Starting at six months (before most babies even sprout their first tooth), the Cleaning Trainer gently massages the gums and gets them used to having a foreign object rubbing the insides of their mouth. Then at about a year you can switch to the Brushing Trainer to brush those itty bitty teeth. Why this set works so much better than some of the others I’ve tried is the protective ring that snaps onto the brush, making it easier and safer for babies to practice brushing themselves. No one wants someone else shoving a brush in their mouth, but if they can do it themselves? Well then it’s kinda cool.

Buy it on Amazon for under $US10.

BPA is found in polycarbonate bottles, food cans, dental fillings, and even in the air.  But when Swiss researchers examined how different types of BPA exposure could possibly affect nine different age groups, they found that it was bottle-fed babies who were at the greatest risk.

The numbers that they used were estimated based on average consumer use, and those numbers were well below the currently accepted levels of Tolerable Daily Intake.

But researchers found that an infant under six months of age could  be exposed to BPA at levels comparable to those that cause health problems in rodents.  For example, a recent study found that low-levels of BPA raises the asthma risk in mice.

It appears that it’s the regular use and reheating of baby bottles that put infants at higher risk of exposure.  If you bottle feed your baby, look for BPA-free bottles or, better yet, glass bottles instead.  And never reheat baby’s bottle in a microwave.

Older kids and adults still should be concerned about BPA.  The US Food and Drug Administration even recommends avoiding it, though hasn’t gone as far as to ban it completely yet.  But it’s parents of bottle fed babies who really need to be aware of its impact on their kids.

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.

Slate’s bottom line:

So you can believe all the germ hype and end up like the obsessive-compulsive billionaire Howard Hughes. Or you can follow the data and get a flu shot, wash your hands sensibly after using the bathroom and around meals, and stop wasting money on hand sanitisers.

What are they calling hype?

For one thing, not all hand sanitisers are created equal. Some contain over 60 per cent alcohol, while others have less than 40 per cent. Higher concentrations of alcohol make for more effective germ-killing.

Even the high quality products don’t work as well as washing your hands. Fatty acids and proteins are particularly resistant to alcohol-based gels. If your hands are soiled or you’ve been working in a kitchen, you really want to wash them with soap and water.

Finally, as Slate points out and several studies have found, even when high quality hand sanitisers are used rigorously, they don’t cut down on the number of respiratory infections and mild illnesses suffered by children in homes or childcare centres. They may kill the germs on your skin at the moment, but little kids touch so much stuff, including each other, that they do little to contain the spread of infections.

I’ve never believed the hype around these gels, and this article is like a breath of fresh air to me. That said, I do use them. I keep a bottle of hand sanitiser in my purse, and one on the changing table in my playroom. Why? Because sometimes Stuff Happens and I can’t get to a sink right away. I figure in those cases, the gel is better than nothing. I don’t use them very often though. I think I’m still working my way through the pint-size pump bottle I was given at my first baby shower six years ago.

What about you? Do you love your waterless hand sanitiser, or are you happy to see the hype around it taken down a notch?

Photo: ParanoidNotAndroid

Going online for parenting information has become so automatic that it’s no surprise that the first thing many of us do when our child shows symptoms of an illness is to turn to Dr Google. But as Jennifer Gruden writes in an article titled “Anxiety in the Age of Google”, that is where information and insanity often meet.

Gruden shares her story of how Dr Google nearly drove her round the bend when her son became ill soon after being exposed to an exploded can of tomato paste. While the chances that her four-year-old had contracted botulism were slim, the very possibility was enough to turn this otherwise sane woman into a frantic mess. In the end, her son was not seriously ill and was back to normal within a few days. Her own recovery took a bit longer.

While her story is dramatic, coloured by the tragic loss of another child after something that rarely happens did happen, it is no doubt being repeated at this very moment in front of computer screens everywhere. Several years ago, I myself spent two sleepless nights worried about my seven-year-old after an alarming Dr Google diagnosis. And this was after we’d seen a real doctor and received a much less scary one.

