn't know he was funny - but he was very funny - he worked the enormous room like Robin Williams at the Met. He was brilliant. Then we had a bit on how we stuff up the under 5's and tiny bit on how we stuff up the 12-15's. Biddulph has some great lines: A 14 year-old-boy has so much testosterone that he will argue with a road sign! But we didn't hear much on adolescents because he had a fair bit to say about the SIEV-X tragedy and the memorial to it that Biddulph has been a prime mover for. There was even a short video at the end.

It's fair to say that at this point quite a few in the audience were sad at the happy conference. My own sad moment came later because I was struck at the time by how different this gathering was to say, an academic conference. For starters, there was a lot of love in the room - a huge amount of it for Steve Biddulph, but as I discovered later, a lot of love generally. A high baseline of love, you might say.

In that environment, Biddulph said one or two things that are contested. He denigrated 'controlled crying'. The audience was approving, even appreciative, of his position. Not a dissenting word was heard in that great chamber. More on this later.

Now, whatever your views on this issue, there's at least two points of view - hence the controversy. The reason it's quite a big controversy is that it's used a lot by desperate parents who can't get their babies to go to sleep any other way. Opponents of it won't like me acknowledging this technique in any way. But there you go, I've covered it enough as a journalist to know those two things: 1/ It's very controversial. 2/ Lots of people use it anyway.

After lunch, I moderated a panel entitled "Can Children be Educated to be Happy?" On it was Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology; Stephen Meek, the Principal of Geelong Grammar, which is using Seligman's techniques in the school; Michael Carr-Gregg, the adolescent psychologist; and Anna Patty, who is Education Editor at the Sydney Morning Herald. My job was to be a bit like Parkinson toward the end of his show - keep the conversation moving and make sure that everyone gets to speak.

Well the audience loved a lot of what Martin Seligman had to say. It loved what Stephen Meek had to say. And it loved the vast majority of what Michael Carr-Gregg had to say. But it did not like what Anna Patty had to say at all. She's a journalist and was there to give her broader based perspective and perhaps inject a bit of scepticism into the discussion. After all, what we're talking about - trying to inculcate resilience, an engaged life and well-being into young minds at school - is still an experiment. What Seligman and Meek are doing at Geelong Grammar is hugely ambitious and could result in all schooling being reconsidered, with well-being becoming a key educational outcome. That would be amazing. But nobody's done this yet and so we don't know if it will work, how well or whether there will be unintended consequences.

Anna Patty pointed some of this out and the audience did not like it. They did not like it a bit. Some of them made clear their position in a way completely unlike the rapturous applause we heard earlier for Steve Biddulph. In her closing remarks, there were boos and some yelling. I was just wondering if I should intervene when it stopped.

That was the moment when I was sad at the happy conference.

Ouch!

Like most people I have made use of the tactical headache when I wanted to get out of something. "I'm sorry," I've said, "I can't" do/attend XYZ because of a headache. I don't do it now. I'd like to think this is because maturity has made me a better person but what it has really made me is better at saying "no."

I get perhaps three or four headaches a year. They are always related to tiredness, or stress, or being dehydrated. They can be treated with over the counter pain relief and cured with sleep, relaxation or water. After doing Friday's show, I can't tell you how lucky I feel.

Our main guest was Paula Kamen, on the line from Chicago. One day in 1991, while putting in a contact lens, she got a sharp pain that seemed to begin behind her left eye and go back into her brain. She still has it. Every single day, for the last 17 years, she's had a pig of a headache. Sometimes it's been so bad she couldn't do anything at all - so it's had a massive effect on her. Paula's tried - well, everything you can imagine short of beating her head against a wall. Despite this she is funny and insightful about not just her Headache (it's capitalized) but other people's too. A couple of years ago, she wrote a terrific book which is a mixture of memoir, black humour and science journalism.

Unsurprisingly, when I told Life Matters listeners what we were talking about, the switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree. Those who couldn't get through went to the guestbook. There's clearly a lot more to be said about pain, which as a subject of scientific inquiry is still in its infancy.

