Archive for September, 2008

Parents who smoke cigarettes around their kids in cars and homes beware – second-hand smoke may trigger symptoms of nicotine dependence in children.

“Increased exposure to second-hand smoke, both in cars and homes, was associated with an increased likelihood of children reporting nicotine dependence symptoms, even though these children had never smoked,” says Dr. Jennifer O’Loughlin, senior author of the study.

“These findings support the need for public health interventions that promote non-smoking in the presence of children, and uphold policies to restrict smoking in vehicles when children are present,” adds Dr. O’Loughlin.

Study participants were recruited from 29 Quebec schools as part of AdoQuest, a cohort investigation that measures tobacco use and other health-compromising behaviours.

Some 1,800 children aged 10 to 12 years old, from all socioeconomic levels, were asked to complete questionnaires on their health and behaviours.

Researchers also asked questions about symptoms of nicotine dependence and exposure to second-hand smoke.

Read more at EurekAlert

Because the formative, pre-school years - three and four years - are when feelings of self, God and others begin to formulate, they need to be treated with the utmost care.

An experimental age, children of pre-school years often want to feel (taste, smell, touch and hear) things for themselves and begin to show curiosity towards learning new things.

They learn through personal experience or through their playing activities.

Because pre-school years are the foundation of the child’s emotional and spiritual development, parenting a pre-school child is both exciting and challenging for most parents.

It is an excellent opening to build a better foundation for the kid’s life. The pre-school years - the first five years of life - are highly significant, as the things that children learn and feel during these years can have an impact on their rest of their lives.

Like all of us, pre-schoolers have specific needs. As a parent, you need to know their needs and find ways to fulfill them. Remember, the greater your understanding of pre-schoolers, the more effective the ministering will be.

Needs of Pre-school Children

Love and Care

Many young children stutter, but they often outgrow it by about age 5.

If it lasts longer, there is no known cure for stuttering. But you can help your child overcome this difficulty in speaking. Here are some suggestions:

• Don’t push your child to speak correctly all the time. Just encourage the child to talk, and allow it to be enjoyable.
• Have plenty of family conversations during meals, without television or radio to distract your child’s attention.
• Don’t worry your child with instructions that may make him or her more self-conscious. Don’t tell the child to slow down, start over, relax, etc.
• If your child is upset or nervous, don’t force talking.
• Maintain a relaxed and peaceful home environment, and make sure that you speak to your child in a non-hurried, calm and clear manner.
• Make eye contact with your child when he or she is talking, and don’t seem upset or frustrated if your child begins to stutter.
• Let your child finish talking, and don’t stop to interrupt or correct.

Source: Yahoo News

Moving from parenting a child to parenting a teenager can sometimes be a pretty scary adaptation, it often seems like the child has grown up suddenly overnight into a completely peculiar and hard-to-get-along-with entity.

Any parent will tell you that parenting teen girls today is an increasingly tough challenge and requires much patience, courage, determination, willingness and responsiveness.

While it is hardly surprising, teenage hood is a period of more developmental changes than any other stage. Together with physical, sexual, mental, behavioral and emotional developmental changes, comes confusion and uncertainty.

Teenage years for girls are an especially dangerous period. Risky behavior, drug/alcohol abuse, depression, pregnancy or suicide is more acceptable, and can result in devastating lifetime consequences.

So, strong guidance from parents is more essential than ever to help teen girls go through the hurdles and stressful experiences of life.

However, parents of teenage girls often face difficulty in recognizing their child’s new behaviors and changed attitudes. And the underlying reason is even worse than dangerous behavior: lack of communication, which is common among many parents who do not talk openly to their children about the risks they face.

Making friends is one of the most important social skills your child will learn.

Attempting to make friends, your little one will communicate with others by telling stories and jokes and exchanging secrets.

However, your child may choose friends who you might feel are bad influences.

Parents can find themselves telling their child not to play with these friends. Let your child know the consequences of exhibiting their friend’s negative behaviors.

There is another way for parents to influence children to make positive choices regarding friends.

The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests, “In most cases a better strategy is to reinforce positive friendships with other children whose behavior and values meet with your approval.

Encourage your youngster to invite these children over to your house to play. Try to arrange activities that are fun and enjoyable.” Hopefully this will encourage your child to seek out positive playmates.

