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iPhone App Gives Parents a Pediatrician in Their Pocket
Tweet Share on Facebook July 8, 2010 CommentParents who dread trying to call their pediatrician on nights and weekends have a new friend: the KidsDoc iPhone app.
Say your child has a stomach ache. Click on "abdominal pain" and KidsDoc asks: "Is this your child's symptom?" Drill down to "pain or discomfort located between the bottom of the rib cage and the groin crease" and you will encounter a list of symptoms based on severity. Selecting: "Not moving or too weak to stand," prompts a message to immediately call 911, whereas selecting "mild pain that comes and goes," instructs you to call your doctor within 24 hours.
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Car Seats Aren't Safe When Used in the Home
Tweet Share on Facebook July 7, 2010 Comment (6)Car seats keep children safe—except when those seats aren't in the car. Parents who park babies in car seats inside the home put their children at risk of falls and head injuries, according to new research from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. That's news to me; parents get lots of information on how using car seats properly protects children in motor vehicle crashes, but this is the first report I've seen on what happens when we yank the baby bucket out of the back seat and walk into the house. It's not a pretty picture.
According to the researchers, who examined injury reports to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, 43,562 babies were treated in emergency departments for car seat accidents that occurred outside of motor vehicles from 2003 to 2007—which translates to about 8,700 babies a year. Most of the children were 8 months or younger, and most suffered a head or neck injury as a result of falling from the car seat. The results were published in the August issue of Pediatrics.
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Do Video Games Cause ADHD? 3 Ways to Keep Your Kids Safe
Tweet Share on Facebook July 6, 2010 Comment (10)Grade schoolers and young adults who play lots of video games are more likely to have ADHD or other attention problems, according to new research in Pediatrics. Does that mean it's time to yank the game controller? Maybe, maybe not. Here's why.
There's plenty of data showing that TV time doesn't help young children, and may be distracting them from what they really should be doing--which is playing and interacting with people. A few studies show that preschoolers who watch lots of TV are more likely to have ADHD, but cause and effect hasn't been proven. (It could be, for example, that kids who have short attention spans are more drawn to TV than others.) Although some studies have explored the link between violent TV shows and aggressive behavior, there's been very little research on video games and ADHD, surprising because every teenage boy I know seems to be glued to games like "Grand Theft Auto" and "Halo." -
Why Parents Who Smoke Put Their Kids at Risk
Tweet Share on Facebook June 30, 2010 Comment (5)Everyone knows that cigarette smoking is bad for your health. And it's bad for your children's health, too, increasing the risk that your offspring will suffer from obesity and mental health problems. Children of mothers who smoked while pregnant are more likely to have behavioral problems by age 4, according to researchers at the University of Bristol in England. And pregnant women aren't the only ones who should worry about the ill effects of smoking on children. Kids whose fathers smoked while they were in the womb were more likely to later become obese, according to researchers in Hong Kong. Both sets of scientists looked at data on thousands of children, and both papers were published in the July issue of Pediatrics.
Scientists have long known that pregnant women who smoke increase the risk that their children will be born prematurely, have low birth weight, decreased lung function, and developmental delays. Moms who smoke after a child is born also increase the odds that their child will have pneumonia, asthma, ear infections, and sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. But this new information suggests that children face a higher risk of obesity, which itself is a key risk factor for diabetes and heart disease, from secondhand smoke as well as maternal smoking.
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2 Ways to Lower Your Child's Cholesterol Without Statins
Tweet Share on Facebook June 29, 2010 Comment (3)Parents should think twice before starting children on statin drugs to lower cholesterol, according to a new report on children and statins from Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs. That's because the powerful drugs have not been extensively tested in children, and they can have serious side effects, especially muscle pain. Instead, parents should consider the two best ways to lower cholesterol without drugs: more exercise, and a healthy diet.
With about 20 percent of children now considered obese and at risk of high cholesterol, many more parents will be facing the question of whether they should put children on statins, an idea that would have seemed odd just a few years ago. In 2008, the American Academy of Pediatrics said that statins could be used for children ages 8 and above, and that 2-year-olds should be given cholesterol tests if they appear to be at risk of obesity. In 2009, doctors wrote children 2.3 million prescriptions for statins. But John Santa, an internist who directs Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, says parents should ask themselves two questions if their child has been diagnosed with high cholesterol before turning to statins:
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Should Kids Take Big Risks? Teenage Sailor’s Rescue Raises Big Questions
Tweet Share on Facebook June 15, 2010 Comment (5)The good news that 16-year-old Abby Sunderland was rescued at sea in the midst of her attempt to sail around the world alone gave parents good reason to heave a sigh of relief, and also ask themselves if they would let their own teenager take on such a dangerous task.
