Suri Cruise is nearly two and a half years old. Heaven knows you couldn't forget that if you tried. And while she has more fashion sense than pretty much any other tot on the planet, there is one thing that seems to still give us all pause. No, it's not how her celebrity parents could have actually spawned her, nor is it how much is spent keeping her best-dressed and -tressed. Nah--it's that thing where she's still carrying around a baby bottle.
Yes, still. It seems like this first made the news when Suri was more than a year old and still using a bottle. Like sippy cups are so great. Now she's making headlines again for still sporting the baby bottle--when she's not even really a baby. My question is this: what is the big deal? My kid is nearly seventeen months old and he still occasionally uses a bottle. We've tried really hard to break him of the habit, but, for a while, he simply eschewed the sippy cup. He could use one, sure, but he couldn't get the same amount of milk from the sippy as from the bottle. So, we let him roll with it. Eventually, he switched over to predominantly using the sippy.
I know there are standards and practices for how we're supposed to raise our children. I know that guidelines have been set to help us make our way through this crazy maze called parenthood. But with issues as large as world hunger, violence, abuse and immunizations out there for us to tackle, why does anyone give a rat's butt about whether or not Suri Cruise still uses her baby bottle? I feel sorry for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes--they're busy people who are trying to raise a kid and have full-time jobs too. it ain't easy. And not every kid fits the model she's supposed to. Is it really the end of the world if Suri still uses a bottle?
I was pretty much a klutz growing up. In fact, I still am. But I'm not obese (although in the last two months of my pregnancy I do feel rather large!). Is there any real connection between the two? Perhaps so, if we're to believe the findings of another recent study.
According to a new report on Reuters, there is a growing pool of evidence suggesting such a link between children with poor cognitive function and adults with type 2 diabetes or who are obese. A study of British children between the ages of seven and eleven (that started in 1958) yielded the results: those with the worst congitive skills were also the most likely to be obese later in life. Researchers were quick to point out these children were no larger than the rest of the kids at the time, meaning weight was not to blame for their being clumsy.
In fact, factors such as body mass at childhood and social class were both taken into account and adjusted. The findings were still solid. So what causes the link (if indeed there realy is one)? Well, that is the question, isn;t it? Researchers considered smoking during pregnancy a possibility as well as children not getting enough exercise during childhood--which is critical to developing fine motor skills.
"It's not uncommon for girls to get their period at 9 or 10 years old, and with that development comes increased hair growth," said Dr. Doris Pastor, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Taking an early developer's feelings into consideration and getting hair removal at a young age to prevent or curb teasing is one thing, but salon workers see more than just motherly concern from some women. Many pre-teen hair removal appointments are for girls accompanied by women who appear to be trying to make their daughters look perfect.
"I had a mother who brought her daughter in, pulled up her shirt and asked us to wax the girl's back. The hair didn't seem to be bothering the little girl, but the mom was embarrassed and wanted it done," said Diane Fisher, owner of Eclips Salon and Eclips Kids Day Spa in McLean and Ashburn, Va. "I told the mom to wait until the child wanted it, but she refused." That little girl was just six years old.
Humans aren't supposed to be completely hairless save for the top of their head and eyebrows, but it seems like the new ideal is to look like a life-size Bratz doll. That there are mothers so invested in the appearance of their kindergartner's backs that they're willing to pay to have hot wax applied and the hair yanked off appalls me.
Science may not have figured out exactly what causes some girls to hit puberty early, but experts are working on how to help those girls get through it. It is well established that girls who experience early onset puberty often struggle with behavioral issues such as delinquency, violence, drug abuse and eating disorders. A new study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, indicates that more parental involvement may be just what an early-maturing girl needs to avoid those pitfalls.
"Helping parents develop positive parenting skills may help early-maturing girls to grow into healthy, well-adjusted adolescents and adults," said Sylvie Mrug, a University of Alabama at Birmingham psychologist who led the study. As part of a larger study on the welfare of children, researchers examined the behavior and family situations of 330 fifth-grade girls, one fourth of whom had started their periods before the age of eleven. What they found was that the girls who experienced early onset puberty and had low levels of parental involvement in their lives were more likely to display socially aggressive behaviors like fighting and teasing.
In other words, just because your little girl is becoming a woman doesn't mean she doesn't need her parents to continue to set limits and stay connected. In fact, early onset puberty means she needs you even more.
