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Yes, Only Children Do Lag in Social Skills—But They Catch Up
Tweet Share on Facebook August 16, 2010 Comment (1)Parents of only children fret that they miss out on peer interaction, and the evidence does suggest that kindergarteners who are only children have fewer social skills than kids with siblings who can teach them the rules (and help try them out). But Ohio State University researchers say that onlies overcome any social skills deficits by the time they are in high school and have just as many friends as their peers. An only child won't be doomed to a lonely adolescence.
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How to Help Girls Cope With Early Puberty—or Avoid It
Tweet Share on Facebook August 12, 2010 Comment (5)Early puberty is no fun. Girls who mature earlier than their peers are more likely to be teased and have behavior problems. They may struggle to deal with sexual advances that come before they are emotionally mature enough to cope. Early puberty in girls also can increase the risk of early sexual activity, depression, and eating disorders. So the news that girls are maturing earlier than ever before is sobering: Ten percent of 7-year-old white girls are already developing breasts, as are 23 percent of black girls, and 15 percent of Hispanic girls, according to a new study from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, which appears in the September issue of Pediatrics. Those numbers are greater than they were 10 to 30 years ago, and appear to still be on the rise for white girls.
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Pets Can Pose Health Risks for Children
Tweet Share on Facebook August 10, 2010 Comment (1)The bowl of pet food on the kitchen floor can make babies and toddlers seriously ill, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It turns out that salmonella bacteria in dried dog and cat food sparked an outbreak of salmonella infections between 2006 to 2008. Half of the 79 cases reported were in children ages 2 and under.
Salmonella can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children and the elderly, and it's no fun for healthy adults, either. People infected with salmonella usually suffer four to seven days of fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain.
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Sisters Bring Happiness
Tweet Share on Facebook August 9, 2010 Comment (2)Parents spend a lot of time dealing with arguing and other nastiness between siblings. But having siblings can save teenagers from negative emotions, and encourage them to be more kind and generous.
"As a parent, it's really good to know that sibling affection is related quite strongly to helping, generosity, kindness," says Laura Padilla-Walker, a professor at Brigham Young University who studies the effects of sibling relationships. "We often don't see them [as] a protective factor."
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Teen Depression Linked to Internet Overuse
Tweet Share on Facebook August 5, 2010 Comment (9)Teenagers who have an unhealthy dependence on the Internet are almost twice as likely to become depressed as other teens, giving parents yet another good reason to limit kids' screen time. That's the news from a study in Pediatrics, which tracked the Internet use of teenagers in China, where "Internet addiction" is considered a serious and growing problem.
The researchers tracked 1,041 teenagers, finding out how much they used the Internet and whether that use was unhealthy. They used surveys similar to those used with pathological gamblers. A typical question asked: "How often do you feel depressed, moody, or nervous when you are offline, which goes away once you are back online?" The vast majority of the teens, 94 percent, weren't pathological Internet users. But 6 percent were considered moderately at risk. Nine months later, those students were one-and-a-half times more likely to have symptoms of clinical depression than teens who were less dependent on the Internet, though they had not been depressed before.
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Preschoolers and Spray Cleaners Don't Mix
Tweet Share on Facebook August 2, 2010 Comment (4)Parents may think they've childproofed the house, but household cleaners are still posing a risk to curious toddlers and preschoolers, despite years of effort to promote child-resistant packaging and safe storage of dangerous chemicals. The good news is that the number of children ages 5 and younger who landed in emergency rooms because of injuries caused by household cleaning products dropped by 46 percent from 1990 to 2006, according to the new study in Pediatrics. But that still means that more than 10,000 children a year are being needlessly harmed by bleach, detergent, and other toxic yet common cleaners.
[Pesticides: 5 Ways to Reduce Children's Exposure]
Spray bottles are the biggest culprit. The percentage of injuries caused by products in spray bottles rose from 30.3 percent in 1990 to 40.8 percent in 2006. That may be because products are more commonly packaged in spray bottles these days; was anyone using laundry pre-treatment sprays in 1990? But the researchers, at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and the Arizona Emergency Medicine Research Center in Tucson, speculate that it may be that the shut-off valves on spray products are no match for a curious 4-year-old. And in many cases, the child injured was not the one wielding the spray bottle. It's easy to imagine the appeal of a spray-bottle war for children too young to realize that the liquid inside isn't harmless water.
