Michele Cheplic | More from this Blogger

I am a survivor.

I hosted a party for 25, five year olds, and lived to write about it.

Now that the party is over, I can honestly say that the anticipation I felt in the days leading up to my daughter’s sixth birthday bash was much worse than the shindig itself.

The key to my survival: Family, friends… and a solid theme.http://fun.families.com*

My daughter chose a jungle safari theme with a heavy emphasis on wild animals for her birthday party. Once we settled on a theme, the invitations, decorations and party favors fell into place.

Here are some of the ideas we used to make her party as “wild” as possible:

GAMES

I printed up some wild animal coloring sheets prior to the party and spread them out on tables, so the kids would have something to do while they waited for all of the guests to arrive. The coloring sheets can be as elaborate as you want them to be. I printed out basic ones and let the kids decorate them with crayons, markers, glitter glue and stickers.

Instead of Pin the Tail on the Donkey the kids played Pin the Tail on the Monkey and Pin the Tail on the Elephant. The children’s museum provided these games, but you could easily make your own Pin the Tail on the (fill-in blank) by drawing a large animal or object of choice on some poster board and making the “tails” out of construction paper.

Since the kids were partying in a jungle, they played Hot Banana instead of Hot Potato. You can use a plastic play-food banana if you don’t feel comfortable using the real deal.

Feed the Monkey was another huge hit with the kids and it was so simple to make. Simply draw or paint a huge monkey face on a big box. Then, cut a large hole for the monkey’s mouth. Line up the kids and give each a chance to throw four yellow bean bags into the monkey’s mouth. The child who gets the most bean bags in the monkey’s mouth standing a fair distance from the box is the winner. ]]> http://www.proparents.com/?feed=rss2&p=3696 http://www.proparents.com/?p=3695 http://www.proparents.com/?p=3695#comments Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000 proparents.com?p=3695 SATURDAY, Sept. 4 — As children head back to school, parents can help make sure their little ones stay healthy and happy all year, an expert suggests.

Adequate sleep and rest are essential, Dr. Peter Richel, a pediatrician at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., said in a hospital news release. His advice in this regard? Establish fixed bedtime routines and avoid booking too many extracurricular activities.

Also make sure your children get three healthy meals a day, he added. Breakfast is particularly important, and eating together as a family helps promote good communication skills.

To lower disease risk, children should be properly vaccinated against illnesses such as tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis, and parents should consider other vaccines such as hepatitis A and varicella boosters against chicken pox. Seasonal flu and H1N1 vaccines are additional options that most parents can request for their kids, Richel noted.

Regular exercise is also important and it should include some form of aerobic activity, such as taking a brisk walk, Richel suggested. This could mean limiting the time kids spend in front of computers, TVs and video games.

Reading and music enrich children's lives, the pediatrician added. Very young children should be read to, and older kids should be encouraged to read during leisure time. Singing and learning to play an instrument are also great activities for children.

Encourage your kids to do their best, but don't demand perfection, he stressed. Keep in mind that each child is an individual who needs support, but not pressure.

More information

For more on parents and child health, visit the American Academy of Family Physicians.

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Stephanie Romero | More from this Blogger

This past Wednesday was the first day of school for my children. My youngest son who just started middle school had been up since 4:30 a.m. He was very nervous and didn’t know what to expect. His stomach hurt, he couldn’t eat breakfast and I think he checked himself in the mirror a dozen times.

I made my rounds in dropping off my children, starting with my oldest getting dropped off at the high school and then it was time to drop my youngest son off. As he got out of the van he had this terrified look on his face. I gave him a smile and told him that everything will be okay. He didn’t seem so sure about that.http://parenting.families.com*

As he walked away, I sat there in the van a few moments. I was remembering his first day of Kindergarten. His teacher had to pry him from my leg. Come to think of that, his teacher had to pry him from my leg for the first half of the school year.

Here he was, off to a new adventure and this time I wouldn’t need to pry him off my leg. I know that middle school seems to begin that difficult but necessary transition of our children breaking away.

After a couple of minutes my 13-year-old daughter called from the back of the van, “Would you just go? He is fine.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes, sticking her headphones back into her ears.

I laughed. One day she will understand why I lingered there, watching him go through those big doors leading to a brand new stage of life.

I am really learning how to accept and appreciate each new stage my children enter in. While I spent more time grieving these stages when my oldest began entering them, I am now seeing how much fun they are. I now see it as a privilege, not something to mourn, that my children are getting closer to becoming who they are meant to become.