It can be tough to travel when you have a family. Being away from your little ones can be as tough as the grueling red eyes, hard hotel beds and crazy meeting schedules that await you. For parents of children with special needs who find themselves business travellers as well, another layer of challenges present themselves.
In response, the parents have become quite creative in handling a hectic work schedule and managing the care of their special needs children. In a recent New York Times article, parents of special needs children discuss how they manage family and career. One child, with Prader Willi syndrome, took a trip with his travelling parent. His meals were portion-controlled and given to him every three hours. The meals were pre-made and frozen in a giant grid.
Other children require shots given with a specific technique or visits to specialists. Some parents, rather than try to cobble their family's schedule around their job, do it the other way around. Or, one parent will take on the schedule so the other parent can avoid all the appointments and have a less hectic day. Still other parents enlist the help of parents, friends and nannies. Some have even gone so far as to get help outside their regular circle by using services like sittercity.com, which helps match children with special needs with the appropriate caregiver.
The article offers some good resources for parents. Any additional thoughts or suggestions not covered by the article?
As many of you may know, I have a sixteen-month-old-son. When I first became pregnant I never thought whether I wanted a boy or a girl. I was simply thrilled to be having a child at all, and wanted only a happy, healthy child--the sex of the baby was inconsequential. Then, at one point I found out I would be having a son. I was an only child and a girl and knew not the first thing about having, and raising, a little boy. Now I'm on track with my second child, a little girl. I'm nervous and flustered and wondering just how different raising a child of the opposite sex will be. After all, I've had experience raising a baby, but he is all boy, all the time.
Is there such a difference in raising children of the opposite sex? Ask anyone, whether or not they're parents, and they'll have a pretty strong opinion about the world of boys vs girls. For example, when I found out I was having a girl, the pink clothing literally started pouring in. Everything is pink! When I was pregnant with my son I received clothes in all manner of colors, but not with my daughter. People also always comment that boys are much more rambunctious than girls in the beginning, but that girls are ever so much harder to deal with as teenagers--and that as the would-be mother of a teenage girl I have a lot of drama to look forward to.
The only real difference I've come across in my research is how you change a diaper. For girls you simply wipe in a different direction than with boys. Perhaps there's a little more clean-up involved as you're dealing with internal parts as opposed to external parts, but really that's the only difference I can discern. All of my friends who have two children, oddly enough, started out with a boy and then followed up with a girl. They all say that there is a real difference, even if it can't be defined in words, to raising a boy vs a girl.
Thoughts? Is there any real difference? Is it just society straining its concept of norms over us? Or is there more to raising girls than pink clothing that makes them intrinsically different than boys? After all, aren't little boys made of snails and puppy dog tails and such, while girls are made of sugar and spice?
In what shouldn't surprise anyone who has thought even the least bit about these sorts of issues, a lack of positive role models in their lives is leading to gang membership for many British kids, according to the Prince's Trust, an organization that works with young adults. According to a survey, the group found that kids were turning to their peers for support because they felt there were no adults they could turn to.
"All the threads that hold a community together -- a common identity, role models, a sense of safety -- were given by young people as motivations to join gangs," said Martina Milburn, chief executive of The Trust. A third of the youth surveyed said they did not have a parent they considered a role model and nearly a quarter of kids in gangs joined in order to find a role model.
Still, it's not all bad news for the UK. Less than one in ten kids admitted to having been part of a gang (although one wonders how many serious gang members fill out surveys). Even the nine percent reported, however, seems too high and should serve as a reminder to parents how very important it is not only to be involved with and available to their kids but to set a good and proper example as well. I know that's something at which I certainly need to work harder.
Officials in the UK have chosen to ban the word "obese" from letters being sent to parents about their children's weight. Instead the parents of these children will receive a letter saying such children are "very overweight." The move is being called both "prissy" and "namby pamby" by Tam Fry, a member of Board of the National Obesity Forum. Namby pamby? Regardless of what you call it, Fry feels a better approach is to just come clean with parents.
In the United States, we've tried to ban the word "fat" and have replaced it with the word "obese." This may or may not be having much of an impact on our nation or our youth as our waistlines continue to get bigger (while our wallets become smaller!). One person I know quite well, however, was in denial about his weight as a teenager until he saw a doctor write the word "obese" on his report during the physical he was required to get before he left for college. That person, at that exact point, took charge of his weight and his life.