Sea Monsters & Hypertension

As a young man I loved to swim in the sea alone. You're not supposed to do this, the life savers tell us not to, but there's something about it that makes you feel amazing. At least, that's how I used to feel. Because one day, a dozen years ago, I went for a swim at Bawley Point on the south coast of NSW and something happened. I was snorkelling across the bay about a metre from the bottom when I saw something. It was a stingray, not fully grown, and it saw me at the exact same moment that I saw it - we arched upward and away from each other at the same time.

The ray was beautiful, it looked hydrodynamically perfect and moved effortlessly. But that's not what struck me as soon as I got to the surface. Instead I became horribly aware that not only was I the only person in the water, there was nobody on the beach or rocks either. I don't think I've ever swum quicker.

I don't swim alone in the ocean any more. It's not that I fear another encounter with a stingray - it's sharks that I worry about now. I don't remember worrying about them before, but these days I do - just for a moment - every time I go into the sea. I'm careful not to get too far from everyone else because I figure why narrow the odds?

The fear of sharks is one of a larger group - the fear of being eaten alive. This fear is an ancient one. It's up there in the amygdala, that part of the brain we got from reptiles, and for most of human history it's been a real asset. It's helped to ensure that my ancestors and yours survived long enough to reproduce - which has worked out well for both of us.

But these days my chances of being killed, let alone eaten, by a shark are close to zero. They're higher than being killed by a lion - Australia doesn't have lions except in zoos and I still go to the beach in summer - but they're still very, very small. I'm much more likely to drown than be attacked by a shark. And many times more likely to killed in a car crash than drown. Actually the drive to and from the beach is the riskiest part of the whole day.

However, it doesn't feel like that. Lizard brain has nothing to say about driving - but quite a bit on the subject of being attacked by a shark. Both risks are small, but one is orders of magnitude smaller than the other. Perversely, this is the one I worry about.

If I really want to worry about something that will kill me, I should lose some weight. If I lost 13.6% of what I weigh now I'd be healthier. (I'd also look amazing in the shower). My family history contains hypertension, diabetes and obesity - not a trifecta I'm keen to encounter. Diseases of affluence - caused by eating too much and moving too little - are the big killers in Australia. (They're not doing the country any good either) They're what I should be worrying about and that worry should change my behaviour.

But lizard brain is not frightened of eating too much and completely unperturbed by the idea of moving too little. It's doing me no favours.

In short, I worry unnecessarily about very unlikely events and ignore genuine dangers because it's the unlikely events that push my emotional buttons and the genuine dangers that don't.

Dan Gardner, the Canadian journalist, manages to make perfect sense of all this in his book, "Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear". I've spent the last week devouring it and interviewed him this morning. You can find it here.

This Mortal Coil

I watched a terrific movie at the weekend: Scoop, made by Woody Allen*. Confusingly, it's not the story of Evelyn Waugh's novel of the same name, (which remains a masterpiece), it's about a young journalism student who's given a tip off about a very wealthy and prominent man. I'm not going to spoil it for you by telling you what happens - except this: the tip-off comes from a dead journalist who manages to reconnect with the living world enough times to point our main character in the right direction. Sort of.

The first time the journo (Ian McShane) does this, he drops off the back of the boat being piloted by the Grim Reaper across a waterway. It's not clear what the waterway is, but it ain't the Murray and if it's the Styx, then Ian McShane is headed for a bit of unpleasantness.

There seems to be more dead in popular culture. Not death in popular culture - there's always been a lot of that - but dead in popular culture. Without thinking about it, Six Feet Under, Shaun of the Dead, even American Beauty, all leap to mind. It isn't just on screens either, a few years ago there was the remarkable The Lovely Bones, the narrator of which is dead from the first pages. More recently there's been Helen Garner's new novel and Mark Wakely's splendid non-fiction effort, Sweet Sorrow, among others.

I have to declare an interest before we go any further - Mark is a colleague and I'm fond of him, but that doesn't stop him producing something rather extraordinary: a beautifully written exploration of death. Friday's Life Matters was given over to a talkback on thinking about death and some of the calls were remarkable. You can listen here.

