Why children believe (or not) that Santa Claus exists

(THE CONVERSATION) The holiday season is upon us, and so are its attendant myths, most prominent of which is the Santa Claus story. This is the time that many children are told about a man who lives forever, resides at the North Pole, knows what every child in the world desires, drives a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer and enters one’s house through a chimney, which most children don’t even have.

Given the many absurdities and contradictions in this story, it’s surprising that even young children would believe it. Yet research from my lab shows that 83 percent of five-year-olds think that Santa Claus is real.

Why?

An evolutionary advantage?

At the root of this paradox is a very basic question regarding the nature of the young child as an inherently credulous being – that is, believing everything he or she is told – versus a rational one.

The noted author and ethologist Richard Dawkins, in a 1995 essay, proposed that children are inherently credulous, and prone to believing in just about anything. He even suggested that it was an evolutionary advantage for children to believe.

He illustrated that quite convincingly with an example of a young child living near an alligator-infested swamp. His point was that the child who is skeptical, and prone to critically evaluating his parents’ advice not to go swimming in that swamp, has much less chance of surviving than does the child who unthinkingly heeds his parents’ advice.

This view of young children who believe easily is shared by many, including 18th-century philosopher Thomas Reid, and developmental psychologists, who argue that children are strongly biased to trust what people tell them.

Not very different from adults?

Yet research from my lab shows that children actually are rational, thoughtful consumers of information. In fact, they use many of the same tools as adults to decide what to believe.

So, what are some of the tools that adults use to decide what to believe, and what evidence is there that children possess them?

I’ll focus on three: One is attention to the context in which new information is embedded. A second is the tendency to measure new information against one’s existing knowledge base. And the third is the ability to evaluate the expertise of other people.

Let’s look first at context.

Imagine reading an article about a new species of fish – let’s call them “surnits.” Then imagine you’re reading this article in two very different contexts – one in which your doctor is late and you’re in the waiting room reading the article in a copy of National Geographic, the official magazine of a scientific society.

In another context, you encounter a report of this discovery while waiting in line at the grocery store and perusing the National Enquirer, an American supermarket tabloid. My guess is that the context surrounding your introduction to this new information would guide your judgment about the reality status of this new fish.

We essentially did this with children. We told them about animals they’d never heard of, like surnits. Some children heard about them in a fantastical context, in which they were told that dragons or ghosts collect them. Other children learned about surnits in a scientific context, in which they were told that doctors or scientists use them.

Children as young as four were more likely to claim that surnits really existed when they heard about them in the scientific context versus in the fantastical context.

How children use knowledge and expertise

One of the primary ways we, as adults, learn about new things is by hearing about them from others. Imagine hearing about a new kind of fish from a marine biologist versus from your next-door neighbor who often regales you with reports of his alien abductions. Your evaluation of the expertise and trustworthiness of these sources presumably will guide your beliefs about the true existence of this fish.

In another research project, we presented young children with novel animals that were either possible (e.g., a fish that lives in the ocean), impossible (e.g., a fish that lives on the moon) or improbable (e.g., a fish as big as a car). Then we gave them the choice to figure out on their own whether the entity really existed or to ask someone. They also heard reports from either a zookeeper (an expert) or a chef (a nonexpert).

We found that children believed in the possible entities and rejected the impossible ones. Children made these decisions by comparing the new information to their existing knowledge. For the improbable animals – ones that could possibly exist but were rare or odd – children were significantly more likely to believe in them when the zookeeper claimed they were real than when the chef did.

In other words, children use expertise, just as adults do.

It’s the adults

If children are so smart, why do they believe in Santa?

The reason is simple: Parents and others go to great lengths to support the Santa myth. In a recent study we found that 84 percent of parents reported taking their child to visit more than two Santa impersonators during the Christmas season.

The Elf on the Shelf, originally a children’s picture book about elves who inform Santa about children’s behavior around Christmastime, is now a multi-million-dollar franchise. And the United States Postal Service now promotes a “Letters from Santa” program in which it provides personal replies to children’s letters to Santa.

Why do we feel compelled to go to such great lengths? Why does Uncle Jack insist on climbing onto the roof on Christmas Eve to stomp around and shake jingle bells?

The answer is simply this: Children are not unthinkingly credulous and do not believe everything we tell them. So, we adults must overwhelm them with evidence – the bells on the roof, the live Santas at the mall, the half-eaten carrot on Christmas morning.

How children evaluate

Given this effort, it essentially would be irrational for children not to believe. In believing in Santa Claus, children, in fact, exercise their scientific thinking skills.

First, they evaluate sources of information. As ongoing research in my lab indicates, they’re more likely to believe an adult than a child about what’s real.

Second, they use evidence (e.g., the empty glass of milk and half-eaten cookies on Christmas morning) to come to a conclusion about existence. Other research from my lab shows that children use similar evidence to guide their beliefs about a fantastical being, the Candy Witch, who visits children on Halloween night and leaves new toys in exchange for candy.

Third, research shows that, as children’s understanding becomes more sophisticated, they tend to engage more with the absurditiesin the Santa Claus myth, like how a fat man can fit through a small chimney, or how animals could possibly fly.

Wondering what to tell your child?

Some parents wonder whether they are harming their children by engaging in the Santa myth. Philosophers and bloggers alike have mounted arguments against perpetuating the “Santa-lie,” some even claiming that it could lead to permanent distrust of parents and other authorities.

So, what should parents do?

There is no evidence that belief, and eventual disbelief in Santa, affects parental trust in any significant way. Furthermore, not only do children have the tools to ferret out the truth; but engaging with the Santa story may give them a chance to exercise these abilities.

So, if you think it would be fun for you and your family to invite Santa Claus into your home at Christmas time, you should do so. Your children will be fine. And they might even learn something.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: http://theconversation.com/why-children-believe-or-not-that-santa-claus-exists-70518.

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net

Smartphone case helps parents regulate children’s phone usage

Children becoming addicted to playing with smartphones are turning out to be a headache for some parents.

One Japanese company has developed a gadget to help parents get some control back over their little ones.

Momo Ltd., A Kobe-based company, is planning to start selling in August a cellphone case called Otomos, The Japan Times reports. It basically allows parents to enact schedules for cellphone use on their children.

