Children’s Health

Mother’s low vitamin D linked to toddler’s risk of cavities

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Women’s low vitamin D levels during pregnancy are linked to a higher risk of cavities in the teeth of their toddlers, according to a new study done in Canada.

Previous studies have shown that vitamin D deficiency among mothers can lead to defects in the enamel of their toddlers’ teeth – which have already begun to develop in the womb – and that these defects can increase the risk of tooth decay.

Dr. Robert J. Schroth from University of Manitoba’s dental school in Winnipeg and his team wondered whether low vitamin D levels in mothers during pregnancy would also translate into higher cavity rates for their toddlers.

They measured vitamin D levels in the second or early third trimester in 207 pregnant women and then examined the teeth of 135 of their children when they were an average of 16 months old. Mothers-to-be were recruited from a predominantly poor, urban area.

Women’s vitamin D levels were mostly in the normal range, but about a third had levels that were too low.

Depending on what definition of cavities the researchers used, 23 to 36 percent of the toddlers had cavities.

Prenatal vitamin D levels were significantly lower in women whose toddlers later had cavities than in women whose toddlers did not have cavities, according to findings published Monday in Pediatrics.

In fact, there was a direct relationship between low vitamin D levels in mothers and higher numbers of cavities in their toddlers.

Besides low vitamin D levels in mothers, defects in the tooth enamel were also associated with cavities in kids.

The researchers believe that improving nutrition during tooth formation and in early childhood could reduce the risk of cavities. They say, “Prevention efforts should begin during pregnancy by bolstering maternal nutrition, either through improved dietary intake or supplementation with vitamin D.”

Whether taking vitamin D is the answer remains controversial, though.

William B. Grant from the Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center in San Francisco, California is a long-time supporter of vitamin D supplementation.

“All pregnant and nursing women need to take 4000-5000 (International Units per day) vitamin D3. There are many benefits for pregnancy outcomes including reduced risk of gestational diabetes, respiratory and other infections, premature delivery, pre-eclampsia, adverse effects on the fetus such as birth defects including very possibly autism,” he told Reuters Health in an email.

Grant has been funded by The Vitamin D Society and the Vitamin D Council to study the benefits of the vitamin, according to his organization’s Website.

But Dr. Philippe P. Hujoel from the University of Washington School of Dentistry in Seattle disagrees that all pregnant women need vitamin D supplements.

“In place of supplementation, I would recommend maintaining proper vitamin D levels during pregnancy the natural way – enjoy the sun, choose foods such as wild salmon, ahi tuna, mushrooms and eggs. Additionally, reducing carbohydrate intake will reduce the body’s need for vitamin D,” he told Reuters Health in an email.

“Avoid sugar. It is a necessary fuel for dental cavities and it burns up vitamin D,” Hujoel added.

Source: reuters

How parents can help their toddlers learn verbs

mom-playing-with-toddler

While previous research has shown that verbs pose a challenge to toddlers as they describe actions rather than objects, a new study has revealed new insight into how toddlers learn verbs.

The research carried out by the University of Liverpool suggests parents can help toddlers’ language skills by showing them a variety of examples of different actions.

The study discovered that showing toddlers similar but, importantly, not identical actions can actually help them understand what a particular verb refers to.

Developmental psychologist, Dr Katherine Twomey, said that knowledge of how children start to learn language is important to human understanding of how they progress throughout preschool and school years.

The research was published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology by The British Psychological Society.

Source: post

TV again tied to poor sleep among kids

In another blow to kids’ pleas to watch more television before bed, a new study suggests increased TV time is linked to less sleep. What’s more, black, Latino and other minority children slept less when they had TV sets in their bedrooms.

“Inadequate sleep in childhood is associated with health outcomes, including attention problems, school performance and an increased risk of obesity,” Elizabeth Cespedes told Reuters Health. Cespedes is the study’s lead author from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

“We wanted to know if television viewing may be associated with shorter sleep duration in children,” she said. For the new report, she and her colleagues used data from an existing study of mothers and children who lived in the Boston area. The study included 1,864 children who were born between 1999 and 2003. Mothers reported how much television their child watched at six months old and then every year until age seven.

Mothers also reported whether children slept with a television in their bedroom every year starting midway through the study.

The average time children slept each day decreased from about 12 hours at six months to about 10 hours at seven years, and total TV viewing increased from about one hour per day to 1.6 hours.

The proportion of children who slept with a TV in their bedroom increased from 17 percent to 23 percent between ages four and seven years, too. Children typically sleep less as they get older, the researchers noted. Still, each extra hour of TV watching added to their lifetime average was tied to a seven-minute decrease in daily sleep.

