You Need It To Live, But Too Much Will Kill You

Seldom in history has a product worn the horns of the Devil and the wings of an angel at the same time. Loved and respected because it provides the energy we need to work, to play, even to breathe, sugar is so important to our diet our bodies take several things we eat and convert them into sugars.

However, eat too much sugar and your body will blimp up and your organs will slowly but surely break down. Never has “moderate consumption” been so important.

But what’s “moderate”? How can we tell what’s too much?

Let’s look at an example.

In our example you will eat 16 teaspoons of refined sugar all in one short sitting. Don’t worry, it will be in liquid form. Sound outrageous? That’s how much sugar is in a 20 ounce bottle of cola. In every bottle.

In general, if you look at the ingredient list of products before you buy them and see some that end in the letters “…ose” you have various different kinds of sugars. Sugars come with other name endings, but “…ose” tends to be the most common ending in packaged foods we eat. Most of them are complex sugars our bodies break down into simple ones so they can be used to burn as energy.

Sugars, along with starch, are the basic carbohydrates. Inside your gut they all become sugars, ultimately simple sugars. What your body can’t use it will expel through your colon or convert to fat for storage.

Because our bodies can only convert a limited amount of sugar into fat at one time, if you are going to eat too much sugar, eat it in a binge. Most of it you will enjoy in your mouth and you will get rid of it in the toilet the next day. Eat a little too much sugar on a regular basis and your body will store it in special cells in your body known as fat cells.

The average American consumes 61 pounds of refined sugar each year. About 25 pounds of that would be in the form of candy. That’s just sucrose, though, and the number doesn’t include amounts of any other sugars we consume.

Sugar may cause your skin to wrinkle. Called glycation, blood sugar in the skin binds to collagen so the skin loses its elasticity. Cut out excess sugar consumption and your skin may retain its elasticity. No good or easy or cheap method exists today to help skin regain its elasticity.

There’s nothing new about the kind of sugar we eat. When Alexander the Great invaded India over 2000 years ago he was shocked at how the people managed to create “honey” without bees.

Sugar cane is a plant of hot climate countries. That’s why people who live in the tropics have had it sweet for so long. Andreas Marggraf discovered, in 1747, that the sugar in sugar beets was the same as that in sugar cane. Sugar beets can be grown in much colder climates than sugar cane.

The first sugar beet factory opened in 1802. Over half of the 8.4 metric tonnes of sugar used in the USA this year–no, seriously, make that 8.4 million metric tonnes–will come from sugar beets. Sugar beets are a form of beet with white sweet roots. Only the root is used to make refined sugar.

Getting back to soft drinks, the kinds with artificial sweeteners may contribute to obesity rather than prevent it. A study at Purdue University using rats had one group consuming soft drinks with artificial sweeteners and another with sugar-sweetened drinks.

The group that drank the artificial sweeteners consumed more calories from other foods than the sugar group. The study did not consider the controversial belief that long term consumption of the artificial sweetener aspartame might cause major diseases. Rats don’t live long enough.

Like many popular discoveries artificial sweeteners aspartame and saccharin were found by accident. Lab researchers working on projects having nothing to do with sweetening mixed some test compounds and decided to taste them.

Ask yourself what kind of researcher eats his own experiment.

The artificial sweetener Splenda came about in an even stranger way. The scientists were looking for a new insecticide. [I'll just wait here while you process that thought. Prepare yourself for the next part so we don't have to pause again.]

A lab assistant had been asked to “test” the compound, but he thought he had been told to “taste” the compound. Remember, they had been looking for an insecticide. [Good thing you prepared yourself for that.]

Table sugar certainly isn’t the sweetest taste around. A compound called lugduname is actually 200,000 times sweeter. [Do you wonder where the lab assistant is today that tasted that stuff?]

Sugars are compounds of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The simplest (simple sugars) are most commonly known as glucose, fructose and galactose. Table sugar (a complex sugar) consists of one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule fused together. Other complex sugars dance with different partners.

We don’t want to avoid sugars totally because they are carbohydrates, by far the most common organic molecules in all living things. [Unless you consider minerals to be "living," which is a whole different discussion.]

An eight-atom sugar called glycolaldehyde has the ability to react with a three-carbon sugar to form ribose, a major component of RNA (ribonucleic acid), which does the real work in living things while DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) takes all the credit.

Who cares? Glycolaldehyde has been found in an interstellar gas cloud near the centre of the Milky Way. [Stay with me here.] Glycolaldehyde may therefore be a precursor of life on our planet. If it’s in space, it might have been here.

That same gas cloud, by the way, contains ethylene glycol, which most of us think of as antifreeze. Which is sweet, but lethal, as many animals have learned when they licked up antifreeze leaks.

These are complex sugars. In deep space. We must at least hypothesize that they were synthesized in space. We haven’t yet guessed how that could happen.

Sugar can be used as more than a fuel for your body. Burn table sugar (sucrose) with some corn syrup and a bit of saltpeter and you have a popular amateur rocket fuel.

It’s also sometimes prescribed by doctors. Yup, you pay a dispensing fee to buy a product called “Obecalp,” a sugar pill made to FDA specifications. It may be prescribed for mild problems with a variety of symptoms but no clear therapy. [Spell the product name backwards.]

Not only is the “placebo effect” surprisingly real according to recent studies, the sugar itself may actually help clear up symptoms. Glucosamine works as an immunosuppressant (drug that lowers the body’s normal immune　response) in mice.

Immune system suppression is a mixed blessing because while it can go crazy sometimes, such as with allergies, it also protects us from viruses and bad bacteria. The sugar alcohol xylitol can be used to prevent ear infections in children.

