How are you celebrating your mom?
Submitted by Dr. Gwenn Is In
Did you know that Mother’s Day dates back to ancient Greece? Back then, they used to celebrate Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. The Romans had a similar celebration to honor their mother of the gods, Juno and that celebration involved gifts. Mother’s Day in the United Stated was declared by President Wilson in 1914 but was intended to honor mother’s who lost sons in war. According to Wikipedia, Mother’s Day as we now celebrate it, began 9 years later.
I had no idea that Mother’s Day has such an old and rich history. I also didn’t realize that gift giving went so far back in time. The jewelry industry certainly figured that out!
But, what gifts do most moms really want? After 13 Mother’s Days, do you know what stands out most in my mind? Just the day and snapshots of my kids’ excitement as they orchestrated various parts of the day from breakfasts in bed to gift exchanges to homemade cards. The rest is just fluff.
With our world so crazed, days like Mother’s Day are perfect days for old fashioned, unplugged family time. Remember, you’ll have kids in tow so don’t go too far over board or you’ll end up with grumpy tots by day’s end. It is your day, but you are a mom and have to be sure the day is kid-friendly.
And, the kids will need some coaching. Celebrating others is not something all kids are natural at. They get excited then don’t know what to do. Help them and coach them, and don’t be upset if they drop the ball or don’t say just what you want them to. They are still learning to express their emotions and not all kids are naturals at that. However you are going to celebrate and whatever your family structure is, talk to your kids ahead of time about what the day will have in store and help them find ways to celebrate you if they need help. You are the mom! So, you may have to buy the supplies for your own gift. Been there, done that many times.
Finally, keep in mind that it is our kids that make us moms. At some point during the day, take a step back and just look at your family and realize how cool it is to be a mom. You and your family are together and that is something amazing to celebrate. So, while they are openly celebrating you, be sure you also celebrate them. Give them a big hug and tell them how wonderful it is to be their mom!
So, whatever you do on Sunday, I hope you have a great day.
Happy Mother’s Day!
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Resource for Boys’ Schooling
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
As I admittedly spend quite a bit of time in this space lauding single-sex education, it should be no surprise that I get a lot of inquiries about what options are out there for parents seeking all-boys programs. Unfortunately, the availability of single-sex classes in public schools is still limited–though I would like nothing more that to see this grow. It is discouraging to talk to a concerned parent who would like his or her son to have the advantage of an education focused on boys’ needs and learning styles, only to have to tell them that there isn’t much available in their area. However, there are still options.
The most important thing to remember is that if you want to see more opportunities for single-gender classes in your school district, the power to make that change lies in your hands. Get a group of like-minded parents together and approach the school board and administration. Boys and Schools can help give you information about how incorporating an option for single-sex classes can be good for both boys and girls, but the schools won’t introduce changes unless they know that there are parents out there that will support them.
In addition, I’d like to introduce you to another resource for those interested in boys’ schools–the International Boys’ Schools Coalition. This organization offers information and resources regarding boys’ schools, including a database of schools. They can be a good source of help for anyone looking to learn more about boys’ schools and education. (And are darned good people as well.)
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National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day
Submitted by Dr. Gwenn Is In
Today is National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day, co-sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics. It is a day to help promote positive youth development, resilience and recovery. While there are still many more services for kids needing help than there were in the past, the stigma associated with mental illness often prevents families from tapping into those services.
Did you know that in a typical classroom of 30, there may be as many as 2 to 4 children with mental health needs? With that many kids to help, this has to be a community effort involving parents, educators and pediatricians. The goal has to be to help and empower all kids to thrive and learn the strategies they need to to cope best in the world around them.
To this end, the American Academy of Pediatrics has put together 20 tips that address these issues with a particular focus on high school kids:
“What Teens Can Do:
When feeling angry, worried or troubled, discuss your feelings with a parent, another trusted adult, or a trusted friend. Teachers and coaches are two examples of adults who can help.
Find safe and healthy interests that you enjoy outside of school and home.
Write down some goals for the future to help you stay focused on things that really matter. This can help you put day-to-day problems into perspective.
Avoid using alcohol, tobacco and other drugs; these don’t help with problems and often make things worse.
Instead, think about positive ways to handle problems and the feelings that go along with them.
If you’re in trouble with your mood, drug use, or sexuality, get help. You never need to feel alone.
What Parents Can Do:
Listen to your teenager—let him talk out his problems with you before jumping in with a solution. Teens need adults to believe in them unconditionally and expect them to succeed.
Encourage your teenager to get involved in activities that engage her with the community in a positive way. For some this may be sports or drama, for others it may involve tutoring younger kids or volunteering in the community.