To be sure, sometimes Googling your child’s symptoms can lead to a life-saving discovery.  But that’s probably about as common as contracting botulism from an exploded can of tomato paste.

Image: Danard Vincente/Flickr

Our world is full of too much sound: concerts, sports events, fireworks displays, trains. The list goes on and on. Very loud noises damage our hearing, and this kind of hearing loss is both cumulative and irreversible.

Any sustained exposure to noise over 100 decibels is potentially harmful. Kids are at special risk for hearing loss from loud noises because their ears are smaller. A baby’s tiny ear canal amplifies sound, so much so that they may hear the noise as 20 decibels louder than an adult will.

The good news is that this kind of hearing loss is fairly easy to avoid. You can start by using common sense.

• Don’t take your two-year-old to a rock concert.
• Consider sitting a little further afield at an outdoor show or fireworks display.
• If you go to a lot of sports events or other loud activities, invest in child-size protective earmuffs .

I had never worried about my kid’s hearing before. I just took it for granted that they can hear fine, and will continue to. We have a few simple rules like, ‘No listening to music through headphones” and “No turning the stereo up so loud it gives mummy a splitting headache in the next room”. But I didn’t realise more general environmental noise – like they’ll encounter at a music festival or sporting event – was a serious hazard.

I’m not normally one to get excited about shadowy dangers to my children’s fragile health. This one looks real to me, though. Their little ears are fragile, and there are a few simple things I can do as a mum to help them stay healthy through childhood. I just wish I’d known about these risks before I spent half my first pregnancy hanging out in nightclubs.

What about you? Are you conscious of protecting your kid’s hearing? Do you think this is something parents need to be concerned about, or just another sign of our overprotective times?

Photo: Niki Tysoe

For boys, riding a bike increased their likelihood of being fit by 30 per cent.

Walking also increased fitness by 20 – 30 per cent. Unsurprisingly, children who were driven to school had the lowest levels of physical fitness.

The findings came from an analysis of physical tests and questionnaires given to 6000 children aged between 10 and 16 over a two-year period.

Study co-author Christine Voss said, “Children need to be active and stay fit in order to be healthy.”

“Encouraging them to walk or cycle to school is one great opportunity to help achieve this.”

How do you get to school?

Source

But as doctors acknowledge, it’s going to take more than simply switching from soft drinks to water and taking a short walk around the block to cause significant weight loss.

Theoretically, cutting as little as 100 calories from your diet and adding in 100 calories worth of exercise every day should lead to weight loss. But the body adapts to those small changes pretty easily, and as you drop a couple of kilos from making these changes you need fewer calories. Aside from those biological changes, we often compensate for these changes by eating more calories at another meal.

This is especially important in dealing with childhood obesity. Parents want to avoid being too radical with the dietary and exercise changes to avoid setting up food issues or body shame – but nothing short of a lifestyle overhaul for the whole family is really going to be very effective.

Doctors like the small-changes approach, though, because they can lead to bigger ones. A short walk around the block can lead to a longer one and then maybe even to a jog, and cutting fizzy drinks for water can lead to swapping a cookie for an apple. And even those small steps can lead to an important victory – stopping weight gain.

And there are a lot of positive effects to healthy lifestyle changes, even if you never lose a kilo. “I’m not saying throw up your hands and forget about it,” Dr Jeffrey Friedman, head of Rockefeller University’s molecular genetics lab, told the New York Times Well blog. “Instead of focusing on weight or appearance, focus on people’s health. There are things people can do to improve their health significantly that don’t require normalising your weight.”

As you researched the book, how did your pre-conceived notions about children and medication break down?

My idea for this book was born of observations in my community in Washington, D.C. seeing pre-school age children with various conditions going to all kinds of therapies. I’d also heard of older kids taking medication for various problems. It all seemed crazy to me. With the competitive nature of our community and parents trying to perfect their kids, it seemed to me that the two were related. I thought the whole thing was a sign of social pathology.

