In 19 states, it’s okay to hit kids with a wooden board

Terry sat in his middle school principal’s office knowing that in a few short minutes, he would be feeling the pain and humiliation of being paddled.

No parent, administrator or teacher should find this scenario acceptable. Yet, every school day, an estimated 838 students like Terry receive corporal punishment in American schools. Nineteen states still allow corporal punishment, despite research that clearly indicates such public humiliation is ineffective for changing student behavior and can, in fact, have long-term negative effects.

For a decade I have studied approaches that are effective for promoting appropriate student behavior. And as a teacher for a dozen years, I experienced personal reward as well as pride in my students, as they learned and used appropriate behaviors. I have not come across a single valid study that showed any positive effect of corporal punishment.

A form of child abuse

Corporal punishment is a method of responding to student misbehavior wherein an adult uses a wooden board to strike a child on the buttocks in order to inflict pain.

The harm done by corporal punishment is well-recognized by many school administrations across the US. Professional organizations across disciplines including the American Psychological Association, National Education Association, American Bar Association and National Association of School Nurses have called for ending corporal punishment.

In fact, the American Bar Association condemns the practice in the following words:

Institutional corporal punishment of children should be considered a form of child abuse that is contrary to current knowledge of human behavior and sound educational practices.

Scotland's child poverty levels so severe teachers are sent advice on spotting malnourished students

Country’s largest teaching union draws up guidelines to help 'poverty-proof' classrooms.

Child poverty in Scotland is now so severe that teachers are being sent advice on how to spot if a child in their class is going hungry, amid evidence that the problem is having an increasingly serious impact on education.

The new guidance, which will be distributed to schools and colleges across Scotland next week, warns that the issue of hunger among pupils is “moving from the exceptional to the more commonplace” as families struggle to make ends meet.

The advice has been drawn up by the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), the country’s largest teaching union, after a survey of 300 schools and colleges suggested that teachers are increasingly having to help underfed pupils. It is the first time that a section on hunger has been included in the guidance.

“Pupils may appear pale, fatigued, irritable or lacking in concentration, or complain of headaches or feeling unwell,” it states. “While there can be other reasons underlying such signs, for a growing number of children and young people in our schools and colleges today, the reason will be hunger.”

Teachers who suspect that a child may be going hungry should include them in morning breakfast clubs and post the details of nearby food banks on school notice boards and websites, so their families can seek help, the guidance says.

Greek austerity may be an economic tale but children are the human cost

Many perspectives have been shared about the social and economic repercussions that the current third EU and IMF bailout proposals for Greece may have. The impact of these tough austerity measures is yet to unfold for the country, for the other southern states, or indeed Europe as a whole.

But moving beyond a purely economic lens, there is already evidence about the extent of deprivation and youth unemployment of more than 50% during the past five years of the first and second bailout programmes, meaning that the likely effects of the third are easier to predict, at least for this generation.

The links between poverty and a range of risk factors for child mental health problems and related outcomes is well established. Nevertheless, the reality hit home a few weeks ago when I joined the Children’s SOS Villages in Greece in training their prospective new carers, or “mothers” and “aunts” as they are widely called. These carers work in a similar way to foster carers and residential care staff in other welfare systems. The villages were established in Austria after World War II to care for orphan children and since then their model has successfully spread across more than 120 countries.

Their model may slightly vary, but their target groups are typically children without parents, for a range of reasons, or those who have been abused and/or neglected. Consequently, it came as a surprise to realise the extent of child abandonment (neglect, an inability to care for them or even asking social services to look after them) for predominantly financial reasons since the beginning of the Greek crisis.

The organisation has responded by diversifying its remit in Greece. In the absence of an increasingly stretched health and social care sector, they have now extended their services beyond the traditional villages to support, relieve and prevent abuse and neglect, running eight social centres in Greece’s major cities to help keep families together.

American Kids Are Poorer Than They Were Decades Ago, Education Report Shows

Poverty, which affects a growing number of American students, begins its negative impact on learning as early as the beginning of kindergarten, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report released Thursday.

Teachers reported that kindergarten students from affluent households in the 2010-2011 school year were more likely to have positive approaches to learning than those whose families live below the poverty line, according to the center's annual report, called The Condition of Education 2015. A positive approach to learning includes paying attention in class, keeping belongings organized and enthusiasm for learning.