Each day will get easier as I drop him off. It will all become second nature and it won’t be long before these first days are nothing but a memory. I may no longer physically linger after my children but the memories of the past will always linger in my mind. ]]> http://www.proparents.com/?feed=rss2&p=3694 http://www.proparents.com/?p=3693 http://www.proparents.com/?p=3693#comments Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000 proparents.com?p=3693 WASHINGTON – An estimated five million uninsured children in the United States were eligible for Medicaid or the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP) but were not enrolled in either plan, according to a new report.

The study published on Friday in the journal "Health Affairs" recommended policy reforms and broader efforts to get uninsured children into government medical programs, including the use of income tax data for automatic enrollment.

An estimated 7.3 million children were uninsured on an average day in 2008 and 65 percent of them were eligible for Medicaid of CHIP coverage, the report said.

U.S. President Barack Obama, who signed landmark healthcare reforms into law in March, has made providing health care to all Americans a top priority of his administration.

Thirty-nine percent of eligible uninsured children live in just three states — California, Texas and Florida, the report by the Washington-based Urban Institute Health Policy Center said. It added that more than half of the nation's children live in these states.

"This new data will help us to focus our efforts and our grant funding where they are most needed," U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. "We now have a much better sense of where most uninsured children live, and which communities may need more help."

Medicaid is the joint state-federal health plan for the poor, disabled and elderly. CHIP provides low-cost coverage for children in families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private health insurance coverage.

"No child should have to skip a doctor's appointment or go without the medicine they need because their family can't pay," Sebelius said, challenging state and local officials to "find and enroll those five million kids."

(Writing by Joanne Allen, editing by Anthony Boadle)

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The county received a $115,000 stimulus grant for the system under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, according to Karen Mitchoff, Contra Costa County Employment & Human Services spokeswoman, which oversees the Head Start program. Mitchoff said the county has spent $50,000 of that money rolling out the system to the first Head Start site. She said the county plans to use the rest of the grant to implement the technology in two other Head Start facilities.

"We did some research and we thought this would be a good utilization for the money," Mitchoff told TechNewsDaily.

A major advantages of RFID tags, Mitchoff said, is that it frees up teacher time that would otherwise be spent on administrative duties such as roll call and recording when children eat - information that has to be submitted to the U.S. Health and Human Services.With RFID tags, this kind of information is recorded automatically.

The system works like this:

When a child arrives at school, the parent signs that child in. Then the child is assigned a little jersey with a number on it that has a tracking device, or RFID tag, sewn into the right front of the jersey. These tags transmit data to sensors placed around the classroom and the playground area. Using software, teachers and administrators can then monitor the children's activities on a computer screen. The children are displayed as moving dots.

If a child moves out of the area, the system sounds an alert to notify the staff.

"This just helps us to know where that child is at all times," Mitchoff said. "Not that the teachers wouldn't know where they are. It's just an assist to teachers. It frees up teachers to spend more time with students and less time on paperwork, attendance and meal schedules."

Privacy concerns

Whatever the county's reasons for implementing the system, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, is more than a little concerned with the implications of the decision.

"I don't think kids should be treated like guinea pigs or farm animals," he said. "Up until now these tracking devices have been used for farm animals or house pets. Now a school district thinks it's a good idea to tag children. It shouldn't happen."

Rotenberg, who said his organization will probably send a letter to the county about its concerns, is worried about the risks associated with making the location of children available.

"If you get into the scenario of stalkers and pedophiles, now it's possible to determine when a child is outside the classroom and that can pose a real threat," he said. "These systems generate location information and they can create audit logs, so the information is not just available in real time but historic information as well. From our perspective that will create privacy risks because parents will be wondering, 'Who, apart from me, knows where my child is at any particular moment.' There are lots and lots of risks because anyone [with access to the system] can get this information."

'Scary news'

Rebecca Jeschke, Media Relations Director at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), called the RFID tracking program "scary news."

Jeschke said she has a number of questions about the program. For one thing, she's afraid that the technology will be used to create information that administrators could use to draw false conclusions about a particular student.

"We don't know how much data they're gathering but with an RFID chip, if you took readings regularly - it's a promiscuous technology and they could take readings all day if they wanted to - you could have what would appear to be a very complete picture of a child's movements, especially if it's a substitution for adult monitoring," she said. "If a child is moving around all the time, will administrators label him hyperactive? And will that information follow that child through high school?"

According to Mitchoff, this is not a problem because although the RFID tracking data will be kept in the system, the children's names and identifying information will be removed after 24 hours.

Opting out

EFF's Jeschke also worries that the socio-economic backgrounds of the families in Contra Costa County will affect their ability to question the risks and merits of the tracking program.

