Lifestyle Choices

As our cities grow bigger and more densely populated, personal privacy is becoming a valuable commodity. Rather than linking us to the outside world, the home is becoming a sanctuary protecting us from the world. (more…)

• ‘I want my coach to help me to perform better, but he only shouts at me all the time.’
• ‘I am working so hard to hear: “Yes, that was great!” but all I hear is: “No, boy, not like that! That is wrong!”‘

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Each day there is two children are kidnapped at South Africa. I can not imagine what kind the nightmare when parents hear the worst news that they won’t see their kids around. It is heart breaking news. We can keep our cars watched 24 hours a day by tracking, how about our little ones? Luckily, there are some similar GPS tracking devices on the market to trace kids. (more…)

Many parents hold to the foolish idea that money is the important thing in life. As a result they neglect their children and fail to spend sufficient time in their training. This is a serious mistake. Money is always useful, but material wealth alone will never guarantee a happy home. In fact, it might have the opposite effect.

Although a good bank account might be a fine asset to any well-trained young person, it could be a menace to one who has never had adequate training. When such a person inherits a large fortune, he may quickly lose it on useless investments. Or as it sometimes happens, he may try to dominate those around him by giving or withholding money. In the end no one is happy. (more…)

Almost every healthy person at some time has had a desire to be married. This is the most natural thing in the world.

There may be various reasons for this desire— love, sex, security, companionship, and so forth —but the urge is usually there. And yet it takes far more than a mere urge for one to be happy in marriage. Surely there must be some counsel that young and old can follow to avoid the mistakes so many are making every day. (more…)

Marriage has been well defined as “the first two-party system of government ever devised.” This is a good definition, for marriage was never intended to be a one-sided affair. It always takes two people to make a successful marriage, but unfortunately it takes only one, through neglect or selfishness, to spoil it.

Of all human relationships marriage is the most important. Only one other takes precedence, and that is one’s relationship to God. For this reason a person should never be tempted to enter into marriage lightly. There is far too much at stake. True marital happiness depends not only on whether the individuals are well matched, but also on whether they can associate together with enduring attention and love. In other words, they must be compatible. They must be in good physical condition, enabling them to impart strong, healthy bodies to their children; and what is more important, they must create an atmosphere of harmony and good will in the home. (more…)

Atopic eczema

Onset and inheritance

This type of eczema often starts in the first year of life, though rarely before three months, but may begin at any age. It affects at least one baby in 50 and is usually mild.

Fortunately it clears up in most children by the age of four or five but it may linger on after the age of ten or rarely into adult life. There may be a long gap when it seems to have settled only to reappear. Doctors are very wary about predicting what will happen: for example, in the case of a baby with atopic eczema, there may be an eighty per cent chance of it clearing by the age of five. But that means one in five will not clear and the parents of that one will naturally be disappointed and lose faith in their practitioner. It is best to show a cautious optimism stressing the fact that a great deal can be done to improve eczema. (more…)

There are particular periods in your life, when changes are faster, more far-reaching and often more stressful than at other times. It is difficult to put exact ages on these times of change because people vary greatly in their timing of the stages of life, as well as in how much difficulty they have with each stage. Any stage that is only partly negotiated,or avoided, can lead to a period of depression.

Children start life as almost totally dependent on their parents and must, for their own personal fulfilment, break away to form their own lives in their own way. But the period ofbreaking away, usually in adolescence, though it can be at any time between the ages of 12 and 40, is often fraught with conflict. You want to be independent, but you still may want your parents‘ love, and perhaps their house, food and financial support for your education too. (more…)

If you have a history of depression in your family, statistically the chances are higher that you may be prone to periods of depression. How much of this correlation is hereditary and how much environmental cannot be answered quantitatively. Although there has been some dogmatic insistence on hereditary factors by geneticists, and on environmental factors by psychotherapists, most will at least agree that susceptibility to depression is affected by both heredity and by early environment, whatever the proportions. These influences weave a complicated and inextricable pattern: a depressed parent may pass on hereditary qualities of susceptibility to the children, but the children will also learn by copying the behaviour of their parent. Depression occurs much more frequently in certain types of personality, and personality is affected by hereditary factors, by copying parents and by reactions to the family environment. The family environment is affected by the general culture, which may be more or less depressive. (more…)

One of the most important things to a child is parental warmth and continuity. In his studies on children Bowlby, a British child psychiatrist, showed how a stable relationship with the parents created a feeling of security and a stable base from which to explore. A threat of loss of this security caused anger or fear, while actual loss of a parent or main care-giver caused a loss of interest if the child did not believe that the parent was coming back. Studies on institutions where children are kept with inadequate and inconsistent care show a distinct change in the behaviour of children in the second six months of their lives. Continual crying becomes replaced byan eventual indifference to adults, and a baby would “lie or sit with wide open, expressionless eyes, frozen, immobile face and a far away expression as if in a daze”. Such babies did not babble or coo and felt stiff and wooden when picked up. (more…)