Angry Kids & Stressed Out Parents will premiere on CBC TV Doc Zone Thursday, March 27 at 9 p.m., and will be repeated Saturday, March 29 at 8 p.m. on CBC News Network. bountiful.ca
From a young age, North Vancouver filmmaker Maureen Palmer has been intrigued by storytelling.
Coming from a big Irish family, she treasures the times spent gathered around the wood stove, everyone in attendance for the same reason: "the good craic."
"Sometimes we come across great stories and you actually can feel the hair on the back of your neck stand on end," she says.
So passionate about the practice, Palmer has made it her profession and has a vast collection of documentary films under her belt in partnership with fellow North Vancouver resident, Helen Slinger. The duo founded Bountiful Films
in 2001 and examples of their documentaries include Leaving Bountiful, The Condo Game, Dog Dazed, Cat Crazed, Mounties Under Fire, and How to Divorce & Not Wreck the Kids.
"I feel this urgency to share great stories and I know Helen feels the same thing," says Palmer.
Bountiful Films' latest project, Angry Kids & Stressed Out Parents, is set to premiere on CBC TV's Doc Zone Thursday, March 27 at 9 p.m. The documentary shares research suggesting
that in North America, more children suffer from mental health conditions than from physical ones, and that many parents are coping with high levels of anger, aggression and other behavioural problems. With child development experts
believing the situation to get worse before it gets better, the filmmakers embark on a search for solutions, turning their lens to three innovative early childhood intervention programs with successful track records over time.
Serving children and parents from both middle class and impoverished backgrounds, the highlighted programs are focused on helping children master needed skills to succeed in life, like self-regulation. With program participants undergoing positive transformations by the film's end, Angry Kids argues that if these types of initiatives are introduced to children at a young age, they'll not only help parents raise happier and healthier kids, but they'll also play a role in reducing crime and saving taxpayers billions of dollars.
The last film Palmer and Slinger worked on was Sext Up Kids, for Dream Street Pictures, also for Doc Zone.
"If you saw that film, you could see that it could have an impact on helping parents understand what's going on with their kids. I feel the same way about this one," says Palmer, who wrote and directed Angry Kids, as well as co-produced it with Slinger.
The concept for the project came from divergent trains of thought, she explains. Firstly, Palmer kept hearing about prison expansion in Canada.
"I started thinking about how sad that was. We really are closing the barn door after the horse is gone. So few people get a chance once they've been in prison to live another kind of life," she says.
Secondly, while filming Sext Up Kids, she observed a lot of anger in both girls and boys. "I was genuinely curious what was driving that," she says.
Talking to experts, Palmer was exposed to the perspective that, "On so many levels we're living in such a busy, rushed society, our children have become sort of the last thing to do on our to-do list when they should become our first. And kids are justifiably angry and not getting the nurturing that they need."
Bountiful started shooting Angry Kids in fall 2012. The film attempts to takes an honest look at parenting - sometimes kids at their worst and sometimes parents.
"I think the families who opened their homes and their parenting to us were really courageous," says Palmer.
It was important for the documentary to not just identify a problem, but to offer solutions. "To me it's vital," she says.
The successful interventions highlighted include the Pax Good Behaviour Game, a lowcost program available to children in Manitoba elementary schools as part of the regular curriculum that's focused on selfcontrol. Another is Triple P - Positive Parenting Program, available to all Canadian families and is also focused on teaching children self-control.
The third intervention showcased is the Abecedarian Program, operating in Lord Selkirk Park, a low-income, predominantly First Nations, neighbourhood in Winnipeg, for the first time
in Canada. The program was developed in the 1970s, intended to help change the lives of primarily black, impoverished children in North Carolina and has proven successful in terms of improving participants' chances of graduating from university, finding full time employment and not needing social assistance.
Palmer hopes Angry Kids helps inspire change.
"Frankly, the more I learned about some of these interventions, the more angry I got," she says.
Despite the evidence they found suggesting the effectiveness of the programs, they're not being invested in enough.
"A lot of the educators and the researchers and the scientists that I talked to in this film, they feel the same sense of moral outrage about early childhood intervention," says Palmer. "They know that if you invest in kids, specifically under the age of three, but up to and including six, you can change the trajectory of most troubled
kids' lives, away from addiction, substance abuse, crime, poor relationships, unemployment, dropping out, you name it. It's all fixable and it actually doesn't have to be expensive. I am left with the feeling like, oh geez, we have so many things that we make a priority in our society, but when it comes to the reality of really investing in kids, we don't."
Palmer and Slinger are currently hard at work on their next film, about female desire.
The documentary asks the question: In the year 2014, are women finally able and free to pursue sexual desire as much as men? They're currently learning about the "bad girls" through history and what happened to them, running the gamut through to HBO series Girls creator and star Lena Dunham, known for her efforts to be a gamechanger. The film's working title is Woman Unleashed and is hoped to air on Doc Zone in 2015.
"Our objective, mine and Helen's perspective for filmmaking is, we just want to move the conversation forward. If people watch Angry Kids & Stressed Out Parents and change their perspective even just a little bit, we will feel we have succeeded. And we thank god that there is Doc Zone and those opportunities to have those conversations in a national context," says Palmer.
