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Fri, January-27-2012, 12:00

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Child care and parenting are hot issues today, with the state taking keen interest in child welfare. But the state can go overboard, specially when it blindly applies child protection laws without being sensitive to the cultural background of the situation – as happened in the following case. This is a follow-up on the last post.

Indian Kids: Did Norway overdo?
John B. Monteiro

Parents used to strike the children to discipline them. Now it is usually in self-defence. – Anonymous epigram.

Ideas of child rearing not only change over time, as implied in the above epigram, but also across national bounderies – as the latest incidence in Oslo, Norway indicates.While the problem of two children of Indian parents snatched away by a state agency in Norway has been sorted out, the action has  provoked widespread resentment in India, as reflected in the following editorial comment in The Hindu (26-1-12)
Notwithstanding the agreement reached on Wednesday between India and Norway which puts a temporary lid on the matter, the case of Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya — whose young children were placed in foster care by the Child Welfare Services in the Norwegian city of Stavanger — raises disturbing questions. Last year, the couple’s children, a boy of three and a girl aged one, were removed to an emergency shelter and then to a foster family, apparently on the grounds that their mother was not in a fit state to bring them up. In fact, the family court annulled the child services’ decision to remove the children, but was itself overruled on appeal. Under the current order, the family will not be reunited until the children turn 18 — in 2026 and 2028 respectively. Parental access will consist of three hours’ contact a year, in three separate visits. A sense of shock in India is fully understandable over this use of state power in family life. Indian anxieties are also unlikely to be assuaged by Norwegian official statements that such drastic interventions are rare, that the relevant service had visited the family weekly for several months, and that all the required procedures were followed; there is particular scepticism about the Stavanger Child Welfare Services’ insistence that cultural prejudice played no role in the process.

Should State play parent to alien kids?
John B. Monteiro

Some people seem compelled by unkind fate to parental servitude for life. There is no form of penal servitude worse than this. – Lord Byron.
There is a reverse situation as well. Parenting has become a big issue in modern family life, as reflected in a recent case of international dimension involving taking into state care two small children of an Indian couple residing in that country. India mounted diplomatic pressure on Norway to ensure return of two children to their Oslo-based Indian parents, whom they were seperated from by the Nordic country’s childcare services in May 2011. On January 25, 2012, the government has agreed to release the  children for repatriation to India. The case has thrown light on the different standard of parenting in India and Norway. But first the facts as reported by Carina Heinesen  in a Norwagian weekly magaqazine Ny Tid (New Time3s) and reproduced in The Hindu (25-1-12).
Among the reasons listed by Norwegian child welfare authorities for taking away the three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter of an expatriate Indian couple were unsuitable toys and clothes, insufficient room for the children to play in the house and the son not having his own bed.

Why not drink and be happy?
John B. Monteiro

 One sip of this
Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight,
Beyond the bliss of dreams.
-    John Milton.

This ancient wisdom has been confirmed with a recent study, reported by news agencies, claiming that drinking alcohol leads to the release of endorphins in areas of the brain that produce feelings of pleasure and reward. a new study has claimed.

The findings of the study led by researchers at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco marks the first time that endorphin release in the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex in response to alcohol consumption has been directly observed in humans.  Endorphins are small proteins with opiate-like effects that are produced naturally in the brain.

“This is something that we’ve speculated about for 30 years, based on animal studies, but haven’t observed in humans until now,” Jennifer Mitchell, the lead author, said.  “It provides the first direct evidence of how alcohol makes people feel good,” she said. According to Howard L. Fields, senior author of the study, the discovery of the precise locations in the brain where endorphins are released provides a possible target for the development of more effective drugs for the treatment of alcohol abuse.