Set clear expectations that you want to know where your teen is and when he’ll be back. Discuss with him the consequences of the use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs.
Help your teen to identify other adults to turn to when she wants to talk.
Let your high schooler know that it’s okay to seek help from a counselor, health care professional or trusted adult, if needed. Students and parents are encouraged to be aware of the services available at their school and how to access those services.
Encourage your teen to explore solutions. In many cases, she will know about the solutions—for example, extra help after school - but may need your encouragement to try them.
Everyone experiences anger and stress! Help your teen to find acceptable ways of working through these feelings.
Teenagers can be quite impulsive—never let a moment of despair become true tragedy. If your child is depressed or moody, be certain that he cannot access firearms, prescription drugs or other dangerous items in your home.
What Schools Can Do:
Schools can help students to feel safe and connected. They can provide meaningful interactions with caring adults on a daily basis and offer engaging after-school opportunities.
Each student should have a sense of ownership, attachment, responsibility and input into school life. Schools can also help students find opportunities in the community where they can engage in positive roles.
Some schools provide mental health services on site; others can help students connect with community resources and providers of these services.
What Pediatricians Can Do:
Talk to high school counselors, parents and patients to become familiar with the particular stresses and challenges facing teens in your particular community.
Often doctors are the first people families turn to with mental health concerns. Recognize that the trusting relationship you have with your patients and parents can make you a good first person to talk to. Ask questions during exams about mental health status, and screen for mental health concerns.
Help your patients and parents focus on the teen’s assets or strengths—what she brings to the table to help her survive and thrive in the high school years. For example: goals, sense of self-worth, generosity.
Know what resources are available in your community so that you can refer teens who need support. Make connections with mental health service providers and referral sources, and have information available in the office about mental health services.”
Here’s a link for more information on National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day that includes some excellent links and resources.
The theme for today is “thriving in the community”. Go for that with your kids and you’ll always find the path to take.
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IT Slide?
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
How about some scary education statistics? I know that we like to throw these things out every once in a while to demonstrate just how bad things are, while still failing to make any real change. Anyway, the Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences “Rising Above the Storm” committee informs us that:
Nearly 60 percent of the patents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the field of information technology now originate in Asia. The United States ranks 17th among nations in high-school graduation rate and 14th in college graduation rate.
In China, virtually all high school students study calculus; in the United States, 13 percent study calculus.
For every American elementary and secondary school student studying Chinese, there are 10,000 students in China studying English.
The average American youth now spends 66 percent more time watching television than in school.
I will confess that one of the things that always gets me about these kinds of lists is how they don’t really delve into differences in cultural schooling systems, colleges, etc. But that’s not to say that there isn’t plenty to be worried about here. Aside from the television point, the thing that I find most disquieting is actually the factoid about IT patents. It seems like a small thing, but I think it may bode ill. After all, one of the arguments that is often made in an attempt to refute concerns about the Boy Crisis is that men still dominate America’s information technology fields, which is a booming and expanding industry. (And which, claim the naysayers, doesn’t necessarily require the same kind of formal education that boys have been dropping out of. I’m not entirely sure that I agree with that claim, based on a quick glance at the want-ads, but that’s beside the point.) More to the point is this–if we start to stagnate or fall behind in information technology sector as well, it really makes me wonder what that might mean for the next generation of boys entering the workforce–and what it means about how well they’re being prepared to enter the workforce now.
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Some Fun Shoes Have Hidden Dangers
Submitted by Dr. Gwenn Is In
With the nice weather finally here, parents will be looking for fun footwear for their kids and ways to keep them moving and outside. The problem is the footwear that our kids want to don are not the safest. Check out what I have to say about two of the more popular shoes kids are wearing, Crocs and Heelys, over at MomLogic before you let your kids wear these the wrong way.
Like everything, it’s all about common sense and proper use. Most things can be safe is used as intended.
Where heelys are concerned, if they were safe and reasonable for regular use, would stores need signs like this?
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There’s No Crying in Basketball
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
So, this video apparently comes from some CBS news report, but I’m not sure exactly when it aired. Still, I think it’s pretty interesting in light of the battlefield that Title IX and athletics in general have become. Apparently, it has become common at many colleges to have a practice squad made up of guys to help the women’s basketball team practice.
To be honest, this didn’t really surprise me at all. I never played basketball, but I did play a lot of tennis, where it wasn’t at all unusual to practice with someone of the opposite sex. I (and really most female tennis players of any ability level) wasn’t really likely to beat an equally ranked male tennis player in an actual match, but it was good practice to hit with the guys, as they helped you to learn to play with someone with a certain amount of power and quickness–what’s more, since men and women don’t play each other, you wouldn’t be practicing with a potential opponent, so the world of strategy didn’t have to enter into the practice session.