The case attaches to a child’s smartphone and is secured by a screw. Parents then download an application that will give them access to Otomos. From here, they may set time restrictions to ensure that kids don’t waste all their time staring at smartphone screens. Once kids have used up their daily allocated smartphone time, the phone goes into sleep mode.

Apart from the smartphone app, parents may also access Otomos through a website.

As an added feature, Otomos can be set to deactivate the smartphone once it detects walking motion. This will prevent children from using their cellphones while walking, thereby preventing accidents. In worst case scenarios, Otomos can also send an alert to parents if their children come to harm.

“We developed the product after hearing many views and concerns of parents who have children using smartphones,” said Masato Otsu, Momo company president.

A charge of 500 yen a month is being expected for a two-year contract. This includes monitoring service, the smartphone case, and app cost. Interest customers may apply at their website or through participating mobile phone stores.

Smartphones are an undeniable part of the modern lifestyle. It makes sense that parents be given some way to control its use by children, much like how older generations had their TV-watching habits regulated by their parents. Alfred Bayle/JB

source: technology.inquirer.net

Ikea recalls safety gates for fear of causing injury to kids

STOCKHOLM — Swedish furniture retailer Ikea is recalling children’s safety gates because the locking mechanism is unreliable and may result in injury to children.

The company urges customers with any model of Patrull safety gate to immediately stop using them and return them to an Ikea store for a full refund without proof of purchase.

Ikea said Thursday it has received reports that the gates have opened unexpectedly, causing children to fall down stairs, with medical attention needed in some cases.

Ikea, a leading global home furnishings group, has more than 300 stores in 27 countries. It said the company has zero tolerance regarding child safety and that the faulty gates had opened despite “approved tests to applicable standards.” TVJ

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net

9% of California kids have never seen a dentist

PALO ALTO, California – Nine percent of children ages 2 to 11 in 2013-14 had never had a dental visit, according to data from the California Health Interview Survey.

The Length of Time Since Last Dental Visit for kids in California survey comes on the heels of the Little Hoover Commission’s scathing report on Denti-Cal, the dental health care program for 13 million low-income Californians.

Counties with the highest percent of young children who had never visited a dentist were San Joaquin County at 28 percent, Shasta County at 19 percent and Fresno County at 18 percent.

In over 12 additional counties, at least 10 percent of children hadn’t visited a dentist, including Santa Clara County, Sacramento County and Los Angeles County.

Tooth decay is the most common chronic disease among children ages 6 to 18. Untreated dental problems, such as cavities and gum disease, can affect a child’s health and quality of life by causing pain, nutritional and sleep problems, impaired concentration and increased school absences, as well as lost work hours for parents.

If dental disease is not treated early, it can result in more serious and expensive intervention later on.

Tooth decay and other oral diseases disproportionately affect low-income children, children of color, and uninsured children. For this reason, the federal government has set a public health goal focused on improving access to preventive dental services for low-income children.

The federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes dental health care for children in the essential health benefits that must be covered by all qualified health insurance plans, a major step forward in ensuring access to oral health care for children.

According to experts, policy options that could influence children’s dental health include: increasing reimbursement rates for dental providers under public insurance programs; creating incentives for them to treat low-income children; increasing the number of pediatric dentists where Medi-Cal patients live; setting pediatric dental benefits under ACA at affordable rates to allow low-income families to access the services; reinstating state support for children’s dental disease prevention; and ensuring that all communities have fluoridated drinking water, as evidence suggests that it reduces cavities among children.

source: globalnation.inquirer.net

Music helps babies learn speech — study

MIAMI, United States — Babies who engage in musical play may have an easier time picking up language skills, suggested a study Monday.

US researchers compared nine-month-old babies who played with toys and trucks to those who practiced banging out a rhythm during a series of play sessions.

They found that the musical group showed more brain activity in regions involved with detecting patterns, an important skill when it comes to learning language.

“Our study is the first in young babies to suggest that experiencing a rhythmic pattern in music can also improve the ability to detect and make predictions about rhythmic patterns in speech,” said lead author Christina Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS).

“This means that early, engaging musical experiences can have a more global effect on cognitive skills.”

The study was small, enrolling just 39 babies and their parents, who took part in a dozen 15-minute play sessions over the course of a month.

Twenty of the babies listened to recorded children’s music while they sat with their parents and helped pound out drum beats to music that included waltz rhythms and tunes like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” a baseball classic.

The other 19 babies also attended active play sessions that used toys and blocks, but without music.

“In both the music and control groups, we gave babies experiences that were social, required their active involvement and included body movements — these are all characteristics that we know help people learn,” Zhao said.

“The key difference between the play groups was whether the babies were moving to learn a musical rhythm.”

When the babies underwent brain scans — known as magnetoencephalography (MEG) — at the end of the month, researchers wanted to see how they differed.

So they had the babies listen to speech and music sounds that occasionally contained a disruption in the cadence, or flow of sound.

Babies in the music group showed stronger brain responses in both the auditory and the prefrontal cortex, which are involved in controlling attention and detecting patterns, the study found.

“Pattern perception is an important cognitive skill, and improving that ability early may have long-lasting effects on learning,” said co-author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of I-LABS.

“Schools across our nation are decreasing music experiences for our children, saying they are too expensive,” added Kuhl.

“This research reminds us that the effects of engaging in music go beyond music itself. Music experience has the potential to boost broader cognitive skills that enhance children’s abilities to detect, expect and react quickly to patterns in the world, which is highly relevant in today’s complex world.”

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.

source: technology.inquirer.net

Lego arm for disabled kids wins digital innovation prize

PARIS — A prosthetic arm made of Lego that disabled children can customize to their own needs won the grand prize at the Netexplo forum for digital technology in Paris on Wednesday.

The IKO Creative Prosthetic System, created by Colombian designer Carlos Torres, is compatible with Lego parts and can be customised with different shapes, colours and accessories.

“Torres wanted to help children with malformed or injured arms feel less isolated by making their disability feel less of a burden or a stigma,” the event organisers said.

“As well as technology, imagination can help children overcome a handicap.”

