It is more expensive for the German goverment if fathers choose to stay at home with their offspring.

The German government said that a new allowance for fathers who stay at home to look after babies has met with such demand that the family ministry will exceed its budget this year.
“Fathers want to get involved in the education of their children at an early age,“ a family ministry spokesman said, reported AFP.
He confirmed a report in Die Welt newspaper that 10 percent of fathers of babies born since January 1, 2007, when new child care support regulations came into effect, have opted to stay at home for several months.
The figure is much higher than the ministry had expected and as a direct result, it is due to exceed its budget by 130 million euros (190 million dollars) this year.
Under the new law, either of a newborn’s parents can stay at home to look after the baby for up to 14 months while receiving two-thirds of their net salary, up to 1,800 euros per month.
The family ministry said the cost of implementing the new law had exceeded its forecasts because men tend to earn more than their partners and it was therefore more expensive for the state if they chose to stay at home with offspring.
The law was the brainchild of Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen, a mother of seven, and forms part of the government’s efforts to encourage germans to have more children to boost the birthrate, one of the lowest in Europe.

French parents are the most heavy-handed in Europe. 7 percent said they hit their child to relieve their feelings.

Visitors to France who are tempted to admire the impeccable manners and subdued behavior common among French children may reflect that this result is often obtained at a sinister cost.
French parents are the most heavy-handed in Europe according to a study which shows that practically the entire French population suffered a spanking or at least a smack as a child, and nearly nine out of ten adults have administered one, reported News.scotsman.co.
In addition, nearly a quarter of French parents have slapped their children on the face and 10 percent admit to punishing their offspring with a “martinet“, a small whip, according to the Union of Families in Europe (UFE).
The martinet is still widely on sale in France. An alarming 30 percent of French children said they had been punished with a martinet according to the survey.
The UFE survey of 2,000 French grandparents, parents and children found that within the three generations 95 percent of adults and 96 percent of children have been smacked.
It found that 84 percent of grandparents and 87 percent of parents have administered the punishment.
Some 58 percent of grandparents admitted to itching to give their grandchildren an occasional smack.
“The figures are impressive. Basically we have all been smacked. Even more surprising is that most people--even children--think the smacks they got were fair,“ said UEF’s Marie-Fran�oise Sabellico.
According to the study, 62 percent of grandparents, 64 percent of parents and 55 percent of children think that the smacks they received were deserved.
Asked why they smacked their children, 77 percent of parents said it was part of “bringing up“ their child, while 7 percent said they hit their child to “relieve their feelings“ and the rest said it was a mixture of the two.
Opponents of smacking have won banning laws in several European countries, including Sweden, Germany and Finland.
The practice is opposed by the United Nations and the Council of Europe which launched a “zero tolerance“ campaign against corporal punishment this autumn.
In France the only related law is one banning violence against the vulnerable.

At Malawi’s Chiseka school on the rural outskirts of Lilongwe, many children attend class outside, sitting among weeds in the shade of a towering blue gum tree. There are 1,531 students, six classrooms, no running water and no light bulbs.
Yet Chiseka has the best academic record in its district by far. Last year all 40 students in the eighth grade passed their exams. And 30 did well enough to qualify for secondary school--a significant achievement in a country where less than 30 percent of students finish primary school, according to AFP.
Chiseka vividly shows one of the biggest challenges Africa faces today: Saving a generation that is growing up with hardly any education. One in two African children don’t finish primary school, and millions don’t go at all.
Those who do often end up in crowded schools with untrained teachers.
Malawi is one of several African countries that are now overhauling education, in an effort to meet the United Nations goal of having every child of the right age enrolled in primary school by 2015.
Countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania are working with donors and the United Nations to improve schools and train teachers.
But Malawi stands out because it is designing its ambitious 10-year education plan itself, in the belief that only a program designed by Africans for Africans will work in the long run.
It gives children books by Malawi authors and teaches them science through their own environment. And it touts Chiseka’s recent success as a sign of slow but steady progress.
The aim isn’t to produce doctors or engineers, but simply to teach everyone to read, to do enough math to hold down a basic job and eventually to write a check and balance a checkbook.
What rides on that goal is the future of the next generation, and ultimately the country’s own chances at development.
Malawi, nestled beside a great lake in Africa’s far southeast corner, is landlocked, short of natural resources and one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth.
Malawi has a bold history of educational reform, not always successful. In 1994 Malawi was the first of at least 10 African countries to abolish primary school fees.
Malawi quickly learned that a generation of children cannot be educated simply by ordering it to happen. For the promise of universal primary education to mean anything, the country had to find a way to train teachers fast and reduce class sizes.
“We can do it, it is manageable,“ says Kamloneera, the director of planning. His optimism comes from his own family history: His father had only a secondary education, but Kamloneera’s siblings all went to college.
“My father brought up eight children who are all doing better than he did,“ he notes.

