Why That Lollypop Can Endanger Your Child's Life

When your baby starts to crawl, you quickly race around, babyproofing the whole house. "Don't drop that penny!" you scream, scrambling over to save your baby.

But as that baby grows older and starts to eat solid foods, it's easy to let up on your paranoia. After all, once your child is three years old, you can tell that she can chew well, right? So what could be the harm in feeding her absolutely anything at all, from popcorn to peanuts to lollypops?

Turns out chewing ability isn't the issue. I recently interviewed Dr. Tony Kille, an otolaryngologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin, about choking hazards. He explained that even when a child’s second set of molars begin to come in, after age two, they are still developmentally unable to manage certain foods well. In time, a child will need to learn how to manipulate the food safety with her lips, tongue, and the rest of her mouth. So the whole "but I can see that she knows how to chew well" excuse just doesn't hold water.

And choking is a real hazard, one that can have severe aftereffects, including brain damage and death. One study in the August 2013 issue of Pediatrics analyzed data collected from emergency rooms around the country between the years 2001 and 2009. It found that about 12,400 children below age 15 are treated in emergency rooms each year for non-fatal choking. Sixty-two percent of these cases involved children under age six.

The most common cause of choking was hard candy (yes, that includes lollypops that were accidentally/intentionally sucked off the stick), which was the culprit in 16 percent of the incidents. Other types of candy caused another 13 percent, meat (other than hot dogs) caused 12 percent, bones caused 12 percent, and fruits and vegetables caused 10 percent.

Think that choking isn't such a big deal? Ten percent of the cases analyzed required hospitalization, and many of these also required a bronchoscopy, a hardcore surgical procedure.

So before you hand your child a hard candy, think twice. Do you really want to deal with the consequences?

Source: The New York Times. "Choking Still Sends Too Many Children to the ER." 7/31/13

Fear of Recession Causes Harsher Parenting (Study Released 8/5/13)

When a recession hits, people start feeling nervous about the future. For many parents, it seems that this nervousness can strongly affect how they parent their kids.

Published in the August 5 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a recent study found that many mothers began using harsher methods of discipline with their kids when the economy began its slide into a recession in 2007. These mothers described yelling, threatening, spanking, or slapping their child more often once the recession started.

A few interesting points about this study:

• This held true only for mothers in the study who had a specific gene variant of DRD2, a gene that helps produce the neurochemical dopamine. Mothers without this variant did not parent more harshly at the start of the recession.
• These same mothers did not have the same levels of harshness just a little while later, even while the recession was in full swing. Some experts think that this may be because the uncertainty at the beginning of the recession was even more powerful than the reality that hit later on.
• Once the economy stabilized and started to improve, parents with this gene variant of DRD2 actually parented less harshly than those without this gene variant. In other words, these mothers react to their environment -- whether good or bad -- and parent accordingly.

Source: US News. "Economic Recession Tied to 'Harsh' Parenting From Mothers." Aug 5 2013.

Welcome to Research-Based Parenting

You've read parenting book after parenting book, and somehow you still never feel quite sure of yourself. After all, who actually writes these books, anyway?

In some cases, the answer might surprise you. Some popular parenting books are written by people who carry no credentials at all, who know next to nothing about basic parenting research, and who ignore any studies that may not support their parenting techniques. "BUT IT WORKS!" they say. Sure, it works for some kids. But do you trust that it works with most kids? Or that it's the best choice for your kid, even if it does work?

We live in an era where people demand proof. In order for us to believe in something, it takes more than a quack promising us that he's found the elixir of life. We demand double-blind studies, peer reviewed in academic journals and found to be watertight.

So we don't believe in hocus pocus when it comes to medicine, psychology, or even business. But somehow, when it comes to parenting, we entrust our precious children's upbringing to a bunch of people who have found something that they think works...but that hasn't been proven to do so, or to do so without any other adverse consequences.

Over the past several years, I've worked as a freelancer for parenting magazines and websites, and I've found so many parenting news articles that somehow never make it to the newsstands. As informed parents, we should be on top of the latest research when it comes to parenting, just as we are when it comes to almost every other aspect of our lives. This blog will describe current studies on parenting and give you the hardcore research about what works...and what doesn't.

I hope you gain as much from this information as I have.