Certainly the storied career of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno has left many praising his legacy of career wins, devotion and loyalty to his university for so many decades, and his concern with providing a wonderful role model for the young men under his tutelage.

Sadly, the end of his career seriously tarnished the image of his decades of honor and success. Pundits will be debating for years whether to give Joe credit for what he accomplished or to revile him for what he did not do, with respect to the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse situation.

But it is precisely what he did not do that may be his greatest legacy after all. Because of what Joe did not do, sensitivity to the horrors of child sexual abuse (in and out of sports) is now at its highest level ever. Safeguards have become instituted in universities across the nation and victims are now encouraged to come forward, rather than living lives of secrecy and mental torment.

These crimes and sexual predators will always be among us, but because of the exposure of the Penn State situation, coaches, athletic directors, college deans and families of athletes will be on the lookout for signs and symptoms and as a result, countless abuses undoubtedly will be prevented.

Shortly after his dismissal, Paterno was diagnosed with lung cancer and broke his hip. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments weakened him, robbing him of his hair and his once-booming voice. In fact, in a recent interview with the Washington Post, he appeared frail, wearing a wig and speaking in a whisper. He canceled public appearances after the interview because of his failing health, according to family members and there was public speculation about how rapidly Mr. Paterno began physically failing when he gave every appearance of being hale and hearty just before he was relieved of his post.

It is really no surprise that a man who was so passionately devoted to his career and who suffered such major and humiliating stress, and the “death” of everything that he was justly famous for that his immune system deteriorated so dramatically and could not fight off the ravages of his illness.

For Paterno’s legion of fans, who referred to the coach affectionately as “JoePa,” the turbulent final months of Paterno’s life were a tragic end to an outstanding coaching career that was built around his motto of “success with honor.”

Rest In Peace Joe Paterno.

Statistics show that about 75% of caregivers are women and two thirds of the caregivers in the United States hold down regular jobs in addition to being a caregiver which can lead to huge emotional and physical stress over time.

What is a Caregiver?

A caregiver is someone who, whether paid or unpaid, looks after another person who can no longer look after themselves due to illness, trauma, or old age. When a person is limited in what they can do, they need someone to step in and give them the care they need. These are people who need help with daily basic tasks such as grocery shopping, house cleaning, bill paying, meal preparation, medications, bathroom and personal hygiene, and so much more.There are millions of caregivers in the United States alone. If you are a caregiver, you are by no means alone.

It is not easy to be the one who is caring for someone else, no matter what their particular health issue may be. If you are in the position of being a caregiver for a loved one, here are some tips to help you when your energy flags and you are concerned about burnout.

Seek Resources

The internet is a wonderful tool for finding information about just about anything these days. Spend some time Googling terms that apply to your particular set of circumstances. For instance I just typed this search term into Google, “How to be a good caregiver” and found several excellent articles. This one in particular I thought was very helpful: Taking Care of YOU: Self-Care for Family Caregivers.

Take time to find out all you can about care giving and the resources available to you. Since you are not alone, there is plenty of information on the Internet, in magazines, and at local hospitals and nursing homes about the art of being a caregiver. When you know what you are facing, you can prepare for it.

Craft a Strong Support System

If you are caring for a family member, you may not be the only one who is working to see your loved one get better. Keep in contact with other family members so that you can coordinate your efforts on behalf of your loved one. If each person knows their role, there will be fewer reasons to stress out along the way and no one person bears the brunt of the entire responsibility.

Get to Know the Medical Professionals

I just Googled this term “Caregivers talking to medical professionals” and instantly found a great article at Caregivers Support.org called “Communication with Health Care Professionals” that gives some excellent advice and tips for talking to healthcare professionals.

Take Care of Yourself!

Caregiving is demanding and caregivers need time off from their caregiving responsibilities to relieve stress and prevent burnout.