You better have a dose of Obecalp and think about this.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers, parents and grandparents who want to grow children who are healthy in all developmental streams, not just intellectually and physically. It’s a great gift.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

[Primary resource: Discover, October 2009]

What A Relationship Needs To Succeed

“If we were endowed with the same biological mating pattern as the [pair-bonding] goose, there could be no polygamy, no promiscuity, no celibacy, no harems, no group marriage, no trial marriage, and no divorce in any human community in any part of the world.” and “The gibbon’s ‘very low sex drive’ is a reminder…[of the fallacy] that pair-bonding is based on sexual attraction.”
- Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman, Bantam 1972

The article title refers mostly to male-female relationships, though the first reason could apply to any relationship, including friendships. Let’s examine that first reason.

Why so many relationships fail is simply that few people know what makes a relationship work. A large part of that has to do with the fact that living conditions for most people today are so different from those in the past.

In my country, Canada (numbers for the US are similar), a century ago 85 percent of the population lived in the country, in rural areas. That left only 15 percent in cities, despite what we hear and read about lots of people in cities in those days and very little about those who lived “off the land.” Those numbers are reversed today.

Today 85 percent of North Americans live in urban areas, have access to everything cities have to offer, but miss out on so much that was good about rural life. Country living is simply not available to most people, for reasons beyond their control. More importantly, what was good about rural life in the past has not been replaced sufficiently by the good of city life today.

In agricultural areas and in areas where most people made their living from resources in the past, people had few enemies. They needed each other. Everyone people knew had value. No one knew when they might find themselves at the side of the road with a broken wagon wheel, homeless (or barnless) because of a fire, in need of someone to fetch the doctor in town but unable to get there for having to look after a sick child, or any of uncountable possible emergencies.

Rural people often needed someone else to help them. They couldn’t afford to alienate others they may need to help them one day. Few rural people had money to spare, so volunteer help meant drawing on the goodwill of friends and neighbours, who were often one and the same.

Kids learned in their families how to get along with others because they had to. Sure, they had fights, many physical, far more than today. But they learned to make up after a fight and get on with their lives. Friends were often combatants of the past who made up so they wouldn’t have to live as hermits without any friends in areas with few other people around. Grudges were rare because people couldn’t afford to have enemies living nearby.

Today people in cities believe that most of their needs can be satisfied with money. We hire people to do whatever we need done. Friends are often workmates, fellow church parishioners or other people life brings together frequently. We may know our neighbours little more than on a nodding acquaintance basis.

Friends tend to be those from whom we can derive some benefit, such as people where we work or fellow club or church members. When it’s clear that these people can no longer provide us with any benefits or potential benefits–they or we change jobs, one leaves the club, one moves some distance away–the friendship dissipates with the disappearance of the potential for mutual support. Friends have become another form of object in the throw-away society. There are always more people become friends with in a city. Of course this generalization, like all generalizations, is not true of everyone and not necessarily entirely true of any one person.

Because of this impression that anything we need can be bought, we have allowed ourselves to lose the feeling of needing others in times of tragedy. In the process, over a period of decades we got out of the habit of teaching our children the skills of making friends, of keeping friends through all adversities, of knowing what makes a friendship work. Again, that’s a whole society, not necessarily true in every family.

Though most of us now see more people in a day than our ancestors of a century ago saw in a month, we tend to have fewer close friends, people we can count on when the going gets rough, when worse turns to worst. We no longer teach relationship skills because they were not taught to us. We don’t know what to teach because most of us don’t even realize there are great gaps in our knowledge about relationships.

To make a friend, you have to know how to be a friend. To find a good mate, you have to know how to be a good mate.

The second reason most relationships fail is that we don’t know our obligations in a relationship. We know what we want from others, but we give little or no thought to what they may want or need from us to maintain a healthy relationship. As relationships are two way affairs, when one person feels no great commitment to the other, the relationship fails or wanes away at the first crisis.

For any relationship to succeed, each person must believe that they contribute more to the success and health of the relationship than the other. The perception of an imbalance is usually not real because we don’t fully appreciate what the other contributes. But if we perceive that we contribute more to a relationship than we receive and we can be comfortable with that, the relationship has a chance.

The best examples of why relationships fail is demonstrated by the staggering divorce rate in western countries. A husband or wife believes that the other is not giving what they used to, that their own needs in the marriage are not being met, that the spouse is “not the person I married.” It’s usually true. However, what most people fail to appreciate and understand is that their own commitment to being a devoted spouse may be equally weak.

You can’t be a good husband or wife if you have very little idea of what is required of a good husband or wife. Ironically, we all seem to have pretty good ideas about what is required of the other, our mates, even if we don’t know what is required of ourselves.

The third reason why relationships fail has to do particularly with male-female relationships. Especially the requirement of fidelity in a marriage or common law relationship. If there is one thing we have taught each other and our children about marital and marriage-style relationships it’s that each partner should be monogamous.

The trouble with that is that there is nothing in our natural or evolutionary history to support that. Humans, like all the great apes, are genetically and hormonally programmed to spread their genes as widely as possible. That means that men are genetically programmed to want to bed as many women as they can. And women are programmed to find as many healthy males with whom to procreate future offspring as they can.

Many people will find those last two statements offensive. But why? Nature didn’t teach us to be monogamous. Religions did. Religions even decry (in some cases even threaten death to participants of) male-male and female-female relationships. Why? Because those who formed the religions knew that most gay men are still capable of passing along their male genes to fertile females, just as most lesbians have the ability to give birth to children, can be impregnated by healthy males.

Religions, in the past, wanted desperately to expand, to enlarge their congregations, to increase their power as unelected bodies of social influence. That meant, in addition to sending out missionaries and conquering other cultures and nations by war, encouraging their own followers to have as many babies as possible. The financial ability of parents to raise children, the likely health of the children and the knowledge of parental skills held little importance compared to the lust for expansion. What was important was numbers.

