Sport is not the only way to help kids keep active
GETTING children more active should not be the preserve of schools. But sport is not the only useful activity for children’s exercise. We also need to focus on walking and cycling, and having more space for children to play.
The Government should be working to ensure that streets are safer to walk, cycle and play in. This means enforcing lower speed limits, measures to clean up dog-fouled, litter-ridden public spaces and giving children legal priority on residential streets.
These things, combined with sport and healthy diets, will allow children to be active enough to achieve normal body weights.
Anyone who doubts this should visit Denmark or the Netherlands where many of these measures have been part of public policy for a long time.
John O’Brien, Clinical Psychotherapist, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary.
Renters still suffering
RENTS in Ireland have doubled in the past few years and are the highest in the EU. Our politicians are pro-landlord because they are landlords themselves and do not care about all the homelessness in our country – the highest ever with people dying on our streets because they do not have a roof over their heads and are exposed to the freezing elements.
This Government has failed the people they are supposed to represent while renters continue to bear a heavy burden with half their incomes gone before they put a meal on the table.
Noel Harrington, Kinsale, Co. Cork.
The truth of ADHD
CHARLOTTE GILL is absolutely correct (Magazine, January 7): ADHD is not a disorder. Her exceptional development as a child is, as she says, just who she is. There is no mental disorder, she is just different. Her story clearly shows that she is a person of exceptionally high intelligence.
Instead of a hearing test at school an intelligence test would have been more informative. She says she ‘thrived on being busy’. My guess is that, far from being busy at her primary school, she was bored and inattentive. Thus the seeds of that so-called ADHD diagnosis were sown.
It is refreshing to find an ADHD diagnosed person who can challenge the accepted notion that it is a mental disorder affecting a rapidly growing number of school children and now spreading to adults.
A significant number of psychologists and psychiatrists will confirm Charlotte Gill’s doubts about ADHD’s validity. These professionals variously describe ADHD as bogus, a fraud, an invention that opens the way for the unnecessary prescription of stimulants.
Dismissing ADHD does not mean denying the presence of inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive children in schools who disrupt their own and other pupils’ learning. These children are different but they do not suffer from a mental disorder. And there are proven behavioural methods which parents and teachers can use to modify these disrupting behaviours without recourse to drugs.
Fortunately Charlotte Gill’s diagnosis does not seem to have harmed her in any way. I wonder if the same can be said of the countless children who are needlessly consuming amphetamines every day.
Kevin Brennan, Kilbarrack, Dublin 5.
Scientists of future
THE 60th BT Young Scientist Exhibition at the RDS in Dublin reflects different responses to a changing world. The 550 school projects this year have tackled major scientific questions with notable projects such as an app for ‘correcting school exams with artificial intelligence’ and ‘banana bandages – a sustainable form of wound care’ and ‘are brunettes smarter than blondes?’
The exhibition, which I attend annually, has excelled as a platform for inspiring young people to use science, technology, engineering and maths to comprehend and enhance the world we live in. The unmissable three-day event has served as a launching pad for many incredible careers.
Gerry Coughlan, Kilnamanagh, Dublin 24.
Frozen by graupel
HAVING endured 72 winters on this island, I thought I knew all there was to know about Irish precipitation. Apparently not. A man from a neighbouring county, Carlow (@CarlowWeather) informed us during the week that ‘the graupel has returned and falling lightly now near Tullow’. In disquieting times, this talk of a graupel ‘invasion’ has frozen any confidence I might have in future discussion of the weather.
Michael Gannon, Kilkenny city.