Female students, students who were older at the start of the school year, students who came from two-parent households, and students whose family income was more than twice the poverty threshold were more likely to have positive approaches to learning, according to teachers. Black students, male students and students whose parents did not graduate high school tended to have poorer approaches to learning. Students who demonstrated positive approaches to learning in kindergarten were more likely to have top scores in first grade.

"Research suggests that living in poverty during early childhood is associated with lower than average academic performance that begins in kindergarten and extends through elementary and high school," the report says. "Living in poverty during early childhood is also associated with lower than average rates of school completion."

Send disadvantaged pupils to boarding school and only the brightest thrive

Send a child to a boarding school and they’ll thrive. That’s what many richer families believe when they send their children away to board, and it’s the belief behind a series of programmes set up around the world in the past two decades, aimed at providing places at boarding schools for disadvantaged children.

Two examples are the SEED boarding schools, started in the US in the late 1990s to teach poor black students, and the internats d’excellence (boarding schools of excellence), introduced in 2008 in France to teach students from poor families. There are 45 such internats are now operating in France, serving 4,200 middle and high school students, essentially for free.

These schools were opened because of concerns that the negative influences students are exposed to in their home environment could impair their academic potential. But very little is known about the effects that substituting school for home produce on students. The only study considering this question found that being enrolled in the SEED boarding school in Washington DC increases student test scores.

Boarding by lottery

In research co-authored with Luc Behaghel and Marc Gurgand from the Paris School of Economics, and conducted with the Poverty Action Lab, we analysed the effects of a French internat on student outcomes. Our findings suggest that while these boarding schools can help boost pupils who are already strong academically, they might not be helping weaker students.

Teaching Tolerance in Kindergarten

By age 9, children have prejudices that are “highly resistant to change.” So if we want to fight racism and violence (particularly against black men), we need to teach diversity much earlier.

Children develop their sense of empathy between ages 4 and 8. It’s this ability to see and feel something from another’s perspective that helps us choose to treat others equally and to engage rather than to act from fear.

The best way to promote empathy is to provide children with quality, reciprocal relationships with people from diverse communities. But that can be difficult, as 84 percent of elementary school teachers are white. And in most major cities, the majority of public school children are not.

So, teachers need to get creative. Young children can only normalize what they experience regularly. If they only receive knowledge, insight and comfort from white people, this can have lasting effects on what they assume about people of color. It is this disconnect, as civil rights lawyer Constance Rice said, that can make police officers “kill and do things that don’t make sense to you and me.”

One effective way to help young children is to seek out diverse experts who can speak in schools about weather, food, construction, politics and electricity (all common preK- grade 3 topics).

Another way to influence young children’s racial attitudes early on are picture books. Given the particular fear toward black men, using literature to combat negative assumptions means going through classroom books and thinking carefully about how often and in what ways black boys and men are included in stories. Are there enough books with caring, compassionate and smart, black, male characters? Are books in classrooms about black history balanced with those about the everyday lives of black men so that racial diversity becomes normalized for young children?

Having only a handful will not be enough to normalize positive images of black men. But although these kinds of books are still difficult to find, it’s not impossible.

Poor Kids and the 'Word Gap'

The White House launches a new literacy initiative aimed at low-income children.

“Education,” Horace Mann declared in 1848, “is a great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery.” But increasingly, the condition of American children—and even their eventual role in society—is determined well before their first day of kindergarten. I’ve taught the children of wealthy, well-educated parents, and I’ve taught children raised in poverty, and in my own experience, these two populations arrive at the schoolhouse door with two very different skill sets and expectations.

According to a 2012 report by the Brookings Institution, less than half of poor children show up to school prepared with the early math and reading skills, emotional and behavioral control, and physical well-being needed to be ready to learn, and that disadvantage persists into adulthood. The report continues, “children with higher levels of school readiness at age five are generally more successful in grade school, less likely to drop out of high school, and earn more as adults, even after adjusting for differences in family background.”

Much of this disadvantage has been attributed to what researchers call the “word gap.” Higher-income parents spend nearly a half hour more per day engaged in direct, face-to-face, Goodnight Moon time with their children than low-income parents do, and by the time these children are 5 years old, the poor ones will have heard 30 million fewer words than their wealthy peers. Nearly all of my more affluent students read in their leisure time, but approximately two out of every 10 of my poor students tell me, “I don’t read” when I offer to help them pick out an independent reading book.

Because the word gap first appears during periods of critical neurological and cognitive development, its effects cannot be easily remedied by later interventions. Teachers, standards, technology, even those hallowed halls of ivy—none of this matters as much to a child’s educational and economic future than an informed and empowered parent.

Unfortunately, explained Ann O’Leary, Director of the Children & Families Program at Next Generation in a phone call, “there’s a lack of alignment among low-income parents regarding how much talking, singing, and reading to children really matters over a lifetime,” and research backs that up. One study found that low-income parents underestimate their power to influence their children’s cognitive development, sometimes by as much as 50 percent. Wealthy parents spend more time engaged in these activities because they have better access to information, and O’Leary argued that when parents understand the impact they have on their child’s cognitive development, they invest.

School should be a safe, nurturing place – not a daily nightmare

The stigma of being the poor child in class is far worse today than it was when I was at school 40 years ago. And instead of diminishing inequality, Cameron seeks to increase it.

You never forget them. The children who were marked apart. In our class at primary school, they were called “Bugsy”, all three of them. The children who turned up bedraggled, a bit whiffy and wearing only a rough approximation of school uniform. You’d hear the bolder, more domineering children talking about them. “So-and-so smells.” “So-and-so wears gutties [plimsolls] instead of shoes.” “So-and-so’s Bugsy.”

With some encouragement from their neat, scrubbed peers, these remorseless critics would tease and bully the Bugsy kids. Even if you didn’t take part in the taunting yourself, even if it horrified you, you stayed out of it – not actively contributing to the misery of these pariah children, but safely beyond the exclusion zone that they lived in all the same.

Vivienne Westwood, in her autobiography, remembers such a child in her own class at primary school. “He smelt and his blond hair was so dirty, poor little Edward, that I thought, you know, I would rescue him. So I decided I would do this by announcing he was my boyfriend. (We were six.) He was horrified. I can see him now, pink beneath the grime: the worst day of his life. Everyone laughed at him. And me.”

That’s exactly what it was like. However sorry you felt for those kids, you couldn’t show it. Voluntarily associating yourself with such misfortune was seen as far more foolish than having it imposed upon you by adults. You never heard from them what it was like, being that distinctive sort of outsider, because you never spoke to them. Those children were despised and feared, as if their poverty was infectious.

But this week, more than 40 years on, I finally did hear, first-hand, from children who have to turn up at school under such stress, every day. In a new report, Through Young Eyes [click to download pdf], children in this situation were interviewed by the Children’s Commission on Poverty.

“If your shirt, like mine, has got tags with a different name … they automatically know that it’s handed down from someone else,” said one child. The report says that some state-funded secondary schools have uniforms costing as much as £500. These are schools, surely, that use uniform policy as a way of keeping out the riff-raff.

The Afghan girls raised as boys

In Afghanistan, ranked the worst country in the world to be born a girl, some parents are bringing up their daughters as sons. Then comes puberty and the ‘bacha posh’ are expected to switch back.

 

Watching Mehran, age six, play football at her school in Kabul, you would think that being a girl in Afghanistan wasn’t so bad at all.

As she moves in and out of the game on the sparsely covered grass lawn, her expression of focus shifts to a satisfied grin when she finally gets to the ball. Barefoot in dusty sandals, she kicks it as hard as she can into the field. Her shirt hangs loosely over her pants, and her short, black hair spikes out in every direction. She’s messy now – dirty even – but she doesn’t much care. There is no need for Mehran to be pretty, or to appear “proper” or shy, as is required and expected of other Afghan girls, who refrain from too much physical activity in their demure dresses and all their hair carefully tucked in under head scarves.

This – to be one of the boys – is Mehran’s privilege.

Mehran is a bacha posh – the literal term translated from Dari for a girl “dressed like a boy” in Afghanistan, the country that the UN says is the worst in the world to be born a girl, and where the average life expectancy of a woman is 44 years. The bacha posh are the secret underground girls of this deeply conservative society, where men and boys hold almost all the privileges, and where the mother of a newborn girl is often greeted with disappointment for not having brought a son into the world.
“They gossip about my family,” Mehran’s mother said the first time I met her. She explained how having four daughters had made her decide to bring her youngest to the barber for a haircut a year earlier, and to tweak her name to a masculine-sounding form, in order to present her to the outside world as a son in trousers and a shirt.