As a result, homosexuality was forbidden and banned, while having large families was encouraged. To keep order among the families of congregations, religions dictated that families should consist of one adult male, one adult female, and the only other adults allowed would be those who could help to tend to the children while the parents were busy creating more or working to support the ones they had. Polygamy and infidelity were considered sinful because the resulting “families” would be hard to manage, to control.

Science doesn’t care much for the word monogamy. It likes “pair-bonding.” You have heard of animals that pair-bond, that stay together for life, through thick and thin. Like geese–most examples of pair-bonding are birds, including northern gannets and penguins. However, the only pair-bonding along our branch of the evolutionary family tree is the gibbon. Though gibbon mates are totally devoted to each other, they are comparatively anti-social. They have little to do with other gibbons or other animals of any kind. They keep to themselves.

Gibbons, like other pair-bonded animals, have low sex drives. Not an attractive characteristic for us humans. In fact, sex is of so little importance among pair-bonded animals that some gibbon couples are homosexual and some heterosexual couples do not engage in sex. Do we really aspire to pair-bonding for ourselves? We should see pair-bonding as it really is in other examples in nature.

Let’s switch back from the term pair-bonding to monogamy. Monogamy, while a charming and attractive concept in certain contexts, is fundamentally unnatural for us humans.

If monogamy is unnatural and many people insist that they could never live with a mate who is “unfaithful” (i.e. not monogamous) then the marriages and marriage-like relationships that depend on monogamy will likely fail. Estimates in the US of infidelity among married men range around 85 percent, while most estimates of infidelity among married women range between 65 and 75 percent.

A priest commented to me recently that it’s up to each member of a couple to fulfill the sexual and other needs of the other so he or she doesn’t need to go looking elsewhere. Good idea in theory, doesn’t work in practice.

If a marriage depends on monogamy, that makes sex the most important component of the marriage, literally the tie that binds. There are two things wrong with that. One is that a marriage must be based on much more than sex or it doesn’t have enough to sustain itself. The other is that few people with a lower sex drive than their partner feel compelled to engage in sex and its accompanying gestures and procedures if they don’t feel like it. They may not want to have sex, even if their partner does, but they also don’t want the “needy” partner to go out and have sex elsewhere.

It may not be the actual act of infidelity of a partner that results in the breakdown of a marriage, but the attitude of the mate that feels “cheated on” who feels the partner should be something he or she was not naturally programmed to be.

Few “unfaithful” partners want to break up their relationship. They just want to be fulfilled in ways they can’t get at home. Nature tells them to find it somewhere else.

A wife who says “You may be the perfect husband in all other ways but you can’t be faithful to me, so you must get out of my life” (even though she can’t give what the husband needs sexually)–reverse the gender words if it applies–can be the partner who makes the marriage fall apart. If doing what nature dictates and what all other primate animals do causes a marriage or relationship to fail, then the marriage was not well founded in the first place.

We humans have the ability to use our intellect to overcome our natural inclinations. Few of us use that ability. Every war that ever was, most murders, almost every person behind bars in a prison or jail and almost everyone in a mental institution or on mood altering drugs give an abundance of evidence that we tend to give in to nature much more often than we overcome it using our intellect.

When following what comes naturally to us causes a relationship to fail, there is something wrong with how the relationship is constituted. That is, we don’t know what a close human relationship is, what it should consist of.

When you don’t know what you’re doing, expect something to go wrong. It will. If you want a relationship to succeed, you need to learn what the other person needs and how you can fulfill that.

A successful relationship means two people each committed more to the welfare and happiness of the other than they are to their own. That’s hard. But no one ever said it was easy.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers, parents and grandparents who want to give their children what they need at each stage of their development, rather than leaving it all to chance.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Why You Are Here

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.
- Woodrow Wilson, 28th US President (1856-1924)

Many people in Western countries, usually in their quiet moments alone, wonder what the purpose of life is, why we are here. So we are told, just about everyone wonders this.

http://billallin.com

When Should Children Be Taught Certain Facts and Skills?

In response to an article I wrote recently about teaching information, facts and skills to children much earlier than most adults think is advisable and possible, one of my readers wrote to ask me to elaborate on the “when.” When to teach children what is a critically important question, yet one that is seldom asked. The following was my reply to her.
………………………

Many adults believe that timing of information given to children is extremely important. They think that if the timing of wrong, it may harm the child’s mind or morals. This is wrong in every possible way.

Teaching a child about drugs, for example, does not open the possibility that the child will adopt the taking of drugs. The whole purpose of teaching the child about drugs is to inform them about what harm can come to them by taking drugs other than under the supervision of a medical professional. Teaching a child about sex between man and woman does not encourage the child to experiment with sex prematurely. Despite these widespread beliefs, there is no evidence that early teaching about drugs, sex or any other matter that a parent should be teaching to a child affects the mind or body of the child as a result of being taught prematurely.

Despite parent supervision of internet use by children, the truth is that this is impossible. Kids are resourceful and will find ways to circumvent restrictions by the parents. One way, for example, is simply to visit a friend’s house, someone who does not suffer such restrictions. In other words, information on every possible subject is available on the internet. However, some of this information is wrong and some (in its wrongness) does harm. Consider how many adults have been fooled by urban legends and so-called Nigeria scams.

A parent should be teaching life skills about all subjects when a child is young. How young is too young? You know your timing is wrong when the child shows no interest in the subject, gets distracted easily. THAT is the only criterion for premature teaching.

Innocence in children is admirable if you want them to never grow up. But they do. Children who have been kept innocent by their parents tend to become ignorant adults. Ignorant adults don’t know what to do and when to do it. They have few coping skills when life throws them a bad curve, such as a personal assault on their person, a home invasion, divorce or death of a loved one.