Source: Savannahnow

While all parents want to teach their children positive discipline [Child disciplining], it is an accepted fact that getting them to adopt good behaviour is not as easy as adopting bad.

Usually, children are more attracted to undisciplined acts more than disciplined ones because they require less effort and seem more spontaneous.

To teach positive discipline, as a parent, you need to invest in spending time with your children to understand their bad attitudes, behaviour, and mental growth, in order to find out what works best for them.

Remember that parents are the children’s first teachers. You can make your children learn self-control, ways to get along with others, self-help, and other aspects of socialization, but this is only possible when both parents and teachers are involved continuously in encouraging preferred behaviours, boundary limits, etc.

Effective Discipline Techniques

Because children follow what you do rather than what you say, it is important for you to maintain consistency. You will need to consistently follow a set of values that are important to you.

To teach your children standards and moral values, discuss them with your children on a personal level, rather than relying on schools, churches and other institutions to teach them.

In infancy, genes are the key influence on a child’s ability to deal with stress.

But as early as 6 months of age, parenting plays an important role in changing the impact of genes that may put infants at risk for responding poorly to stress.

The researchers looked at 142 infants who had been placed in a stressful situation—being separated from their mothers—when they were 3, 6, and 12 months old.

They measured infants’ heart rates while they were exposed to the stressor, isolating a cardiac response called vagal tone.

Vagal tone acts like a brake on the heart when the body is in a calm state, but during a challenging situation, this brake is withdrawn, allowing heart rate to increase so the body can actively deal with the challenge.

They also collected DNA to determine which form of a dopamine receptor gene the infants carried; specific forms of this gene are related to problems in adolescence and adulthood including aggression, substance abuse, and other risky behaviors.

To assess the mothers’ behavior as high or low in sensitivity, they also videotaped the mothers and their infants playing together for 10 minutes when the babies were 6 months old.

As the children grow, their role to take care of themselves also increases and your need for your children will be decreased, but if you are a parent of young children, it is one of the challenges for you to teach them self care skills.

If the children are young, the simple tasks also need to be carefully taught.

Dressing, making bed, washing hands, brushing teeth, tying shoes, and eating without calamity are some things that you need to take care for your children.

It is not an easy thing to teach self-care skills to the young children.

Tips to teach self care skills to the children!

First show your children how to do the things and make them learn by themselves, so that they should feel it as “so easy to do.”

The most important thing is to encourage your children. Encouragement is the key in teaching them self care skills. When your young children attempts to do something on their own and in completing that task if they are successful or not, you need to encourage, appraise, applause, and insist them to do it again and again. Assure your children that mistakes are okay and do not get depressed with those mistakes.

Millions of American children are exposed to violence in their homes each year, putting them at risk for a variety of emotional and behavioral problems.

According to a new study, children who are maltreated tend to have a lot of re-exposure to family violence, and this re-exposure often leads to increased psychological problems.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Irvine, and West Chester University found that the types of violence that abused children [Types of child abuse] were subsequently re-exposed to led to specific types of psychological problems.

Specifically, previously abused children who witnessed family violence had more symptoms of depression and anxiety, while previously abused children who were subjected to harsh physical discipline were more aggressive and broke rules more frequently.

“Our study has implications for mental health treatment and policy: Clinicians and service providers should be especially concerned about the substantial number of maltreatment victims who are re-exposed to family violence, because these children are highly vulnerable to ongoing emotional and behavioral problems,” according to Andrea Kohn Maikovich, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and the study’s lead author.

Read more at EurekAlert

Children who suffer from verbal abuse can know the pain of those words.

If you are stressed, you might be showing that irritation on your children, but remember that this makes your children lose the confidence on themselves.

They may even unable to recognize their own talents and unable to adapt the challenges of life.

Verbal abuse on children is yelling on them with demeaning language, such as “I am ashamed of you,” “Can’t you do anything properly,” and more.

It causes a psychological effect by continuous verbal harassment.

Effects of verbal abuse on children!

If you are abusive [Types of child abuse] to your child, it causes a negative self image. This is the most common cause of verbal abuse.

Your verbal abuse makes your children think like “No one likes me,” “I am fit for nothing,” “I am always wrong,” etc or it may make your children depressed and withdrawn.

If you have seen such signs in your children, then change your attitude towards your children and show them affection and love instead of abusing.

In some cases, the children show self-destructive behavior such as cutting skin with razors and other self-injurious acts, which may put your children in danger.