"Not all kids go to public preschools; it's usually kids in low income neighborhoods," she said. "Note that it's not kids in the rich neighborhoods that they're tracking. And why young kids who are too young to understand the implications of what's happening to them? Because it's Head Start, it's arguably a population that doesn't know about this [technology]. And I have some concerns about why this school was targeted because it involves parents who don't really have the time to get involved."

Mitchoff said so far there really hasn't been any resistance from parents to the program. She said her organization reached out to the parents to tell them about the program and only one parent was concerned, but not about the privacy issues.

"She felt the money could have been better utilized for other things in the community, like cleaning up the garbage next to the site," Mitchoff said. "But as you know, grants are very specific and we couldn't use it for anything else. So that child wears a jersey but there's no tracking device in it."

• 7 Ordinary Things Turned Hi-Tech
• Teachers Embracing Social Media in the Classroom
• Sneaky Surveillance: Why You Are Not Anonymous

• Original Story: Program Tracks Preschoolers with Electronic Tags

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For children with urinary incontinence, the first approach to treatment is usually behavior modification - sometimes called bladder training or "urotherapy." Tactics like changing drinking habits and taking scheduled trips to the bathroom can be effective, but often the challenge with children is getting them to stick with a routine.

When it comes to scheduled bathroom breaks, many children simply forget. So for the new study, Danish researchers looked at whether outfitting kids with a sports watch timed to go off at regular intervals would help.

They found that among 30 children who had not improved with standard urotherapy, adding the wristwatch allowed 18 (60 percent) to at least partly respond to therapy by the end of the 12-week treatment period. A partial response meant that the children reported a 50 percent to 89 percent reduction in their average number of "wet days" per week.

In contrast, only 5 (18 percent) of 28 children who stuck with standard therapy alone had a partial response, and none became completely continent.

Past studies have suggested that about half of kids with urinary incontinence can become "dry" with behavioral changes that typically include altering fluid intake, learning proper "toilet posture," and scheduled bathroom breaks, noted Dr. Soren Hagstroem, the lead researcher on the current study.

These findings, Hagstroem told Reuters Health in an email, indicate that the timed bathroom breaks are "the crucial element" in this regimen.

They also suggest that "scheduled voiding is especially effective when the children have a timer watch to remind them to go," said Hagstroem, of Aarhus University Hospital in Skejby, Denmark.

The study, published in the Journal of Urology, included 60 children between 5 and 14 years old with daytime urinary incontinence at least once per week, along with overactive bladder. Overactive bladder — a bladder that frequently contracts, often suddenly — is believed to affect most children with urinary incontinence, Hagstroem noted.

The children spent four weeks on standard urotherapy, during which time two became completely continent during the day. The rest of the children were then randomly assigned to continue with standard urotherapy alone or to start wearing a sports watch programed to remind them of their scheduled bathroom trips.

After 12 weeks, 60 percent of the 30 children in the wristwatch group had at least a partial improvement — including nine children who were completely "dry" based on their self-reports, one who reported at least a 90 percent reduction in wet days, and eight who were partial responders.

Moreover, the researchers found that seven months later, the nine children who were completely continent had remained so, and another seven had become continent. Six of those 16 children no longer needed to use their watches.

Kids may also grow out of urinary incontinence: according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, about 10 percent of 5-year-olds experience incontinence but only 5 percent of 10-year-olds and 1 percent of 18-year-olds do.

According to Hagstroem, most children with overactive bladder and urinary incontinence can be treated without medications or surgery, which may be offered as options when behavioral changes fail.

Hagstroem recommended that parents try the wristwatch tactic to boost the chances that behavioral changes will work — if their child is at least 5 years old and the incontinence is not caused by an anatomical abnormality or a neurological disorder (which is the case for only a small number of children, the researcher noted).

The wristwatch did not appear to help, however, with bedwetting — a problem reported by most of the children in the study. None of the children in the wristwatch group showed an improvement in bedwetting during the 12-week treatment period.

That finding is "interesting" because behavioral therapy is typically recommended for nighttime urinary incontinence as well, according to an editorial comment by Dr. Tryggve Neveus of Uppsala University Children's Hospital in Sweden published with the report.

Still, this study suggests that timed bathroom trips are a "crucial" part of urotherapy for daytime incontinence, writes Neveus. "Maybe we should recommend that the timer watch be included from the start and not as a later add-on in resistant cases."

SOURCE: http://link.reuters.com/dyw98n Journal of Urology, online August 19, 2010.

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Crohn's disease involves chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract. The exact cause is not known, but the condition is often associated with an immune response problem. Some recent studies have found that the risk of bowel surgery is as high as 34 percent one year after diagnosis and as high as 47 percent five years after diagnosis.