The child, not the parent, should choose when he or she is ready to learn about a subject.Children learn about life in the womb, even before they are born. They have the ability to learn a language (a sophisticated and complex cognitive process) even before they can walk. Studies show that children study language before they even have the ability to make use of that learning through their own speech. Children have the ability to understand the most complex information we can give them at a shockingly early age.

If mistakes are make with early teaching, they would be with the adult, not with the child. The adult (usually parent) might not teach well for the learning style of the child. Imagine a parent using the lecture style of a university professor with a child of two years. No matter how fact filled the lecture might be, the child will not be interested because young children learn by doing more than by listening. They learn language by listening, but that has an incentive because the child wants to participate in family conversations. For most matters to be learned early by a child, they can learn is easier by doing something.

I most cases, children learn while they play. Play is their form of work. A parent can teach a child in the context of play. Make it a fun and enjoyable situation. Because kids want to learn, teaching them something that is given them as if imparting a secret is also a fun learning style. They often want to believe that they know something other kids don’t. And they should be in that situation at least once in a while.

Let’s take a teaching example. How many facts might a parent possibly teach a child about sex? Let’s say 50 facts. A child of three years has no need for or use for 50 facts about sex. The child will not be interested in learning 50 facts. But he might be interested in learning a few of them. It stops being fun for a child to learn when the learning becomes memorization. A child has learning limits. Those limits are more of total accumulation at any given time than of their ability to understand something.

How many lies do parents tell their children so that they can avoid teaching them the truth? A parent may tell a child that a new baby is delivered by a stork or an angel from heaven. The child will know that is wrong. The child sees the mother grow in the belly, then return from the hospital, with baby in arms, much thinner. Which does more harm, telling the child that babies begin with the joining of sex organs (every kid has a set) of mother and father, or telling the child a lie? Believe me, telling the lie to a young child makes the child mistrust information from the parent.

A lie told to a child by a parent, no matter what the intent of the parent, is a lie to the child, a lie that undermines the trust the child has in the most important adult in his or her life. A “white lie” is a lie and it’s understood as a lie by the child.

The message a child learns from a lie by his parent, no matter what the nature of the lie, is “I’m a bad parent who can’t cope with teaching you the truth, so I am making up this lie. We’re stuck with each other, so live with it.” Children recognize lies and diversionary tactics far more readily than most adults realize. They don’t know what to make of a lie, what to do about the fact that their most important source of information about life has lied to them. The child will still love the parent, but trust between them will have been undermined.

Children can handle truth at any age, even as young as age one year. No child knows what to do with a lie told by a parent, no matter how well intentioned it was. A child’s life revolves around trust, and since the young child’s life revolves around parents, for a parent to lie to a child to avoid telling the truth helps to destroy that environment of trust between them. It shatters the child’s life.

Bad parenting does far more harm to children than teaching them too early has ever done.

Please consider these thoughts carefully. Put them into action yourself and tell other people you know. There is nothing private about this information. You and they are not too young to learn. Nor too old. There is no young age limit to learning just as there is no upper age limit.

Invite others you tell to join our group.

Children, more than adults, are built to learn. They are learning factories. Young children process an alarming amount of information daily, far more than adults do and far more than most adults realize.

Do not hesitate to write back with more questions.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know when, what and how to teach critically important information and skills to children so that they can grow up healthy and truly well balanced.
Learn more at

http://billallin.com

The Value of PowerWhile that may seem like a strange title, think about it. What is power? When people seek power or have power, what is it they seek or have?http://billallin.com

How do we know if we have or lack power?

I believe I have distilled the concept down to something manageable. Power is a potential.

Power is the potential to hurt others of our own kind. Wealth, in itself, does not bestow power directly. Yet we all know and reluctantly accept that those with money can commit crimes–can hurt others in some way–and buy their way out of punishment.

Sometimes that potential is realized. Hitler had power that he used. He killed, maimed and otherwise harmed millions of people. For that Hitler will forever be considered one of the most vile devils humankind has produced.

To have power as potential and not use it is one thing. To have power you use is quite another. Using power is socially unacceptable. Having power you don’t use might get you anything you desire.

Does a president or prime minister of a country have power? Perhaps just the mention of the name George W. Bush would be sufficient to answer that question. The man started a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives (many from his own military) and destroyed untold numbers of families based on a lie. The war itself has even harmed American citizens who never left their own country, whether they believed the lie or not. If nothing else, they will pay taxes for the rest of their lives to cover loans made to pay for the war. And the quality of their health care will be reduced because the money will not be there to pay for something better from the public purse.

Power is the potential to be physical. It’s not really intellectual in nature. It’s the potential for sheer, overwhelming might.

Those with power can never be intellectually satisfied. They can never be satisfied in any way. What could Hitler do, for example, after he had exercised his power over so many of his own people and the people of countries he conquered, other than to keep going? Once power is exercised, it may not be stopped. President Bush (the second) was stopped only because the US constitution insists that one person may only hold the top job in the country for two terms. We might wonder what he might have done if his term had not ended. Iran would almost certainly be next on his attack agenda. Then North Korea?

Those who are intellectually satisfied have no need for power. Intellectual satisfaction itself is a form of potential. Those who are intellectually satisfied have the potential to move on to greater and more challenging thoughts, projects and ventures.

Does Donald Trump have power or is he intellectually satisfied? I suspect he would say he is intellectually satisfied because he can accomplish new business ventures repeatedly. I would maintain that Donald Trump has power, but not intellectual satisfaction. He has the money to buy his way out of trouble, but success in business should not be equated with intellectual satisfaction. Trump, like Hitler, is driven to continue his business conquests. Donald Trump is a warrior with power, even though he doesn’t use guns.