That association was stronger for boys than girls, according to findings published in Pediatrics. “I think in our case it’s possible that the content of the television watched may be different for boys than girls,” Cespedes said. “The content may be especially disruptive.”

She and her colleagues also found that sleeping with a TV in the bedroom was tied to 31 fewer minutes of sleep per day among racial and ethnic minority children. The effect of a TV in the bedroom was not as strong among white, non-Hispanic children.

Cespedes said it’s hard to know why minority children would be more affected by having a TV in the bedroom. “At all time points, racial and ethnic minority children in our study were sleeping a bit less and watching more television,” she said.

Dr. Heidi Connolly, a sleep specialist who was not involved with the new study, said the research is one of several recent papers that point toward a negative effect of TV on sleep.

“This doesn’t seem like very much, but if you think about it, seven minutes every night by the time you get to the end of the week you’re already a half hour short on sleep,” Connolly, from the University of Rochester Medicine’s Golisano Children’s Hospital in New York, said.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against children younger than two years old watching any television. It also recommends limiting older children’s screen time to no more than one or two hours per day.

“I think it’s unreasonable to expect that kids aren’t going to watch TV,” Connolly told Reuters Health. “It’s pervasive in our culture. But you do want to limit screen time to less than two hours per day.” Connolly also said people sometimes say their children need the TV on to sleep, but that’s not the case.

She said consistent bedtimes, regular bedtime routines and a TV-free comfortable sleeping environment are good sleep behaviors.

Source: orlando sentinel

Why jogging in the park is healthiest for your kid

Researchers have suggested that children who are exposed to scenes of nature while exercising are more likely to experience health-enhancing effects after activity. Sports science academics in the University’s Department of Applied Sciences and Health asked kids aged 9-10 years to complete a series of 15 minute moderate intensity cycling activities – one whilst viewing a video of a forest track synced to the exercise bike and another with no visual stimulus.

The researchers found that after the ‘green exercise’ the children’s post-activity blood pressure was significantly lower than it was without the simulated forest environment, indicating that the nature scenes promoted positive health effects. Data showed that the children’s mean systolic blood pressure – the pressure in the arteries when the heart beats – was 97.2 mmHg a quarter of an hour after green exercise, compared with 102.7 mmHg after normal activity (over 5 per cent lower).

Lower blood pressure is normally associated with a lower risk of developing health problems, whereas high blood pressure – also known as hypertension – is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Dr Michael Duncan, lead author of the study and associate head of the Department of Applied Sciences and Health at Coventry University, said that hypertension is a chronic health problem across the world, so given the results they’ve seen in our study it’s crucial that we continue to try to understand the role physical activity and – in particular – green exercise plays in blood pressure.

The study has been published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Source: The Health site

8 ways to help your baby talk soon

Many of you have been interested in how to stimulate more speech from your toddlers . Most often children just need a little more incentive to get them talking  use what is known to speech therapists as “Communicative Temptations.”

There are many ways of “tempting” your child to speak. Here are 8 Communicative Temptations I have found helpful in therapy. After getting the idea of how this works, you will be able to come up with some of your own “temptations”. If you do and they seem to work for you

1. Eat something your child loves in their presence with out offering them any. When your child indicates that they would like some, model a more advanced way for them to make the request, whether it is using a sign, a word or a simple phrase. For example, if your child points and grunts to the candy, model the sign for candy then wait and see if your child will imitate the sign candy. If your child simply keeps pointing and grunting take his/her hand and help him make the sign for candy then reward him/her with the candy.

2. Play with something your child loves but don’t offer to share.
For instance if your child loves playing with playdough and wants to participate in the fun, you could model the /p/ sound for “please” or “play,” or you could model the signs for please or play. If your child can already say one word model a two word phrase for him/her to imitate like, “play please.”

3. At meal time and snack time give your child bite size portions, rather than dishing up a whole serving for them, then wait for them to request more. If no attempt is made model the sign “more,” help them make the sign, or model the /m/ sound for them to imitate.

4. Limit your child’s access to things like the t.v., toys, food, or going outside. Set it up so they have to make a request or ask for help to access these things. You may accomplish this by putting favorite things up high or locked up.