When I began my research in 2009, after first meeting Mehran, the existence of these girls was denied by many foreign experts on Afghanistan. It seemed unlikely that the country’s harsh gender segregation would allow for such deviations. But it is an ancient practice that Afghans can reference as far back as the time before Islam took hold in the country.

Nobel Peace Prize win for Malala and Kailash is a beacon of hope for children’s rights

In a celebration of the rights of children, the 2014 Nobel Prize for Peace has been awarded to Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Taliban for going to school in Pakistan, and Kailash Satyarthi, who has been campaigning against child labour in India for more than 20 years.

Announcing the award, committee chairman Thorbjørn Jagland described it as a recognition of “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education”.

Coming the day before International Day of the Girl Child, the committee’s recognition of that struggle is an opportunity to reflect on a number of recent incidents – such as the mass abduction of nearly 300 adolescent school girls from their boarding school in northeastern Nigeria by Boko Haram – that have highlighted the plight of adolescent girls in many parts of the world.

Development practitioners and donors are more than ever convinced that increasing opportunities, skills and resources for women and girls will lead to measurable improvements across a wide range of development indicators and for all people, irrespective of their gender. The running assumption is that targeting adolescent girls is one of the most effective strategies available to achieve wider developmental outcomes.

In line with this thinking, myriad interventions around the world are being designed and trialled to specifically target the plight of adolescent girls.

Ways to Stop Bullying

Are you being bullied? Well, you're not the only one. In fact, studies show that one-third of all students are bullied every year!

Here you can watch a WellCast video which suggests a four step method that will show you how to boost your confidence, protect yourself from harm and find help.

 

 

Bone author Jeff Smith speaks out ahead of US Banned Books Week

‘You can’t take away someone’s ability to choose what they want to read,’ says Smith, as forces of free speech mobilise for 2014 event focusing on graphic novels and comics.

“The point,” says cartoonist Jeff Smith, whose multiple award-winning comic Bone was one of the books that parents tried hardest to ban in America last year, “is that they are trying to take away someone else’s ability to choose what they want to read, and you can’t do that.”

Smith was speaking as the forces of free speech mobilised in the US for Banned Books Week, the annual festival that opens on 21 September and which, in the wake of attacks on acclaimed books from Bone to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, is taking a special focus on comics and graphic novels this year. The most challenged book of 2013 – the book that received the largest number complaints in schools and libraries across America – was Dav Pilkey’s children’s graphic novel Captain Underpants. Smith’s Bone came in 10th, with the series – described as “one of the 10 greatest graphic novels of all time” by Time – drawing fire over its “political viewpoint, racism, violence”, according to the American Library Association.
“I’ll be honest, I had two simultaneous reactions when I heard Bone was in the top 10,” said Smith. “First, that I was being attacked and I didn’t know why. Then a thought like: hey, this isn’t the worst thing that can happen. A lot of my heroes are on this list. Mark Twain, Melville, Bradbury, Steinbeck, Vonnegut; authors whose work is about something – that do the kind of writing I aspire to.”

According to Smith, this year’s focus on comics “matters a great deal”.

“Comics are now part of the literary scene, part of the discussion, and it shines a spotlight on these kinds of attacks,” he said. “That doesn’t mean the people who want to ban these books are malicious; in fact just the opposite. They have a concern which to them is legitimate. But that isn’t the point. The point is that they are trying to take away someone else’s ability to choose what they want to read, and you can’t do that.”

Attacks on UN schools in Gaza clearly breach international law

The shelling of Jabalia Elementary Girls' School in Gaza on July 30 by Israeli forces was a shocking example of modern military action. The shelling was the sixth time a United Nations school has been struck since the current hostilities began.

Increasingly and tragically, education is at the centre of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza as people flee their homes to shelter in places like schools. It is a cruel reminder that in modern conflicts the civilian population suffers most. The attacks on UN schools have been described by UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon as “shameful”, “outrageous” and “unjustifiable”. A spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said international humanitarian law has been breached.

What is a UN school?