%Gallery-28708%
As for the UK, Primary Care Trusts, or PCTs, are being guided to measure children's height and weight at ages five and eleven. Parents can choose not to participate, and so can their children. In the event that both do choose to participate, the measurements will be sent by letter to the parents and not the children. Naturally, a good portion of the obese children are not participating in the measurements, thereby negating the attempt to correct the situation. Children as little as seven years of age are being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, which was unheard of in the UK a decade ago.
What do you think? Should we go back to calling people fat? Should we call them obese? Should we only be telling their parents? Is there a good approach to any of this? I'd have to go with a quote from Aaron Neville on this one: Tell it like it is.
Is it ok to set potty training deadlines? I mean for ourselves as well as our kids. Way back when it seems children were potty trained pretty quickly. Now, common wisdom holds you wait until the kid is at least three or that each child takes as long as necessary for that child to, er, get on the pot, so to speak. On the other side of the coin, though, many children must be potty trained in order to attend preschool or daycare.
But when is the right time? How do you tell when the right time is for your child? Also, with that in mind, is it ok to set goals, of any sort, for your child? I have a friend who decided she was spacing her children apart enough so that she would never have two babies in diapers at the same time. This would mean the first one would have to be toilet trained by the time the second one came along. No way of knowing whether or not that would be possible, of course, as every child is different, but it's a noble effort.
I would love it if my sixteen-month-old son were potty trained by the time he hit two years old. I don't know if this is realistic or laughable. I don't even know when a good time to get started on the training is. A colleague of mine, who is from another country, said that in her homeland the children started toilet training as soon as they were able to sit up on their own! She said she knew of kids as young as six months being potty trained! And why two years old for me as a deadline? I don't mind changing two sets of diapers, but I do mind the cost (if I go with disposables). Also, the thought of only one child in diapers at a time has its appeal. Finally, maybe what it all comes down to is that it just seems like the "right" time.
What about you? Did you set deadlines for potty training?
When friends of toddlers ask me for advice on potty training, I usually just shrug my shoulders. I don't really remember the "training" part of teaching my daughters to use the toilet; it just sort of happened. In fact, when my younger daughter was showing signs that she was ready, I remember thinking to myself, "How did we do this again?"
Some people think that this might be because my kids are girls. Parenting legend has it that girls are easier to potty train than boys, and at least two studies appear to back that notion up. Researchers found that though boys and girls show readiness at roughly the same age and follow the process in similar steps, girls typically master this important skill earlier than boys do.
I've got no boys of my own for anecdotal evidence, so I did a quick and very unscientific poll of my friends. After factoring for time lost catching up on old business and making plans to get together in the future, I came up with... nada. No one I called could really remember. This makes me think that even if boys do train later than girls, it isn't the kind of difference that makes an impact on parents.
So let's find out what ParentDish readers think -- do boys take longer to train than girls? And if they do, why?
If you are currently pregnant, you might want to think twice before you run out and buy a new iPhone: a recently released study found that women who use cell phones frequently during pregnancy are more likely to have kids with behavior problems. The study also found that kids who use cell phones appear to be at risk for behavior problems.
Researchers looked at 13,159 children whose mothers had signed up to participate in a Danish National Birth Cohort study during their pregnancies. When the children were seven years old, the researchers did follow-up studies in which they correlated maternal cell phone use and behavior problems in the children. According to a Reuters news report, "After the researchers adjusted for factors that could influence the results, such as a mother's psychiatric problems and socioeconomic factors, children with both prenatal and postnatal cell phone exposure were 80 percent more likely to have abnormal or borderline scores on tests evaluating emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity, or problems with peers."
One theory is that radiofrequency exposure from the cell phones caused some kind of neurological damage to these children in utero, and that childhood cell phone use is now exacerbating that damage. And yes, the researchers also took into account the possibility that moms who talk on their cell phones a lot are ignoring their children, which may be the real cause of the bad behavior. Frankly, I'm more willing to believe that than anything.
What do you think -- are you concerned that your cell phone may be harming your unborn baby?
Our household is actively involved with potty training right now, a milestone that I had vaguely hoped would be maybe a 24-hour preoccupation but has regrettably turned out to be a ongoing effort. I suppose some kids gaily toss their diapers aside, shout NE'ER MORE!, and that's that -- not a drop spilled after the great change has been made, a well-worn, self-motivated path instantly created between child and potty chair.
We, however, are firmly mired in the Land of Endless Reminders: do you have to go potty? Do you have to go potty? Do you have to go potty? I feel like a demented parrot, hovering in front of my child and squawking the same phrase over and over all day long, but we've learned that reminders are not only useful, they're downright necessary.
