New Parent Report Blog
The New ‘Sleep Professional’
Sleep consultant and “new parent mentor” Vonda Dennis’ clients like to say that she carries magic pixie dust in her pockets. How else to explain a screaming baby so quickly settling to sleep in her arms?
But Dennis says a lot of what she does to quiet a baby is simply common sense. “Most of what I tell my clients sounds really reasonable, and a lot of it is basic logic that parents have, but just aren’t pulling from,” she said.
In her postnatal mentoring sessions, Dennis focuses on “Believing in Yourself” and “Instinct Training” as well as sleep training and relaxation. The goal, she said, is “not so much training the babies, but training the parents.”
Although all types of people seek out sleep consultants, Dennis’ clients tend to be high-performing professionals, mostly in their late 30s and early 40s. “It’s funny and cute at the same time,” she said. “Most of them run companies or are heads of major corporations, but they cannot figure out how to get a little person to sleep.”
Sleep consultants such as Dennis say that despite the recession, their business is booming. Jill Spivack, co-founder of Sleepy Planet, a sleep consultancy firm in Santa Monica, suggested that the poor economy might be fueling anxiety and stress in the home. That may be part of it, but most of the parents and sleep consultants I spoke with said the uptick has more to do with increasingly befuddled and over-educated parents drowning in information overload.
“My mother said, ‘All we had was Dr. Spock; no wonder you are all confused,’” said Eileen Henry, a 48-year-old sleep consultant based in Colorado. “I also think we all cry uncle sooner.”
Is Competitiveness Bad for Girls?
Is being competitive a good or a bad thing when you’re a teenager? Well, a bit of both actually: competing to win is detrimental to girls’ social relationships and was linked to higher levels of depression, whereas this was much less the case for boys. However, competing to excel is beneficial to the well-being of both genders.
A new study by Dr. David Hibbard from California State University and Dr. Duane Buhrmester from the University of Texas at Dallas finds that the influence of competitiveness on psychological well-being and social functioning in adolescents depends on both the type of competitiveness and the teenager’s gender. Their findings are published in Springer’s journal Sex Roles.
Competitiveness can be both a virtue and a vice. One person’s win can be another person’s loss and the drive to be better than others, when taken too far, can appear ruthless and selfish. Consequently, competitiveness may have social and emotional downsides and its effects are likely to differ for males and females. Indeed, research shows that competitiveness is rated both as more typical of adult males and as more desirable for males than for females.
To date, the implications of competitiveness for males and females during late adolescence — a time when high school seniors are looking to assert their identities for jobs that involve varying levels of ambition and competition, while at the same time working to establish close friendships and romantic relationships — have not been investigated fully.
Frozen Fountain of Youth?
You’ve probably heard of single women in their mid/late 30s freezing their eggs for later use. In Tuesday’s Washington Post, Gillian E. St. Lawrence talked about taking this idea somewhat further.
St. Lawrence is 30. She’s been happily married for 8 years. She and her husband both want children. But they don’t want them now. And they don’t want to gamble with the decline in fertility rates looming around the corner. So instead, they’ve opted to create and freeze a handful of embryos, to be implanted at some future date when they feel more “ready”.
So, what does it take to be “ready” to have a baby?
For St. Lawrence and her husband, it means having time, which means having money. Enough money to be able to stop working, or at least stop working so much: “We both want very reduced work hours so we never have to look at day care or a nanny.” The two clearly want to be hands-on parents, which is obviously a good thing. But if St. Lawrence is saying it’s not okay to have kids if you can’t spend as much time with them as you want, what does that say about 99.98% of parents in the world? Should we all have engineered our conceptions, and lives, differently? St. Lawrence’s quest for optimal parenthood may be personal, but there’s a broader implication.
McDonald’s McNuggets Contain “Silly Putty” Chemical
All McDonald’s nuggets are not created equal.
U.S. McNuggets not only contain more calories and fat than their British counterparts, but also chemicals not found across the Atlantic.
CNN investigated the differences after receiving a blog comment asking about them.
American McNuggets (190 calories, 12 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat for 4 pieces) contain the chemical preservative tBHQ, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a petroleum-based product. They also contain dimethylpolysiloxane, “an anti-foaming agent” also used in Silly Putty.
By contrast, British McNuggets (170 calories, 9 grams of fat, 1 gram of saturated fat for 4 pieces) lists neither chemical among its ingredients.