The winner was chosen from entries from around the world, including a mobile phone app that can translate the 11 official languages of South Africa, and a Japanese robot that got good enough grades in school exams to go to the University of Tokyo.

The Netexplo forum, put on by the observatory of the same name for the ninth year, explores innovation in digital technology via a network of 20 universities spread across 15 countries.

Event co-founder Thierry Happe said the Netexplo Observatory had identified some 2,175 digital inventions this year.

“The 10 nominations illustrate the general trend that, thanks to digital (technology), has pushed the limits in order to enlarge the field of possibilities,” he said.

source: technology.inquirer.net

Prince William's wife Kate to guest-edit Huffington Post

London — Prince William's wife Kate is to guest-edit the UK section of The Huffington Post to highlight child mental health issues, Kensington Palace announced Friday.

The Duchess of Cambridge will sit in the news website's hot seat for a day in mid-February, their official residence said.

Kate will use the opportunity to highlight the work being done by parents, teachers, researchers, and mental health professionals, the palace said.

"The Duchess of Cambridge has made the mental health of young children a key focus of her work in recent years," a spokesman said.

"She is delighted that The Huffington Post will help put a spotlight on this important issue.

"The Duchess will be commissioning contributions from a number of leading figures in the mental health sector as well as from young people, parents, and teachers."

The 34-year-old has campaigned against the stigma surrounding childhood mental illness, and is a patron of several related charities.

Last year, Kate visited charities helping vulnerable children, and publicly spoke about the cause on several occasions.

Stephen Hull, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post UK, said they were "thrilled" that the duchess was joining the team.

"Dealing with mental health issues has been a major editorial focus for us and I'm very excited to be working together on such an important project." — Agence France-Presse

source: gmanetwork.com

Allergies may boost chances of anxiety or depression symptoms

Kids who have allergies at an early age are more likely than others to also have problems with anxiety and depression, according to a new study.

As the number of allergies increase, so do internalizing behavior scores, the researchers found.

Internalizing behaviors include disorders, like anxiety or depression, that develop when people keep their problems to themselves, or "internalize" them.

“I think the surprising finding for us was that allergic rhinitis has the strongest association with abnormal anxiety/depression/internalizing scores compared to other allergic diseases,” said lead author Dr. Maya K. Nanda of the division of Asthma, Allergy, and Immunology, at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri.

Rhinitis includes the “hay fever” symptoms of runny nose, sneezing and itchy, watery eyes.

The researchers studied 546 children who had skin tests and exams at age one, two, three, four and seven and whose parents completed behavioral assessments at age seven. They looked for signs of sneezing and itchy eyes, wheezing or skin inflammation related to allergies.

Parents answered 160 questions about their child’s behaviors and emotions, including how often they seemed worried, nervous, fearful, or sad.

Kids who had allergic sneezing and itchy or watery eyes or persistent wheezing at age four tended to have higher depressive or anxiety scores than others at age seven, the researchers reported in Pediatrics.

Anxiety and depression scores increased as the number of allergies increased.

“This study can't prove causation. It only describes a significant association between these disorders, however we have hypotheses on why these diseases are associated,” Nanda told Reuters Health by email.

Children with allergic diseases may be at increased risk for abnormal internalizing scores due to an underlying biological mechanism, or because they modify their behavior in response to the allergies, she said.

Like other chronic diseases, allergic diseases may trigger maladaptive behaviors or emotions, she said, but some prior studies support a biologic mechanism that involves allergy antibodies triggering production of other substances that affect parts of the brain that control emotions.

Earlier studies have found links between allergies and anxiety disorders such as panic attacks or generalized anxiety disorders, Nanda said.

The new study took race, gender and other factors into account, “so the strong association between allergic disease and internalizing disorder we found is definitely present,” she said.

The severity of mental health symptoms varied in this study. Some children had anxiety and depression that needs treatment, while others were at risk and required monitoring, she said.

“We think this study calls for better screening by pediatricians, allergists, and parents of children with allergic disease,” she said. “Too often in my clinic I see allergic children with clinical anxiety [or] depressive symptoms; however, they are receiving no care for these conditions.”

“We don't know how treatment for allergic diseases may effect or change the risk for internalizing disorders and we hope to study this in the future,” Nanda said. — Reuters

Kids get more cavities when they live with smokers, says Japan study

Young children are much more likely to get cavities if they live in a household with smokers, a Japanese study suggests.

Compared to children in non-smoking households, kids living with smokers were more than twice as likely to have cavities at age three.

Even when smokers in the home didn’t light up near the children, these three-year-olds were 50 percent more likely to have cavities than kids who didn’t live with smokers, the study found.

The findings should give parents another reason to quit smoking, and another way for health care providers to talk to them about cessation, said senior author Koji Kawakami, a researcher at Kyoto University in Japan.

“Education on the harm of secondhand smoke might increase if dentists became aware of the risk of [cavities] as well as tobacco consumption of their clients,” Kawakami said by email.

To understand the connection between secondhand smoke and cavities, Kawakami and colleagues examined data on almost 77,000 children born between 2004 and 2010 in Kobe City, Japan.

To be included in the study, children needed data on household smoking status when they were infants, as well as records from dental exams done at 18 months and three years.

Overall, about 55 percent of the children lived in households with smokers, but only about 7 percent had people who smoked around them instead of lighting up somewhere away from the kids.

By age three, 14 percent of the kids in non-smoking households had cavities, compared with 20 percent of children who had smokers in the home who tried not to use cigarettes in their presence, and 28 percent of kids who were directly exposed to the smoke.

Children of women who smoked during pregnancy didn’t appear to have an increased risk for cavities, the authors reported in the medical journal BMJ.

One limitation of the study is that it relied on mothers to honestly report smoking in the home on questionnaires, the authors acknowledge. In particular, women may have underreported smoking during pregnancy.

In addition, because the study was observational, and didn’t randomly assign groups of children to live with or without smokers, the findings can’t prove that smoke exposure causes cavities.

Two things in Japan—lack of fluoride in the water and less sugar in a typical diet—might make results for these children different than what researchers might see in the US and other countries, where children consume more sweets and have fluoride-enhanced drinking water, the authors also note.