Today we talked about a more controversial aspect of dying - euthanasia. My guest, Dr Rodney Syme, does not like the word. He prefers 'physician assisted dying' and is upfront about his role in helping some people suffering pain, despair and fear end their lives. The book he's written (this has been a very bookish post) will upset a lot of people, in part because he is not always positive about some who work in palliative care. Hopefully it will be read rather than just ranted about.

*Woody Allen's character comes up with a great line - one that all pessimists (like me) will enjoy. He's just been accused of always seeing the glass as half-empty.
"No, you're wrong. I see the glass half full, but of poison."

Chill, Bill

Bill Clinton did not inhale. Or more accurately, he said he didn't inhale. Remember, he was trying to secure the Democrat nomination for President at the time. This was in 1992 - years before the idea of a President who had to quit cocaine and stop drinking before he could achieve anything was really imaginable.

Bill said he didn't like it and he didn't inhale, which leads to the conclusion that it was the mouth feel of the smoke that he had a problem with. Anyway he got the nomination, won the election and proceeded to squander the biggest political talent most observers had ever seen. He was, famously, distracted by one thing and another. But I digress.

Times have changed. Barack Obama has admitted he did inhale. Frequently. "That was kind of the point." Well, yes. But he hasn't won his party's nomination yet, let alone anything else.

One of these men has clearly been more honest than the other - and one is the greatest political talent...etc. But the point is both were talking about the past, their youth. Because that's when most people use cannabis. They try it when they're at high school or university and it peaks in their 20's - the decade marked by independent income and freedom from parental shackles - then it drops away markedly.

But the latest National Drug Household Survey shows that the beginners, the school-age users, are disappearing. Ten years ago, 35% of boys had recently used cannabis when surveyed. Last year it was a shade over 13%. It's the same story with girls - in 1998 about 34% had recently gotten stoned; last year it was 12.7%. Something is going on, but what?

I won't know until the morning, when I ask Jan Copeland, head of the new National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre, but there is a long journalistic tradition of guessing and I'm nothing if not a traditionalist. Firstly ecstacy use is increasing, rapidly becoming the drug of choice for younger people. Secondly, cannabis use is associated with tobacco use and smoking is trending down.

Actually I think these reasons are connected. Tobacco is not healthy, as discussed here before, and it's not seen as such a cool choice anymore. Whereas e is seen as 'healthier' - it doesn't make you cough or wheeze, it doesn't make you smell, it doesn't send you outside or offend anyone. It makes most people feel amazing and wanting to engage with the world. Cannabis doesn't do that - it's renowned for making people feel hungry, happy and sleepy. But it can also make people withdrawn, uncommunicative and paranoid. Stack all that up and it's an easy call. Sorted.

I will ask, though really most of the interview will be about cannabis and addiction. Because, yes, it turns out that if you're my age, your Dad was right after all - there is now evidence that cannabis can be a drug of addiction and also lead to real health problems.

Luckily for Bill Clinton, he'll never know.

Pack of Bankers

A few years ago there was an ad on the telly. The scene: it's summer, there are kids in the pool, a barbie is going nicely. A woman says to a man she's just met, "So, what do you do?".

"I'm a banker."

Everything freezes - all other conversation, the kids in the pool, even the dog turns to look.

Pause.

"I'm with St George."

"Oh!" the woman says - almost sighs really - and everything is back to normal.
Cue voiceover and pictures of the banker engaging in conversation just like a normal good bloke.

It was a great ad (sadly I can't find a link to it) which cast the St George Bank as different, more human, nicer than all the other banks. This approach is still very much part of the bank's brand today. But the real reason this was such a great ad was that banks were really on the nose.

Nobody, apart from a couple of radio broadcasters, had anything good to say about them. They were seen as ruthless profiteers, growing fat on the banking fees and charges paid by almost everyone.

Nine years on, I wonder how much public affection there is for banks at the moment.

Interest rates are up. Technically, this is not the banks' fault. The cost of their money has been increasing, partly because the Reserve Bank wants to get to grips with inflation and partly because since the collapse of the US sub prime market all risk is more expensive.

