Entries for July 2009

What a week for superachieving women! Sonia Sotomayor is poised to become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, and President Obama just named Regina Benjamin to be the nation’s next surgeon general. And what a week for supermoms, who inspired their daughters to work hard and succeed beyond the moms’ wildest dreams. They’re inspiring me to be tough with kids, in all the right ways.

“I want to make one special note of thanks to my mom,” Sotomayor told the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. “I am here today because of her aspirations and sacrifices for my brother, Juan, and me.” Then Sotomayor turned to her mom, seated behind her, and said: “Mom, I love that we are sharing this together.” Go Mom! That helps make up for all those nights around the kitchen table in the Bronx housing project, where the whole family studied together. Sotomayor’s mother earned a nursing degree to support the family after her husband died when Sonia was 9. She made it clear that she was working hard and that her kids would, too. Sonia sure did, heading off to Princeton and becoming a federal judge before being nominated for the nation's top court.

It wasn’t so very long ago that parents were warned that trying to teach tiny babies a foreign language would delay their speech. But as a mom in a bilingual family, I found that hard to believe. When my daughter was tiny, she had no problem understanding my husband’s Russian or my English. Her speech wasn’t delayed at all. And she had many friends in preschool who spoke their native language at home with their parents, and English at school, and managed both with ease.

But we weren’t perfect bilingual parents, alas. When Anna started talking, my husband and I slacked off on the Russian and started speaking English to her. Now when Baba and Deda come to visit, Anna asks me to translate–even though she still understands a great deal of Russian, especially essential words like morozhnaya–ice cream.

Too much Tylenol can be a very dangerous thing, for kids and adults. So much so that the Food and Drug Administration is considering banning infant Tylenol as part of its efforts to reduce the risk of potentially fatal liver damage. But we parents can take steps on our own to make sure we're using Tylenol safely. For advice on how to reduce the risk of using this popular painkiller, I called Bernard Dreyer, a pediatrician who studies how parents use children's medications. Among his surprising discoveries: Those little plastic dosing cups that come with Tylenol are very hard to use accurately, and as a result, 5 to 10 percent of parents give twice as much of the medicine as called for. Yikes!

"Tylenol is a safe drug," Dreyer told me, "but like all medicine, it does have side effects." The most serious one is permanent liver damage, caused by repeated overdosing. (This is why an FDA advisory panel recently voted to ban Percocet and Vicodin, two popular adult painkillers that contain acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.) Here are five Tylenol take-homes I learned from Dreyer, who's a professor of pediatrics at the New York University School of Medicine: