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Hi all! I really need a break from blogging. I want to spend more time with my kids and my husband. I am not ready to shut down NewsAnchorMom.com, but I won't be posting for awhile. I hope you understand!
-NewsAnchorMom Jen
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Taking a Much Need BREAK
Monday, March 12, 2012
All they need is LOVE
New research shows love is the key to brain development. FINALLY-something I am actually already doing for my kids. Isn't that such a relief? Simply loving your children is helping them develop in a positive way.
FROM CNN:
Myths inevitably survive long after they’ve been scientifically disproven. Such is the case with the fantasy that mental illnesses can be written off solely to genes and chemicals. Over the last decade a string of scientific discoveries has shown that the biology driving mental illness has at least as much to do with the environment as with chemicals or genetic inheritance. And it increasingly appears that the single most powerful environmental factor is the love - or its lack - that children receive from their parents. So in a very real way we parents are back on the hook for the lifelong emotional well-being of our kids.
I say this based on a thousand studies. But to make the point here, let me describe a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that more definitively than any before it shows how parental care literally changes not just kids’ hearts and minds, but their brains as well.
Here’s how the study was done. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis recruited 92 children between the ages of 3 and 6. Rather than asking parents about how they treated their children, the researchers brought the kids and parents into a lab and videotaped them as the parents, almost always mothers, tried to help their children cope with a mildly stressful task that was designed to approximate the stress of daily parenting.
Ratings of parental ability to nurture their children were done by study personnel who watched the videos while knowing nothing about either children or parents. Several years later, on average, the children had the size of a brain area called the hippocampus measured using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). After taking into account a whole range of factors that can affect hippocampal size, the researchers found that children with especially nurturing, caring mothers, based on their behavior during the laboratory stressor, had significantly larger hippocampi (plural of hippocampus - you’ve got one on each side of the brain) than kids with mothers who were average or poor nurturers.
-NewsAnchorMom Jen
Monday, March 5, 2012
Are your kids getting the right prescription?
I have to admit, I never really think about the possibility that the medication I get for my kids at the pharmacy might not be what I ordered. I doubt it happens often, but there was a big mistake at a New Jersey pharmacy. A child's fluoride pills were switched for a breast cancer medication! Yikes!
Here's the story from CNN:
Some families got more than they bargained for at a New Jersey CVS drugstore when their childrens' prescriptions for fluoride pills were filled with a popular breast cancer drug instead.
"We believe that, as a result of a single medication restocking issue at our Chatham, New Jersey pharmacy, 13 families had similar incidents in which a few tamoxifen pills were mixed in with their prescriptions for 0.5 mg fluoride pills," said Mike DeAngelis, a CVS Caremark spokesman.
DeAngelis went on to say that the company is doing a full investigation into how the switch could have occurred.-NewsAnchorMom Jen
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Is Red-shirting for kindergarten more popular?
My mother-in-law texted me about this story on 60 Minutes about red-shirting. I have two boys who will be the oldest in their class(or close to it.) I am lucky because they both miss the cut-off, so I didn't have to hold them back. If my two-year-old had been born one day earlier, I would have red-shirted him. I guess I can see how it could get abused, but I am surprised to hear more parents are making the decision to hold their child back. If your child was born on August 32st and the cut-off was September 1st, what would you do? What if his/her birthday was in July?
Here's the story FROM 60 Minutes
-NewsAnchorMom Jen
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
5 Ways to be a better Mom
For me, being a better mom would consist of letting things go. I know there are some who think I already let things go too much. However, I think like would be better if there wasn't so much pressure to be a perfect mom. It sounds like this writer from Fox News agrees with me. She wrote about 5 ways to STOP being the perfect mom.
FROM FOX NEWS:
1. Prioritize
2. Rid yourself of the guilt
3. Don't be a career mom
4. Stop Comparing
5. Reframe your thinking
-NewsAnchorMom Jen
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Boys getting the HPV vaccine
Should boys get the HPV vaccine? Is there still controversy surrounding the side effects? I will have a nine-year-old next year. I am curious to see whether our pediatrician will recommend he get the vaccine. Has your doctor recommended it for your kids?
FROM CNN:
Parents have been hearing a lot about the human papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccine. But what was once designed solely for girls and young women up to the age of 26 to protect them from different strains of the virus, is now also being strongly recommended for younger boys.
Following in the footsteps of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending females and males at 11 to 12 years of age have routine HPV vaccinations.
Doctors say the vaccine is most effective if administered before a child becomes sexually active, and responds better in the bodies of younger children, usually between the ages of 9 to 15.
HPV is known to be the root cause of cervical cancer in women, and HPV can lead to other health problems in both females and males, including genital warts and mouth and throat cancers.
-NewsAnchorMom Jen
Monday, February 27, 2012
Sugar added to baby formula
An investigative report by WMAQ-TV found sucrose(sugar) is actually added to some formula. I am not talking about the natural sugar found in breast milk. Is this the start of bad eating habits? Why isn't sugar listed as an ingredient in these baby formulas? The investigation tested several formulas. Two contained added sucrose: Similac Advance(3.5 g per serving) and Similar Soy Isomil (3.8g.)
Here's the story:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
-NewsAnchorMom Jen
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