• Schedule regular afternoon or evenings out.
• Take time to talk with friends, either in person or on the phone.
• Eat nutritious meals.
• Get enough sleep.
• Exercise regularly. It is a great stress buster.
• Make a list of jobs you could ask for help with. For some reason, this seems to be one of the hardest things for caregivers to do!
• Arrange adult day care.
• Join a support group.
• Draw strength from your faith.
• Take time to pamper yourself.
• Plan a weekend getaway.
• Hire a temporary caregiver from a respite care program. While many forms of respite care exist, the quality of care provided by respite services may vary.  Therefore, it is important to check out the facility before leaving your loved one

Was there ever a concern for the victims in this case by the university and those within the football program? Was there ever a concern in that organization that by not informing the police, that the perpetrator was free to carry out his demented desires with untold other victims?

University administrators were aware that a graduate assistant had seen Sandusky attacking a young boy in the team’s locker room shower in 2002. However, even though Sandusky was prohibited from holding youth sports camps on campus in 2002, he continued to hold them through 2008 under his Sandusky Associates company at the university’s Behrend campus, just outside Erie. Further, it is being reported by a person familiar with Sandusky’s relationship with Penn State that the former coach long maintained an office in the East Area Locker building which is across the street from the Penn State football team’s building, and was on campus as recently as week ago working out.

We see this all the time:  athletes or coaches with addictive issues are protected so that they can continue to perform for the team; domestic violence is almost an acceptable behavior if the athlete is one of the stars of the team; coaches who abuse their athletes describe their victims as wimps, or worse (e.g., “This is nothing.  You should have seen how my coaches treated me!”).

Why is it that the everyday Joe is accountable, but many star athletes and coaches (as well as celebrities in any arena) get a free pass, unless the media get wind of their behaviors)? Think Lindsay Lohan here.

It’s time to make every individual, regardless of his/her popularity, power or importance to the team accountable for their behaviors.

The Michael Vick’s of sports have paid for their deeds, but I fear that they represent only the tip of the iceberg.  Furthermore, these cover-ups tarnish the image of the majority of athletes and coaches who lead clean lives, tending to their families, and appreciating the gifts that the Almighty has bestowed on them.

Jack Singer, Ph.D.
Licensed and Certified Clinical & Sport Psychologist

R.I.P Joe!

There are so many fun activities that we can do with our children to get them excited about books and the world of reading. When kids are having fun, it is so much easier to draw them into something – like the wonderful world of literature. The very best thing we can do is to guide and direct them to enjoy it for themselves. When we are intrinsically motivated to do something, it is a much more lasting motivation.

Here are some family reading time tips for parents or caregivers of young children:

• Read together every day. This is family time, bonding time, and it is so important to both you and the child! Be sure to express to your child or children how much you enjoy and value this time together.
• Explore the story with your child. When you have finished a chapter or a book, ask your child what their favorite part of the story was. Then have them draw a picture of the part of the narrative that so captured their imagination. When they are done, ask them for a short explanation of their picture and that part in the story.
• Build critical thinking skills. Play a guessing game with your child as the story progresses. Ask specific questions on the plot or key events to ‘set the stage’ for reading such as: “So what is going on in the story?”, “What happened so far?” “Where are they at?”. ” What do you think will happen next?”. This will teach your child how to find, identify, extract and understand main ideas.
• Develop skills in processing and understanding text as they read. As your child is reading, they will come across unknown vocabulary or expressions. Pause and see if they understand what they are reading. Explain or define the word or expression and then them re-read the paragraph or section.

An activity that will help with reading and make your little one feel a bit more grown up is helping you cook from a cookbook. You can explain to your child that it is important to put the ingredients in and follow the instructions in the recipe in order. Then you let your child be in charge of reading the recipe to you as you make the dish. You will, of course, give them any help they need. But they can also read the labels on the ingredients that you are using. For instance, they can help you differentiate between baking powder and baking soda and make sure you get the right one. Perhaps you might even let them fix your ‘mistake’ when you pick up the wrong one.

