A pediatric bonanza!

Wow. This coming month’s Pediatrics seems to have been written specially for this blog. The magazine is a treasure trove of studies about hot parenting topics, but the editorial staff seems to have outdone themselves this time. Let’s see:

Mango Mama Redux

Back around the turn of the decade/century/millennium, a young, beautiful woman lived amidst the banana groves on Maui with her husband and her three unassisted-birthed, unschooled, natural-fiber clothed babes. She claimed to have healed herself of uterine cancer; her family ate their raw, organic vegan meals at a low, Japanese-style table…when they weren’t roaming the [...]

Skeptical Parent Crossing #4 is up…

Over at SkepDad’s. I’m hosting the carnival next month, and boy, is he going to be a tough act to follow. Good work, Brad!
Entries for the next carnival can be submitted here.
Enjoy!

Emotional availability vs. AP – from a bona fide attachment researcher

Frankly, I’m not entirely sold on attachment theory. While there seems to be plenty of evidence that being responsive to your baby’s cues is, overall, a good thing and makes babies more likely to be securely attached, I do think being “securely attached” (which, after all, merely represents a specific response pattern) is not absolutely [...]

This ought to be interesting.

Largest study of US child health begins:

Offit’s book a rallying point for the pro-vaccine camp?

I sure hope so:
Dr. Offit’s book, published in September by Columbia University Press, has been widely endorsed by pediatricians, autism researchers, vaccine companies and medical journalists who say it sums up, in layman’s language, the scientific evidence for vaccines and forcefully argues that vulnerable parents are being manipulated by doctors promoting false cures and [...]

Please tell me this is a fairy tale…

Once upon a time, in a far away land called Yoo-Kay, a parenting website polled 3,000 mothers about the stories they told their children. And lo and behold, a significant proportion of them refused to read certain traditional fairy tales to their Precious Darlings, finding them either too ominous or not PC enough.

Another site for the ol’ blogroll

Which I discovered only yesterday, written by a child psychologist from Hawaii. Dr. Heather at Babyshrink is also committed to the concept of the “Good Enough Mother“, and, not surprisingly, is also somewhat exasperated by AP’s exaggerated claims, not to mention some of its more obnoxious practitioners (see if you can spot one we’ve met [...]

Free-range kid meets the LIRR…

Remember Izzy, son of columnist Lenore Skenazy and the free-range kid who was allowed to go home all by his lonesome on the NYC transportation system (oh, the horror!)?
Mom allowed him to go on the Long Island Railroad unaccompanied…and it wasn’t pretty:

Denial’s Due: Christine Maggiore, dead at 52

Christine Maggiore, the HIV-positive AIDS denialist whose daughter died from AIDS-related pneumonia, died last Saturday. According to the LA times:
On Saturday, Maggiore died at her Van Nuys home, leaving a husband, a son and many unanswered questions. She was 52.
According to officials at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, she had been treated for pneumonia [...]