Obviously, the situation is somewhat different with a college practice squad, since a practice squad is by definition made up of people who (for whatever reason) would not be able to play on the team. But while I may not have found it particularly shocking to hear of male practice squads for women’s teams, apparently some people are a little offended. I understand that it takes little to no effort to be offended in this day and age–heck, sometimes I wonder if it’s a new national pastime. But I do think the objectors here are way off the mark. Is it so hard to accept that men are often faster or more powerful or that they might be good practice partners? Clearly, these squads are not made up of players from the men’s team, but I think that if the women’s teams and coaches are able to determine that this is the practice squad that will help their team win, then they should be able to use it. Do we need to be so ridiculously even-handed that we need a gender quota on practice time for people who didn’t make the team, regardless of what might be best for the team? Seriously, I find the whole controversy absurd.
What gets me most of all (and this is my tennis bias showing through again) is that the objectors seem to assume that this is some kind of denigration of women’s athletic skills instead of an attempt to refine them. Really, at upper levels, a lot of sports are so markedly different (not better or worse–just different) between the men’s and women’s levels, that I don’t know why we can’t stop trying to measure them against each other and just enjoy them for what they are.
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Do you know your child’s developmental milestones?
Submitted by Dr. Gwenn Is In
A new study says that 1/3 of parents know little about infant development. That is a lot of parents!
The study out of the University of Rochester focused whether parents feel comfortable with their knowledge and how to stimulate their infants. 10,000 parents of 9month olds were interviewed about their knowledge of infant development and also video taped interacting with their infants in a play setting. And, 1/3 were found to have poor parenting knowledge nationwide. As we might expect, compared to the 2/3 of parents who were found to have good parenting knowledge of development, many of these parents had low income and poor education.
This study helps us identify a group of parents with potentially vulnerable infants - parents who may need more reminding and coaching of infant development in general. Parenting classes, services, resources need to be developed to help this groups and pediatricians clearly need to reach out more to these families.
But, anecdotally, all parents in my experience don’t really get infant development all the time. Even well educated parents and parents with solid incomes don’t always understand appropriate infant development. Given the importance of stimulating infants brain growth during the first year of life, it is important that all parents get appropriate reminders of infant developmental milestones.
Here are some web resources I find useful for infant development that lists infant developmental milestones by age:
Zero To Three
Hallmark Developmental Milestones
Image: Reuters
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Today Is Shutdown Day…so why are you reading this??
Submitted by Dr. Gwenn Is In
Today is the second annual Shutdown Day! But, it is raining here in the Boston area so most folks I know are stuck inside…and this is my weekend to work, so I’m inside regardless. So…how about we extend “Shutdown Day” to “Shutdown Weekend”? Cofounded by 29 year old McGill MBA student Ashutosh Rajekar, the goal is simple: turn off anything plugged in and get outside for an entire 24hours. Rajekar told Reuters: “People are failing to socialize with each other and they are becoming outcasts, they are becoming more and more introverted.”
As someone who uses technology as part of his career, Rajekar made this great point to Reuters: “‘We are not anarchists,’ Rajekar said, explaining that the group doesn’t oppose practical computer use for such things as operating power plants or completing school assignments.
But if people are using computers to waste time on social networking sites or trolling the Internet and ‘basically finding an excuse not to socialize, then we believe things are not going well,’ he said.”
That is the point, isn’t it. Technology and computers can and do add great value to our lives but can also cause great harm. Too many people are using it to tune out and not live life and that is what is concerning. We wouldn’t need the recent “TV Turn Off Week” or an awareness day like Rajekar’s Shutdown Day if we were collectively using computers and technology in a healthy way.
So, stop reading this…power down…and go do something completely low tech for the remainder of the weekend. Create a rainy day plan for tomorrow that involves something out of the house and with other people. Regardless of weather, whatever you do, don’t hit that on switch!
See you Monday!!
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Measles On The Rise!
Submitted by Dr. Gwenn Is In
The headline alone should cause us all to worry: CDC reports largest measles rise since 2001. This story is all over the news - ABC News, The New York Times, The Associated Press on Yahoo, to name a few.
As all the news stories point out, there are a number of likely contributing factors to this rise in measles. First, we learned this week from the CDC that many children are being given their vaccines too early which likely causes those vaccines to not be quite as effective. We have to worry that the early vaccination of these kids is a factor in this measles outbreak.
Then, there are the issues of parents opting to not give their kids vaccinations either due to religious reasons or out of fear of vaccine safety or vaccines causing autism. I’m not going to address those issues today. Today is about numbers. Today is about the fact that in the last 4 months, the CDC has been reported 64 confirmed cases of measles in 9 states. According to ABC News,
“Of the 59 measles cases among U.S. residents, 21 of the people were between 16 months and 19 years old — and 14 of them claimed vaccination exemptions due to religious or personal beliefs.”