But when I started working on the book, I found that the experts didn’t necessarily think what I thought. You would find these quotes in the media about, say, ADHD [attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder] being a flavour-of-the-month diagnosis. I realise now there is only a very small minority of doctors who believe this — but they get a lot of press. Overall, most experts say the real problem is under-diagnosis. Also, medication truly helps many children: Twenty years of scientific research have shown, for example, that antidepressant medication, when coupled with cognitive-behavioral therapy, works for 60 to 80 percent of children suffering from depression and anxiety disorders. So I kept shifting my idea for the book; I kept trying to make my original idea hold water.

You’re thinking really changed, though, when you started talking to parents.

Right. I went to a meeting in Silver Spring, Maryland — it was for a group I’d found called “Should I Worry?” It was billed as a meeting for parents who were anxious about their children’s progress and wondering whether they had issues. As it turned out, though, these were parents with children with very serious mental health problems in the public school system; they were desperate to find a life raft. They were using medication for their children because otherwise their children would be locked away. I just started crying in the car on the way home. I felt I had absorbed so much misery of a kind I had never experienced before.

The key here is not whether medication is good or bad but: What did the parents go through? What did the children go through? I realised I had to talk to more parents. Once I did, the emotional reality emerged. They had all gone through a long emotionally-wrenching journey with their children. Let’s say ADHD is the most benign of the mental health disorders children can have — it still can have really serious ramifications. I write about one ten-year-old girl who’d been formally diagnosed with ADHD — she sobbed for weeks over the distress she felt in doing her homework and begged her parents to run her over with their car. Her parents remain conflicted about whether to give her medication — they haven’t yet. The situation has completely drained the family.

More often, however, I would hear that medication made families’ lives a lot better. The key here is not whether medication is good or bad but: What did the parents go through? What did the children go through? What was the thought process leading up to their decision to have their children take medication?

What people tend to assume is that kids who are just distracted or jumpy are given medication.

Exactly. When we talk eye-rollingly about badly behaved, fidgety kids, we’re completely missing the reality of what is going on for these families. One woman spoke to me about her nine-year-old boy who was eventually diagnosed with Asperger’s. She didn’t want to believe that anything was wrong with him — she assumed that others were putting out-of-whack expectations on him. But she had to confront the problem when her son’s teacher told her that he’d been banging his head on the ground and repeating back what people were saying, reversing pronouns and repeating lines from movies and TV — all typical ways autistic children speak. The main thing that doesn’t come through in the media coverage of children’s mental health issues is the fact that people are really suffering.

Why do you think the media is invested in promoting an image of parents giving medication to their children when they don’t measure up to their expectations in some way?

For one, I think the media is made up of people like me who share the same prejudices of society at large so, for the most part, they’re just people who haven’t necessarily had the exposure to these issues to know what is going on. Also, the behavior of the pharmaceutical companies has been so bad. It has made for a long string of valid stories about their bad behavior in the press, as in the case of Harvard psychiatry professor Joseph Biederman who, after pioneering aggressively medicating kids, was found to be in the pocket of the drug companies. But this kind of press has also made it easier to conflate what the drug companies are doing, which is basically pushing medication at all costs, with what psychiatrists are doing. Too often, we let the drug companies dictate how we see mental health issues today.

In your opinion, are any children being overmedicated?

There are populations where over-medication is going on. Children on [medical benefits], for example, are being given anti-psychotics at a much higher rate than upper-middle-class children. But the press is mainly about upper-middle-class families. I’ve found if you say what everybody already thinks, people will rally to what you’re saying and celebrate it as truth.