But the connection between cigarette exposure and cavities is strong enough that the US Surgeon General has warned that secondhand smoke may be associated with an increased risk of tooth decay in children.

“This study simply adds to the body of evidence that associates secondhand smoke and an increased risk of tooth decay among children,” said Jonathan Shenkin, a researcher in pediatric dentistry at Boston University and a spokesperson for the American Dental Association.

“Tooth decay is the most common chronic disease in childhood,” Shenkin, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email. For parents, “knowing they can protect their children against pain and suffering will hopefully be a strong motivator to quit smoking.” — Reuters -

The secret lives of teens

There are many tech-savvy parents out there, but there are also those for whom the online world is uncharted territory, who have no idea what goes on when their child is glued to the screen, alternating between social media networks.

For teens, the internet can make it easier to hide from their parents. "Madiskarte na rin kami. Also, mas maalam kami sa social media compared to them. So hindi nila alam na kayang gawin kunwari sa Facebook, puwedeng i-hide mo sa kanila yung specific post," a 19-year-old student told GMA News Online. Another student, also 19, said that many teens even make separate accounts—one for relatives, and another for friends—in order to maintain secrecy.

Clinical child psychologist Dr. Ma. Lourdes Carandang notes that most parents have not really dealt with their children's online lives, because children know more about how to navigate online. "So in that sense, they have more power than the parents. So that's already a big difficulty that we have," Carandang told GMA News Online after delivering a talk at the 2nd Philippine Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry National Convention last month.

During her keynote presentation, "Entering the Inner World of Digital Natives and Taking a Closer Look at Adolescent Depression," Carandang urged parents to look into their children's online activities. "Try to look into their games. Try to look into Facebook and Instagram. Just make pakialam because it's really very interesting that they now have the power over us because they know about this and we don't. So let's know a little bit, enough so that we are not ignorant about it. We have to equip ourselves also with some knowledge about it. Be curious to be able to have a little bit of knowledge of what this thing is all about, which is their life now. Talk to them about it," she said.

'Emotional contagion' and cyberbullying

Adolescents in particular are vulnerable to emotional contagion on the internet. As an example, Carandang talked about how some adolescents would post photos of their bleeding wrists, then receive comments from others who would post photos of their own. "It's a contagion. The internet is a very, very potent tool for emotional contagion among the adolescents," she said.

Emotional contagion also leads to the escalation of cyberbullying, which can lead to depression and suicide.

Carandang explained that bullying involves the bully, the bullied, and the bystander. But on the internet, there is no "bystander."

"So who's going to stop it?," she said. "And when it happens, it happens so fast it spreads like wildfire and even when you try to make bawi, ayun na. And that has caused a lot of heartaches, depression, and even suicides among our adolescents."

A recent blog post by a Filipino adolescent reads: "Dearest loves, I've decided that I'll kill myself when I'm 18 but now I think I'll do it earlier." There are many more similar posts that allow a glimpse into the world of the depressed, whether through words, poetry, or art. Carandang emphasized that depression is not just feeling sad, but feeling powerless and worthless.



Dealing with depression

It is important for families to understand what depression is like, so that they can better understand when a loved one is suffering from it—and know that they have to be patient when the depressed person rejects their help. "The patient will push the family member away and sometimes they do not understand. But I think if they know that that's what it is, they won't be rejected. They can take it as part of the situation and can still be empowered to help," Carandang said.

Because depression isolates, it's highly important to stay connected. Carandang recalled one adolescent who attempted to kill herself but said, "I couldn't do it because I was thinking of my mother and her face and how she has cared for me." According to Carandang, it’s this type of connection that needs to be built, even if it isn’t to family. “Connect so that the isolation will be taken care of," she said.

The most important thing for parents and families, however, is to be sensitive to the child's cues. Not all expressions of depression will be as direct as the above examples.

In certain cases, the cues may even hardly visible, such as in one teenager's letter to her parents. "It was a beautiful letter: Dear Mom and Dad, I love you. You've been giving me this and so on and so forth. It looked very positive. Sabi pa nga, this is not a suicide note. But if you look very mindfully, there is a line there that said, 'I wish you had noticed,'" said Carandang.

"Their songs, their poems and other art forms, contain the message. Sometimes they will not tell you, and people say 'Why did this person, who was so wonderful, such a happy girl, etc., suddenly does that?' But when you look at the journal, you look at the poems, the drawings, you see it there. Or in some casual remarks that they say which we ignore, because it's not something we normally talk about. It is still a bit taboo," she said.

Sincere and open communication

Carandang told GMA News Online that more than looking for cues, it is about sincerely caring for the child and communicating honestly with them. "Instead of checking [their online accounts], they need to be more honest with their adolescent and say something like, 'Alam mo, I'm very worried. I noticed something going on and I don't want to miss it. I don't want to let it just go. I want to know because I care that something might happen. I want to know from you.' But talk to them with respect. 'Yun ang gusto nila eh, and be direct with them," she advised.

Similarly, both 19-year-old students' advice to parents is not so much to try to use social media, but to focus on the personal relationship. "Social media is a way to be more connected to people, pero importante pa rin talaga kasi yung in person mo magawa. Hindi ‘yung with something that is in between you," one said.

The other added that the teen should also make an effort to connect to his or her parents. "It takes two to tango. Parents and kids should give time for personal space, hindi lang puro computer. Doon tayo sa technology ngayon, pero kaya pa rin naman 'yun... dapat sanayin pa rin ng both parties na may connection na personal," she said.

Carandang shared a case with one adolescent who at first was reluctant to show her Instagram account, until one day, she asked the girl, "How do you do ba the Instagram?"

"She showed it to me, then she said, 'Look at my posts,'" Carandang said, adding that the teen's openness might have been because she was sincerely interested, as opposed to being interested in order to be able to tell the child what she should do. "It's not so much that, but 'I'm interested because I care what happens to you.' If you communicate that, they will start communicating."

Carandang added that the parent should not be discouraged if the results are not immediate.

Her advice is for parents to set a regular time for their child, during which they don't teach the child anything, but just get to know them. "When that happens, it's magical. It's so interesting how the person starts to open up because first of all, it's regular, so you can depend on it. Talk to them, just say, 'This is our time', and pretty soon they will start opening up," she said.