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Kids Can Go to School With Head Lice, But Schools May Disagree
Tweet Share on Facebook July 30, 2010 Comment (42)This week the nation's pediatricians let loose a bit of news that could transform the lives of parents: They said head lice are OK. Any parent who has had to deal with a school's no-nit policy has experienced firsthand the frustration of keeping a perfectly healthy child home from school because that child's shiny clean hair harbors a few nits; the child isn't learning, the parent isn't earning. But don't be surprised if your school continues to send children home for lice.
Many schools have adopted a no-nit policy as the simplest way to manage head lice outbreaks, which are commonplace, affecting 6 to 12 million children a year. But the American Academy of Pediatrics took another look at the science, and said there's no evidence that head lice pose a disease risk, or are a sign of bad hygiene. What's more, they say there's no evidence that sending a child home reduces the spread of lice, or that in-school screenings can control outbreaks. So this week the AAP revised its policy, saying schools shouldn't send home children with lice or nits (louse eggs). I called my local school district to see if they were thinking of revising their send-'em-home policy, and was told that mine was the first call they'd gotten on that question.
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How to Help Children Cope With a Dangerous World
Tweet Share on Facebook July 19, 2010 Comment (1)We live in dangerous times, and children often see and hear more than we parents would like. Just the other morning my 7-year-old was asking me what was going on with the American soldiers and Afghan villagers in a photo on the front page of the paper. That was just hours after a 5 a.m. earthquake jolted us awake in Washington, D.C.!
Children are resilient, but experiencing traumas like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or the Gulf of Mexico oil spill can threaten their physical and mental health. Even watching frightening or traumatic images on TV can spark PTSD-like responses. Given that we can't always protect our children from disaster, what can parents do to minimize harm? Quite a bit, it turns out. In a new issue of Child Development, researchers who have studied children affected by disasters including the 2004 tsunami, 9/11, and Katrina found that how parents respond has a great deal to do with how well children survive adversity. Their findings include:
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Kids' Vision Tests Don't Catch Common Eye Problems
Tweet Share on Facebook July 14, 2010 Comment (2)Eye tests commonly used in schools and pediatricians' offices don't do a good job of finding vision errors like farsightedness and astigmatism in school-aged kids, even though they're great at catching nearsightedness. That's the news from researchers in Australia, who tested 12-year-olds with the usual eye chart test, in which children read a chart with letters in ever-smaller sizes.
School troubles could be a sign of undiagnosed farsightedness because the condition can make reading difficult, according to David Hunter, ophthalmologist-in-chief at Children's Hospital Boston. I called Hunter after reading the new study, published in the Archives of Ophthalmology, because my child has passed those eye chart tests with flying colors, but I've had farsightedness and astigmatism my whole life. So I asked Hunter: How can parents tell if a child needs more than that test?
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Does My Kid Really Need a Cholesterol Test?
Tweet Share on Facebook July 12, 2010 Comment (8)Do all children need a cholesterol test? Troubling news from West Virginia suggests so, where researchers say the current system of screening for high cholesterol misses almost 10 percent of children who are affected because it relies on a family history of heart disease to identify children at risk. About 1 in 500 children have hereditary high cholesterol, which is the most common cause of high cholesterol in children.
Pediatricians and cardiologists have been going back and forth on the question of testing kids' cholesterol for years now; the most recent recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics, issued in 2008, calls for fasting cholesterol tests in children starting at age 2 if kids are overweight and/or have a family history of heart disease. But the West Virginians, writing in Pediatrics, think it's time to screen all kids, no matter their risk profile. Their subjects weren't all overweight either, just a group of fifth-graders screened as part of an effort to combat the very high rates of heart disease and obesity in Appalachia. So I called up William Neal, a pediatric cardiologist and professor of pediatrics at West Virginia University, who is one of the authors of the new study, to find out why the call for cholesterol tests for all.