China is starting a drive to boost food safety and healthy diets among children following scandals over phony milk powder and other substandard products.
Fake milk powder has led to the deaths of at least a dozen babies since 2004.
Another scandal has involved the discovery of a banned cancer-causing industrial dye to color egg yolks,
said AP.
The campaign starting this month will focus on small retailers in rural areas, where processed foods are commonly mislabeled or contain inferior ingredients and where nutritional knowledge is lowest, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
“Its goal is to spread food safety and nutrition knowledge to children and their parents, help youngsters have healthy dietary habits, and regulate the domestic food market,“ Cheng Zhigang, a spokesman for an inter-department task force behind the campaign, was quoted as saying.
Safety scandals involving China’s exports of food, toys and other products have drawn international attention, prompting a rapid response from government departments anxious
to defend China’s reputation as a global
supplier.

A boy practices heading a ball in a school in Dorudzan village near the Iranian city of Marvdasht, Fars province.

Children are dying for lack of drugs tailored to their needs, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which launched a global campaign on Dec. 6 to promote more research into child medicine.
More than half the drugs currently used to treat children in the industrialized world have not been specifically tested on youngsters, even though they metabolize medicines differently to adults.
As a result, clinicians lack clear guidelines on the best drug to use and often have to guess at the correct dose, Reuters reported.
The problem is even worse in developing countries where price remains a major barrier and 6 million children die each year from treatable conditions.
In the case of HIV/AIDS, the few existing pediatric therapies developed for children generally cost three times more than adult ones.
In a bid to address the problem, the WHO has drawn up the first international List of Essential Medicines for Children, containing 206 products deemed safe for children that tackle priority conditions.
“But a lot remains to be done. There are priority medicines that have not been adapted for children’s use or are not available when needed,“ said Dr Hans Hogerzeil, the UN agency’s director of medicines policy and standards.
Medicines that need to be adapted to children’s needs include many antibiotics, as well as asthma and pain drugs. The WHO also wants more research and development of combination pills for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
The agency is building an Internet portal linking to clinical trials carried out in children and will launch a website with the information early next year.
Testing medicines on children has always been a vexed issue, since good ethical practice requires informed consent from people participating in clinical trials, which is difficult to obtain in the case of children.

Some 700,000 Bangladeshi health workers and volunteers started vaccinating about 25 million children under age five on Saturday as part of the country’s efforts to eliminate polio after the disease re-emerged last year, the Health Ministry said.
Many makeshift vaccination camps were set up at bus and train stations in the capital, Dhaka, and elsewhere to provide children with two drops of liquid vaccine, the ministry said in a statement, AP reported.
Volunteers waited in one camp near Dhaka University, where about 500 children assembled Saturday morning to take part in a painting competition.
Polio re-emerged in the impoverished South Asian country in 2006 after a nearly six-year absence, prompting the government, with the help of the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Health Organization, to launch a new campaign against the virus.
About 1,880 people were sickened by polio worldwide in 2005, down from more than 350,000 before 1988, when WHO launched a global anti-polio campaign. In 2006, worldwide cases fell to 1,526, the statement said.

A new survey shows Japanese children sinking in academic scores and coming last internationally in the percentage seeking science careers, shocking a nation long proud of its technological prowess, AP reported.
Japanese 15-years-olds ranked 10th in mathematics in the latest OECD test, down from sixth in 2003 and the top slot in 2000. Japan also fell to sixth in mean science performance, after coming in second in the previous two surveys.
The survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development also found that 7.8 percent of Japanese students expected a science-related career at age 30, by far the lowest among the 57 nations and territories polled.
“Frankly speaking, it’s regrettable,“ Education Minister Kisaburo Tokai said of the results.
He said falling popularity of science was “a very big problem“ for Japan, arguing that one reason could be the flourishing of financial businesses during the booming “bubble“ economy that collapsed in the early 1990s.
“It’s true that other fields looked more attractive than being engineers and researchers in the bubble era. The thinking still lingers,“ Tokai said.
“Taiwan, which participated in the test for the first time, topped the ranking in mathematical performance and other Asian countries also fared well,“ said the Nikkei economic daily’s editorial.
“Our society should have a greater sense of crisis. If this continues, it would lead to a decline of Japan’s global status,“ it said.
The best-selling Yomiuri Shimbun said “concerns arise over the future of the nation as a scientific and technological powerhouse,“ blaming the poorer results on more liberal education policies.
Since 2002, Japan has cut back on class hours and material by some 30 percent to encourage individual thinking and give more breathing space to students famous for studying long hours in cram sessions.
A government panel is now moving towards raising class hours again amid public criticism.