Parents in western countries should be alarmed by the latest findings on drug use published by the medical journal, The Lancet. The global study found that the advanced economies continue to lead the would in the use of drugs like marijuana and amphetamines.

It found that Australian and New Zealand are the worst affected countries, with 9.3 to 14.8 per cent of people admitting that they used marijuana in the past year. While the Americas averaged about 7 per cent for marijuana use, North America was by far the worst affected region, with 10.7 per cent of people admitting they had used the drug.

By contrast many developing countries registered a low level of usage, with only 1.2 to 2.5 per cent of people in Asia admitting to using marijuana.

The leader of the study, Louisa Degenhardt from Australia’s National Drug and Alcohol Research told the Sydney Morning Herald that… click here to read whole article and make comments

We've just had a heads-up about this - a Google doodle described as "Japan Winner 2011". Not sure exactlty what that means but it is a nice surpise coming from Japan, where having babies has not been all that popular in recent times.

Thanks to Matthew Mehan for this tip.

Here’s a Christmas present for parents who want a really good model of character education to propose to their school or higher educational authorities: a programme called Alive to the World, which hails from South America and has been adapted and piloted in Britain over the past four years.

Alive to the World, says UK co-ordinator Louise Kirk, is based on four principles:

* Good behaviour can be taught by helping children develop their willpower.

* A PSHE programme has to be seamless, with the same core values taught across the board.

* All children are by nature idealistic and respond to ideals towards which they can strive.

* It is more profitable to look at success than failure, so the core values taught are those which underpin a successful and happy life.

These include respect, trust, perseverance, honesty responsibility, generosity, self-control. It teaches through story-telling. A sex education component… click here to read whole article and make comments

We know that marriage has been losing “market share” in the sexual culture of the developed world so the news that barely half of American adults today are married comes as not much of a surprise.

What is surprising in the Pew Research Center anaylsis of new Census data is the speed with which the number of new marriages seems to be dropping -- by 5 per cent between 2009 and 2010, although this may be related to the economic recession.

A long-term decline has brought the proportion of married people (age 18+) in the US from 72 per cent in 1960 to just 51 per cent today. Other adult living arrangements—including cohabitation, single-person households and single parenthood—have all grown more prevalent in recent decades.

In the United States, the declines have occurred among all age groups, but are most dramatic among young adults. Today, just 20% of adults ages… click here to read whole article and make comments

While we are on the topic of obesity, a word of caution from Selena Ewing of Women’s Forum Australia might be in order: “Women, and especially mothers: no fat talk! Be counter-cultural! ‘Fat talk’ has become a cultural norm and it harms women.”

Ms Ewing continues:

In social settings, women frequently complain about their bodies and share weight management tips. This is known as ‘fat talk’ among researchers in psychology, social science and health. Research shows that all kinds of women tend to do this, regardless of their actual weight, even female athletes, and all age groups from schoolgirls onwards.

Why? While the average size of female role models (dancers and models) is decreasing, the actual weight of women in the Western world is increasing. Fewer women meet the social ‘ideal’ body. Body dissatisfaction has become normal for women. And it seems that women do ‘fat talk’… click here to read whole article and make comments

The large percentages of children in developed countries who are overweight or obese continues to worry public health experts. “Eating too much” is not a sufficient answer. Sedentary habits -- hours spent on telly or other screen-based pastimes -- are contributing factors. But family structure matters too.

An Australian study has found that girls in single-parent families are more at risk of obesity than children in two-parent families. “This fits with recent research findings from the United States showing that children in single-parent households are at a higher risk of becoming overweight or obese than those from households with two parents,” says the author, Linda Byrne.

Our research indicates that children in single-parent households eat fewer servings of fresh fruit and vegetables, eat more servings of food high in fat and sugar, and spend an extra two hours every week watching television, compared with children in dual-parent… click here to read whole article and make comments

In the last post on the new State of Our Unions (SOU) report from the National Marriage Project we read that “the benefits of generosity were particularly pronounced among couples with children”. Parents who were very generous with each other were more likely to be very happy as well. But there’s more. Generosity in having children is also part of the happiness equation.

As Wilcox and Marquardt note in their report, “When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and How Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable”, there is a growing media genre of marital misery based on research that finds a couple’s happiness declines once they start having children.

That’s true up to a point, say Wilcox and Marquardt, and that point seems to be when the number of children exceeds the usual one, two or three. They found that, while parents of small families were less happy than childless… click here to read whole article and make comments

An item about generosity in marriage is getting some play on the New York Times Well blog today. Tara Parker- Pope reports on the 2011 State of Our Unions report just out from the National Marriage Project.

Says the Times:

Researchers from the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project recently studied the role of generosity in the marriages of 2,870 men and women. Generosity was defined as “the virtue of giving good things to one’s spouse freely and abundantly” — like simply making them coffee in the morning — and researchers quizzed men and women on how often they behaved generously toward their partners. How often did they express affection? How willing were they to forgive?

The responses went right to the core of their unions. Men and women with the highest scores on the generosity scale were far more likely to report that they were… click here to read whole article and make comments

Canada comes out as the least inhibited country when it comes to sex education, an international survey shows. But even there, the majority of adults think that the job belongs first and foremost to parents.

Two-thirds of Canadians (69 per cent) and Britons (67 per cent) as well as four-in-five Americans (81 per cent) believe the parents or guardians should be primarily responsible for teaching sex education to children and teens.

The online survey of adults conducted by Angus-Reid last month found that Americans focus more on family, Britons are dissatisfied with what they learned as children and teens, and Canadians want schools to begin teaching sex ed at an early age.

Canada is definitely different from the United States and Britain on the question of when to start sex education in school. While only 13 per cent of Americans and 17 per cent of Britons would begin… click here to read whole article and make comments

Child Trends, a Washington nonprofit, has published an analysis of child and parent poverty in the United States based on 2010 census data released recently. Although the recession and factors such as the age of parents or their children have a bearing on poverty, the outstanding indicator is family structure. Here are their top 10 facts:

Top Ten Facts

Two Generations in Poverty, 2000-2010

Fact: Women are more likely to be poor or low income than men.

Fact: Single-parent families (at 37.2%) are about four times as likely as married-couple families (at 8.8%) to be in poverty.

Fact: More than one in 10 children is living in deep poverty, more than one in five is living in poverty, and more than two in five are low income.

Fact: Families headed by Black and Hispanic householders are more likely to be… click here to read whole article and make comments