“I would certainly choose the British nuggets over the American” says Ruth Winter, author of “A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives.”
McDonald’s says the differences are based on the local tastes: In the United States, McNuggets are coated and then cooked, in the United Kingdom, they are cooked and then coated. As a result, the British McNuggets absorb less oil and have less fat.
“You would find that if you looked at any of our core food items. You’d see little, regional differences,” says Lisa McComb, who handles global media relations for McDonald’s, which has more than 32,000 restaurants in 117 countries. “We do taste testing of all our food items on an ongoing basis.”
One apparent difference is only a matter of labeling, according to McComb. U.K. McNuggets list ground celery and pepper, which are labeled simply as “spices” in the United States, she says.
Marion Nestle, a New York University professor and author of “What to Eat,” says the tertiary butylhydroquinone and dimethylpolysiloxane in the McNuggets probably pose no health risks. As a general rule, though, she advocates not eating any food with an ingredient you can’t pronounce.
Dimethylpolysiloxane is used as a matter of safety to keep the oil from foaming, McComb says. The chemical is a form of silicone also used in cosmetics and Silly Putty. A review of animal studies by The World Health Organization found no adverse health effects associated with dimethylpolysiloxane.
Study Says Sex During Pregnancy, Nursing, and Parenthood Varies
From the positive pregnancy test to weaning an infant typically takes up to two years, and involves major relationship changes, some wonderful, others challenging. Unfortunately, most pregnancy guides don’t have much to say about the sexual issues of pregnancy and new parenthood. That’s why sex educators Anne Semans and Cathy Winks interviewed 700 women about sex during and after pregnancy for their book Sexy Mamas. Their book makes no claim to be representative, but it demonstrates that the conventional wisdom is far from the whole story.
The conventional wisdom holds that women’s libidos decrease during the first trimester because of the enormous emotional shift into pregnancy and because of morning sickness, which may last much of the day. Libido rebounds during the second trimester, only to fall again during the third because of fatigue and the awkwardness of having a huge belly.
But Semans and Winks found that pregnant women’s feelings about sex vary tremendously. “Some experienced a sexual awakening,” Semans says, “others felt turned off.
Men may also experience libido changes during the wife’s pregnancy. Swedish researchers studied 112 pregnant couples. Some of the men loved sex with a pregnant wife, while others lost interest, especially during the third trimester.
Do More Friends=Better Grades?
School friends may play a major role in your teen’s academic success, a new study suggests.
It included 629 12th-graders in Los Angeles who filled out a questionnaire and then kept a record of activities such as time spent studying and time spent with school friends and out-of-school friends.
Students with higher grade-point averages (GPAs) had more school friends than out-of-school friends. The more school friends, the higher the GPA.
“We found that within an adolescent’s friendship group, those with a higher proportion of friends who attended the same school received higher grades,” Melissa R. Witkow, an assistant professor of psychology at Willamette University, said in a University of California, Los Angeles, news release. “This is partially because in-school friends are more likely to be achievement-oriented and share and support school-related activities, including studying, because they are all in the same environment.”
The Dangers of Lithium Cell Batteries for Children
Last fall, 13-month-old Aidan Truett of Hamilton, Ohio, developed what seemed like an upper respiratory infection. He lost interest in food and vomited a few times, but doctors attributed it to a virus. After nine days of severe symptoms and more doctor visits, the hospital finally ordered an X-ray to look for pneumonia.
What they found instead was totally unexpected. The child had ingested a “button” battery, one of those flat silver discs used to power remote controls, toys, musical greeting cards, bathroom scales and other home electronics.
The battery was surgically removed the next day, and Aidan was sent home. But what neither the doctors nor his parents realized was that the damage had been done. The battery’s current had set off a chemical reaction in the child’s esophagus, burning through both the esophageal wall and attacking the aorta. Two days after the battery was removed, Aidan began coughing blood, and soon died from his injuries.
To this day, Aidan’s parents don’t know where the battery came from. “This is something I would never want another parent to live with,” said Michelle Truett, Aidan’s mother. “I was oblivious as to how dangerous they were, and I want more people to know the danger.”
