On Parenting

As someone who loathed PE and would happily have spent her childhood in the school library, I feel a bit embarrassed to be lobbying for more dodge ball. But anyone who's observed the behavior of children who have been cooped up inside all day versus those who have been running and jumping outside for an hour doesn't need a study to know which ones are better equipped to learn.

For those who remain in doubt, two new studies indicate that what many schools now regard as expendable "extras"—gym class, music, art—may actually help children do better in academics like math and reading. Since the federal No Child Left Behind Act became law in 2002, school districts across the country have jettisoned what they consider expendable subjects in order to drill students on the basics. Now, scientific evidence is starting to accumulate that turning schools into kiddie gulags where tiny tots spend the day hunched over their desks in sad imitation of their parents' cubiclebound days is actually counterproductive.

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Children up to age 18 should get flu shots, a federal advisory panel said Wednesday, adding older children and teenagers to a list that until now included children only up to age 5. But the reason for that may be more to keep parents from calling in sick than to protect kids.

Older children get the flu more often than do toddlers and preschoolers, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but they are less likely to fall dangerously ill. Research has shown that it's cost-effective to vaccinate children, because then parents don't have to stay home from work to tend sick kids. If all parents followed this advice, 30 million more kids would get flu shots. But have the researchers considered that millions of parents will have to leave work to take the kids to the pediatrician for those shots? Or that for many parents these days, "sick days" now are still work days, type-madly-at-home days while the sick kid watches SpongeBob?

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I still cringe at the memory of the pediatrician diagnosing "fluid in the ears" when my daughter was a toddler, a phrase that seemed to lead inevitably to antibiotics, diarrhea, and diaper rash, even though the kid hadn't seemed one bit sick. In years past, doctors have been aggressive in using antibiotics to prevent asymptomatic effusion, as it's called, because of fears that the fluid accumulation interfered with young children's hearing and language development.

But in most cases, antibiotics don't reduce the risk of children developing fluid in the ears, according to a new analysis in the February Archives of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery. That's particularly true for the children who are most likely to have effusion, those who are under 2 years old and who have recurrent ear infections. "If parents are worried about effusion, they shouldn't give antibiotics," says Maroeska Rovers, a clinical epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Rovers and her colleagues examined five studies with 1,328 cases to see if giving antibiotics helped prevent effusion. The risk of side effects, including bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics, outweighed any small benefit of treatment, they found.

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Wonder what your teenager is listening to on those little white earbuds? How about 84 references to explicit substance abuse a day? Most of which, by the way, are associated with partying and sex.

About one third of the most popular songs of 2005 refer to substance abuse, according to a new analysis led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. They took on the task of counting because they were well aware of data showing that cigarette-smoking characters in movies tend to increase smoking among teenagers. This new study, published in the February Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, didn't look for cause and effect. But it does give a sobering portrayal of just what's pouring into kids' ears.

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