The UN schools in the region are provided by UNRWA, which is mandated to provide services and programmes for: “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period June 1 1946 to May 15 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict” and their descendants

UNRWA operates in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, providing services to some 5m registered Palestinian Refugees, 40% of who are under the age of 18. Education accounts for more than 50% of the $1.4 billion UNRWA budget, providing basic education aimed at combating the high levels of poverty and unemployment experienced by refugees. UNRWA is funded almost totally by voluntary contributions from donors, but at the beginning of 2014 it had a cash deficit of $65m. The education of each child costs $755 per year.

Spare the Rod, School the Child

In 1998, a young American biologist named Justin Brashares, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, went to Ghana to research antelope behavior. But, as he hiked the West African forests and savannahs, he didn’t see many antelope. He also didn’t see many hippos, leopards, duikers, or lions. What he did see were large, aggressive troops of olive baboons. They had recently begun to raid maize crops and steal chickens, causing such serious and persistent damage that many Ghanaians were keeping their young children out of school to help guard family farms.

How had baboons gained influence over the education of Ghanaian children? In search of an answer, Brashares dug into the fantastically detailed records of wildlife populations and hunting activity that Ghana has kept since its days as a British colony. He found that as populations of large mammal species had declined in the country’s national parks over the decades, baboon populations had expanded into the newly predator-free habitat. Hunting intensified by human population growth was one reason for the over-all declines, but the mammal numbers didn’t follow a straight line toward extinction: they rose, then fell, then rose again.

Brashares asked Ghanaian farmers about the pattern. “Oh, it’s the fish,” he remembers them saying dismissively. Poor fishing on the Atlantic coast, they told Brashares, drove more people into the forest to hunt for bushmeat. More hunting meant fewer large mammals, more olive baboons—and, eventually, more kids kept home from school. Brashares’ analysis of data collected by researchers from his lab and elsewhere showed that, in 2009, sixty-five per cent of school-age children in sixty-four baboon-affected villages were withdrawn from school for at least one month, and many for much longer than that.

Poor progress of disadvantaged pupils a waste of talent, says Alan Milburn

Disadvantaged children who achieve highly at primary school in most cases then fall behind their less able but better-off peers.

England's education system is wasting young talent "on an industrial scale" because of poor progress made by the brightest disadvantaged children once they leave primary school, Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, said after publication of a report detailing the educational differences that emerge by the age of seven.

The report found that children from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds who achieve the highest levels at primary school have in most cases fallen behind their less able but better-off peers by the time they sit GCSE exams five years later.
Of almost 8,000 disadvantaged students who achieved top grades in English and maths standardised tests at age 11, only 900 went on to study at an elite university. But if disadvantaged children performed as well at secondary school as their better off peers, another 2,200 would later study at the likes of Oxford or Manchester universities.

The commission's research follows recent data published by the Department for Education (DfE) showing that just 50 children on free school meals were admitted to Oxford or Cambridge last year, compared with 60 from Eton alone.

"The early promise of top-performing poorer children is being squandered," Milburn said. "It is vital that secondary schools focus harder on helping disadvantaged children convert high results at age 11 to excellent GCSE and A-level results in academic subjects, and that all high attainers are given advice, opportunities and support to progress to elite universities."

Earth’s generation next will be wealthier, but not always healthier

Our Tropical Future: A new report on the State of the Tropics has revealed rapid changes in human and environmental health in the Earth’s tropical regions. This is the second in a four-part series about the new report, based on the work of 12 universities and research institutions worldwide, which shows the challenges facing diverse nations such as Burma/Myanmar to manage those changes.

If you’re looking for a good news story about the health of the world, then consider taking a trip to the Tropics.

An end to world poverty is still a long way off, but poverty is falling in the Tropics. Among people living in the 130-plus tropical nations and territories, shown below, the proportion living in extreme poverty has almost halved since the 1980s.

The rates of infectious diseases are also declining, along with maternal and child mortality rates. Life expectancy is on the rise.

All of those trends for the better have global significance, given that by 2050 three out of every five children will be living in a tropical part of the world.

However, it’s not all good news on human health, according to the inaugural State of the Tropics Report, launched this week by Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar.

School days should be longer to help poorer students, suggests MPs

New report says swift action is needed to help poor white pupils and encourage good teachers to work in disadvantaged schools.