I am reminded of a program currently on television, Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? I know there are children in grade five who are intellectually more satisfied than Donald Trump. Not that they are smarter than Trump. They have more intellectual potential than Trump, thus can be excited and enthusiastic about life.

As life objectives, we can strive for power–with its potential to hurt others physically– or we can strive for intellectual satisfaction–with its potential to benefit humankind and give the users satisfaction unimaginable to those with power.

While the better choice may seem obvious to you, an intelligent reader, I submit that as societies we tend to put greater emphasis on power than on intellectual prowess. “Get a good education so you can get a good job” is the mantra chanted by so many parents to their children.

And it’s working. Children are getting education that will make them good employees, good followers of prescribed business and human resources plans. Much evidence suggests that children are not gaining intellectual satisfaction in school or in the jobs they hold as adults. In fact, away from their jobs, where they have considerable expertise, many adults are stupid, so much so that a grade ten dropout may have a more rounded education in life experiences. Donald Trump likely pays someone to change a washer in a leaky tap, something a grade ten dropout could do.

Those who do not strive for either power or intellectual satisfaction become human puppets. They dangle on strings pulled by others. When no one pulls their strings, they hang limp and useless. When they get laid off from a job, for example, they seek another employer to tell them what to do and pay them to do it. Few attempt to use their intellect to become self employed entrepreneurs. Ironically, the post modern world is primed and ready for entrepreneurs, but they can’t be found.

We don’t teach children the value of independence, of entrepreneurship, of intellectual satisfaction. As a result, we don’t find many adults with these values.

We make our choices, as parents, as teachers, as neighbours and as citizens, and we live with the consequences. We should not wonder, then, that people follow those with power, even if those people have evil intent.

We get as adults what we teach to children. If we teach the value of power, we get followers and power seekers.

We don’t really know yet what we might get if we taught the values of intellectual satisfaction. A few schools teach this, but they are rare, they are considered “different,” out of the mainstream.

These few schools tend to produce children who become adult geniuses. The kids are not necessarily born with genius, they have intellectual opportunities offered to them constantly as they respond with delight at their own intellectual satisfaction. They grow intellectually without feeling the need for power, the need for potential to hurt others.

Our children are not our future, as such. They are our potential for the future we would like our societies, our countries, our communities and our families to have. The potential becomes reality only based on what we teach our children.

Teach right. Teach good. Teach peace. Teach often.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers, parents, anyone who wants to know when and what to teach children so that they grow to become independent and well balanced adults who have the ability to achieve intellectual satisfaction.
Learn more at 

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.
- Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic, activist (1909-1943)

I have never met a person who, as a child, wanted to grow up to be a criminal, a drug addict, a gulper of prescribed drugs, a divorcée, a workaholic, a gambling addict, an alcoholic or a wife beater. Nor have I ever heard or read of one.

Yet somehow so many of us grow into these roles in life.

Are we a society of losers?

A recovered alcoholic, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, considers himself a lifelong addict. Does that mean we should consider him a lifelong loser and treat him as a social pariah, as human detritus?

If not, then how should we think of and treat such people? How, indeed, should we think of and treat those who still “suffer” daily with their affliction? Is it even possible to have our governments provide sufficient assistance to help a significant number of them recover? Many people believe it’s not possible.

The subject of helping people to recover from their life problems is so enormous that most of us prefer to not think about it. “It would just cost us more taxes.” Of course those people don’t realize how much of their taxes already go into dealing with the social problems these people create, including the cost of health insurance and maintaining prisons and rehab facilities for them. Some estimate that figure as high as half our taxes today.

We don’t want to face up to the fact that society has failed them. Especially because we have no clue about how we could have failed them. Fair enough. Let’s worry about what we can fix.

Now return to my first sentence. We, as parents, as teachers, as relatives and neighbours, grow our own children from scratch. They learn what we teach them.

They learn what we teach them. They learn what we teach them. So let’s teach them what they need before they need it. Before they break.

Too many of us believe that children should be kept in innocence for as long as possible. Such people are wrong and dangerous to society. The whole purpose of childhood is to learn how to cope with the rigors of adulthood. Not to turn childhood innocence into adult ignorance. A child that doesn’t learn as early as possible about the pitfalls as problems of adults is doomed to fall victim to them and not have any defences at the ready.

We have long established traditions for teaching children what they need to know. One is called schools. The other is called parents. If that sounds patronizing, remember that these are the primary sources of education for children, all children. In a Canadian study of teens a few years ago, 89 percent of them claimed that most of what they learned about life came directly from their parents.

In general, schools are not allowed to teach what kids need so that they can cope with the rigors of the adult world they are growing into. Schools are directed, by curriculum and policy, to teach what kids will need to be employable, to be good employees. However, schools suffer from the lack of need satisfaction in the teens they teach through discipline problems. Students who can cope with their problems suffer from loss of classroom time when the troubled kids act out.

Most young parents know little or nothing more than what they learned about parenting from their own parents. Which is grossly insufficient. Which dooms their children to develop the kinds of problems mentioned at the start of this article.

New parents whose goal is to be better parents than their own parents were to them are lucky. They know they need to do something different. Unfortunately, they don’t know what to do. They know what they want to be different for their kids, but not necessarily how to achieve it. They have no easily accessible source for that information.

Western societies are extremely lucky that they don’t have more social problems than they do. They must be doing something right. After all, western societies have few problems with terrorism, war and other forms of rampant violence found in other parts of the world, parts that claim that parents do know what they should be teaching their children. Maybe not.

No matter where in the world you look, social problems abound.