The best practices for parents are to communicate, give time, and be open to them. "It's about not being judgmental so that they will be open, acceptance and showing them that unconditionally, you're there," she said.

Mindfulness and parenting

Setting limits and being able to deal with the intrusion of technology in family life are well and good, but the more internal and lasting positive change can happen if the child develops the ability to self-regulate through emotional intelligence.

According to Carandang, who trained under meditation master Thich Nhat Hanh, mindfulness training is one way to develop this. She explained the Eastern definition of mindfulness as "paying total attention to what is going on inside you, being aware of what is going on inside you and being aware of what is going on around you in your environment without judgment and criticism, warmed by kindness and spiced by curiosity."

This way of life can be applied to parenting, she said. An example of mindful parenting would be when one is angry about something at work, but not unjustly taking it out on the child. "It's a very common thing: something troublesome happens outside the home, we go home, and the best and easiest target of our anger which we may not be aware of is the child," said Carandang.

"The greatest gift you can give your child is yourself. It might be the best gift, it might be the worst gift, depending on who you are. The child doesn't just follow what you say, the child absorbs what you do. But more than that, the child absorbs what you are—who you are," she said. — BM, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com

Talking to kids about smoking risks may help parents quit

Parents who quit smoking may be less likely to relapse when they discuss the dangers of cigarettes with their children, a US study suggests.

Researchers followed almost 700 ex-smokers with children for one year. Half of the parents received a series of mailers with educational materials explaining the risks of tobacco and activities to help them discuss these dangers with their children. The other parents served as a control group and didn’t get any help.

After one year, the parents supported by mail were twice as likely to still be abstinent.

More research is needed to explain why this happened because the findings came from a project designed to test something different – whether parents prompted to talk about cigarettes with their kids might help prevent their children from smoking, noted lead study author Christine Jackson.

It’s possible, however, that talking to kids helped parents cement their own identities as non-smokers, or that the conversations created a feeling of cognitive dissonance that made it difficult for participants to advocate against smoking while being smokers themselves, said Jackson, a senior research scientist at RTI International in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

“Our research is important because it suggests an entirely new approach to helping adults, specifically adults who are parents of school-aged children, succeed in quitting smoking,” Jackson said by email.

To understand how parent-child conversations about smoking might influence tobacco use, researchers asked parents of children aged 8 to 10 years old to participate in a study when they called a smoking cessation hotline available in 11 US states.

Parents were around 37 years old at the start of the study, and they had typically started smoking when they were about 16.

Most of them had tried to quit at least once before the current attempt and had a previous daily habit of at least 20 cigarettes, or about a pack a day. Many parents also lived in households with at least one or two current smokers.

The parents in the support group received six magazines with tips to prepare them for conversations about smoking with their children, as well as supplies to complete structured anti-smoking activities with their children.

Only 465 out of the original 689 parents remained in the study by the end of the year. When researchers counted all of the dropouts as parents who relapsed, the effect of the mailers remained meaningful, though smaller.

After accounting for the dropouts, parents who received mailers were still 58 percent more likely to remain abstinent by the end of the study, the authors report in Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

In addition to the high dropout rate, other shortcomings of the study include the reliance on parents to accurately report whether they remained abstinent and the lack of data to explain why parents who received mailers were more likely to avoid tobacco.

Even so, the findings suggest that parents may reinforce what they know about the benefits of smoking cessation by teaching these lessons to their children, said Jonathan Bricker, a behavioral scientist at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.

“Humans tend to want to act consistent with what they teach others,” Bricker, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email. “By teaching your child, you hold yourself more accountable. If you teach it, you are more likely to do it yourself.”

Regarding the experiment's original focus, Bricker noted, previous research has found parents who stop smoking when their children are young may cut the risk that their kids will start smoking by as much as 40 percent.

When parents quit, this can also nearly double the odds that any children who smoke may also quit, he added. — Reuters

Sleep-deprived kids are more tempted by food

Children who don’t get enough sleep might be more tempted by food, a new study suggests.

Five-year-olds who slept less than 11 hours a night were more eager to eat at the sight or reminder of a favorite snack, compared to those who slept longer, researchers reported in the International Journal of Obesity.

The children who slept less than 11 hours at night also had a higher body mass index – a measure of weight in relation to height – than those who slept 11 hours or more. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends 11 to 12 hours of sleep for pre-school children.


“There is now accumulating evidence in both children and adults to suggest that short or insufficient sleep increases reward-driven ('hedonic') eating,” said Laura McDonald, the study’s lead author and a researcher at University College London, in email to Reuters Health.

“This is, of course, a concern,” she added, “given that we live in a modern ‘obesogenic’ environment” where tasty, high-calorie foods “are widely available and cheap to consume.”

Previous studies have shown that too little sleep significantly increases the chances that a child will be overweight or obese, McDonald and her team point out. But less was known about how sleep affects daily calorie intake.

“Some studies using brain imaging in adults have shown that sleep restriction increases responsiveness in reward centers of the brain in response to images of palatable food . . . however, no studies in children have examined whether sleep changes food responsiveness,” noted McDonald.

The new study involved 1,008 five-year-olds born in 2007 in England and Wales. The researchers had mothers answer a questionnaire about their youngsters’ responsiveness to food cues and their behavior toward food when they were presumably full, soon after eating.

The average sleep duration for the children in the study was 11.48 hours.

Among kids who slept less than 11 hours a night, food responsiveness was 2.53 on a scale of 1 to 5, compared to 2.36 for those who slept 11 to 12 hours, and 2.35 for those who got at least 12 hours of sleep a night.

“In children who do not get enough sleep at night, limiting exposure to palatable food cues in the home might be helpful at preventing overconsumption,” McDonald said.

The study found no link between sleep duration and whether kids were still willing to eat when they were full.

While the study can’t prove that less sleep causes more eating, McDonald said another possibility is that the reverse might be true. “It is definitely a possibility that food responsiveness might impact sleep behavior,” she said. “For example, it could be that children who are more food responsive are also more difficult to settle at night (when adults or older children might be eating).”

