Feature Channels: Family and Parenting

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Giving your child extra time on the iPad for good behaviour may not be the best idea according to a new University of Guelph study.

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Pregnant women with influenza are more likely to experience complications, but how this affects infants is unclear. A newBirth Defects Researchstudy uncovers the potential risks to infants.

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In a new study using a mouse model, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine suggest that long-term postpartum weight gain may be due not so much to retained fat as to reprogramming of maternal energy metabolism.

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Bottle feeding infants is associated with left-handedness, according to a new study from the University of Washington. The study found that the prevalence of left-handedness is lower among breastfed infants as compared to bottle-fed infants. This finding was identified in about 60,000 mother-infant pairs and accounted for known risk factors for handedness.

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Multiple miscarriages may be linked to the poor quality of a man's sperm, suggests new research. The early-stage study, from scientists at Imperial College London, investigated the sperm quality of 50 men whose partners had suffered three or more consecutive miscarriages.

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Researchers have long known that sick children can affect a company's bottom line, as employees are distracted or have to take time off to care for their children. Far less is known about the impact a parent's work life has on their children's health.

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Wolters Kluwer, Health and the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) announced the 2018 winners of its annual AJN Book of the Year Awards honoring exceptional texts for advancing healthcare quality. The list of winners appears in the January 2019 issue of AJN, the “leading voice of nursing since 1900.” AJN is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

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If your holidays will include elderly visitors, it may be important to do some advance planning to help ensure their safety. Dr. Sonja Rosen, chief of Geriatric Medicine at Cedars-Sinai, offers tips to prevent falls and keep older guests comfortable.

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Establishing consistent routines at home for your teen may generate pushback, but it could also set him or her up for future success.

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Scott Shainker, DO, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center discusses placenta disorders and who is at risk

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A quarter of parents of young children who drink alcohol on special occasions do not think about limiting how much they drink or whether they’ll be able to take care of their child the next day, according to a new national poll.

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Medical researchers at Melbourne's Murdoch Children's Research Institute have made a new discovery about how a baby's sex is determined - it's not just about the X-Y chromosomes, but involves a 'regulator' that increases or decreases the activity of genes which decide if we become male or female.

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Digital devices like the iPad have only been around for about 10 years, but in that short amount of time, they have become ingrained into everyday life and research examining their impact on young children is limited.Tune into 60 Minutes this Sunday, Dec. 9 at 7 p.m. ET/PT as Dr. Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, discusses with Anderson Cooper the evolving digital age children are growing up in today and how his research hopes to uncover the impact this new era has on a child’s developing mind.

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When infants are playing with objects, their early attempts to pay attention to things are accompanied by bursts of high-frequency activity in their brain. But what happens when parents play together with them? New research, publishing December 13 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, by Dr Sam Wass of the University of East London in collaboration with Dr Victoria Leong (Cambridge University and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) and colleagues, shows for the first time that when adults are engaged in joint play together with their infant, their own brains show similar bursts of high-frequency activity. Intriguingly, these bursts of activity are linked to their baby’s attention patterns and not their own.

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With the holiday party season in full swing, deciding what to wear can be the biggest headache. But paying attention to what you eat at such occasions might reveal it’s your diet more in need of a makeover. The good news is experts at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) can help.

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Children with elevated levels of callous traits—such as a lack of remorse and disregard for other people’s feelings—show widespread differences in brain structure compared with children with lower levels of the traits, according to a new study published in Biological Psychiatry. The differences, which included large- and small-scale structural alterations, support the idea of callous traits as a neurodevelopmental condition.

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A new study links hearing loss with an increased risk for mortality before the age of 75 due to cardiovascular disease. Researchers at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health found that mortality among those with hearing loss is elevated, particularly among men and women younger than age 75 and those who are divorced or separated.

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When households in sub-Saharan Africa don’t have an adequate number of insecticide-treated bed nets, pregnant women and children under five are the most likely family members to sleep under the ones they have, leaving men and school-aged children more exposed to malaria, new Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (CCP) research suggests.

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SLU pediatric researchers received $412,500 from the NIH to study how fetal exposure to inflammation can alter immune responses after birth.

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Dr. Meghan Miller of the UC Davis MIND Institute talks about her paper, published in JAMA Pediatrics, about the risk of younger siblings of children with autism or ADHD for either or both disorders.

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New non-invasive treatment for stress urinary incontinence helps strengthen the pelvic floor, and shows more than 87 percent of patients were dry or had mild leakage after a 12-week treatment period, with 93 percent of patients experiencing improvement in just four weeks.

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A new analysis finds striking inconsistency in parental leave policies at the nation’s top residency programs, illustrating the enormous challenge these programs face balancing training the next generation of doctors and supporting trainees’ personal and family needs.

