Entries for May 2008

Children often miss getting recommended vaccines on schedule, leaving parents and pediatricians scratching their heads as to how to catch up. A new Internet scheduling tool from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is designed to make that chore a little easier.

It took me about 10 seconds to download the tool on my desktop, then click to bring up the scheduler and type in my daughter's name and birth date. The parent or pediatrician adds in which shots the child already has received, and the scheduling software (designed by a professor and graduate student at Georgia Tech), weighs the complex and often conflicting rules for each immunization, and then cranks out a nifty, printable color-coded chart showing how much space to leave between catch-up doses, as well as regular shots.

What better way to celebrate turning 21 than by ingesting a life-threatening dose of poison?

That's the birthday treat of choice for many 21-year-olds, who proudly down 21 drinks in honor of the big day. Thirty-four percent of college men and 24 percent of women say they drank 21 drinks or more to celebrate their birthdays, according to a new study. That reflects the popularity of drinking games like "21 for 21," "drink your age," or the "power hour," in which the celebrant tries to drink 21 drinks between midnight and 1 am on his or her birthday eve. The maximum number of 21st-birthday drinks reported by a woman was 30, while the maximum for men was a mind-blowing 50.

"Children are better prepared for school if their parents read to them" sounds like the "duh" headline of the day. But keep reading—there's actually some useful news here.

Child development experts have known for a long time that reading to small children helps them learn new words and boosts early literary skills, like rhyming words and associating letters with sounds. About 50 percent of parents read to their children every day, according to Reach Out and Read, a Boston nonprofit. But it's the style of reading, more than the frequency, that really matters, according to a new review in the Archives of Diseases of Childhood.

What would you do if your teenager told you she was going to join the Mormon church? That question hadn't occurred to me, but a new book on raising teenagers, Like, Whatever, has given me a new perspective on how to make faith, and questioning it, a bigger part of our family life.

That's just one of the surprising finds in this parenting book, which I came across via the suburban mom mafia, having met editor Rebecca Kahlenberg through another journalist mom at my daughter's preschool. Rebecca's the experienced mother of four, ages 19 through 6, but she says that she learned new tricks in the process of editing the book—including the science of why it's critical that kids get at least 100 hours of driving practice with a parent in the car before heading off on their own, which she's now in the midst of with her 15-year-old.

I read the headline on the article—"Parental Psychiatric Disorder Associated With Autism Spectrum Disorders in the Offspring"—and thought, Oh, no! Back to the bad old days of the 1950s when "refrigerator moms" were blamed for causing autism. But the article beneath this scary headline, in the May Pediatrics, is good news, the kind that could lead to better understanding of the sources of autism and, eventually, effective ways to treat or prevent it.

Julie Daniels, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, looked at the health records of the parents of 1,227 Swedish children with autism who were born between 1977 and 2003. Those parents were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with schizophrenia as parents of children who didn't have autism.