Emerson Wickwire, director of the Insomnia Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told Reuters Health by email that the study adds a new twist to research showing sleep is a risk factor for obesity.

“The current study suggests a new potential explanation (hedonic eating) for weight gain among children who sleep less . . . in other words, kids in the study who slept less were more susceptible to unhealthy food cues in the environment,” said Wickwire, who was not involved in the study.

Wickwire said the study also showed the importance of sleep for children.

“We know that parents have a huge influence on the sleep patterns of five-year-olds. So really, it’s incumbent on parents to make sure their kids are getting enough sleep,” said Wickwire, a board-certified sleep specialist. —Reuters

YouTube launches kid-friendly mobile app

Children can now access YouTube on mobile devices without parents worrying they might stumble into inappropriate content.

Google on Monday rolled out the YouTube Kids app to devices running Android via Google Play and to Apple devices via the App Store.

"Today, we’re introducing the YouTube Kids app, the first Google product built from the ground up with little ones in mind. The app makes it safer and easier for children to find videos on topics they want to explore, and is available for free on Google Play and the App Store in the U.S.," YouTube Kids Group product manager Shimrit Ben-Yair, a mother of two, said in a blog post.

She said the app has a bright and playful design with larger images and bold icons, making it "fast and simple for little thumbs to navigate."

A voice search feature allows a child who can’t spell or type to still find videos.

Content is narrowed to content appropriate for children, even as parental controls include a timer, sound settings and product feedback.

The app is available via Google Play and the Apple App Store. -Joel Locsin/TJD, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com

Medication mistakes common among young children – US study

NEW YORK - Roughly every eight minutes from 2002 through 2012, a child in the US experienced a medication mistake, according to a new study of calls to poison control hotlines.

The number and rate of reported medication mistakes rose during the 11-year study, except for cough and cold medicines, the researchers report in the journal Pediatrics.

The reduction in mistakes with cough and cold medicines follows a multipronged campaign to decrease the use of these products among young children, which suggests education is helpful in reducing errors, Henry Spiller, one of the study’s authors, told Reuters Health.

“We think that multipronged effort had an effect,” said Spiller, director of the Central Ohio Poison Center at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus. “We can see a drop associated with these efforts.”

Medication errors can cause injury, increased healthcare spending and even death, the researchers write.

Most studies have focused on medication mistakes in healthcare facilities like hospitals. Less is known about mistakes that happen with children’s medicine at home.

For the new study, the researchers used data on medication errors reported among children younger than six years between 2002 through 2012. The data were obtained from the National Poison Database System, which records information on calls made to the 55 US poison control hotlines.

On average, 63,358 children experienced medication errors during each year of the study. Put another way, among every 10,000 young children in the US, there were 27 medication errors each year.

While the vast majority of the cases did not require additional medical attention, 25 children died during the 11 years as a result of medication mistakes.

Over a quarter of the mistakes involved children being given the same medication twice.

The most common mistakes involved pain medications like aspirin. Next most common were mistakes with cough and cold medicines and allergy medicines.

Medication errors became less common as children got older, the researchers found. About a quarter of the mistakes occurred in infants under age one year.

Pause before giving medication 


Spiller said in a phone interview that parents and caregivers should pause for a moment before they administer medications to their children.

“This is when a lot of these medication errors occur—during these distracted periods,” he said, adding that parents should make sure they’re giving the correct medication, the appropriate dose, and not giving a second dose.

“If you just take a moment, you can kind of save that mistake,” he said.

Dr. Huiyun Xiang, the study’s senior author, said there is also a lesson in the reduced number of mistakes among cough and cold medicines following an education campaign.

“A similar case can be made against the routine use in young children of other medications that are frequently associated with errors, like analgesics,” he wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

“Parents and caregivers can do their parts by using smart phone apps to schedule and track medication doses and by using measuring cups provided with liquid medications to give accurate doses,” wrote Xiang, of Nationwide Children’s Hospital, where he directs the Center for Pediatric Trauma Research.

When medication mistakes do occur, Spiller said parents and guardians should call their poison center.

“You’re going to get an expert immediately,” he said. — Reuters

Kids tend to eat more when playing computer games featuring candy

NEW YORK - Kids eat more calories when playing a computer game featuring advertisements for candy than when the game has ads for toys, according to a new study from the Netherlands.

Children with low self-control were especially vulnerable to cues from a candy-themed game and ate more sweets even when offered a reward not to eat, the researchers found.

“Impulsive children have insufficient inhibitory behavioral control, and food advertisers try to influence eating behavior, thereby making it more difficult for especially impulsive children to self-regulate their food intake,” Dr. Frans Folkvord told Reuters Health by email.

Since kids are not fully aware of the persuasive intent of food marketeers, it is very difficult for any child to be critical towards the advertisements, said Folkvord, of Radboud University Nijmegen, who led the study.

Past research has shown that food advertising influences how much children eat, but little is known about what makes an individual child susceptible, Folkvord and his colleagues write in the journal Pediatrics.

The researchers recruited kids between the ages of seven and 10 to play online games that had either a candy theme or a toy theme.

“We used an online memory game that is comparable to the advergames that are used by major food companies,” Folkvord said.

Kids played the simple memory ‘advergames’ on a computer. Sixteen cards marked with a candy or toy brand name and logo appeared face down. Two could be flipped over at once. On the other side, they displayed individual candies or toys. The object was to match pairs as quickly as possible.

For the study, researchers divided the 260 children from primary schools in the Netherlands into four groups. Two groups played the candy advergame while the two other groups played an advergame promoting a toy brand instead.

The kids played the games for five minutes in a room with two bowls of jelly candy and milk chocolate candy.

Researchers told one group playing each game that they could eat as much candy as they liked, and told the other group that they could eat the candy, but if they made it to the end without eating they would be rewarded.

Before the game-playing sessions, the researchers also had all the kids answer questions to gauge their level of impulsivity. Based on scores on that test, 39 percent of the children qualified as impulsive, according to Folkvord.

Overall, kids ate more calories when playing a game with a candy theme. But rewarding the kids for avoiding eating the candy in the room during the game sessions resulted in most eating fewer calories.

Children who played the candy game without the inhibition reward ate an average of 156 calories, for example, compared to 87 calories for kids who played the same game with the inhibition reward.