The Social Impact of Sperm Donation
If you want to adopt a child in the United States, you’ll face an array of bureaucratic roadblocks and invasive interrogations. Adoption agencies will assess your finances, your relationships, and your fitness as a potential guardian. The interests of the child, not the desires of the would-be parent, will be treated as paramount throughout.
If you want to procure sperm or eggs, the process is completely different. You can shop for gametes the way you’d go shopping for a house or a car — buying ova from an Ivy League undergraduate, or sperm from a 6-foot-8, athletic, blue-eyed Dane. The person selling you the right to bear and rear their biological offspring can do so anonymously, with no future strings attached at all.
The result is a freewheeling fertility marketplace whose impact on American life keeps increasing. Sperm donations generate between 30,000 and 60,000 conceptions every year, and roughly 6,000 children are conceived through egg donation annually as well. About a million American adults, if not more, are the biological children of sperm donors.
Not surprisingly, these Americans have a complicated relationship to the reproductive marketplace that made their existence possible.
Studies Link Autism to Infertility Treatments
Every parent of a child with autism wonders what might have caused the disorder. Does it secretly run in the family? Was there a toxic exposure during pregnancy? An infection in early infancy? Was the mother or father too old?
Amy Sawelson Landes of Tarzana, Calif., has asked herself all of these questions, plus one more: Could the fact that she had taken an infertility drug to get pregnant have contributed to her son Ted’s autism? “It was one of the first things I wondered about,” says Landes, who was 37 when Ted was born 18 years ago.
A study presented Wednesday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Philadelphia provides some of strongest evidence to date that Landes might be onto something. The study, conducted by a team at the Harvard School of Public Health, found that autism was nearly twice as common among the children of women who were treated with the ovulation-inducing drug Clomid and other similar drugs than women who did not suffer from infertility, and the link persisted even after researchers accounted for the women’s age.
Moreover, the association between fertility drugs and autism appeared to strengthen with exposure: the longer women reported being treated for infertility, the higher the chances their child had an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
A second paper presented at the conference by an Israeli team found an association between autism risk and in vitro fertilization, which also involves the use of drugs that stimulate ovulation. Taken together, the studies add to a growing body of evidence that a history of infertility and treatment for infertility could play a role in causing autism. However, the papers raise more questions than they answer.
The Harvard study was the first to look specifically at Clomid-type drugs and autism. It was a large study involving data from 3,985 women — all of them nurses; 111 reported having a child with autism. However the data was based on questionnaires completed by the women, rather than clinical records, so there was no way to confirm the history or timing of treatment for infertility or autism diagnosis. Nor did researchers have access to information on whether the affected children were born prematurely, whether they were twins or triplets, or whether they had low birth weights.
World Blood Donor Day: 6/14-6/20
Many Americans consider giving blood to be an important act of community service, however, less than 10 percent donate on an annual basis. Incredibly, if just one percent more donated–less than four million Americans–the nation’s blood shortages would disappear for the foreseeable future. To help close this gap, Nexcare Brand and America’s Blood Centers are partnering on the second annual give program, a nationwide blood donation initiative kicking off on World Blood Donor Day, Monday, June 14th, and extending through Sunday, June 20th.
With the support of hundreds of participating local blood centers, the give program inspires Americans with a message of hope, and helps them to spread the word by distributing limited-edition Nexcare Bandages marked with the word give.
World Blood Donor Day comes at an important time each year. As local blood centers face “summer shortages,” the nation’s blood supply comes under strain due to less donations because of increased vacation schedules and other seasonal distractions that tend to take place in the summer months. World Blood Donor Day reminds Americans to donate and enables them to help make a impact in reducing these shortages.
The 2010 give Bandages are inspired by both the patriotic act of giving blood as well as Flag Day, which will also be recognized on June 14, 2010. This collection of three Nexcare bandages are designed to represent the American flag signify the everyday hero in each American who commits to saving lives by donating blood.
Additionally, there’s a dedicated website, www.nexcaregive.com, where visitors can share their story, get directions to our local blood center and register to receive coupons and a free sampling of bandages.
Did You Know? Facts About Blood Donation
• One pint of blood can save up to three lives
• Every two seconds, someone needs blood
• Most Americans will require a blood transfusion at some point in their lives
• Less than 10% of Americans donate blood on an annual basis
• If one percent more Americans gave blood, all national blood shortages would disappear for the foreseeable future
• There is no substitute for human blood
• Donors can give whole blood up to six times a year