In many ways it's actually more challenging to have a small child who's not in diapers. Leaving the house requires more strategizing than before, and once you're out and about -- well, there's no longer a safe haven of Huggies between your child's rear end and the shopping cart, you know? Plus, new issues are at hand: he prefers to pee standing up while I prefer not having to use an entire roll of Bounty Select-a-Size paper towels after each bathroom visit; potty reward stickers are now affixed to approximately eight thousand surfaces of my house, including, as I discovered the other morning, the bottom of my 6-month-old's left foot.
Despite the difficulties, though, it's an exciting time. Sure, it's a little moist, there are occasional setbacks, and frankly there's a lot more nakedness than I had expected, but we are on our way to leaving diapers behind (one kid down, one to go!). As my son loudly informed the bemused Fred Meyer clerk this week, "I've got THOMAS underwear on because I'm a REALLY REALLY BIG BOY and I go POOP in the POTTY!" He then went on to disclose some disturbing information about hot dogs, but thankfully we were well on our way out the door at that point.
Parents worry about their children. New parents, especially, often wonder and wish for a set of rules to follow or a guide to carry them through the exciting and sometimes terrifying adventure that is child-rearing. Hence, the birth of the milestone. At a certain age your child should be able to smile, sit up, crawl, walk, talk, and eventually talk back to you.
Many of us breathe a sigh of relief to have these guideposts to help us. We delight in being able to check items off the list--yes, little Bobby smiled at the "right" time; whew--Sally walked by her first birthday. Mainly, though, it's the stuff before the "whew" that gets us. Many of us spend a lot of time worrying about whether or not our children will meet those milestones; some of us worry more when our kids don't hit the mark. Milestones are also used as a way of detecting developmental disorders, especially when a child goes far beyond missing a mark.
And who sets that mark? Well, milestones are really just a set of commonly held notions. Thousands and thousands of children are surveyed and studied and the average age of what they do when becomes the milestone. Hence, it is possible for a milestone to change based on new data. New data takes a long time to produce and cement, of course--markers don't change based on the experience of one or ten or even hundreds of children. Rather, the ranges of times associated with the milestones increase or decrease over time.
A new small study has found that television, even when only on as background noise, has a "small but real" affect on the way young children play. Researchers found that when playing in a room with a TV on -- they used Jeopardy, a program they thought the children would have little interest in -- children tended to stop playing and watch the TV now and then, shortening the intensity and length of their play. This finding is in conflict with former studies that found that young children don't pay attention to TV that they don't understand.
When my older daughter was only a toddler, she used to ask us to turn off the TV while she played. She said once, "It makes me watch it," meaning that she couldn't take her eyes off of the TV when it was on. It surprised me, because, like those old studies, I figured if she didn't understand it she wouldn't watch. Now we have a no-TV rule during the day, unless we're sitting down to specifically watch a program. A lot of parents really like to have television on as background noise during the day, however, to listen to as they go about their activities.
So will TV's influence on your child's play affect them long term? This study isn't broad enough to prove that, but plenty of research has gone into how TV affects children. KidsHealth does a good job of rounding up some of that research, and offers tips to parents who want to limit TV time in their home.
When it comes to describing a baby's smile, words like "addictive" and "intoxicating" are frequently used to explain the feeling those gummy rays of happiness have on exhausted parents when they finally appear on Baby's face at around 6 weeks of age.
A recent study has people marveling just how accurate those descriptors were. When new mothers were shown photographs of smiling infants, the picture of their own smiling baby triggered a surge of dopamine in their brain, the same chemical the body produces when a person uses drugs, alcohol, or nicotine.
These findings of the study may assist scientists in understanding why some mothers fail to bond with their children and lead to early treatment. Unattached parents can lead to children suffering from abuse or neglect.
Whether it's from improvements in nutrition or chemicals in the food, the fact is many children are physically maturing at a much earlier age. While menstruation used to start around age 12, 
In what shouldn't surprise anyone who has thought even the least bit about these sorts of issues, a lack of positive role models in their lives is 
Officials in the UK have 
When friends of toddlers ask me for 
If you are currently pregnant, you might want to think twice before you run out and buy a new iPhone: a recently released study found that women who use cell phones frequently during pregnancy are 
When it comes to describing a baby's smile, words like "addictive" and "intoxicating" are frequently used to explain the feeling those gummy rays of happiness have on exhausted parents when they finally appear on Baby's face at around 6 weeks of age. 