Does that mean that social problems are unavoidable? No. It means that, in general, people in all parts of the world have no clear idea what to teach their children to help them cope with life in the 21st century.

Sadly, the last time our ancestors did have a good idea about what to teach their children to help them to cope with life, they all lived in tribes. In tribes, the social norm is that every adult bears some responsibility for teaching every child. As little changed from one year to the next, from one decade to the next, knowing what to teach children was adopted as social policy for the tribe. Everyone taught children the same things. Every child got the same message.

We don’t do that today. If anything, parents go out of their way to make sure their kids don’t grow up like other kids. That’s a social norm. Everyone should be different, we believe.

Yet everyone is the same in many ways. We all have the same needs, for example, with few exceptions.

Schools address the needs of employers. Parents address the needs of their children so long as they know what those needs are. However, so many of the needs of children are unknown mysteries to many parents. Most parents learn parenting “on the job.”

Many parents don’t teach their children about drugs for fear that the kids will “experiment” with drugs. By the time the parents decide to teach the kids about drugs, the kids have already learned about drugs on the street, in the schoolyard, in the parks, virtually everywhere they go. Some kids already take drugs by the time their parents decide it’s time to teach them about drugs.

How’s that for timing, for knowing what kids need and when?

Why would a child, an adolescent, an adult need to turn to drugs? Simone Weil said it’s an attempt to fly from emptiness. What’s empty?

Better to say that human needs have gone unfulfilled. The need for fulfillment of needs is what is empty.

Does that sound like psychobabble? That’s what many people would say, people who don’t know what children need at all, let alone when they should learn stuff that will fulfill their needs. Ignorant people often have strong opinions against evidence that they are ignorant.

It’s true that children are not small adults and should not be treated that way. If they were, we would have to punish them for offences they didn’t know were offences. For misdeeds they did because they didn’t have the words to explain to their parents and teachers what they needed. For bad stuff they did out of frustration because they needed something they couldn’t talk about, but adults didn’t know either so they ignored the needs of the children, thinking they were just misbehaving. Yet that is what most punishment of children is about.

A child needs to know how to deal with every social situation he experiences. We know that for adults, so we provide ways to teach them social skills, sort of. Few children receive any significant amount of instruction about social skills. They learn the hard way, by making mistakes. Or by watching what happens when other kids make mistakes.

But that is teaching what not to do in social situations, not what to do proactively, before the information is needed. We need to teach social skills to children, to address their social development when they need it most. They need the skills before they need to put the skills into practice. In teaching skills to children, especially social and emotional skills, timing is critical.

We also need to address their emotional development. Huh? Why do so many adults experience heartbreak when a relationship with a mate who is incompatible with them breaks up? Why do more than half the couples who marry get divorced later? That number should be even greater except that many couples today skip the wedding part and simply live together until they separate later because one of them “failed” the other or they “grew apart.”

Understanding emotional skills and knowledge is part of what we need to get along well with others. As a social species, we need to have social interactions with others. In most activities people do–either personal or work related–they need to interact with others.

Socially and emotionally well adapted and developed children and adolescents become socially and emotionally well adapted and developed adults. Moreover, socially and emotionally successful adults are not only well liked and appreciated, they do a great deal to help others in their families, their communities and their countries. They gain great public respect because they do things they seem to understand–almost intuitively–are right. Nobel Peace Prize winners, for an example.

Teaching to the social and emotional needs of children and adolescents is not hard. We simply have not put into place the mechanisms for doing it. The needs themselves are not secrets, they’re public information. Unfortunately, most of that information is contained in psychologists who specialize in fixing broken people rather than in teaching everyone before they break. And in sociologists who manipulate us by advertising, religion and politics because we don’t want to listen to what they know otherwise.

While we long for innocence, what we get is ignorance. There is nothing pretty or beneficial about ignorance.

We have schools, but we use them almost exclusively to train children to be successful employees, not successful adults. The change would be easy and cheap, but someone has to make the first move in every community.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow socially and emotionally well developed and balanced children, not just intellectually well developed employees.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein

Do you wonder sometimes if Einstein didn’t get sucked into a black hole somewhere and spewed out covered in some of the strange stuff he talks about other than physics?

Who can’t see with their own eyes and feel with their own heart?

As it turns out, most of us.

Most of what we value in life–including what we do with the precious hours allotted to us in our own lives–we adopt from what we have hard from others. We eat more or less the same things as our neighbours and family eat. We subscribe to spiritual beliefs somewhat similar to those of others we know. We wear similar clothing to work, on the golf course, playing a sport or shopping.

Would you not think a down-and-outer bum from the street would be clearly out of place in the same pew as you at church? Yet for all you know, the “bum” may lead a more spiritually pure life than you, may help others more often than you, may even have a personal net worth far in excess of yours.

So why would the bum not belong beside you in church? Likely because you think he may embarrass you by embarrassing himself, meaning that you care what others think about you when you sit in the same church pew as a bum in ragged, dirty and smelly clothing.

Surely when we fall in love we feel with our own heart more clearly than we do with emotions at other times in our lives. That’s a one-to-one thing that only involves two people (only one if the love is unrequited, but let’s consider two the norm). Two people who love each other deeply care only about themselves. It’s not selfish so much as self centred, or a universe of only two people.

Yet how do we find and choose such a person? Most often we use standards or guidelines passed on to us from others. Most times we won’t get involved with someone our friends or family can’t stand. Because their opinion matters. We use other standards to measure potential mates, but we usually acquire them from others.

The “deeply in love” stage is limited in most long term relationships. It’s known as the romantic phase. It usually lasts from six weeks to eight months, depending on the people involved and circumstances. By the time a year has passed in any relationship, the romantic phase is over and a couple has moved on to a deeply bonded relationship. Romantic gestures may continue, but the hormonal rush of romance will have tapered off to something more manageable. If the relationship continues, both members will be sizing up where they want it to go and where the other may be prepared to have it go.

