Pictures, once shared on the Internet are out there to stay, with no guarantee you can delete them. It’s not just drunken photos on FaceBook or MySpace that might come back to haunt your teen at job time, that you have to worry about.

Innocent photos, in combination with other personal information posted and shared online, can provide more than enough details for a predator to stalk your child. Take a picture of a cheerleader, standing in front of their house, with the address showing.  

From just this one photo, any interested observer can find out just about everything they need to know. The neighborhood they live in, the economic class they belong to, the color and design of their cheerleader uniform and potentially the school they attend, how sophisticated or not they appear. You get the picture.

We need to teach our children to be very careful what information they share, and with whom. What they think is private often isn’t.

- Bob Kessinger, CyberPatrol

Bob is the co-author of Surfing Among the Cyber Sharks: Parent’s Guide to Protecting Children and Teens from Online Risk - June, 2009.

Lice is part of life, especially for parents of girls in kindergarten through about third grade. At our school, lice checks are always done in the morning, on dry-haired kids. Research, and practical experience, says that lice checks need to be done on wet hair. This is when you can see not only the nits (the eggs), but the actual moving lice which spread the epidemic.

living lice are the moving transmitters of the epidemic, and visual inspection found only 6 cases, while wet combing found 19. In other words, the odds of finding moving lice were about three times higher with wet combing.

[From Vital Signs - Combing Wet Hair May Be Best Way to Find Lice - NYTimes.com]

Happy nit picking. No one likes lice, but it’s just part of growing up.

This one hits closer to home since I was already 43 when w had our first.

A recently released study finds that children of older dads score lower on IQ tests even after weighing socioeconomic factors.
Australian and US researchers analyzed test results of more than 33,000 US born children born to fathers between the ages of 14 and 66. The tests included reasoning, concentration, learning, memory and speaking and reading skills, at eight months, four years and seven years.

[From Fatherhood Examiner: Older Dads Father Dumber Kids?]

The lead author, John McGrath says that he was surprised by the results, since a lot of the “blame” for DNA errors usually goes to older eggs in the mom. Luckily, McGrath says the “effect we see is very small.”

Despite my advanced age, my kids are still among the smartest, most beautiful and well-behaved on the planet.

Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?

The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer — beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone — he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July.

It was an inexplicable, inexcusable mistake, but was it a crime? That was the question for a judge to decide.

[From Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? Gene Weingarten Reports. - washingtonpost.com]

This is a particularly chilling article on how leaving babies in the back seat of cars to die in a closed car is a tragedy that happens to all sorts of people. As a society, we demonize these poor people who already have suffered the worst event that could ever happen to a mom or dad. And then, we subject them to criminal prosecution. The truth is that this is a horrible unintended consequences of an unrelated safety issue. When airbags were put in cars, new laws required babies and children to move to the back seat, putting them out of sight, and sometimes tragically, out-of-mind.

What do peaches, apples, sweet bell peppers, celery, nectarines, strawberries, cherries, lettuce, imported grapes and pears all have in common? Research done by the respected Environmental Working Group (EWG) determined from 45 produce items these 10 typically have the highest amounts of residual pesticides. So make them your priority when buying organic.

Alternatively, join one of the several organic farm-to-home delivery services such as Planet Organics

or Spud.

Here are the relevant links for more info:

http://www.foodnews.org

http://www.planetorganics.com

http://www.spud.com

http://livepower.org

A pox party is a party held by parents for the purpose of infecting their children with childhood diseases, most commonly chicken pox.

Would you, could you infect your child with a disease, to avoid the controversial avoidance of childhood immunizations?

In our careful watch to ensure our baby slept on his back to avoid SIDS, our newborn son started to develop a flat head. While only a cosmetic concern, our pediatrician recommended we put him on his side while sleeping to mitigate the potential problem. The challenge was, our active son actually rolled over by himself at 1 week, so was not likely to stay on his side.
We found the Symmetry Sleep Positioner useful to keep him on his side (and rotated sides). In the months before he was able to really move on his own, we place him in the SSP within his crib, and he slept comfortably. The device stopped being useful once he could roll himself off of it, but by then he was moving enough that the flat head syndrome was not an issue.
While we never used the caliper to actually measure change, the improvement was visible.

Here is more information on eliminating what appears to be the worst plastic in your drawer: BPA or Bisphenol-A.

BPA is a chemical compound used to make polycarbonate plastic. BPA has been linked to cancer, infertility, obesity, and diabetes. In animal studies, BPA has been found to cause the early onset of puberty and stimulate mammary gland development in females (Richter et al., (2007) Reprod. Tox, Vol 24(2) p. 199).