5. Play turn-taking games such as rolling the ball back and forth, or pushing a car back and forth. Once your child expects another turn hold the car or ball and wait. Look at him/her expectantly if no sign or verbal request is made, model an appropriate request such as the sign for “ball,” the /b/ sound, the word “ball” or “ball please”…

6. Use tight containers to store things in. When your child indicates he/she wants a cookie you might hand him/her the cookie jar (tightly sealed of course), when he/she can’t open it and hands it back to you make him/her sign open or help.

7. Use wind up toys or other toys that are difficult for kids to operate on their own. Wind up a wind-up toy your child gets a kick out of then hand it to them when they want a turn, wait for them to request help by using the sign or the word to operate the toy.

8. Blow bubbles then screw the lid on tightly and hand it back to your child for their turn. Wait for them to request help with a a sign or a word. Model the sign or word if necessary.

Using these little tricks that require your child to communicate will teach your child the power of communication. They will learn very quickly that when they sign or say “out” they can go outside but if they simply cry by the door nothing happens. It is important to be quick with your reinforcement so your child will make the connection easily, for example if you are teaching your child to request “more cookie” be sure to have that cookie ready to put in their darling little hands right away. When your child points and grunts, or tantrums pay no attention at all, or be sure to explain that you don’t understand what they want even when you do. Then model an appropriate way to make the request. Little tricks like these have helped me get most non-verbal children to start communicating. And of course these things need to be done in patience and love. When your child sees that he/she can communicate their wants/needs effectively, it will give them added confidence that will help them in the continuing process of language development.
Source: Mommy seech theraphy

Toddlers Who Sleep Less May Eat More

Toddlers who get too little sleep tend to eat more and are at increased risk for obesity, a new study indicates.

The study included children in over 1,300 British families who had their sleep measured when they were 16 months old and their diet checked when they were 21 months old.

Those who slept less than 10 hours a day consumed about 10 percent more calories than those who slept more than 13 hours, according to the study in the International Journal of Obesity.

This is the first study to link amount of sleep to calorie consumption in children younger than 3 years, the University College London (UCL) researchers said. They suggested that shorter sleep may disrupt the regulation of appetite hormones.

“We know that shorter sleep in early life increases the risk of obesity, so we wanted to understand whether shorter sleeping children consume more calories,” Dr. Abi Fisher, of the Health Behavior Research Centre at UCL, said in a university news release.

“Previous studies in adults and older children have shown that sleep loss causes people to eat more, but in early life parents make most of the decisions about when and how much their children eat, so young children cannot be assumed to show the same patterns,” she added.

Although the study found an association between toddler’s sleeping less and eating more, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

The main message from the study “is that shorter-sleeping children may [be] prone to consume too many calories. Although more research is needed to understand why this might be, it is something parents should be made aware of,” Fisher concluded.

Source: web MD

Newborn hearing screening ‘insufficient’ in most provinces

To reach their full potential, children deserve access to proper hearing screening and timely intervention

Too many Canadian babies aren’t being screened for hearing problems at birth, a failure that jeopardizes their future success, say doctors who graded provincial and territorial programs.

Tuesday’s report card from Speech-Language and Audiology Canada and the Canadian Academy of Audiologists finds “serious shortcomings” for newborn screening and comprehensive follow-up.

“The difference between early and late diagnosis of permanent hearing loss on a child’s life is monumental,” Dr. Hema Patel, a pediatrician at Montreal Children’s Hospital and a mother of a son with hearing loss, told a news conference on Parliament Hill.

“As a country, we are failing our children.”

To reach their full potential, all children deserve access to proper hearing screening and timely intervention, Patel said. The ability to communicate effectively with others is the foundation of a child’s social, emotional and educational development.

Extended periods of auditory deprivation can have significant impact on a child’s overall brain development, studies suggest.

Newborns are screened for hearing problems using quick and non-invasive tests that are done by a trained technician, ideally before the infant is discharged from the hospital.

The two hearing groups assigned a grade of “insufficient” to most provinces and territories that offer only localized programs or where the programs were considered to be substandard in quality.

British Columbia was the only jurisdiction to earn a grade of “excellent,” for screening 97 per cent or more of babies across the province with a carefully designed program with clear standards, follow-up and tracking of births and outcomes.

Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick were considered “good.”

Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon, Alberta, Quebec, Manitoba, Nunavut, Saskatchewan and Northwest Territories were graded “insufficient.”

The report card is meant to encourage all provinces and territories and the federal government to strive for excellence in early hearing detection programs, Patel said.

Internationally, most universal newborn hearing screening programs recommend screening by one month of age, confirmation of the diagnosis by three months, and intervention by six months, according to the Canadian Paediatric Society’s 2011 position statement.

The report card was endorsed by the Canadian Paediatric Society, VOICE for Hearing Impaired Children and the Elks and Royal Purple of Canada.

Source: CBC

Spanking triggers vicious cycle, study finds

Parents who spank unruly children may not know it, but they are participating in a vicious cycle that will lead to both more spankings and more misbehavior in coming years, a new study suggests.

Researchers wanted to resolve the age-old “chicken-and-egg” question that surrounds the issue of physical discipline in childhood — do spankings promote aggression in children, or do naturally aggressive children simply receive more spankings as parents try to control their behavior?

The answer is yes to both, said study author Michael MacKenzie, an associate professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work in New York City. Across a child’s first decade of life, current spankings will lead to future misbehavior — but current misbehavior also will lead to future spankings, the investigators found.

“You can think of it as an escalating arms race, where the parent gets more coercive and the child gets more aggressive, and they get locked into this cycle,” MacKenzie said. “These processes can get started really early, and when they do there’s a lot of continuity over time.”

The findings are based on almost 1,900 families from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. That’s a decade-old research project conducted by researchers at Columbia and Princeton universities involving children born in 20 large American cities between 1998 and 2000.

Families in the study took part in assessments shortly after giving birth and when the children were approximately 1, 3, 5 and 9 years old. These assessments included questions about whether the children received spankings and the extent to which the children behaved aggressively, broke rules or acted surly or antagonistic.

About 28 percent of mothers reported spanking their children during their first year of life, increasing to 57 percent at age 3 and then hovering around 53 percent at age 5 and 49 percent at age 9.

But researchers also found that at each age, children who exhibited more behavioral problems went on to experience more spanking at a later age, indicating that the more difficult children might prompt increasing levels of punishment from their parents.

“Some children are eliciting higher levels of physical discipline, and high levels of physical discipline are in turn associated with later higher levels of parental aggression,” MacKenzie said.

Even though the study shows that spanking and misbehavior tend to feed each other, the investigators also found strong evidence that spanking a child within the first year of life likely is the catalyst that starts the cycle.

These findings put an end to the “chicken or the egg” debate over which comes first, the spanking or the childhood misbehavior, said Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental & behavioral pediatrics at Steven & Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York in New Hyde Park, N.Y.

“I see it starting with the egg, with the egg being the spanking, and then the spanking then leads to more aggressive behavior, and the aggressive behavior then leads to more spanking,” Adesman said.

The findings are published in the March 25 online issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

If parents can stick to non-physical forms of punishment when a toddler acts out, they are more likely to have a well-behaved child at ages 3, 5 and 9, he said.

“During the early toddler years, parents probably need to get more counseling or advice on strategies for managing children’s behavior without resorting to spanking,” Adesman said.

Unfortunately, MacKenzie said, it can be tough to avoid the urge to spank, given how stressed and overwhelmed many young parents can become.

“Spanking gives very immediate feedback, because children will stop doing what they were doing, but it’s not giving children the ability to regulate themselves over time,” he noted.

“But parenting is not an easy thing, and challenging kids make the job even tougher,” MacKenzie explained. “We need to give these parents the support they need to do as well as they’d like by their children.”

Source: cbs news

Violent video games may be tied to aggressive thoughts

Playing violent video games may be linked to violent thoughts and behavior among kids, according to a new study.

The report, based on data from Singapore, found that kids who often play violent video games end up showing more aggression later on, and more often believe hitting is acceptable, than kids who don’t play them.

Parental monitoring of gaming didn’t seem to lessen the association.

“Just like children’s bodies can be affected by what they eat, their brains can be affected by what they repeatedly do,” Douglas A. Gentile told Reuters Health in an email. He worked on the study at Iowa State University in Ames.

Experts still debate whether there is a connection between violent video games and later aggressive behavior, and if so, how the connection works.

The three-year study included about 3,000 kids ages eight to 17. Each year, researchers asked the kids how often they played video games on weekdays and weekends, what three games were their favorites and how much violence was in those games.

They also asked the kids if they would hit someone else when provoked.

Another set of questions addressed the kids’ feelings about violence in general, whether they thought hitting was okay in some situations or if they ever daydreamed about hurting people.

Kids also reported how much their parents were involved in controlling video game time.

Children who played more violent video games tended to have more fantasies about violence and to think violence in real life was more acceptable, according to results published in JAMA Pediatrics.

The effect was statistically small, but might be a serious issue for individual parents worried about their kids, Gentile said.

The relationship seemed to be the same for boys and girls, for kids with and without a history of aggression and for kids with involved and uninvolved parents.

In studies conducted in the U.S., parental involvement has made a difference, so the culture of Singapore may have something to do with these results, Michele Ybarra, of the Center for Innovative Public Health Research in San Clemente, California, told Reuters Health.

“One reason may be that Singaporean parents don’t vary as much as Americans – they all tend to be involved, so it’s harder for our statistical processes to see what effect it has,” Gentile said.

Younger children seemed to have a larger increase in aggressive thoughts linked to video game play than older kids.

It’s tough for parents to know what to do based on this report, according to Christopher Ferguson, who researches the effects of media on behavior at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.

“This is not a very good study,” Ferguson told Reuters Health. “This data set has been criticized before.”

The study design, which followed kids over time and relied on their own reports, is similar to a study that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected in 2011 as part of its ruling against banning the sale of violent games to minors, he said.

When researchers ask kids to report their own feelings and actions over time, certain kids may be more likely to admit to thoughts or actions, and that can skew the data, he said. He was surprised that for kids of such a young age, their parents weren’t factored into the study.

“The research we have now has been very inconsistent,” in terms of video games and aggression, Ferguson said. “There may be a connection to relatively minor acts of aggression, the equivalent of kids sticking their tongues out at each other.”

There is no evidence of a connection to bullying, fighting or school shootings, he said.

But violent video games are a divisive area of research, said Ybarra. She thinks the new study does accurately characterize the relationship between video games, thoughts and actions, even though it relies on kids’ self-reports.

“It depends on who you talk to,” Ybarra said. “Some people think that there’s a growing consensus (on video game-related violence), others think there’s growing debate.”

She believes there is a growing consensus that violent games may be tied to aggression, and that violent thoughts might be the intermediate step in the relationship.

“It seems odd to me that you would say there’s no problem with showing kids violent media,” she said.

Ybarra agreed that it’s hard to draw any real recommendations from this particular study. But, “it’s probably a good idea to do what you can to limit your kids’ exposure to violent video games,” she said.

Source: Reuters

Active mums have active children

The more active a mother is, the more physically active her child will be, suggests a UK study of 500 mums and four-year-olds. But many mothers’ exercise levels fell way below recommended levels, it said.

Researchers from Cambridge and Southampton universities used heart-rate monitors to measure activity levels over seven days. The study, published in Pediatrics, said policies to improve children’s health should be aimed at mothers.

Children are not “just naturally active”, it concluded, and parents have an important role to play in developing healthy exercise habits early on in life.

Run around
As part of the study, 554 four-year-olds and their mothers from Southampton wore a lightweight combined heart-rate monitor and accelerometer on their chests, for up to seven days.

Participants wore it continuously, including while sleeping and doing water-based activities. Kathryn Hesketh, now a research associate at the Institute of Child Health at University College London, co-led the study and said the data from mothers and children showed a direct, positive association between physical activity in children and their mothers.

“The more activity a mother did, the more active her child. Although it is not possible to tell from this study whether active children were making their mothers run around after them, it is likely that activity in one of the pair influences activity in the other.”

She said that for every minute of moderate-to-vigorous activity a mother engaged in, her child was more likely to engage in 10% more of the same level of activity.

So if a mother spends one hour being more active per day, her child may spend 10 minutes being more active per day. These small differences may seem trivial but over the course of a month or a year they could be significant, she added.

Factors which influenced a mother’s activity levels included whether she worked or not and whether the child had brothers or sisters.

Co-study author Dr Esther van Sluijs, from the Centre for Diet and Activity Research at the University of Cambridge, said the link between a mother and child’s activity levels was stronger for mothers who left school at 16, compared to those who left at 18.

Changes in motherhood
The study recognised that once women become mothers their activity levels fell and often failed to return to previous levels. This lack of activity could then influence their young children, it said.

Miss Hesketh said: “There are many competing priorities for new parents and making time to be active may not always be top of the list. However, small increases in maternal activity levels may lead to benefits for mothers and children.”

Simply walking and moving more each day can be all it takes to create these benefits. Dr Ann Hoskins, director of children, young people and families at Public Health England, said it was committed to increasing physical activity in families and children to improve overall health.

“Active play is an important way to develop coordination and motor function skills in the pre-school early years and there are lots of activities like parent and toddler swims, buggy fit and baby gym which provide opportunities for mums to socialise, be active and support their child’s development.”

Their Change4Life campaign encourages families to eat well, move more and live longer. For children, that means being active for an hour a day and two and a half hours a week for adults.

Source: BBC news