During the toy-themed game, kids without the inhibition reward ate 101 calories, compared to 33 calories when they had been offered the inhibition reward.

For certain more impulsive kids, however, the food cues in the candy game were stronger than the incentive not to eat. The more impulsive kids playing the candy game tended to eat the same amount of calories whether or not they had been offered the inhibition reward.

“Impulsive behavior is extremely common and it is believed to be genetic,” said Dr. Deborah A. Cohen of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

Cohen studies how the social and physical environments influence health.

Impulsiveness tends to go hand in hand with making poor decisions, said Cohen, who was not involved in the new study.

“Most of the food companies have advergames on their websites,” she told Reuters Health by email. “Exposure depends upon how much time children have free computer access and also based upon their awareness of these games.”

“Children as old as 15 do not recognize that advergames are adverts,” Folkvord said. But parents can help train kids to recognize advertising and reduce their undesired effects, like overeating, he said.

“Parents should explain to their children why food companies advertise their products and brands, helping them to become more critical, and subsequently become less susceptible,” Folkvord said.

Even then, there is only so much that parents can do, Cohen said.

“Everyone is susceptible to advertising, even those who believe they aren’t,” she said. “Parents have a limited ability to protect their children, because they do not control advertising nor is it easy for them to limit exposure to advertising.”

Counter-advertising campaigns, like the ‘truth’ campaign against tobacco use, may be one way to inoculate kids against the persuasive power of food ads, she added. — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Stress in pregnancy linked to children's asthma risk

NEW YORK - Stress during pregnancy brought on by events like divorce, job loss or death of a loved one appears to be linked to an increased risk of asthma and eczema among children.

These findings, Dr. Petra Arck told Reuters Health in an email, could "allow clinicians to evaluate future asthma risk in unborn children using a simple life event assessment questionnaire."

Arck, of University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, and her colleagues note that although there are strong genetic components to asthma and related conditions, these alone do not help explain the unprecedented increase in such diseases in recent years.

Over the same period as that increase, they add, stress levels have been on the rise. But there hasn't been much evidence to connect stress in pregnancy to asthma and eczema.

To investigate further, the researchers examined data from 1,587 children and their mothers who took part in an Australian pregnancy study. The original purpose of the study was to determine the effects of intensive fetal monitoring on pregnancy outcomes.

Mothers-to-be were asked about recent stressful life events halfway through their pregnancy and again toward the end of pregnancy. Their children were evaluated for asthma, eczema and other allergy-related conditions at age six and 14.

Complete data were available for 994 children and their mothers.

The researchers calculated that the likelihood of having asthma or eczema as a teenager was substantially higher among children of mothers who experienced stressful life events during the second half of their pregnancies.

Specifically, kids were about twice as likely to have asthma as 14-year-olds if their mothers had been through a single stressful life event, once other factors known to influence asthma were taken into account. Risks were similar when mothers had experienced multiple life stressors.

When the researchers looked closer, they found that pattern only held among children whose mothers did not have asthma themselves.

There was no link between stressful events in pregnancy and a child's chance of having asthma or eczema at age six, according to findings published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

The authors note that they did not have information on how mothers-to-be coped with stressful life events or the types of social support they had available.

And they point out that factors other than stress in pregnancy might have been responsible for the increased risk of disease in certain children.

One researcher not involved in the study said it was well designed and addressed an important topic, but urged caution when interpreting the findings.

Alet H. Wijga, from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, the Netherlands, echoed the warning that stress, itself, may not have been what caused kids' asthma and eczema.

"Life events like money problems, job loss and residential move associated with separation or divorce during pregnancy may well have lasting impact on the socio-economic position of the mother and her child and may, for example, be associated with unfavorable indoor and outdoor exposures throughout the child's life course up to adolescence," Wijga told Reuters Health in an email.

"I do think the study provides evidence for an association between prenatal adverse life events and the risk for allergic disease in childhood," Wijga said. The challenge in the future will be to sort out the possible effects of stress during pregnancy from a child's environment growing up, the researcher added. — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Exercise video games may add to kids’ activity: study

NEW YORK - Giving children active video games to play while they follow a weight management program boosts their moderate and vigorous activity levels, according to a new study.

Kids who played the active video games also lost more weight than children who only followed the weight management program.

Traditionally, studies have examined what harms may come from children spending long hours sitting and playing video games.

"We thought - if you received active games - maybe we can turn this lemon into lemonade," Dr. Deneen Vojta told Reuters Health.

She is the study's senior author from the UnitedHealth Center for Health Reform and Modernization at the UnitedHealth Group in Minnetonka, Minnesota.

"Wouldn't it be great if instead of beating on kids about screen time we turned screen time into a positive?" she said.

For the new study, the researchers built upon an existing weight loss program for children and their parents that had been found to work.

They recruited 75 overweight and obese Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Texas children who were randomized to one of two groups for a 16-week study period.

Both groups took part in the weight management program at local YMCAs and schools, but one group also received an Xbox game console and two active games.

The Xbox Kinect device captures the child's body movements to operate the game. The games given to the kids in the active gaming group were Kinect Adventures! and Kinect Sports. (Children in the weight-loss program-only group received the same equipment and games at the end of the study).

All the children's activity were recorded using an accelerometer, which measures movement, during the day.

At the start of the study, the children were between the ages of 8 and 12 years old and weighed between 123 and 132 pounds (lbs). About 67 percent of the kids had a body mass index (BMI), a measure of weight relative to height, that put them in the overweight category for their age groups. The rest of the children were in the obese category.

The researchers found that children in the group that received the active games added about seven minutes of moderate to vigorous activity and about three minutes of vigorous activity to their daily routines over the 16 weeks.

Meanwhile children in the group that only took part in the weight loss program didn't experience a significant change in their activity levels or duration.

Although the difference between groups appears to be small, the researchers write in JAMA Pediatrics, the added activity among the game-users group is equivalent to about 4 lbs of fat lost over a year.

They also found a greater percentage of children in the active-gaming group were no longer in the overweight category by the end of the study. The percentage overweight had dropped a little over 9 percent in the active gaming group versus just under 4 percent in the comparison group.