Keep in mind that there is no cure for the measles and before the development of the measles vaccine, this illness spread in epidemic proportions. As the New York Times reported in their story:
“Before 1963, when the vaccine became available in this country, there were three million to four million cases of measles annually. The disease killed 400 to 500 children a year and put 48,000 in the hospital.
The vaccine wiped out transmission here by 2000, but the disease can easily be imported because there are so many cases overseas. Worldwide, measles still kills 242,000 children a year.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics has this to say about stopping measles vaccination:
“Measles is one of the most infectious diseases in the world, and is frequently imported into the U.S. If vaccinations were stopped, 2.7 million measles deaths worldwide could be expected.”
The question to ask yourself is this, do we really want to go back to pre-1963 life? Do we really want our kids exposed to infectious diseases complete with those horrible medical consequences if we have a way to prevent them? The time has come for the doubters of vaccines to take a step back, put aside their emotions and look at the statistics more objectively because it is their children at risk - and all the other kids not vaccinated or vaccinated incorrectly now at risk. What infuriates, and saddens me, is this is all so preventable and in our control.
Strange Proportions
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
Way back when I was in college, taking women’s studies courses (hey! it was the Nineties, didn’t everyone take a women’s studies course back then?), I remember learning about the whole “voiceless girl” theory of classroom inequality. At the time, the Carol Gilligan studies about girls different ways of knowing/thinking/etc. were very big, and one of the things that had received a lot of attention was the “finding” that boys tended to receive a lot more teacher attention in class. Now, in retrospect, we find that there wasn’t a particularly good distinction made in the study between positive and negative attention. And the whole thing was flawed because it started from the assumption that receiving less attention necessarily correlated to lower self-esteem for girls. But at the time, the big thing was to point out that boys were getting more classroom attention and that this intimidated girls into not participating in class.
Of course, the big problem with this set-up is that it is boys, not girls, who have been demonstrating lower test scores, grades, clasrrom engagement, college attendance, and so on. Whatever kind of attention boys may have been getting in school (in whatever quantities), it certainly wasn’t doing anything to help their literacy scores.
And then today, I came across this article from the Guardian, which suggests that the problem is more or less the opposite of that old women’s studies axiom. Rather than intimidating girls into silence, it is possible that boys may be hiding in the background in English classes, where girls tend to shine. The study suggests that as the proportion of girls to boys in an English class rose, the boys performed more poorly. Converesely, in classes with a smaller proportion of girls, boys tended to perform better.
None of this is to suggest that this is somehow the girls’ fault, or that it’s not a good thing to have active, intelligent, and engaged girls. But it is suggestive of the value of single-sex classes in certain subjects where different learning styles may be creating a class of “voiceless boys.” I wonder what the women’s studies department would make of that?
Do you know your UV index? You should!
Submitted by Dr. Gwenn Is In
Last weekend, visiting relatives in New York, my husband went to the Mets game with our 13 year old daughter and some relatives and friends. They had great seats on the 3rd base line, right in the open air! My daughter couldn’t believe how big Shea Stadium was compared to Fenway Park. It was a typical early spring day so they came prepared for the elements with windbreakers and baseball hats. By the time they came home, they all realized they had forgotten one very important thing: sunblock. Everyone had burned noses and my husband’s Irish arms were an interesting shade of red.
Today’s UV index where we live is 6. That is already in the moderate zone!! I had no idea that you could even map a UV index or calculate it until I read about that today in White Coat Notes. We all should be doing this much more!
Today’s White Coat Notes post has many excellent, expert driven sun safety tips that we all should be following. Here the the highlights but I’d recommend you read the entire post and click on the links for more information:
1. Use sunscreen - SPF 30 or higher that covers UVA and UVB and reapply every 2 hours
2. Wear protective clothing: long sleeved shirts, wide-brimmed hats, and sunglasses (many companies have UV clothing even for kids- just search for “sun protective clothing” on Dr. Google)
3. Avoid peak sun intensity hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m - and seek shade often (yes, that does say 4pm!!)
4. Avoid tanning beds - those are never, ever safe.
Two points from today’s White Coat Notes that I do want to reintegrate. First, keep in mind sun exposure is one of the few cancer exposures we have total control over. That doesn’t happen to often in the cancer world. Skin cancer from sun exposure is preventable - if any of us get this cancer, we have only to look into a mirror to discover how we got it.
Second, spray on tans are safe and fun but don’t go over board or you’ll look like an OompaLoompa!
So, have fun in the sun…just do it carefully.
