We’ve all read the advice to constantly stimulate your baby with talk — keeping up a ceaseless stream of updates and information, packing in every possible teachable moment. And quite frankly, sometimes I’ve even annoyed myself with the constant chatter: “Yes! Now we’re going to go get milk! Yes! The milk jug has BLUE on it! Milk comes from COWS!”

Apparently, I’m not the only one rolling my eyes and thinking “will you LISTEN to yourself, woman?”
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A certain type of heart defect found in newborns appears to be strongly linked to the time of year the baby is born, according to research presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology yesterday.

Dr. Pirooz Eghtesady from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital studied 1,500 newborns from 38 children’s hospitals throughout the United States born between 1996 and 2006 who had congenital heart diseases that affected the left side of the heart only. They found that one disease, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, was much more common in babies born in April through July (in the Northern Hemisphere). Hypoplastic left heart syndrome is a serious birth defect that usually requires at least three surgeries to correct.
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Pang Ya is only two and yet, at almost 41 kilos, she weighs as much as the average adult Chinese woman.

Her family, who live in the Shanxi province of China, say Pang was born at a normal weight. They are now seeking assistance for their obese child.

My family has a cat who is, shall we say, voluptuous. Morbidly voluptuous. Like Pang’s parents, we don’t know how are cat developed such girth, but theorize she sneaks over to the neighbours to steal their cat’s food. I assume Pang doesn’t hop the fence at night to raid the neighbours pantry, Pang’s family will find the source of their daughter’s weight problem is a little more obvious than ours.

Source: The Telegraph

Artists will no longer be able to use the “artistic purpose” defence when creating images of nude children, with the Attorney-General of NSW, John Hatzistergos yesterday announcing an overhaul of child pornography laws.

Mr Hatzistergos said: ”There will be no further artistic purpose defence. It is anomalous to describe something as child abuse material and then to have a defence of artistic purpose. Instead, the definition of child abuse material will take into account the context in which the relevant material was produced or came into existence.”

Instead, artists will have to pay $500 per image to have Commonwealth censors classify each image to ensure they are not prosecuted as child pornographers.

There is still a cultural debate around the issue of nude children in art following the infamous police raid on a Bill Henson photographic exhibition back in 2008.

The artist Polixeni Papapetrou, whose photograph of her six-year-old daughter on the cover of Art Monthly (left) caused a storm last year, criticised the law change yesterday.  ”I think they’re barking up the wrong tree. I really think they should be going after those people who exploit children.
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What did kid’s do about their problems back in the day? Only a few generations ago, there was no booming childhood psychiatry industry. Child therapists didn’t have offices in every neighbourhood, and medications to treat mental health issues were unheard of.

How did those kids cope?

It’s an obvious question, in a world cluttered with headlines about childhood problems ranging from ADHD to depression to the newly proposed “temper disregulation with dysphoria”, which appears to be a fancy name for pathological temper tantrums.
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Police in Wilson County, Tennessee say 3-year-old Cheyenne Alexis McKeehan learned to play shooting games on the family’s Wii game console using a controller that is designed to look like a real gun.

This familiarity with fake guns, they say, led the little girl to picked up a loaded .380 calibre pistol her stepfather had left on the living room table.

Whether she truly thought it was a toy or was just being curious, what happened next is horrifying:  She shot herself in the stomach. 

Cheyenne was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at Physicians at University Medical centre in Lebanon.
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Baby wearing parents in the US are set to get a major warning that their method of carrying their kids could put their babies at risk.

The head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission told MSNBC her organisation is expected to announce a generalized alert warning parents of the risks of suffocation and the children who have died while in the slings.

A review of the CPSC’s most recent data makes it difficult to asses just how many injuries and deaths can be attributed to the fabric slings – baby carrier injuries are lumped in with car seats, backpack carriers and other means of toting baby. There were seventeen total “carrier related” deaths between 2002 and 2004, not including motor vehicle accidents, and more than fourteen thousand injuries have been reported. Again, that’s carrier-related injuries, not sling specific.

But Inez Tenenbaum of the CPSC specifically linked the slings to deaths in her statements this week, noting, “”We know of too many deaths in these slings and we now know the hazard scenarios for very small babies.”
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While doctors agree that obesity prevention should start early on in life,  some ring the alarm early…I mean really early–before the kid is even born.

Dr. Elsie M. Taveras, an assistant professor of population medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, feels that, while there is not yet any hard data from controlled studies to prove it, observational studies show that there are many risk factors in prenatal, infancy and early childhood that eventually steer children toward becoming obese adults.
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Angela is 11 and has Retts syndrome. She is profoundly disabled, and unable to communicate. She began menstruating at age nine, and her parents believe that her periods trigger epileptic fits.

After trying multiple treatments, Angela’s parents decided that a hysterectomy was the only solution to end the periods and the associated distress. And in a controversial decision by The Family Court of Australia, the family have permission to go ahead and have Angela sterilised.
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Have you been slathering yourself and your kids in hand sanitiser? Most of us have. Those little bottles of alcohol-based gel have become ubiquitous. We find them at the supermarket where we go to grab a trolley, at the cinemas when we go to grab a seat, near the doorway of any shopping centre and installed in every classroom. In all, three quarters of Americans use six or more germ-killing products every day.

There’s good news for those of us who’ve been rolling our eyes at all the literal hand-wringing we’re expected to do over germs these days. According to a new article in Slate, all those products don’t work to stop the spread of colds and flus. Read more »