The banks' first responsibility is to their shareholders. Indeed, the market would punish them if it was not, so the banks have to pass on the costs of borrowing money to their customers. But most people don't care about all that, what they care about is that interest rates are going up - at a time when petrol, fruit and veg and rents are shooting up too.

That's the context. On top of that have come one or two stories that don't help the banks at all when it comes to winning hearts and minds. And now, another one, from the other side of the world about our old friend: fees and charges.

Essentially British banks have been coining it in, especially through fees for unauthorised overdrafts (where more has come out of your account than you have in it). The Office of Fair Trading estimates these fees alone are worth £3.5 billion every year. It's taking the banks to court. Now the High Court has ruled that this comes under unfair contract rules supposed to protect the public. It is going to be years before this legal process is finished but it could end up with the British banks having to pay back rather a lot of money: £9 billion (+ the half billion they've already handed over). You can hear the Brits cheering from here.

The thing is though, Australian banks are doing pretty well out of fees and charges. Choice estimates that in 2006, they raked in $4 billion from credit card and account holders who paid late, inadvertantly went over their limit, or had a cheque (that somebody else had written) bounce.

Choice, along with the Consumer Action Law Centre, is having a red hot go at the banks on this. There's a Senate Inquiry due to report in September. And Steve Fielding, the Family First Senator for Victoria, has a private member's bill that would stop banks charging more than their costs for dishonoured periodic payments, direct debits or cheques. With one thing and another, it doesn't look like being an annus mirabilis for Australian banks.

All in all then, you wouldn't be completely astonished if somewhere, somehow, the bankers were having a few words in some influential ears.

Capital Idea

I am in the middle of a few days off work and have been away, hence the lack of blogging from me.

The first thing to say is how restorative that particular combination is. Not working and going away - in my experience you have to do both - is a wonderful tonic. The perceptive Peter Martin has written about the value of not working, that is, the value of not working to a person who usually works. He could not be more spot on.

I get to not work for seven weeks a year. In Australian terms, that's rather a lot of not working. (In American terms it's an astronomical amount of not working). It tends to break down into a four-week break over summer and three one-week breaks through the year. I get up later and spend more time with the kids. There's always a child-friendly movie and an associated visit to a certain global fast food chain which the kids love and I enjoy more than I should. There's usually plenty of time out doors, though this week in Sydney it hasn't been good.

But we haven't been in Sydney. We've been in Canberra, my home town. I have lived exactly 6 and a half years in Canberra. But six of those years were 14 to 20, a pretty crucial period in most lives. Because of that, and because my mum is there, (and two of my sisters with attendant nephews and nieces) it is my home town. Years ago, I felt like a Londoner, an Australian Londoner, but it did feel like home. I like living in Sydney and it is home but it will never be my home town. Canberra, with it's distinct, proper seasons, hills, bush and family very much is. It's a city that mostly has blue skies, and true to form, it was glorious.

We stayed at my mum's house. My son and I walked up the bike track from O'Connor to the facility that most people still think of as Bruce Stadium, and we watched the Brumbies come home the stronger against the much fancied Sharks from South Africa. The next day we went to some friends' house for lunch, then on to my niece's 8th birthday party as the afternoon became evening. On Monday we went to the wonderful Questacon - there was just us and about 20-thousand kids there - then I caught up with a Canberra bloke who lives in Sydney for lunch. Another friend, down from Sydney to visit her sister-in-law, popped in for an hour, and then my sister came around for a cup of tea. It was wonderful.

Canberra is a much maligned town. It's news shorthand for the government. Everybody knows jokes about public servants. It is one of the few places in our hot country with really cold winters. But it's actually a great place to live and a fantastic place to bring up kids. It's clean and green, though not as green as everyone would like (it really needs some rain). Compared to all of the state capitals (bar Hobart) it's easy to get around, and because it's the national capital it has wonderful facilities for such a small place.

At lunch yesterday with my friend, I met a senior public servant who came from Sunshine Coast in the mid 80s. His oldest is in year 12 and other child is in year 8. He'd be about 50, so in a few years when the kids have finished school he could do the 54/11 and live anywhere he wanted. Or, he could keep working and get a transfer. Go home to the sunshine on the Sunshine Coast. He's not going anywhere.