Ruthe Goes To Oxford

As parents, many of us are faced with conditions of exhaustion, loneliness and stress. We are usually the first to be blamed for our child’s faults, and seldom acknowledged for the good.

We have come a long way as a society, but we still have a long wayto go. In the future, parenting specialists will consider current parenting models and the inadequate supports for parents to raise

our future generation to be quite primitive. It really is still a systemic oppression that falls on parents – that we are expected to be perfect parents along with our long work hours and the myriad of household chores that need handling, in addition to tending to our primary relationships with partner and friends. All of which requires care and time to nurture.

No wonder we lack the time and are often too fatigued to show the deep love we have for our children. On top of this, the misinformation we internalized as children while attending school and also growing up in our families and communities led us to believe that we were far less intelligent and much less good than we truly are. We refer to this as internalized oppression from social conditioning,. which has us internally rejecting our goodness and replacing it with messages of inadequacy that play in our head. We can also refer to this as negative self-talk.

Your goal now is to encourage yourself to see, acknowledge and believe in your innate goodness and be proud of your accomplishments thus far and learn to love yourself as a unique individual.

It is my hope that future policies governing our societies will place us, the parents of the world, at the center of policy making, so that all parents are freely and easily given the resources we need to help us build good lives. For those of us that live in cities or towns and villages, an aware policy towards parents will likely have services and structures that meet our needs by:

1. Reducing the hours in the work week, and

2. Providing aware settings for parents to learn nurturing skills that enrich relationships.

Researchers at University of Oxford said that such kids are more likely to have psychiatric or behavioural disorders.

They also said that boys in particular could be affected if their father had depression or was an alcoholic.

Te peak age for men to be affected by psychiatric disorders is the same as the peak age for becoming a father – between 18 and 35.

Paternal depression during the postnatal period, measured at eight weeks after birth, has been linked to increasing the chance of the child
subsequently developing behavioural and emotional problems from 10 percent to 20 percent.

During the study, researchers found that teenage offspring of depressed fathers also have an increased risk of various psychological problems, including depression and suicidal behaviour.

Researchers said that around 2 percent of men are affected by generalised anxiety disorder, and children whose parents have anxiety disorders have a two-fold increased risk of developing such disorders themselves,

Paternal alcoholism is also linked to an increased risk of mood disorders, depressive symptoms, poor performance at school, low self-esteem and problems forming relationships.

The research team, led by psychiatrist Professor Paul Ramchandani, said more studies were needed on how fathers” psychiatric disorders affect their children’s development.

“Men’s roles in bringing up children have changed significantly over the last century, with many dads now taking on an active ”nurturing role” so it’s important that there is more research into the relationship between fathers” mental health problems and how these may affect their children,” the BBC quoted Emily Wooster, policy and campaign manager for the mental health charity Mind, as saying.

Trent Consultants Psychology Clinic. Dedicated to the study, diagnosis, and treatment of mental, emotional and behavioral disorders. Trent Consultants has a variety of programs for parents who want to give their children a headstart in life. Trent Consultants website www.trentconsultants.org Email: childcare@trentconsultants.org