The act of sizing up where we want a relationship to go is largely determined by what others tell us. Nothing in nature tells us it’s time to evaluate. Lots of effects in our lives do just that. I’m reminded of how often that happened in the popular television series Friends, where relationships ended because one couldn’t meet the evaluation tests of the other.

When do we act on our own, using our own eyes to provide independent evidence to our brain so that it can make up its mind (pun noted) without influence from outside? When do we act only according to the dictates of our heart, without letting anyone else express their opinions, however well intentioned? In fact, not that often.

We are not just social animals who require the attention and approval of others in our social circle, we are also individuals who need others in our lives to provide validation, approval, love and other aspects of social intercourse. We are not rock or islands in the stream. Nor can we be for long. We each function within a particular social milieu. Stepping outside of it by making totally independent choices may jeopardize our membership in the group.

Einstein was right. We rarely make independent decisions, with our eyes or out hearts. Usually it’s because we can’t afford to be so independent.

So are well all slaves to each other? Or to someone who is effectively our master? No. Slavery today, in the free world, is a matter of choice.

What we must do sometimes is balance off what others want us to do and think with what we believe is best for us. When we decide to act independent of the wishes and advice of others who care about us, we need good communication skills to express our feelings in ways that will not offend or alienate them.

Sure it’s hard. So was relativity for Einstein. But what else have you got to do with your life than to get better at it?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want children to be able to make wise decisions as they grow up, to be able to balance the intricacies of life so that they can be happy and get along well with those they want to hold dear.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.
- Don Marquis, American humorist, writer (1878-1937)

This applies more to the Western part of the world than to the rest where a majority of people know what they want: food and safety.

It applies as well today as it did during the lifetime of Don Marquis, who died during the Great Depression.

Why do so many of us depend on others to tell us what we should want, what we should strive for and how we should spend our lives?

Let’s look at some background. Charles Darwin did not tout “survival of the fittest” as the way all animals–including humans–succeed or go extinct. That “fittest” thing is inaccurate and wrong. If that were the case, the strongest and smartest among us–including in the animal kingdom–would be more successful than the rest, which is clearly not true.

Darwin said that the most adaptable species would survive when others are dying off as conditions in their homelands change. Humans live in more and varied parts of our planet than any species other than a few that can only be seen (by us) with a microscope. We live in the frozen Arctic and on mountain sides, in jungles and deserts. Some of us have our homes on water and make our living from it. Since the beginning of the last century, a majority of us live in urban areas. We have adapted to hugely varied living conditions.

Why have so many of us recently migrated to cities? Supposedly because jobs are more plentiful and living is easier.

When the vast majority of living humans earned their living from agriculture, most people worked for themselves, in one sense or another. In cities, most people earn their income working for an employer that determines when they will work, how hard they will work, what days they will work, what they will wear at work, what equipment they will use, when they can take breaks from work, even the quality of the air they will breathe at work.

The attitude of most employers in cities today is “Take it or leave it, and if you leave someone will replace you tomorrow.” Ethics and morality aside, most employees stay in their jobs because it’s too hard to find other jobs. They need to have employers because they “need to eat” and to feed, clothe and shelter their families.

Recent studies have shown the stress and polluted air, both of which may be found in abundance in all large cities, shorten people’s lives. People live shorter lives, even though they may have greater income than their rural countrymen, so that they can have a job, can work at a job someone else has created for them.

When a global catastrophe occurs–and it surely will–who will survive? People who live in big cities obviously have not adapted well enough to live healthier than their rural countrymen.

Look at the problems that have arisen since the downturn of national economies globally. Multitudes of people get laid off from their jobs each week, all over the world. Those people are desperate to find jobs. Because they know they can’t survive on their own skills alone. They don’t have the knowledge or skills to create jobs for themselves, no matter how wonderful they are at the jobs they do today.

Being able to survive on your own skills and knowledge is what adaptability is all about.

Could you survive if electric power went off in your part of the world for six months? If not, then you have not just traded your labour and skills for the produce of other people, you have sacrificed your personal incentive to survive. Survival, it is said, is one of the few instincts we human have. In cities we are breeding that instinct out of ourselves.

Those who can’t adapt in times of extreme stress will die, will go extinct. When the time comes, it won’t matter how physically strong you are or how smart you are. It will matter whether you can adapt to survive while others do not.

We may want to consider how successful we are as a species if almost all of us would die because we could not look after our own needs following a global catastrophe. That catastrophe could be as simple as a bad virus bringing down the major internet services of the world.

We have seen how quickly our planet is warming globally (though climate change has caused some places to be colder). The opposite–another Ice Age–could happen even faster if earth is hit by an asteroid or someone decides to set off a nuclear bomb that creates a global black cloud that lasts for years (known as “global winter” or “nuclear winter”).

Remember the die-off of the dinosaurs? Some of them–the most adaptable–survived. Today we call them birds. Most died off within 1500 years of the asteroid striking Mexico’s Yucatan. Fifteen hundred years is a blink of time in cosmic history.

It’s time we consider teaching our children survival skills, an attitude leaning toward independence and interdependence. It’s not time to be afraid. Frightened people can’t adapt. They are afraid because they can’t adapt. If what we really want is to survive, we need to teach that as an attitude as well.

It won’t necessarily take a natural disaster of global proportions to find people scrambling to survive. We have seen recently how bad things can get when business people take advantage of weak laws and morals and some sell houses to people who can’t afford subprime mortgages. It doesn’t take much.