When you can get a child excited about things – making pictures, funny games that maybe lead to silly stories, helping in the kitchen and feeling like a big kid – you help to raise their confidence and also their motivation to really enjoy books and reading. Getting creative and changing things up can inspire children to get reading!

1. Give Him/Her a Chance to Explain. Be glad that you’ve raised a teen that has his own ideas about life and wants to carve his own path to success. Give him a chance to explain exactly why he believes that chasing a college education is the wrong direction for him. Of course, try to keep an open mind.

• As a parent, hearing, “I don’t want to go to college right now” can seem like the end of the world. However, refusing to attend college right now still leaves the door open for him to get a degree in the future.

• After twelve consecutive years of schooling, it’s understandable that your child wants to take a break from academics to focus on finding out what life’s all about.

• Strive to be supportive and listen with an open mind.

2. Come to an Agreement. If your son or daughter’s mind is made up about foregoing college this year, meet him or her halfway.

• Allow him or her to take a year or two off from schooling in order to pursue different dreams. If your child tests the waters and finds them to be deeper than he or she expects, they’ll probably return to school. If your child is successful without higher education, celebrate his or her success. But, I advise that you put certain financial expectations in play here. You do not want to be in a position of having to pay for your 35 year old son or daughters’ college tuition because you didn’t limit parental expectations. There comes a point when they are very definitely on their own and they need to recognize this from the very beginning. If that college fund that you have been saving towards for so long is not used for college, at some point you are very much within your rights to use it for something else. Be sure that your child understands that this is not THEIR money. It is YOURS, and will be used as you see fit should they not attend college.

3. Provide an Incentive. If you truly believe that your child’s only true shot at attaining a successful career is by attending college, entice him or her to your point of view. Offer a financial incentive or other type of reward that he or she can earn with solid, specific academic progress.

• If you offer an incentive for your child to attend school, he may attend only for the reward. If so, he may lack the academic effort, waste his time and throw away your money in the process. If you tie the reward to specific academic goals, you’ll ensure that he’s serious about school.

It’s only natural to want the best for your children. And college generally is the best route to success for most individuals. However, it’s important to understand that college is only one of many paths to success in life. Your role in your child’s success is to support and encourage him to chase after his dreams. Ultimately, he has to decide on the path that’s right for him.

Trust in your parenting skills. You’ve raised a talented, intelligent, and self-sufficient young adult. It can be hard to let go, but you’ve instilled in your child the values you deem important. As he goes through the trials of life, he’ll stay true to those values with or without a college degree.

Reading out loud to children can expand their vocabularies, foster more vivid imaginations, and help them learn pronunciation skills. Some sentences or sections of books or even whole books may get skipped over if a child is only reading to himself. When the text is beyond the child’s level of literacy, they are much more likely to choose something else to read. So therefore, when children are read to, they are being exposed to literature that they may not be able to evince any interest in.

It can be also good for kids to hear books that are above their own reading levels. They are exposed to sentence structure, words, and concepts that they would not normally encounter on their own. Their brains are being fed and nurtured and they do not even realize it. They are just enjoying the experience of having someone read to them. Not only are you spending some very quality time with the child, but you are building on their literacy development and speaking skills. The experience of the read-aloud time can be a great bonding time between a mother and a child, an older sibling and a younger sibling, or a teacher and her students. They are coming together over a book they both enjoy and sharing a pleasant time together.

When we turn reading into a pleasurable experience like this is so unbelievably good for children, in terms of motivating them to read and to love and enjoy books. So often books turn into ‘just a part of school’ for children, they turn into ‘work’, and many children get really turned off from books because they view reading as a chore and just naturally rebel. Doing all that we can, as their caregivers, to show them how wonderful an experience reading is will do tremendous good in keeping them excited about reading.

