Check It Out: The best gift you can give your child

By Joan Janzen

A grandparent watched her grandson’s nativity play. As the third wise man, he marched up to the manger with his gift of frankincense and bellowed: “Frank sent this!”

Another lady remembered her six-year-old son poking his head around the door, saying, “Mom, you know I wanted a bike for Christmas? Well, I don’t need it now. I just found one behind your wardrobe.”

Christmas is a special time for kids, a time when parents and family members love to give their children something they’ve always wanted. But what is it that children need all year round?

Erica Komisar, a social worker and psychoanalyst, spoke on social media, emphasizing that children need to be able to experience childhood. Having spent the last 33 years working with parents and children, she realizes the importance of raising happy, healthy and resilient children.

“That should be every parent’s goal,” she said, “And yet there is a worldwide epidemic of mental illness in children and adolescents. We need to focus on the underlying causes of this epidemic as well as solutions.”

As an author who has filled books with neuroscience and epigenetic research, she advised there is no substitute for healthy parents spending time with their children. “So many studies link institutional care from 0 - 3 years to behavioural issues, increased stress hormone levels, anxiety, and increased aggression,” she stated.

Most adults who were raised in the 1960s and 1970s never experienced institutional care as preschoolers. During that time period, it was more common for one parent to be available for their preschool-aged children, and also be present for children arriving home after school.

People raised in that era, myself included, lived on the edge, riding in vehicles without seatbelts, pedalling bikes without wearing helmets and eating cereals loaded with sugar so we could get the prize inside the box.

Our visual options included one to three TV channels and cartoons on Saturday mornings; however, this also meant we had more time to play outdoors. Our music playlist was acquired by listening to the radio for hours and simultaneously pushing the play and record buttons to capture our favourite songs on cassette tapes.

Phones hung on the wall, and you answered at your own risk since there was no caller ID. Polaroid cameras and photo booths at the mall were the closest thing to instant photos we ever experienced.

Nevertheless, most kids grew up to be relatively responsible and resilient. In stark contrast, psychologist Jonathan Haidt from the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship noted in an online interview that anxiety in children began increasing starting in 2012. That’s when phone-based childhood began replacing play-based childhood, and teachers, parents and psychologists began seeing problems arise.

“I call it phone-based childhood,” Jonathon explained. “Kids used to go to a friend’s house to play. Kids used to see each other more before they got phones. Social interactions were replaced by virtual play.”

He said, social networks can be useful for adults, but children should be playing in person. Playing on social networks breeds social comparison and is not good for intellectual development.

“Nobody wants their kids to be isolated,” he noted. In his book, he advises parents to wait until their child is 14 years old before giving him/her a smartphone and even later before allowing them to use social media. “They should meet friends after school and do things together,” he said.

Social worker Erica Komisar suggested communities step up by providing affordable mental health services to help coach parents. They need to understand the underlying causes of behavioural symptoms in children rather than labeling and medicating them, which only causes more illness, Erica suggested.

She stressed that media should help by turning around the narrative that implies work outside the home is more important than mothering. “Being a mother is the most important and valuable work,” she said. “Instead, we find that media focuses on the needs of the parents, not the needs of the children.”

Erica also suggested governments provide flexible spending money to families, which they can use to pay a family member or friend to be a caregiver for their child, rather than providing state-funded institutional care.

The family is the building block of society, the unit that ensures children are fed, loved, protected, nurtured and raised to become resilient and responsible citizens. There is no substitute for loving parents spending time with their children.

Experiencies growing up in the 1960s and 1970s may not have been perfect, but it did produce a lot of children who later became resilient and responsible adults. The best gift you can give your child at Christmas and all year round is spending time with them.