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Most parents would agree that one of the of the biggest modern parenting challenges is monitoring a child's online activity.

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Vitamin C may reduce the harm done to lungs in infants born to mothers who smoke during their pregnancy, according to a randomized, controlled trial published online in the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

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Harmful medical errors decreased by almost 40 percent after implementing an intervention designed to improve communication between healthcare providers, patients and families, according to a new study published Dec. 6 in the British Medical Journal by researchers at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) in conjunction with the Patient and Family Centered I-Pass Study Team.

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Newborns with Vitamin D deficiency have an increased risk of schizophrenia later in life, researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Queensland report. The discovery could prevent some cases of the disease, and shows that neonatal vitamin D deficiency could possibly account for about 8 per cent of all schizophrenia cases in Denmark.

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A longer duration of infertility was associated with lower sperm count and other parameters of impaired sperm in a BJU International study of 1644 infertile men. Also, older age and higher body mass index were associated with a longer duration of infertility.

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Two-Thirds of Women Did Not Receive Their Desired Contraception at the Six-Week Postpartum Visit, Increasing Risk of Unintended Pregnancy.

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Conditions encountered in the womb - when the embryo consists of only about 100 cells - can have life-long impact on health. Scientists previously assumed that this is because embryos respond to adverse conditions by programming their gene expression. Now an international team of researchers at the Leiden University Medical Center, Wageningen University and Research, Lund University, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York propose a radically different alternative. Rather than being programmed by the environment, random differences in gene expression may provide some embryos with a survival advantage, in particular when conditions are harsh. By studying DNA methylation, an important mechanism to control gene activity, the researchers found that a specific part of the DNA methylation pattern was missing among famine-exposed individuals. The findings are published in the journal Cell Reports.

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The kicks a mother feels from her unborn child may allow the baby to 'map' their own body and enable them to eventually explore their surroundings, suggests new research led by UCL in collaboration with UCLH.

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Together with colleagues from Sweden and Luxembourg, scientists from the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg have observed that, during a natural vaginal birth, specific bacteria from the mother's gut are passed on to the baby and stimulate the baby's immune responses. This transmission is impacted in children born by caesarean section.

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"Not in front of the kids." It's an age-old plea for parents to avoid showing conflict and strong negative emotions around their children.

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Parents who force unremorseful kids to apologize to others before they're truly sorry may do more harm than good.

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  When it comes to helping infants learn to talk, it’s not just how much parents say, but how they say it. Speaking directly to the baby with a style of speech known as “parentese” — talking slowly and clearly, often with exaggerated vowels and intonation — appears to improve infant language development. A new study from the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) shows that parents who learn how and why to speak parentese can have a direct impact on their children’s vocabulary.

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The temptation to overindulge at Thanksgiving is immense, but before going overboard, it’s worth pausing and remembering you can eat, drink, and be merry – as well as healthy – over the holiday season.

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Getting a jump on a low-income child’s education can have a positive effect on social behavior even 40 years later, researchers find.

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Spanking may be increasingly harmful for children on a more global scale than previously known, a new University of Michigan study indicates.

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Nearly a third of parents say they are not planning to get their child the vaccine this year, according to the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health at the University of Michigan.

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Many parents probably think nothing of sucking on their baby’s pacifier to clean it after it falls to the ground. Turns out, doing so may benefit their child’s health. A Henry Ford Health System study found that babies whose parents sucked on their pacifier to clean it had a lower level of the antibody that is linked to the development of allergies and asthma.

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Women in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Uganda are often pressured by family and through societal expectations to have more children, but commonly resort to covert or indirect means of contraception to maintain some reproductive autonomy. This is a central finding from a cross-country study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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At the fifth International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) in Kigali, Rwanda, taking place Nov. 12 to 15, 2018, there will be four new research findings presented. The 2018 ICFP is co-hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, which is based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Rwanda.

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Parents and their adolescent children actually agree with each other about preventive care and confidential medical services, except for around abortion. Doctors, however, have a different opinion.

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When tragic or violent events occur, parents may wonder about how to help their kids understand the graphic images and emotional video footage that they may see. Stephanie Marcy, PhD, psychologist at Children's Hospital Los angeles suggests a few guidelines to keep in mind so parents can be better equipped to help their children handle scary news.

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A new national study shows that people whose mothers had more partners – married or cohabiting – often follow the same path.Results suggest that mothers may pass on personality traits and relationship skills that make their children more or less likely to form stable relationships.

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Enjoying good times around the holiday table can sometimes be difficult for people with food allergies.

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A Rutgers-led experimental study found that women prefer and invest more in daughters, while men favor and invest more in their sons. The study of gender biases appears in the journal Scientific Reports.