...parents should develop a healthy medium between letting kids get dangerously sick and raising them in a nearly sterile environment. “In the U.S we have this idea that we need to protect infants and children from microbes and pathogens at all possible costs. But we may be depriving developing immune networks of important environmental input needed to guide their function throughout childhood and into adulthood”
A study this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that most common antibiotics — penicillins — appear to be safe. But the study raises a red flag with two types of antibiotics, sulfa drugs (brand names include Bactrim and Thiosulfil Forte) and urinary germicides (brand names Macrobid and Furadantin). These medications are typically used to treat urinary tract infections.
According to one hypothesis, vomiting reduces caloric intake, decreasing insulin secretion. Low insulin, in turn, boosts levels of other hormones that are known to play a role in the development of a healthy placenta and a healthy blood supply to growing brains.
Stories, Scribbles and Wiggles Toddler Program
Thursday, October 29, 2009, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm, Woodland Indian Baskets and Myths
Thursday, November 19, 2009, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm, All that Glitters is Gold
Thursday, December 10, 2009, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm, Polar Bears and Narwhals
Read packages and look for questionable food dyes
Here are the specific dyes called out by the FSA and/or CSPI:
* Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Red 40 (both groups)
* Yellow 10, Carmoisine, Red 4 (FSA)
* Blue 1, Blue 2 Green 3, Orange B, Red 3 (CSPI)
When the TV was on, the researchers found, both the quantity and the quality of interactions between parents and children dropped. Specifically, parents spent about 20 percent less time talking to their children and the quality of the interactions declined, with parents less active, attentive, and responsive to their youngsters.
Without adult support, children under age 3 could not learn the words directly from the program, nor could they understand them when they appeared in a different context within the video.
...back off almost entirely: to stop asking their child to do the desired behavior and say it's OK not to do it at all, stop offering praise or other rewards for doing it, and mask their attitude of engaged enthusiasm or frustrated rage with an appearance of bland disinterest in whether the child does it or not. What happens next, frequently, is that within a day or two the child starts doing the behavior with no prompting from parents or anyone else. If you try something similar with your own recalcitrant child, within a few days he or she may well be using the toilet, eating green beans, or bathing without dire struggles.
Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.
The advantage that children get from living in two-parent families may actually be due to family stability more than the fact that their parents are married. A new study finds that children who who are born and grow up in stable single-parent homes generally do as well as those in married households in terms of academic abilities and behavior problems.
"If you want your kids to do well in school, then the amount of education you get yourself is important," said Pamela Davis-Kean, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). "This may mean that parents need to go back to school.
"A growing number of large-scale, long-term studies now show that increasing parental education beyond high school is strongly linked to increasing language ability in children. Even after controlling for parental income, marital status and a host of other factors, we find that the impact of parental education remains significant."
Pregnant women account for 6 percent of U.S. swine flu deaths since the pandemic began in April, even though they make up just 1 percent of the U.S. population.
On Wednesday a federal vaccine advisory panel is meeting to take up the question of who should be first to get swine flu shots when there aren't enough for everyone. At the top of the list are health care workers, who would be crucial to society during a bad pandemic.
But pregnant women may be near the top of the list because they have suffered and died from swine flu at disproportionately high rates.
Infants just 6 months old can match the sounds of an angry snarl and a friendly yap to photos of dogs displaying threatening and welcoming body language.But my takeaway of this research is that it is an example of the long history of the relationship of humans and dogs and perhaps represents co-evolution as in early tribes those infants best able to discern a friendly dog from a threatening canine would be the most likely to survive.
Being active at age 5 helps kids stay lean as they age even if they don't remain as active later in childhood, a new University of Iowa study shows.
...children may colour trees blue or grass red because their memories can't "bind" together the colour and shape of an object.
There isn't one Coppertone product on EWG's list of recommended sunscreens and only two of the 50 Banana Boat and Neutrogena products tested met its criteria. One downside is that all of the products on EWG's list are pricier than your average sunscreen, some slightly more so and others are significantly more expensive.
