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 plantations, eating fresh bananas straight off the plants.

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 necessary to produce psychologically functional adults. It’s somewhat like assuming that making prom queen in high school is inherently better. While this may be an indicator of of high social functioning, it doesn’t necessarily indicate future happiness or success.

Also IMO, while responsive parenting may attenuate a baby’s behavior, the baby’s basic temperament will also be a major factor in determining her personality (possibly, also, through how adults respond to her behavior). Babies are not presented to us tabula rasa. Attachment theory, to my mind, also doesn’t credit human resilience enough – though we all have heard or know about people who turn out to be wonderfully functional people, despite coming from the most awful, abusive family situations.

But assuming one takes the precepts of attachment theory to heart, how can a parent nurture their baby in a way that will promote secure attachment?

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 lawyers filing class-action suits.

“Opponents of vaccines have taken the autism story hostage,” Dr. Offit said. “They don’t speak for all parents of autistic kids, they use fringe scientists and celebrities, they’ve set up cottage industries of false hope, and they’re hurting kids. Parents pay out of their pockets for dangerous treatments, they take out second mortgages to buy hyperbaric oxygen chambers. It’s just unconscionable.”…

…Dr. Nancy J. Minshew, a neurologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a leading autism expert, said she had begun telling any parent asking about vaccines to read the Offit book. A brain-imaging specialist who gets no money from vaccine companies, she said she had never met or spoken with Dr. Offit.

The article is great, however I wish they would have corrected the record about Offit’s supposed conflict of interest in advocating vaccines, due to his supposedly being the holder of a patent for Rotateq (a vaccine against rotavirus):

His opponents dismiss him as “Dr. Proffit” because he received millions in royalties for his RotaTeq vaccine.

Actually, Offit is not the patent holder; the hospital he works for (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) did, and they have since sold it. Liz Ditz has the goods on this. Offit is also donating the royalties from the sale of his book to autism research.

My review of Offit’s excellent book is here.

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 here before in the post I just referenced 😉 ).

I haven’t read all the articles yet, but the ones I have are brimming with common sense and don’t misrepresent any research I’m aware of.
Enjoy!

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 in the last six months. Because she had recently been under a doctor’s care, no autopsy will be performed unless requested by the family, they said. Her husband, Robin Scovill, could not be reached for comment.