First Year Forecasts Future for Kids
June 30, 2008
The first year of a kid’s life tells a lot about the future. In a recent article in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Benjamin Lahey and his colleagues report that a kid’s behavior during the first year predicts that kid’s temperament even during the teen years. For example, a fussier baby is more likely to behave poorly as a teen. On the other hand, how a kid behaves as a teen also depends on how that kid was parented during the very first year. For instance, kids who got more mental stimulation from parents—say, singing to them lots—were less likely to cause trouble as teens.
As Lahey and his colleagues write:
… interventions focusing on parenting during the first year of life would be beneficial in preventing future child conduct problems.
So, if you think that you might need a little help in parenting, get that help before you have a baby. The first year is no time to be practicing your patience and just learning to parent as you go along. Be ready. Your child’s future depends on it.
Let Kids Play
June 27, 2008
Kids want to play, and they actually need it. So let your kids play.
According to The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds:
Play is so important to optimal child development that it has been recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child.
That’s even more than saying that play is good for kids. The United Nations says that play is even a kid’s right.
Moreover, the article linked to above suggests that play helps kids develop in almost every way that you could image. In fact, this article states:
Play is integral to the academic environment. It ensures that the school setting attends to the social and emotional development of children as well as their cognitive development. It has been shown to help children adjust to the school setting and even to enhance children’s learning readiness, learning behaviors, and problem-solving skills.
So play is even important to kids in school. So make sure that your kids always get time to play!
Fat or Fiction
June 26, 2008
Feeling fat might hurt more than actually being fat. That’s the conclusion of research published as Perceived or True Obesity: Which Causes More Suffering in Adolescents? The authors find:
A high percentage of both normal-weight girls and boys perceive themselves as overweight. Although this estimation is more common among the girls than the boys (49.4% compared to 26.2%), it is found in both sexes.
Even worse, the kids who are at a normal weight but think that they are fat rate their quality of life as lower than kids who are a normal weight and know it, and even lower than kids who are actually obese.
So keeping your kids in shape is not enough. The kids must also believe that they are in shape. So be sure to encourage your kids to eat right and get enough exercise, but also help them learn to know when their weight is right or not.
Social Network Smarts
June 25, 2008
MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites could be more than social. Christine Greenhow, a researcher in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues studied high school students from low-income families, and found that working with social networking sites gave these students a good attitude about developing technical skills and even helped some students to work with creative abilities, like film making or writing poetry. Moreover, this research suggests that the amount of money made by the parents did not make much of an impact on how likely these kids were to use social-networking sites and learn from them.
As Greenhow says:
I think one thing we’re learning is that there’s quite a lot of good things that are going on in social-networking sites that really aren’t getting talked about in the popular media…. You see these sites really helping foster creativity and communication in kids.
She adds, though:
There are some cautions that the kids themselves have identified, and one of them being that MySpace can be a distraction, away from other things that they really have to do, like work and school…. I also have heard them talk about thinking about privacy issues and trust issues in such big online communities.
So parents should keep in mind that social networks can be useful tools for kids. Like everything else, though, kids can want too much of this good thing. So be sure to help your kids learn how to manage their social-networking time and get the most from it.
Tongue Piercings Trash Teeth
June 24, 2008
Mouth piercings can damage teen teeth. Dentists from Tel Aviv University studied the impact of teens getting a lip or tongue piercing, and it’s not good news for oral health. The researchers conclude that as many as 20 percent—or one mouth-pierced teen in five—stands a high risk of tooth fracture or gum disease.
Liran Levin, a dentist and one of the Tel Aviv researchers, says:
There is a repeated trauma to the area of the gum. You can see these young men and women playing with the piercing on their tongue or lip. This act prolongs the trauma to the mouth and in many cases is a precursor to anterior tooth loss.
Given that, it’s no surprise that Levin recommends talking teens out of mouth piercings. But with so many teens pierced, it’s unlikely that all parents will win that battle. So if your teen is going to get a mouth piercing, here are the guidelines that Levin recommends:
- Select a piercing business that uses only disposable piercing tools and that uses an on-site autoclave to sterilize other equipment
- After the piercing, rinse the mouth regularly with chloroxidine-based mouthwash for two weeks
- Do not play with the piercing
- Clean the piercing regularly.
For more on piercing in general, visit Body Piercing.