Here are the most affordable sunscreens on EWG's recommended products list (calculated based on price per ounce):
Badger Balm, SPF 30
Caribbean Solutions Sol Kid Care, 25 SPF
Mexitan Sunscreen Lotion, SPF 50 or SPF 30
Tropical Sands, SPF 50 or SPF 30
Solbar Shield Sunscreen, SPF 40
Vanicream Sunscreen Sensitive Skin, SPF 60 or SPF 35 version
Goddess Garden Kids Natural Sunscreen, SPF 30
Solbar Zinc, SPF 38
Jason Natural Cosmetics, Mineral Based Sunblock, SPF 30
...when their parents frequently argue, young adults are significantly more likely to binge drink than other teenagers. They also tend to smoke, and their poor school grades are similar to those of their peers who don't have both biological parents at home.
So, herewith, some modest proposals. Clearly, research shows that what’s best for children is domestic stability and not having to bond with, and to be left by, ever new stepparent figures. Less important is whether or not their overworked parents are logging “date night” (or feeling the magic). So why don’t we accept marriage as a splitting-the-mortgage arrangement? As Fisher suggests, rekindling the romance is, for many of us, biologically unnatural, particularly after the kids come. (Says another friend of mine, about his wife of 23 years: “My heart doesn’t lift when she walks in the room. It sinks, slightly.”) If high-revving women are sexually frustrated, let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaise, and ignoring them in the home, and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see. Alternately, if both spouses find life already rather exhausting, never mind chasing around for sex. Long-married husbands and wives should pleasantly agree to be friends, to set the bedroom aglow at night by the mute opening of separate laptops and just be done with it. More than anything, aside from providing insulation from the world at large, that kind of arrangement could be the perfect way to be left alone.
As far as the children are concerned, how about the tribal approach (a natural, according to both primate and human evolution)? Let children between the ages of 1 and 5 be raised in a household of mothers and their female kin. Let the men/husbands/boyfriends come in once or twice a week to build shelves, prepare that bouillabaisse, or provide sex.
Or best of all, after the breast-feeding and toddler years are through, let those nurturing superdads be the custodial parents! Let the Type A moms obsessively work, write checks, and forget to feed the dog. Let the dads then, if they wish, kick out those sloppy working mothers and run effective households, hiring the appropriate staff, if need be. To a certain extent, men today may have more clarity about what it takes to raise children in the modern age. They don’t, for instance, have today’s working mother’s ambivalence and emotional stickiness.
there is little evidence that being older than your classmates has any long-term, positive effect on adult outcomes such as IQ, earnings, or educational attainment. By contrast, there is substantial evidence that entering school later reduces educational attainment (by increasing high school dropout rates) and depresses lifetime earnings (by delaying entry into the labor market)I also read a recent book review of 'The Nurture Assumption' (See sp!ked: It’s time to move beyond the nature/nurture divide). This book makes the argument that parents have very little to do with how their child turns out. And in fact, genes and peer groups are the most important determiners.
This relates to this idea of redshirting because many parents believe that they can improves their child's self-esteem if they give them an advantage to succeed. However, as the book argues:
‘The experts are wrong: parental nurturing is not what determines how a child turns out'
Contrary to the current orthodoxy, Harris argues that self-esteem is based on what we do, not on how we are encouraged to feel.Looking at this from my own standpoint as someone who was young but had a best friend in elementary school who was redshirted (held back in first grade actually), there is no doubt that he had higher self-esteem for a long time and I wondered what was wrong with me. However, over the long term the advantage I gained of besting older kids prepared me better for the real world than the short-term artificial advantage provided to the kids who were held back.
Morning sickness, which affects most pregnant women, is thought to be a reaction to the hormones human chorionic gonadotropin and thyroxine, which are secreted at unusually high levels during pregnancy to maintain a healthy placenta. Now Nulman speculates that these hormones, which are higher in women who experience morning sickness, may protect the fetus's developing brain.
Writing in The Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, researchers say they found no good evidence of a link between pacifier use and nursing.
“Pacifiers have traditionally been thought to interfere with optimal breast-feeding,” wrote the researchers, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. In the 1980s, health officials discouraged their use.
But in recent years, researchers have found evidence that babies who use pacifiers when they sleep may be less susceptible to sudden infant death syndrome. The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends that pacifiers be used for that reason.
