It seems that every year buying gifts and necessities for our little ones becomes harder and harder. Now there is a new low that bans the use of certain toxic chemicals in the toy manufacturing since February 2009.

Toys containing the chemicals, called phthalates, can no longer be manufactured or imported after February 2009…

Sounds great, doesn’t it? However, the new law has a loophole: selling of the old toys with those chemicals continues to be absolutely legal!

The agency [Consumer Product Safety Commission] wrote a letter last week telling manufacturers they can still sell their existing stocks of phthalate-containing toys even after the ban takes effect in February.

With education costs increasing every year, don’t you worry how your precious little home genius will afford college education? This mom devised a few tips that help save the money for this important and expensive educational milestone: Lisa M. recommends

• putting money into his education account 4 times a year
• enrolling in the Upromise program: you receive a percentage of purchases into your education fund
  

  This includes regular grocery shopping, pharmacies, gas, stores and Internet shopping.

We all have heard that kids exposed to violent content are more prone to violence.

Researchers point to an existing body of research that documents the negative effects of violent media on children. “A clear picture has emerged that exposure to violent media increases the likelihood of aggressive thoughts, emotions, and behavior.”

But many parents don’t even realize how much violent are actually the movies their kids do get to watch:

There has been a recent swipe of most of decongestants, cough suppressing medicines, and other cold medicines for little kids from the shelves of all the pharmacies. This is further information on the dangers of cold medicines for the little ones:

A significant number of infants tested positive for cough and cold medicines on a toxicology screen when brought to a hospital emergency room for an apparent life-threatening event (ALTE) in a study done from 1997 to 2006. In 2007, infant cough and cold drugs were withdrawn from the market…

The secret? It’s a game. THE ONLY RULE IS: IF you get upset, you lose.

None of us wants our children to go through any encounters of bullying. Yet they will. I don’t think anybody can avoid it at one point or another, at some degree. Schools are offering “anti-bulling” programs, declaring “bully-free zone”, but they seem to fail on every account: except a satisfactory feeling feeling for the parents, of course. You just can’t stop bulling “from the top” – from the high authority. It is easy to find ways to torment, tease, humiliate or otherwise bully someone without attracting any attention from the teacher, even parent. And the worse is that kids who try to report such bulling, usually just get more bullied and hated.

A kid easily succeeds with another task that leaves his peers struggling. Parents, beaming with pride, praise the kid by telling him, that he is talented, he is gifted. Praise is good, right? Not necessarily. As a parent who believes that praise is a very important and integral part of learning, of building confidence, I can see more and more that some types of praise can do more damage then good. Have you noticed, how sometimes “talented and gifted” kid can shy away from a difficult assignment, whose grades can even suddenly drop and he can lose all the interest in school, in work, in new accomplishments? Is it the school being too tough? Or should we blame the way we were praising this kid, how we present their learning process to them, how their self-image effects their undertaking of difficult assignments?

As a vegetarian, who is madly in love with all kinds of nuts I found this study greatly disturbing. How much more do we have to alter our diets during pregnancy? How did kids in previous centuries even survive – their mothers didn’t know anything about correct nutrition and the right lifestyle? Yet, it’s better to be safe then sorry.

Pregnant women who eat nuts or nut products such as peanut butter every day during pregnancy may increase their offspring’s chances of developing asthma by nearly 50%, compared with women who rarely or never consume nut products during pregnancy.

Once the baby reached his first birthday it is time to introduce a new (or old?) fun product: milk! But… which one? There is quite a selection. Actually, American Academy of Pediatrics just changed their guidelines regarding the introduction of milk into baby’s diet:

There’s been a major change in baby nutrition advice, but it’s gone nearly unnoticed.

This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics changed its recommendation that weaned babies be fed whole milk until they’re 2 years old.

Dr. Breggin interviewed by Michael Savage

Q
Years ago Dr. Breggin who is psychiatrist was on this program warning America about the dangers of over diagnosis of ADD and ADHD and particularly the drugging of our children with Ritalin today. So, Dr. Breggin, do you know much about this “new epidemic” of newly-diagnosed number of people with autism?