Longer school days could help boost the results of poorer children by giving them somewhere to do their homework, a cross-party group of MPs has suggested.

The report by the Commons education select committee says new guidance is needed on how extended school days can help youngsters from disadvantaged communities.

It also calls for the government to examine which incentives would encourage good teachers to work in disadvantaged schools, arguing that schools serving poor white communities "need a better chance of winning".

The report by the committee on the underachievement of white working-class children warns that these youngsters are falling far behind their classmates and their potential will be left "unlocked" if swift action is not taken.

Figures show that just under one-third (32%) of poor white British children got at least five C grades at GCSE last year, including English and maths, compared with 61.5% of poor children from an Indian background and 76.8% of poor children from a Chinese background.
At the same time, the gap in results between poor white children and their richer classmates has hardly changed in the last seven years, the report says, and the attainment of poor children from other ethnic backgrounds is improving faster than that of poor white children.

The committee also found that white British students from disadvantaged families spend fewer evenings per week doing their homework, and have a higher absence rate from school than many other ethnic groups.

Hundreds of Nigerian teachers strike over kidnapped schoolgirls

Nigerian teachers stage nationwide rallies over Boko Haram's deadly terror campaign against children and colleagues.

Nigerian teachers have held a strike and staged rallies nationwide to protest against the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls by Boko Haram and the killing of nearly as many teachers during its insurgency.

Gunmen from the Islamist group stormed a school outside the remote north-eastern town of Chibok on 14 April, carting away some 270 girls in trucks. More than 50 have escaped but at least 200 remain in captivity, as do scores of girls kidnapped previously.

The president of the National Union of Teachers, Michael Alogba-Olukoya, told reporters Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates as "western education is sinful", had killed 173 teachers in the past five years. "All schools nationwide shall be closed as the day will be our day of protest against the abduction of the Chibok female students and the heartless murder of the 173 teachers," he said.

In Maiduguri, capital of the north-eastern state of Borno, where the insurgency is most intense, some 40 teachers marched to the office of Governor Kashim Shettima. The demonstrators chanted: "Bring back our girls" and waved placards reading: "Vulnerable schools should be fenced".

Shettima went to the gates of the compound to speak to the teachers, who wore black union vests over their traditional robes and were escorted by the army.

South African education still fails many 20 years after apartheid

Since the dawn of democracy in South Africa 20 years ago, pass rates in the country’s end-of-school exam – commonly known as the matric – have been steadily on the rise, despite indications that the schooling system is failing in many other respects.Sceptics have indicated that it seems especially convenient that the 78.2% pass rate for Grade 12 students this year – an election year – exceeded the target of 75%. But Umalusi (the independent quality assurance body overseeing assessments in the schooling system) declared the 2013 National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations to be fair and credible. And the indications are that the steadily increasing pass rate is not because examination papers are getting progressively easier.

Are standards improving?

It is important to be clear about exactly what is meant by “rising” pass rates. The rate is calculated by only those Grade 12 learners who actually sat the exams. Although the number has increased steadily over the years, data from the census has led to estimates that only 48% of students who begin Grade 1 actually complete Grade 12, with most learners dropping out of school in Grade 10 and 11.

The Bald Cartoons Campaign

The Bald Cartoons Campaign Shows Snoopy, Garfield, and Others Shaving Their Heads for Kids Cancer.

 

 

Snoopy, Garfield and several other beloved animated characters are undergoing a major makeover for a good cause. In a moving new campaign to raise cancer awareness, the cartoon characters are shaving their heads in solidarity with kids who have lost their hair to chemotherapy.
Brazilian cancer advocacy group GRAACC created The Bald Cartoons Campaign in order to prove that “a child with cancer deserves to be seen just like any other child.” The ad starts off with kids talking about how hard it was for them to lose their hair while undergoing treatment. But things change once they are shown images of the bald cartoon characters on a screen. As they watch, their faces light up and several of them break into big grins.

“I thought that if I took my hat off at school people would laugh, but now I don’t feel that anymore,” one boy says.

The campaign first started last November with a handful of characters, but has since expanded to include 40 more cartoons, including Olive Oyl and characters from Adventure Time and Rio 2 in time for the country’s Cancer Awareness Week.