This slower pattern of growth in the first year of life is possibly one reason why breast-fed babies are less likely to become overweight children later on
Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity...
Good schooling correlates particularly closely to higher I.Q.’s. One indication of the importance of school is that children’s I.Q.’s drop or stagnate over the summer months when they are on vacation (particularly for kids whose parents don’t inflict books or summer programs on them).
Professor Nisbett strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise I.Q. and improve long-term outcomes.
A new study adds weight to the argument that giving swimming lessons to children ages 1 to 4 makes them less likely to drown.
The idea might seem obvious, but some safety experts have raised concerns that teaching young children to swim may put them at higher risk by diminishing their natural fear of water or making their caregivers overconfident.
The new theory stems from decades of anecdotal observations that some autistic children seem to improve when they have a fever, only to regress when the fever ebbs. A 2007 study in the journal Pediatrics took a more rigorous look at fever and autism, observing autistic children during and after fever episodes and comparing their behavior with autistic children who didn't have fevers. This study documented that autistic children experience behavior changes during fever.
...a 2008 study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, that found a higher incidence of autism among children whose mothers had been exposed to hurricanes and tropical storms during pregnancy. Maternal exposure to severe storms at mid-gestation resulted in the highest prevalence of autism.
The pupil measurements showed that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present. Instead, they call up the past as they need it...
"If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective," Munakata said. "What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like 'I know you don't want to take your coat now, but when you're standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom."
The findings, reported in the journal Physiology & Behavior, suggest that children's heightened liking for sweet taste is related to their high growth rate and that sweet preferences decline as children's physical growth slows and eventually stops.
A team from Cambridge's Addenbrooke's Hospital exposed four children to peanuts over a six-month period, gradually building up their tolerance.
By the end the children were eating the equivalent of five peanuts a day.
It is the first time a food allergy has been desensitised in such a way, although a longer-term follow up is now needed to confirm the findings.
Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin — the fatty sheath of "insulation" that coats our axons and allows for fast signaling bursts in our brains. The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses.
Regardless of their mothers’ ages, children whose fathers were 50 years old had lower scores on all tests, except those assessing physical coordination, than those whose fathers were 20, the researchers found. And the older the fathers, the more likely the children were to have lower scores, they found.
By contrast, children with older mothers generally performed higher on the cognitive measures, a finding in line with most other studies, suggesting that these children may benefit from the more nurturing home environments associated with the generally higher income and education levels of older mothers, researchers said.
Nature can account for all of the family resembance in the Body Mass Index; nurture doesn't matter at all
More than 25 separate studies have established that marital quality drops, often quite steeply, after the transition to parenthood.
More than 2 million children with Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) are seen in hospitals, emergency rooms and doctors' offices in the United States every year -- many more than doctors know. In fact, only 3 percent of children with RSV in an outpatient setting actually receive a diagnosis of RSV infection.
Dr. Ruebush deplores the current fetish for the hundreds of antibacterial products that convey a false sense of security and may actually foster the development of antibiotic-resistant, disease-causing bacteria. Plain soap and water are all that are needed to become clean, she noted.
“I certainly recommend washing your hands after using the bathroom, before eating, after changing a diaper, before and after handling food,” and whenever they’re visibly soiled, she wrote. When no running water is available and cleaning hands is essential, she suggests an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.
Dr. Weinstock goes even further. “Children should be allowed to go barefoot in the dirt, play in the dirt, and not have to wash their hands when they come in to eat,” he said. He and Dr. Elliott pointed out that children who grow up on farms and are frequently exposed to worms and other organisms from farm animals are much less likely to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases.
Also helpful, he said, is to “let kids have two dogs and a cat,” which will expose them to intestinal worms that can promote a healthy immune system.
...experts now are realizing that the popular parental response—to coddle teens in an attempt to shield them from every harm—actually may be counterproductive.
"The physical exercise caused by suckling at the breast — about six times daily on average for more than 4 months — may result in increased lung capacity and increased airflow in breast-fed children compared with bottle-fed children," Dr. Ikechukwu U. Ogbuanu