Be Consistent

At a certain point during children’s school years, parents and teachers stop reading out loud to kids. Often this happens when the child goes to middle school. Experts suggest that we continue to read to children of all ages. It is a wonderful bonding time we can spend with children and it is still very good for them, even if we – or they – feel they are too old for it. The biggest thing you will be doing is to keep them interested in reading for pleasure. Just like when they were first learning to read and there was that danger of their equating reading with work, the very same thing happens in the teen years. This is true for many teens. There are some who will still read for pleasure, but, they are becoming rare.

Helping our children develop these life-critical skills begins with conversations and a commitment to read aloud every day. And that commitment doesn’t end when they begin school and learn to read. It is imperative that we encourage older children to continue to read. As parents, we must stay attuned to the things that interest them and work hard to help them find reading material that match those interests. We must guide our children to become lifelong readers and lifelong learners. And we can do that at home, with some fun family bonding time. And in so doing, we will also be strengthening our families.

You will need some small strips of paper (you might adjust the size according to the item you are labeling), a pair of scissors, a pen or marker, and some tape. Or you can purchase different color Post It notes.

Go through the house room by room, looking for things to label. Say, for instance, you started in the kitchen. Some things in the kitchen you could label are: cabinet, microwave, refrigerator, drawer. Labels will probably not stick on the oven or the dishwasher doors when they heat up – and when the dishwasher blows out steam. There ample opportunities in the kitchen for naming things, though. You could even keep a stack of paper on the counter and when you come back from the store once a week, you and your child can label cereal boxes, cans of soup, etc.

Constant repetition of these basic words will help your child recognize them by sight and can also begin to help with letter recognition. This is a very basic step in the learning to read process and will not help with phonics skills. It is, however, a very important step and a fun way for your child to begin to ‘know’ words on his own.

You and your child can get very creative with all of this labeling, too. As stated before, some of the strips of paper can be different sizes, according to the thing being labeled. The strips of paper can also be arranged on things differently. For example, you can put the word ‘window’ vertically on the middle bar that separates two windows. And on venetian blinds, you can tape the word ‘blinds’ to an individual blind so that it is easily read when the blind is closed in the downward position. Your child will think it is so funny, because, when you open the blind it will be harder to read. And if you close the blind in the upward position, you won’t be able to read it at all.

This is a good way to use the things in your house in the same manner that you would a flashcard. Close the blinds up and quiz your child on the first letter of the word. And if they are advancing even more, you can ask them to spell the word. This could also be done with cabinet doors – open the door all the way so you cannot see the word.

One room that is difficult to label is the bathroom. In common with the dishwasher in the kitchen, the bathroom can be a pretty steamy room. It can be labeled, but just  keep in mind that you will be replacing those labels from time to time.

The best thing about using labels all over the house is that your child will consider it ‘play’. He or shee love to help you cut the paper and hang the labels, making it more like a craft than an educational experience. All the while he’ll be learning an important foundation to a life of literacy – what a great combination!

And be sure to really listen to your child. Each child learns differently and it may well be that your child’s interests are in things that are very difficult to label. Find out what interests your child. Is it butterfly’s or airplanes? How about planting a small garden and helping your child label everything that is planted? The possibilities are limitless and require only your imagination and a close observation of your own child or children. Find out what works for them and do it consistently.  Expose your child to different experiences. Learn together.

When mothers talk to their babies while they’re still in the womb many researches believe that is actually the first step in language development. One thing for sure is that babies get used to the sound of their mother’s voice and perhaps when they are born, that familiarity lends itself to quicker recognition and a fast bond after birth. This is also a wonderful time for the father to bond with both his wife and his unborn child. Many men report that they enjoy gently massaging the mother’s belly and talking to the baby.

Do you love music? Music is thought to be pre-linguistic and contributes to your baby’s foundation for language skills. Listening to music yourself, and singing tunes you enjoy can provide healthy stimulation for your child’s development.

Of course when babies are born, it is very helpful to them for their parents to continue speaking. Babies will start to recognize sounds and get to know gestures and facial expressions. Babies learn so much from the sights and sounds around them and will begin, almost immediately, to try to imitate the sounds their parents make. This is all part of the process of babies figuring out how we, as humans, communicate with each other.  They will start to recognize how we relay information to each other in narrative form and begin to learn how to do that themselves.

We begin to see babies’ story-telling skills emerge in the toddler days when they launch into those long, animated baby monologues. When we listen intently to one of these stories that babies tell, it is almost like we can actually follow along, because, the child is so excited in relaying the details to us. It is very much like watching a foreign-language TV show. If you watch it long enough, you begin to follow the story, even if you don’t understand a word of it. That is the power of the narrative – and the baby has learned that skill from watching us and listening to us intently.

Parents can use every opportunity throughout the day to talk to their baby about anything and everything. That is a great way to build up the babies’ early literacy foundation. When washing the dishes or making dinner or cleaning up, parents can explain the tasks they are doing to their baby. Babies will begin to hear familiar words if the parents are in the habit of doing this frequently.

It is so tempting, when talking to babies and toddlers, to use baby talk. Experts suggest parents speak properly to their children, however, so the children can have the most possible exposure to the correct sound of words. For example, if a child has a ‘baby word’ for banana, and the parent constantly uses that ‘baby word’ back to the child, they are only reinforcing the incorrect pronunciation.

Even if a parent sometimes uses their babies’ pronunciations of words, the important point is that the child is being talked to frequently throughout their day. It is an essential building block of language, and therefore literacy, development.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2010)

It’s an important connection to study, he says, since it’s much more common for people to work out in groups than on their own.”People playing sports, for instance, are usually part of a group. If they’re playing golf, they’re in a group. They’re often going for runs in a group,” says Eys.”If we understand how those groups work, and take advantage of those situations, we can facilitate physical activity.” 

For the past two years, Eys and his team of graduate students have been observing teens aged 13-17 in the Sudbury area, tracking them as they take part in high school sports, rec leagues, and non-structured group activities like running and jogging.

Once a year, says Eys, they fill out questionnaires that measure how they feel about the level of cohesion in their groups. The teens taking part in highly-structured sports, particularly at the high school level, are asked specifically about their teams’ focus — how it strikes a balance between self-improvement and winning. 

While they’re still analyzing the first two years of data, Eys points out that, so far, they’ve found “a really strong relationship between that motivational climate and perceptions of cohesion.”That relationship seems to echo the findings of researchers who’ve posed the same questions to adults, says Eys. 

“If you look at the research on adults, the link between group perceptions and cohesion is pretty clear,” he says. “If people are in groups that they enjoy, they’re more likely to stick to their exercise regimens.” 

For Eys, his research isn’t purely academic — it’s also personal. A decade ago, Eys played basketball at the University of Waterloo, and in his fourth year made it to nationals. While the team didn’t win, they managed to strike a near-perfect balance, he says, between competitiveness and camaraderie. 

“We still, to this day — and this is ten years after the fact — get together as a group. It was obviously a very cohesive bunch. I don’t think we were necessarily the most talented group in the league, but some of these group processes can overcome that.”

Eys also has two daughters, aged six and four, who are “taking their first steps into organized activities.” Researching what it is that makes a good group activity, he says, will translate into an increased likelihood that physically active kids become physically active adults. 

The goal of his research is to “have something to be able to take to coaches, to be able to take to organizations” that would outline all those factors that go into a cohesive group environment. Making kids play better, may help them play longer.

The study will continue for at least one more year and is expected to expand to include kids in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, says Eys.

I am also available for phone consultations with athletes around the U.S. and in-person visits with athletes in Southern California. Call today toll free at 1-800-497-9880 for a free 20 minute telephone consultation with Dr. Jack Singer.

Jack N. Singer, Ph.D.
Certified and Licensed Sport and Clinical Psychologist
Diplomate, National Institute of Sports Professionals, Division of Psychologists
Diplomate, American Academy of Behavioral Medicine
Certified Hypnotherapist, American Academy of Clinical Hypnosis