International Self-Esteem Day

The Mental Health Foundation of NZ runs regular polls. Their most recent stated:

24th June (not July as listed on the site) was International Self-Esteem Day (I’m sure you knew that already!). Then they listed five actions you might be likely to try:

1. Take time to do things you enjoy;
2. Get something done you’ve been putting off;
3. Wear something that makes you feel good about yourself;
4. Learn something new or improve your skills;
5. Do something nice for another person.

It’s interesting that nobody polled for number 3 on the list, and the majority polled for number 5.

There’s hope for NZ society yet! (Incidentally, it appears Self-Esteem Day was created by a New Zealander, Janice Davies, who says: Your life-long goal is to create happiness in your own life. While we'd all like to be happy, I'm not sure that we can make this our life-long goal....)

The "anti-smacking" law

Family First reports: Almost two years after the passing of the controversial anti-smacking law, more than 80% of NZ’ers still want the law changed and 77% say that the law won’t have any effect on our unacceptable child abuse rate.

These are the key finding of research commissioned by Family First NZ, following on from similar research in 2007 and 2008. The Curia Market Research poll surveyed 1,000 people, and also found huge confusion over the legal effect of the law.

The key findings are:

83% say the law should be changed – only 13% say to keep it as is
77% says the law won’t help reduce the rate of child abuse in NZ
Less than one third of respondents actually understand the law

Here are some graphs provided by Family First to show these results: