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Kids and Killer Hot Dogs? 3 Tips to Prevent Choking on Food
Tweet Share on Facebook February 22, 2010 Comment (51)It's easy to giggle over the killer-hot-dog headlines that have been sparked by the American Academy of Pediatrics' new recommendation that, to prevent choking, hot dogs should come with a warning label. What would it say—"Choking on this hot dog may be hazardous to your child's health"?
But I'd bet that most parents have had the awful experience of seeing a child's face suddenly turn red when a piece of food "went down the wrong pipe." I'll never forget the instructor in a baby CPR class who showed us how to whack a choking toddler between the shoulder blades and said: "You WILL have to do this." She was right.
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Are Sugar-Loving Kids Likely to Grow Up Alcoholic and Depressed?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 18, 2010 Comment (2)Kids like sweet things, a preference that starts with breast milk and continues on to lollipops and birthday cake. But for some children, intense cravings for sweets may be associated with a vulnerability to alcoholism and depression. And that same vulnerability may also make it harder for some children to cut back on sugary treats.
That news, from research published in the journal Addiction, was enough to get this mother of a candy-loving child hustling to call Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia who studies children's food preferences. Mennella led the study. Since the story broke, Mennella has been deluged with E-mails and calls from people saying, "This sounds like me! This sounds like my family!"
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Oxytocin-Autism Study: the Kind of Evidence-Based Research Parents Need
Tweet Share on Facebook February 16, 2010 Comment (6)Oxytocin may help improve social behavior in people with autism, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There's a lot this study can't tell us; researchers studied just 13 young adults with high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome, and it tested their social responses only in the laboratory, with a ball-tossing game and a measurement of how responsive they were to social cues in pictures of human faces.
Still, there's also a lot to get excited about. Oxytocin is a hormone produced by the hypothalamus that helps stimulate childbirth and breast-feeding. It's also sometimes called the "hormone of love" because it's thought to help regulate emotions. Some studies have found that children with autism have lower levels of oxytocin in their bodies. And other small studies of oxytocin's use in autistics have found that the hormone reduces repetitive behaviors and helps improve the ability to recognize emotions in voices and faces.
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Indian Children Offer Clues to Link Between Child Obesity and Early Death
Tweet Share on Facebook February 12, 2010 Comment (6)All parents would love to look into their children's future and see what becomes of them. But for the many children who are overweight or obese, that glimpse might foretell an early death.
We can thank the Pima and Tohono O'odham Indians of Arizona for this unsettling insight. Scientists have studied these populations for years because of their high rates of diabetes and obesity. The 4 percent incidence of high blood sugar levels among the Indian teens in this study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was once rare. Now, alas, the rest of the country is catching up; about 3 percent of all American teens have high blood sugar.
[Here are 3 simple ways to judge your child's risk of developing diabetes at a young age.]
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3 Ways Parents Can Use Michelle Obama’s Experience to Fight Child Obesity
Tweet Share on Facebook February 11, 2010 Comment (16)At first glance, Michelle Obama's big "Let's Move" campaign to fight child obesity doesn't offer much to parents like me. I need help convincing my daughter's teacher that Smarties candies aren't the best motivational reward, and I wish my neighborhood had sidewalks so kids could walk to the pool and the park without risking being run over by a cellphone-distracted driver. Meanwhile, most of the first lady's big multiagency initiative is pure Washington wonk: Spending $10 billion over the next decade to make school lunches more healthful; $400 million in tax breaks for grocery stores that move into neighborhoods that have few sources of nutritious food; a Food and Drug Administration plan to improve food labeling. These are all good and necessary changes, but it will take years for them to have a measureable impact on children's lives. With one third of kids in the United States already overweight or obese, we can't afford to wait for solutions that work for typical American families.
But the first lady got my attention big time when she admitted she was guilty of feeding her own daughters junky fast food and carryout meals, to the point that her pediatrician said they risked getting fat. "It wasn't that long ago that I was a working mom, struggling to balance meetings and deadlines with soccer and ballet," Obama said at Tuesday's White House briefing. "And there were some nights when everyone was tired and hungry, and we just went to the drive-through because it was quick and cheap or went with one of the less-healthy microwave options because it was easy. And one day, my pediatrician pulled me aside and told me, 'You might want to think about doing things a little bit differently.' "
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6 Ways Parents Can Help Kids Cope With Social Cruelty
Tweet Share on Facebook February 5, 2010 Comment (11)Kids can be incredibly cruel to one another, but parents can help minimize the pain. That's the reassuring message from Carl Pickhardt, a clinical psychologist in Austin who recently wrote Why Good Kids Act Cruel: The Hidden Truth About the Pre-Teen Years (Sourcebooks, $14.99). Though Pickhardt's book is aimed at tweeners, I found his book helpful as the mom of a first grader already faced with "I'm not inviting you to my birthday party."
I called up Pickhardt for firsthand advice and to ask him why he focused on the middle-school years, when social cruelty knows no age restrictions. "It's not that you don't get it in childhood," Pickhardt says. "It's just that the most damaging point is in middle school. The kids are right in the midst of this developmental change from childhood to adolescence. Combine that with self-awareness and striving for social place. It can be really devastating." Kids who don't feel safe at school can't concentrate on academics, and nobody wants to see a child suffer.
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4 Reasons More Recess Helps Kids Do Better in School
Tweet Share on Facebook February 4, 2010 Comment (68)There's one thing that's almost guaranteed to make your child do better in school: more recess. Not only do children do better academically if they get outside to play, but they have fewer behavior problems. That's the word from none other than the principals of America, who know all there is to know about bad behavior at school.
I write this having just returned from a stint as recess volunteer at my daughter's elementary school, where I zipped up coats, told a half-dozen first-grade boys they needed to split up for five minutes because I was tired of seeing them try to rip each other's arms off, and talked with another young lad who was heartbroken because the girl of his dreams refused to play with him. Despite this, the playground was a happy scene, with children running, shouting, throwing balls, and generally being rowdy on a sunny winter's day.
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Vaccine Study Retracted, and Causes of Autism Remain Elusive
Tweet Share on Facebook February 3, 2010 Comment (21)In 1998, the medical journal The Lancet published a study suggesting that the childhood MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine was tied to autism. On Tuesday, the journal retracted the study, saying in an editorial that key aspects of the paper—in which Andrew Wakefield reported that 12 children he studied had experienced a sudden onset of autism symptoms after getting MMR shots—were false.
This came after years of controversy surrounding the study and after last week's conclusion by Britain's General Medical Council that Wakefield had acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in doing his research. Among the findings: Wakefield didn't randomly choose the children studied, he subjected children to painful and unnecessary tests, and he was paid by lawyers for parents who thought their children had been harmed by the MMR vaccine. (Wakefield, who now works for a clinic in Texas that sells autism treatments, disputed that finding, calling it "unfounded and unfair.") British journalist Brian Deer has cataloged other problems with the study, including records indicating that the children's autism symptoms did not coincide with the MMR shot.
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Digital Kids: Dumber and More Distractable? Or Do Kids Learn Better Online?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 2, 2010 Comment (6)I'm still reeling over the recent news that, on average, American kids spend 7.5 hours a day with electronic media—and that's not even counting texting! If you're wondering how this affects how our kids live and how our families function, check out the wide-angle view in tonight's Frontline documentary, "Digital Nation." Among the show's wake-up calls:
*College students are doing worse at absorbing information from their lectures and reading because they're constantly multitasking with laptops and cellphones, according to David Jones, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who has tested his students' comprehension.
