Yes, yes, well done, Jamie Oliver. Bravo and all that. He started by taking on Turkey Twizzlers — and now he has set his sights on food advertising, with a campaign that’s lit up the internet.
Celebrities are falling over themselves to take part in #AdEnough, posting selfies covering their eyes as part of Oliver’s bid to get TV adverts for junk food banned before the 9pm watershed.
Claudia Schiffer and Amanda Holden are among those demanding ‘proper controls’ on TV advertising, which, they claim, bombards children with messages about junk food. (Currently, their only protection, it seems, is to cover their eyes).
Children often get what they want, even though they do not always know what’s best for them and cannot really be expected to
Increasing spending-power combined with increased attention from parents and grandparents produced an over-entitled generation who lacked discipline or self-control (file photo)
Over-indulged children of think they are always right and that everyone should listen to them (file photo)
All very noble. After all, we’re in the middle of an obesity epidemic, with one in three children overweight or obese by the time they leave primary school.
But hang on a minute, aren’t we missing something here? There is already a filter between children and non-stop junk food — and it’s called their parents. Really, the issue is not the advertising, but Mum and Dad’s inability to say no to children.
This is a failure of parenting, and is part of a much bigger problem. Too often today, parents feel unable to exert any meaningful control over their children — to insist that they do as they’re told.
While the sentiments behind Oliver’s campaign may be worthy, at its core is an acceptance that parents are now so feeble when it comes to laying down the law, they need the Government to step in to remove the problem for them.
Thinking back to my own childhood, the idea that I could simply nag my parents into giving me junk food is laughable. I was given my meal every evening, which I either ate or didn’t.
If I didn’t eat it, then I was hungry until breakfast, so fairly quickly I learned to eat whatever was put in front of me. Fast food was a very occasional treat.
The issue is bigger than food, however. Society seems increasingly to be shifting to a position where children can’t be challenged.
So they get what they want, even though they don’t always know what’s best for them and cannot really be expected to.
What worries me is that these big social shifts can have a profound impact on the psychological development of the next generation. In China, for example, there is a well-known phenomenon called Little Emperor Syndrome, which was the result of mainland China’s one-child policy.
Increasing spending-power combined with increased attention from parents and grandparents produced an over-entitled generation who lacked discipline or self-control.
These only children have been described as ‘little dictators’ because they are so used to always getting their own way — and I worry this is what we’re starting to see here. A generation of spoilt, emotionally dysfunctional and entitled people who lack grit and, instead, feel the world owes them.
They can’t tolerate any opinion that differs from their own, so used are they to adults hanging on their every word. They think they are always right, and that everyone should listen to them.
Recently, I was speaking to a senior manager in a City firm, who said companies now face real difficulties in knowing how to deal with graduate employees.
‘They don’t want to be told they’re wrong,’ he said with a sigh. ‘They think their opinions are as important as someone who has been doing the job for 20 years.
Most of them are too fragile and precious to last, he added. ‘They don’t accept hierarchy, and they all think they’re special and more important than they are. They refuse to do tasks they deem boring because they think it’s beneath them.’
Not only is this leading to a generation intolerant of others’ views (bad news for the rest of us), it means they are unable to cope when their own lives don’t go as they expect.
We do our children no favours by mollycoddling them. The world can be harsh, with plenty of disappointments. Children need to learn how to deal with such setbacks — it’s a vital life skill.
While it might be easy to give in to the demands of children, in the long term we’re sending out entirely the wrong message and damaging a whole generation.
DrMax@dailymail.co.uk
Throwing money at patients won’t save the health service
Surely the answer is to invest in reducing waiting lists by employing more staff, not giving the patient a minimal amount of money, which will quickly run out, to access psychotherapy elsewhere
On the surface of it, personal health budgets sound like a wonderful idea. Giving patients direct control of the money to be spent on treatments such as therapy empowers them and allows them to choose care tailored to precisely what they want and need.
This scheme has been around for several years, but this week the Government unveiled plans to roll it out more widely — from 23,000 patients to 350,000 — saying this will help tackle the inadequate and fragmented care so many receive.
But don’t be fooled: this plan is bad news for patients and bad news for the NHS.
Personal health budgets have already been tried in the Netherlands, and are now being restricted because of the problems caused.
It’s true that the care given to the most vulnerable individuals in this country is often inadequate. But the plan undermines the very NHS that these people rely on. Care is inadequate because the help these patients require is complex and expensive.
The answer lies in investing in the resources already there, not in bunging patients cash and telling them to find care elsewhere.
Take this example from my practice: anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. It ruins lives.
Unlike the maximum waiting times for operations, though, there is no cap on the time my patients wait for the specialist psychotherapy treatment they need.
There is chronic underinvestment and the waiting time in many services is over a year. This is scandalous.
Surely the answer is to invest in reducing waiting lists by employing more staff, not giving the patient a minimal amount of money, which will quickly run out, to access psychotherapy elsewhere.
Also, supporting patients to develop a plan for their personal budget takes considerable time from health care professionals. And that’s more time away from other patients.
Is this simply a way of dressing up an unwillingness to properly fund NHS services and cynically selling it to the public as ‘choice’?
Boys must be saved from this barbarity
Some doctors argue that circumcision should be considered in the same regard as female genital mutilation
There is no doubt that female genital mutilation (FGM) is a barbaric practice and has no place in our society.
It’s gone from something that was hidden within communities and condoned, to something that everyone has heard about and we loudly condemn.
One of the smart things that campaigners did was to change the terminology used to describe the practice from ‘female circumcision’ to FGM. Female circumcision sounded too medical and didn’t properly capture the horror of what was happening.
I have long questioned why we don’t talk about ‘male genital mutilation’ when it comes to male circumcision. This week, Dr Niall McCrae, a mental health expert at King’s College London, argued that while FGM has been illegal in the UK for 30 years, no one dares do the same with male circumcision for fear of offending religious sensibilities.
I totally agree with him.
Male circumcision involves the removal of healthy tissue, just as FGM does. It’s no less ethical or more justified doing it to a male as it is a female — there is no difference.
There are medical conditions when it might be necessary. Indeed, I was circumcised when I was four for medical reasons. But the majority of circumcisions are for cultural reasons or because it’s thought to be more hygienic — interestingly, the exact same justifications used for FGM.
Circumcision is a painful and potentially damaging operation that can have life-long consequences. I have seen many men who are having relationship difficulties as a result of sexual problems caused by it. As for hygiene, you don’t need to remove a part of a child’s anatomy, you just teach them to use soap.
The only proven medical benefit is reduced risk of HIV infection. But surely we should be teaching boys the importance of safe sex rather than lopping off things, just in case. Let’s call male circumcision what it really is: male genital mutilation.
- Evidence published this week suggests that a single episode of concussion increases the risk of Parkinson’s disease by more than 50 per cent. There is now mounting proof that various types of trauma to the head can cause long-term damage, including possibly dementia.
This brings up lots of difficult questions when assessing the risk of, say, contact sports — and especially boxing, the only sport where the sole aim is to induce neurological damage in the opponent, because that’s what it is when you knock someone out.
Can this really be permitted in a civilised society?