This new multi-center study included 854 children under 16 years of age who were newly diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which consists of two main conditions: ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Over five years of follow-up, the researchers found that the risk of bowel surgery in these children was nearly two times lower than reported in previous studies.

However, they did find that children diagnosed with Crohn's disease between ages 13 and 16 had an increased risk of bowel surgery.

The researchers also found that starting treatment at diagnosis with immunomodulator therapy — which balances and improves the body's immune response — did not affect the risk of surgery. Neither did race, gender or family history of inflammatory bowel disease.

The study appears in the September issue of the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

"Our study findings indicate that changing disease behavior over time influences the risk of surgery, and treatments focused on early intervention to alter the natural course of the disease will need to be assessed in studies that ideally involve randomized controlled trials," wrote senior author Dr. Neal LeLeiko, director of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition at Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, R.I., and colleagues.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases has more about Crohn's disease.

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This means that doctors and parents need to be aware that children with sickle cell disease are more likely to need emergency treatment and to be hospitalized, Dr. John Strouse of Johns Hopkins Children's Center and colleagues explained in a Hopkins news release.

The study authors analyzed the medical records of 123 children with sickle cell disease treated for any kind of flu between September 1993 and December 2009. Of those, 29 were infected with the 2009 H1N1 swine flu virus.

Both seasonal flu and the H1N1 virus caused typical flu symptoms, such as fever, cough and a runny nose, in most of the children. However, those infected with H1N1 were nearly three times more likely to develop acute chest syndrome, a leading cause of death in children with sickle cell disease. It is marked by lung inflammation, reduced ability to absorb oxygen and shortness of breath.

In addition, compared to children with seasonal flu, H1N1-infected children had a more than five-times increased risk of ending up in the intensive care unit, and were more likely to require a ventilator for breathing.

The study, released online in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of the journal Blood, underscores the need for vaccination against the H1N1 and the seasonal flu strains, the researchers said.

Sickle cell disease, an inherited disorder characterized by abnormally shaped blood cells, affects about 100,000 people in the United States, mostly black Americans. An earlier study from Hopkins Children's Center showed that children with sickle cell disease are hospitalized with seasonal flu nearly 80 times more often than other youngsters.

More information

The Nemours Foundation has more about sickle cell disease.

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The study published on Friday in the journal "Health Affairs" recommended policy reforms and broader efforts to get uninsured children into government medical programs, including the use of income tax data for automatic enrollment.

An estimated 7.3 million children were uninsured on an average day in 2008 and 65 percent of them were eligible for Medicaid of CHIP coverage, the report said.

U.S. President Barack Obama, who signed landmark healthcare reforms into law in March, has made providing health care to all Americans a top priority of his administration.

Thirty-nine percent of eligible uninsured children live in just three states — California, Texas and Florida, the report by the Washington-based Urban Institute Health Policy Center said. It added that more than half of the nation's children live in these states.

"This new data will help us to focus our efforts and our grant funding where they are most needed," U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. "We now have a much better sense of where most uninsured children live, and which communities may need more help."

Medicaid is the joint state-federal health plan for the poor, disabled and elderly. CHIP provides low-cost coverage for children in families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private health insurance coverage.

"No child should have to skip a doctor's appointment or go without the medicine they need because their family can't pay," Sebelius said, challenging state and local officials to "find and enroll those five million kids."

(Writing by Joanne Allen, editing by Anthony Boadle)

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Ardi Rizal shocked the world when a video of him drawing heavily on cigarettes appeared on the Internet in May and drew attention to Indonesia's failure to regulate the tobacco industry.

"He has quit smoking and the most important thing is he doesn't ask for cigarettes anymore," national commission for child protection secretary-general Arist Merdeka Sirait told AFP.

Six months after his father gave him his first cigarette, the overweight boy was smoking two packs a day and threw violent tantrums if his addiction was not satisfied.

Accompanied by his mother, the boy left his village on Sumatra island in July to undergo treatment in the capital.

"He received psychosocial therapy for one month, during which therapists kept him busy with activities and encouraged him to play with kids of the same age," Sirait said.

"We diverted his addiction from cigarettes to playing."

Ardi's case has highlighted the tobacco industry's aggressive marketing to women and children in developing countries like Indonesia, where regulations are weak and many people do not know that smoking is dangerous.

Sirait said the government had given financial support to Ardi's parents, who were ignorant of smoking's dangers and used cigarettes to keep the toddler happy as they worked long hours at a street market.

"Ardi was very happy when he left Jakarta this morning as he has really missed his father in the village," Sirait said.

Cigarette consumption in the Southeast Asian archipelago of some 240 million people soared 47 percent in the 1990s, according to the World Health Organization.

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