Bloggers have been flaming Sunderland's parents for letting the teenager set out on a voyage that would be challenging even for a seasoned sailor. "If people are looking at age, they're looking at the wrong thing here," dad Laurence Sunderland told reporters Friday as a rescue ship headed to the girl's disabled boat in the Indian Ocean. "Age is not a criteria. Abby is a fine sailor," he added. "I've never advocated this for 16-year-olds. I've advocated this for experienced sailors."
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2 Simple Ways to Get Kids to Watch Less TV
Tweet Share on Facebook June 14, 2010 Comment (4)About one third of children watch more than the daily two hours of TV recommended by pediatricians, but parents often wince at the battles they face in prying children away from the tube. Here's help.
Children and teenagers who say their parents had rules about how much time they could spend watching TV or playing video games were much more likely to stay within the recommended limits for screen time, according to a new study in Pediatrics. The study, conducted by researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and several universities, asked 7,415 children and teens ages 9 to 15 about their TV and computer habits. They found evidence that two simple tactics work: setting family rules for screen time and getting kids moving, whether through organized sports or free-time play.
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To Help Cure Autism, Share Your DNA
Tweet Share on Facebook June 9, 2010 Comment (11)The news that children with autism have rare genetic variants unique to them is big, fancy science. It comes from the largest study ever on the genetics of autism, involving the DNA of 996 children with autism and their families, and more than 120 scientists in 11 countries. Not only did children with autism have rare genetic variations, the researchers found, they didn't share those variations with their parents, meaning that the variations were not inherited. But if you're the parent of a child with autism, news like this that doesn't include a cure, better treatments, or even a clear-cut cause doesn't sound so exciting.
Not so, says Stanley Nelson, a geneticist at the University of California-Los Angeles, who sent me an E-mail this morning so vehement that I just had to call him up and get the scoop. Clearly, finding more autism genes could make it easier to identify the causes of autism and discover potential treatments. So I was at first surprised by what Nelson said. "This work is grossly inadequate, even though it reflects about 15 to 20 years of sample collection, tens of millions [of dollars] in molecular testing, and analytical effort," he wrote, adding that this biggest-ever study, published online in Nature, explains the genetic basis of only about 3 percent of diagnosed cases of autism.
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Risky Teen Behaviors: The 5 Biggies Parents Should Know About
Tweet Share on Facebook June 8, 2010 Comment (7)When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked teenagers if they had ever used a prescription drug that wasn't prescribed to them, 23 percent said "Yes." That was the big news in the CDC's new Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which anonymously polled 16,000 high school students in 2009 about whether they had been drinking, smoking, using illegal drugs, or indulging in other risky behaviors.
Twenty-three percent may sound like a lot, but it's not a big surprise to researchers. Teenage abuse of ADHD drugs, like Adderal, has risen 76 percent in the past eight years, according to a study published last year in Pediatrics. And opioid drugs like OxyContin, which are widely prescribed to adults for pain relief, are the third-most-popular drugs of abuse for teenagers. Both ADHD medications and OxyContin are easy to find in medicine cabinets and teenagers figure most parents will never notice if one or two pills go missing.
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7 Skills Your Child Really Needs for a Happy, Productive Life
Tweet Share on Facebook May 28, 2010 Comment (8)What skills do children need to grow up to be healthy, happy, productive adults? That's a big question for parents, who are bombarded with conflicting advice from schools, books, and experts. Ellen Galinsky has wrestled with that question herself, while raising her own two children, and also as president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, where she researches the conflicts between work life and families. Her new book, Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs, includes hundreds of simple ways that parents can use games and activities to promote the development of life skills in children.
[Read 10 Reasons Play Can Make You Healthy, Happy, and More Productive]
I asked Ellen what practical lessons she learned in researching the book, things that parents can use to help their children daily. Here's an edited version of our conversation:
