Hopping Mad
What would you, as a parent, do to help your child get ahead? Would you edit his college application essay? Shuttle him from violin lessons to soccer practice? Would you jump the ropes at your community’s Easter egg hunt and elbow other parents to ensure he gets his share of chocolate-filled plastic eggs?
If you answered "yes" to that last one, and you live in Colorado Springs, CO, then it’s your fault that the annual egg hunt at Bancroft Park has been cancelled. In your defense, you can always claim you were just trying to help your child earn more money than his peers when he grows up. If you are that desperate, ruthless parent, I have only one question for you: are you going to finish that chocolate bunny?
If you’re the parent of a middle schooler with an unhealthy body mass index (BMI), don’t despair! Okay, despair some, because you’re still the parent of a middle schooler, and there’s plenty to despair about, let me tell you. What I’m really saying is don’t assume your child’s BMI when he starts sixth grade determines his BMI at the end of eighth grade. A new study in Pediatrics shows that middle schoolers’ BMI’s move all over the map, just like their emotions.
The best news from this study is that over a third of kids who started middle school in the overweight range moved to the healthy zone by the end. As fortune would have it, 13% of healthy-weight sixth-graders finished middle school overweight. Researchers were unable to pinpoint any factors such as household education level, gender, race, pubertal status, or height changes that predicted who would go which way. Subgroup analysis did, however, demonstrate that 89% of middle-schoolers who thought Justin Bieber was "awesome" in sixth grade decided by eighth grade he was "lame." So, like I said, don’t despair.
It seems the pediatric literature was full of such good news-bad news scenarios this week. The organization Safe Kids Worldwide just published their report on accidental poisonings in the US, and the good news is that childhood poisoning deaths are now only half what they were in the 1970’s, numbers that reflect similar trends in automotive safety and bell-bottom strangulations.
The bad news is that 60,000 children visit emergency departments each year for poisonings, with accidental medication ingestions and overdoses account for the lion’s share. Safe Kids blames an aging population, the rising popularity of medications to control pain and hypertension, and the fact that pills can be divided evenly into those that look like Red Hots and those that look like Tic Tacs. Safe Kids suggests caretakers follow their "Up, Away, And Out Of Sight" program, which I was surprised to learn refers to medication safety tips and not to expenditures by political "super PACs."
As if the news were not already as mixed up as a middle-schooler’s social life, researchers in Pediatrics also published an analysis of deaths from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) over the decades. Again, there is good news: the "Back To Sleep" campaign that began in the mid-1990s led to a sharp drop in SIDS deaths. But you knew the news wouldn’t all be good, or there wouldn’t be anything to study. While prone sleep continues to contribute to SIDS deaths, around one-third of victims are discovered supine. The pithy "back to sleep" slogan appears to need a little revision. The new slogan to be printed on diapers, onesies, and posters will be, "Back To Sleep, and also put your baby to sleep on a firm surface, not in your bed, not with you or another adult, not on his side, not overbundled, don’t cover his face, and don’t smoke or drink while you’re pregnant." Anticipate seeing this new slogan in a much smaller font.
I’d elaborate, but I have to get back to my mixed martial arts training. Our neighborhood Easter egg hunt is coming soon.