The experience of having a child with real mental health issues — as opposed to regular everyday anxieties or depressions — is a very foreign experience; it’s hard to have compassion and empathy for something completely foreign to you. And it’s scary. We really want to believe that if children have problems, then their parents did something to cause their problems. The idea is that your parents screw you up — it’s hard-wired into us — so that when you hear about children with problems, your first thought is, “The mother must work too many hours” or “The parents are too competitive” or “They’re cold.” Of course, parents do have the ability to make their children happy or unhappy, but there is also a biological predisposition and temperament. The interplay between environment and what is inborn is a very important relationship. As I say in the book, the main paradigm for understanding the interplay of genes and environment now is “biology loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger.” But we want the narrative that explains it all away. We like to believe we can protect against this.

But we don’t know the long-term effects of these medications on brain development, right?

We do know that with all these drugs — SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] included — there are side effects for the adults and children who take them. But you’re right in the long term, we don’t know. So this is part of the torture that parents go through in deciding to put their kids on medication.

What advice would you give parents who are trying to get appropriate care for their mentally ill children?

There are a lot of online communities for parents of children with various issues, and advocacy organizations like the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill where parents can get the help they’re entitled to. In public schools, for example, it’s a question of knowing how to work the system and what your rights are, who to talk to, how to stand up for your child, what forms to request, etc.

Paediatricians can also make recommendations for mental health specialists and can track the child over time. It’s important to have somebody else keeping an eye out, watching what works and doesn’t. But how many pediatricians, especially ones who accept health insurance, take that kind of time? The average pediatrician visit is 11 minutes. There has to be a way for longer visits to exist and be reimbursed.

There are also terrific books out there. For example, Making the System Work for Your Child with ADHD by Peter Jensen really lays out for parents what to do to get help.

So you would argue that children in fact are not being over-medicated?

Ninety five percent of American children are not being medicated at all. You might say, “Well 5% is still 1 in 20,” but that doesn’t make an argument for gross over-medication.

Look, nobody wants to stuff their kids full of chemicals. Nobody wants to interfere in ways that nobody understands with the growth of their kids’ brains. But for doctors who work with these kids and see how they suffer — and how limited their lives are — and then see how medication and therapy can bring these kids more of a full childhood, a “normal” life, one the child deserves to have — if we have that choice, why would we deprive children of those experiences?

Those at highest risk 60 percent higher — had given birth five or more times. It’s not a matter of “the fewer births, the better,” though. Giving birth once, three times, or never added a 10 percent higher risk of heart disease. Four births correlated with a 30 per cent increase in risk.

Pregnancy complications, such as high blood pressure and pregnancy-related diabetes, or birth-related complications did not explain the link between number of births and later heart disease and stroke risk.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm noted that pregnancy leads to significant changes in how blood flows in and through blood vessels. That can alter risk for heart disease and stroke. It’s hoped that studying these changes can lead to a greater understanding of heart disease in women.

This study is significant because of its size and the conclusive nature of its findings. Most other studies have been small and had conflicting results. Given that Sweden has generous health care and maternity leave granted to all citizens, I do wonder if the results would be the same here.

It’s not just that your kids are going to get all uppity and in your face after they completely trounce you in Mario Kart or Bowling, playing the Wii can actually be physically dangerous — at least, that’s the warning one doctor is giving after suffering from infraspinatus tendinitis — an inflammation of the back of the shoulder — himself, caused by a Christmas Day round of Wii Tennis.  So should we all put our video game systems up for sale on eBay?

Video game-related injuries are nothing new — my mates and I were well acquainted with what we called “Robotron Elbow” nearly thirty years ago — but the unique properties of the Nintendo Wii system offer additional opportunities for harm that other systems do not.

Dr. Bill Elliott says that people are getting walloped by overly enthusiastic players and the Wii Fit balance board — an amazing bit of technology, in my opinion — has been responsible for at least one broken foot.  I know my kids get pretty wild when they play some of the more active games.

Still, Dr. Elliott notes that, in the grand scheme of things, the Wii is probably not a serious threat to anyone’s health but that it doesn’t hurt to be a little cautious and “avoid the same repetitive activity day after day.”  Sounds like a good idea to me.

Photo: click