Common items containing BPA are plastic food containers, reusable water bottles, baby bottles, and the linings of canned foods. These are usually marked with plastic number “7″. The “7″ identifies “other” plastics including all BPA-based items.

How can you reduce exposure to BPA without overly inconveniencing your family life?

1) Avoid microwaving plastic containers, which may cause BPA to break down and leach out more.

2) Avoid washing plastic containers in the dishwasher or with harsh detergents, which can also cause BPA to break down and leach out more. Hand wash them instead with a mild detergent.

3) Switch to BPA-free plastic baby bottles, sippy cups, and water bottles. Look for plastics marked “1″ containing Polyethylene Terephthalate (PETE) which is considered safe.

4) Use wax paper instead of plastic wrap, especially when microwaving. If you must use plastic wrap,look for brands that are BPA-free such as Ziploc, Glad and Saran.

To learn more about BPA and plastics:

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/300/11/1353

http://www.enviroblog.org/2008/03/bpa-questions-answered.htm

http://pediatrics.about.com/od/hiddendangers/a/0108_env_chmcls.htm

Thanks to the French American International School in San Francisco for this information and links.

We’ve been working on trying to throw out as much plastic as we can. We just got this set of Pyrex storage bowls - $29.95 at Amazon to replace all those old tupperware style plastic containers since microwaving and heating plastics appears to be the worst thing you can do. We still have not figured out how to send food to school with our four-year-old since glass will break and everything else will likely get lost within a week. Plastic is disposable and low cost, difficult benefits to give up.

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That’s what unhappy people do.

“We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more — visiting others, going to church, all those things — were more happy,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.”

[From What Happy People Don’t Do - NYTimes.com]

While the study can’t definitively say it’s TV that makes people unhappy (versus “unhappy people watch a lot of TV), I think we all know all know it’s likely the former. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise since we all know that gorging on basically everything is bad for you. Gluttony, after all, is a deadly sin. Whether it’s too much steak, vodka, gambling, drugs, or just lying around the beach for years (AKA “sloth,” another deadly sin), too much of a good thing is, well, too much of a good thing.

Perhaps turning off the TV is hardest on us as parents. I know that this week, there will be more of our share of Kung Fu Panda and Wall-E than the kids need. We’ll need it however, if we ever hope to get anything other than canned cranberries on the table on Thursday. But reading this article, which can only confirm your suspicions, might help give me the strength to take the remote control in my hand and press OFF… well, maybe after just one more episode of the Backyardigans.

(Editor’s note: Here are more arguments in favor of cloth diapers. Everyone needs to make the best informed choice on this “paper versus plastic-type” debate, but it’s in everyone’s best interest to know the facts.)

Cloth diapering your young one’s bum is not only eco-friendly; it offers a solution to the highly absorbent chemicals found in disposable diapers. Consider the following.

*Babies in cloth diapers have fewer diaper rashes.1

*Cloth diapers are soft on baby’s delicate skin.1

*Disposable diapers contain sodium polyacrylate, a type of super absorbent polymer (SAP), which becomes a gel-like substance when wet. SAP has killed children after ingesting as little as five grams.2

*Scrotal temperature increases in boys wearing disposable diapers affecting spermatogenesis which can lead to infertility. 2

*Disposable Diapers contain Tributyl-tin (TBT) — a toxic pollutant pollutant, which has a hormone-like effect. The smallest concentrations of TBT can harm people’s immune systems and impair their hormonal system. 3

Sources:

1 http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu

2 Whitewash: Exposing Health and Environmental Dangers of Women’s Sanitary

Products and Disposable Diapers, what you can do about it. Armstrong, Liz and

Adrienne Scott. 1993. HarperCollins.

3 New tests Confirm TBT Poison in Procter & Gamble’s Pampers: Greenpeace demands world-wide ban of organotins in all products. May 15, 2000.

Alison Manes is the mother of six, and the co-founder of Go Green Sustainable Industries, LLC. Alison won Tucson’s Business Woman of the Year award from the American Business Women’s Association in 2003 for her marketing work. Go Green Sustainable Industries, LLC, manufacturers a remarkable new sustainable diapering system using organic and recycled fabrics. Go Green Sustainable Industries, LLC, is committed to manufacturing sustainable products made in the USA. You can view LolliDoo® Diapers at www.lollidoo.com. You can also view Alison’s blog at http://earthymommaodyssey.blogspot.com/.