"Sure enough, the outcomes were very, very good," Vojta said.

The authors note in the paper, however, that they cannot be sure the children sustained their weight loss and increased activity beyond the 16 weeks.

The findings are in keeping with results from a 2012 study that found about one-quarter of 1,200 Canadian high school students played active games. That translated to about an hour of exercise two days a week.

Still, other studies have suggested that active games don't help kids meet the daily recommended dose of physical activity. (see Reuters Health story of February 27, 2012 here: reut.rs/1fAOAMj)

Vojta said they are currently working on incorporating the weight management program into a home-based program, for instance, one that would be administered through the game console.

"In many ways, these home-based active gaming solutions solve two problems," she said.

The games give children and adults the ability to build up a tolerance to exercise in their own homes, she said, and they give people who live in rough or high-crime areas an opportunity to exercise safely. — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Even kids can make their own 'Flappy Bird' game in 15 minutes with this simple tool

What better way to celebrate a flappy, er, happy first birthday than teaching children to make their own "Flappy Bird" game?

A US-based organization advocating computer science education did just that, posting on its website the code for making a "Flappy Game."

"Flappy Bird is a simple game, and using the basics of computer science, any student can create their own version with endless possibilities," Code.org said on its website.

With the code, it said children can build their own Flappy game, "whether it’s Flappy Bird, or Flappy Easter Bunny, Flappy Santa, Flappy Shark with Lasers, Flappy Fairy or Flappy Underwater Unicorn."


It also said that with the code, any student can create his or her own variation of the popular but now-defunct mobile game "with endless possibilities."





"You can make your own rules, and make your flappy game as easy or as hard as you want. You can even reverse the scoring or make it change randomly as you play," Code.org said.

But best of all, it said students can share the code with one click so their friends can play the game on any computer or phone, or even inside Facebook or Twitter.

Meanwhile, Code.org also marked its birthday with one billion lines of code written by students in under three months.

"Since we launched the Hour of Code and its follow-up course in December, over 27 million users, in 34 languages, across 170 countries together wrote one billion lines of code in our tutorials," it said.

In 15 minutes

A separate report on GeekWire said the code allows children to develop their own "Flappy Bird" game in 15 minutes.

It quoted Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi, a Seattle entrepreneur who founded Code.org with his brother Ali, as saying the idea for a "Flappy Bird" tutorial came about during a Code.org employee happy hour.

"The entire group was playing Flappy Bird competitively when they realized they could not only play this fun game, but also let others create it," it said.

“We already know that the chance to ‘make an app’ is something people aspire to, but they think it’s out of reach. We want to give kids something that lets them express a degree of creativeness,” Partovi said.

“There are endless possibilities and kids can try them and realize the creativity involved in computer science within just 20 minutes,” Partovi added.

Code.org described itself as a "non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science education by making it available in more schools, and increasing participation by women and underrepresented students of color."

"Our vision is that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer programming. We believe computer science should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra," it said. — VC/TJD, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com

Saliva reveals asthmatic kids’ smoke exposure

NEW YORK - Asthmatic children who are exposed to cigarette smoke are more likely to make repeat trips to the hospital for breathing problems. But researchers say asking parents about kids' smoke exposure may not yield the most reliable information.

In a recent study, saliva revealed exposure to tobacco smoke in roughly 80 percent of children brought to the hospital for asthma or breathing problems. But only about a third of parents said their children came in contact with smoke.

What's more, finding evidence of nicotine, a chemical in tobacco, in children's saliva was a better predictor of whether they would need to come back to the hospital, compared to the information parents gave to doctors.

"We think saliva is a good and potentially useful test for assessing an important trigger for asthma," Dr. Robert Kahn, the study's senior author, told Reuters Health.

Previous research has found that being exposed to tobacco can lead to airway problems and poor asthma control among children, Kahn and his colleagues write in the journal Pediatrics.

By figuring out which children are being exposed to tobacco, doctors may be able to step in and identify and possibly eliminate the exposure, said Kahn, a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center in Ohio.

For example, if a parent is still smoking cigarettes and exposing the child to smoke, doctors can offer the parent smoking cessation tools while the child is hospitalized.

For the new study, the researchers assessed data from 619 children admitted to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center for asthma or other breathing problems between August 2010 and October 2011. The children were between one and 16 years old.

During the children's first couple of days in the hospital, researchers asked their parents if the children had any exposure to tobacco—either at home, in the car or in another place the children slept. Nurses also collected blood and saliva samples from the children.

About 35 percent of parents reported their children having some tobacco exposure.

However, about 56 percent of the children's blood samples and about 80 percent of their saliva samples tested positive for cotinine, a component of nicotine that's a marker for tobacco exposure.

The difference in the results of the saliva and blood tests and the parents' reports doesn't necessarily mean the parents lied about their children's exposure to smoke.

It could also be that the researchers and doctors didn't ask enough or the right questions or that the parents didn't know their children were being exposed to smoke.

"Sometimes a parent's response to a simple question may not reflect the nuances of life," Dr. James Kreindler said.

He was not involved with the new study but is an attending pulmonologist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.

One in six children in the study had to be readmitted to the hospital within a year.

Parents' reports of smoke exposure weren't tied to the likelihood of children returning to the hospital. But Kahn and his colleagues did find that children were more likely to be readmitted if their saliva or blood tested positive for cotinine.

The researchers write that saliva is an attractive testing option, because it's not hard or invasive to get a sample. It also appeared to be a more sensitive test than blood.

But Kreindler cautioned that the new results don't mean children should get tested for cotinine in the hospital.

"The test they are using to determine cotinine levels is a very sophisticated test—not one that would be available to every community hospital," he said. And the treatment for asthma wouldn't necessarily change based on whether a child was exposed to tobacco, he noted.

Kreindler said a cost analysis would also be needed to look at the expense of testing.

According to Kahn, a cost analysis would most likely follow a trial of whether smoking cessation after positive saliva tests decreased hospital readmissions among children.

"The take-home message should always be that exposure to secondhand smoke for both adults and children is a significant health risk factor—particularly for children with asthma and respiratory disorders," Kreindler said. "They should not be exposed to secondhand smoke under any circumstance." —Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com