It’s time for the less afraid and more adaptable among us to prepare for worse times than anyone has seen in living memory. That’s not pessimistic. It’s optimistic to think that some of us will survive a tragedy because we know how to adapt. True, many of us will die. But that happens in natural disasters frequently. We have adapted to that. As Darwin predicted, the less adaptable will perish.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach skills about survival, knowledge of survival techniques and an attitude to treat adapting to changing conditions positively to their children and loved ones.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Lazarus Long, fictional character in Robert A Heinlein novels

“Neurotic” in this case may be taken to mean “emotionally excessive to the point of being harmful.”

Insecurity breeds jealousy. The two are not irrevocably linked. Insecurity can also lead to bullying, to lack of an ability to commit to a relationship, to various emotional problems other than neuroses, to addictions, to violence and rage, to bad relationships and to divorce.

Consider how prevalent these are in our society.

They are so common that social scientists refer to them as social problems, meaning that so many people have these problems that the numbers alone create further problems in churches and clubs, in communities, in the workplace, in legislative assemblies of government, in countries, even at the United Nations.

People learn to feel secure during their maturation, as they grow from children, through adolescence, into adulthood and beyond. They key word in that last sentence is “learn.” People learn to feel secure. It doesn’t come as a matter of course. People learn insecurity as well.

If security or lack of it is learned, who teaches it? We all help in the process of teaching insecurity. Insecurity is another word for fear. People learn insecurity in their families, as children, in school (not intentionally in the classroom), in the playground, in various groups and unhealthy friendships. They learn it from television and newspapers that encourage us to fear each other, on the street, in offices, in elevators, in our homes. They learn it from clerks in stores who ignore them while helping other customers who came in later.

Where do people learn security? That which should be learned is usually taught by someone, isn’t it?

No one teaches people how to be secure. No one teaches them that fear is not just harmful, but unnecessary. In the United States, the recently retired president, self-titled “the war president,” taught the necessity of believing in a War On Terror (with what results?) and he personally controlled the status of alerts (Amber Alert, Red Alert).

Learning to avoid fear and how to feel secure can be taught. It’s a matter of understanding certain facts and mastering some skills. If it can be taught and if it’s so important and so damaging to us personally and to our communities and our countries, we should be teaching it.

The information needed and the skills to be learned are available. They are neither hidden nor secret. They simply are not taught.

Are you afraid of anything? Do you feel insecure? Lots of people do, but it’s not a necessary consequence of modern society as ultra-conservatives would have us believe.We fear and we feel insecure because we have not learned how to avoid these harmful emotions.

Someone has something to gain by making us feel afraid and insecure in such massive numbers. Of that you may be certain. I won’t point fingers because it will not take much thinking on your part to figure out who is responsible for your fear and insecurity.

The economy is bad, are you afraid to lose your job? Unless you die within the next two years, you will survive the recession and get another job. Plan now what you would do and how you would go about it if you were to lose your job. If you don’t make a plan, maybe you have something to worry about. If you do, you won’t need to worry because you will know exactly what you will do.

If your spouse died or unexpectedly announced his/her desire for a divorce, what would you do? With a plan, these events would bring unhappiness. But they would not necessarily destroy your life. Having a plan of what you would do in case of tragedy is not a self fulfilling prophesy. It’s simply being ready.

There are two ways to avoid insecurity and fear. You learned them by reading this article.

It would be wise if this kind of information and these skills were taught to everyone. It could be taught in schools, if we wanted it.

It would cost almost nothing to prepare teachers to teach social and emotional skills. Just give each teacher a book about it and the authority to teach it.

Imagine a world without fear.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow secure and self confident children into adults who won’t contribute to the social problems we endure today and who will lead emotionally and socially healthy lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

That is called integrity. Unfortunately it is not something you can buy or steal.
- The L WordThe easiest way to understand the basic concept of integrity is: doing the right thing when no one is looking and no reward forthcoming.

The delicious irony of the second sentence of the quote is that buying someone’s good will or stealing anything would be the opposite of having integrity.

Does integrity exist today or is it a virtue more comfortably left in the past?

No one can claim to be pure and noble. We all have our weaknesses and strengths. None of us is perfect. When we demonstrate moral weakness, we join the vast majority of humanity that is not consistent about integrity.

Most of us try to do our best most of the time. Whether anyone is watching is or not, whether we may get a reward or not. If we don’t, we may have trouble sleeping at night, we may suffer stress and its resulting anxiety beyond what we should, our relationships with those we love will surely suffer eventually.

Our media fill our minds with examples of every kind of immoral behaviour that is anything but integrity. Yet, somehow, most of us keep trying to do what is right.

Whether we have integrity or we act the opposite way, a large part of the responsibility lies with our parents. In the first five years of life, parents teach us by example or by actively teaching us lessons to live with integrity or to work against the benefit of society as a whole to gain for ourselves. As adults, we each make decisions for ourselves. Yet most of us, especially after age 40 (usually sooner), follow the life lessons and role models given to us by our parents.

Integrity is how we survive instead of descending into chaos as families and communities and nations.

Why should we care about our community as a whole if our community seems to not care about us? Actually, it does. Communities don’t have good enough social skills to express to us how much they appreciate us. What they do have is a penchant for whining and crying when its citizens misbehave. They whine and cry because they have not yet gained sufficient maturity to know what to do to solve its problems and avoid them in the future.

As sophisticated as we have become technologically and to a lesser extent scientifically, socially as communities we are just entering our adolescence. Seven billion of us live in an immature world that only our descendents will see into adulthood.

Just as we can’t force an adolescent of 14 years to act like an adult in all ways, we can’t push our communities to act more mature when they don’t know how.

We can only do the right thing, do our small part to see that the community we belong to grows in a healthy way.

That means living with integrity.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children into adults who live comfortably with integrity and maturity.
Learn more at http://billallin.com