Don’t be surprised if your other children are not as excited about your pregnancy as you are. Some children find it very exciting, while others might find it a little bit scary. They may worry that Mom won’t love them as much or have as much time for them when the new baby comes.
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NEW YORK (CNN) — Michelle Hammond and Jeremiah Holland were intrigued when a friend at the Oakland Tribune asked them and their two young children to take part in a cutting-edge study to measure the industrial chemicals in their bodies.
Tests showed Rowan’s blood had high levels of a chemical that can cause thyroid dysfunction in rats.
“In the beginning, I wasn’t worried at all; I was fascinated,” Hammond, 37, recalled.
But that fascination soon changed to fear, as tests revealed that their children — Rowan, then 18 months, and Mikaela, then 5 — had chemical exposure levels up to seven times those of their parents.
“[Rowan's] been on this planet for 18 months, and he’s loaded with a chemical I’ve never heard of,” Holland, 37, said. “He had two to three times the level of flame retardants in his body that’s been known to cause thyroid dysfunction in lab rats.”
The technology to test for these flame retardants — known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) — and other industrial chemicals is less than 10 years old. Environmentalists call it “body burden” testing, an allusion to the chemical “burden,” or legacy of toxins, running through our bloodstream. Scientists refer to this testing as “biomonitoring.”
Most Americans haven’t heard of body burden testing, but it’s a hot topic among environmentalists and public health experts who warn that the industrial chemicals we come into contact with every day are accumulating in our bodies and endangering our health in ways we have yet to understand.
“We are the humans in a dangerous and unnatural experiment in the United States, and I think it’s unconscionable,” said Dr. Leo Trasande, assistant director of the Center for Children’s Health and the Environment at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.
Trasande says that industrial toxins could be leading to more childhood disease and disorders.
“We are in an epidemic of environmentally mediated disease among American children today,” he said. “Rates of asthma, childhood cancers, birth defects and developmental disorders have exponentially increased, and it can’t be explained by changes in the human genome. So what has changed? All the chemicals we’re being exposed to.”
Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, a public health advocacy group, disagrees.
“My concern about this trend about measuring chemicals in the blood is it’s leading people to believe that the mere ability to detect chemicals is the same as proving a hazard, that if you have this chemical, you are at risk of a disease, and that is false,” she said. Whelan contends that trace levels of industrial chemicals in our bodies do not necessarily pose health risks.
In 2004, the Hollands became the first intact nuclear family in the United States to undergo body burden testing. Rowan, at just 1½ years old, became the youngest child in the U.S. to be tested for chemical exposure with this method.
Rowan’s extraordinarily high levels of PBDEs frightened his parents and left them with a looming question: If PBDEs are causing neurological damage to lab rats, could they be doing the same thing to Rowan? The answer is that no one knows for sure. In the three years since he was tested, no developmental problems have been found in Rowan’s neurological system.
Trasande said children up to six years old are most at risk because their vital organs and immune system are still developing and because they depend more heavily on their environments than adults do.
“Pound for pound, they eat more food, they drink more water, they breathe in more air,” he said. “And so [children] carry a higher body burden than we do.”
Studies on the health effects of PBDEs are only just beginning, but many countries have heeded the warning signs they see in animal studies. Sweden banned PBDEs in 1998. The European Union banned most PBDEs in 2004. In the United States, the sole manufacturer of two kinds of PBDEs voluntarily stopped making them in 2004. A third kind, Deca, is still used in the U.S. in electrical equipment, construction material, mattresses and textiles.
Another class of chemicals that showed up in high levels in the Holland children is known as phthalates. These are plasticizers, the softening agents found in many plastic bottles, kitchenware, toys, medical devices, personal care products and cosmetics. In lab animals, phthalates have been associated with reproductive defects, obesity and early puberty. But like PBDEs, little is known about what they do to humans and specifically children.
Russ Hauser, an associate professor of environmental and occupational epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, has done some of the few human studies on low-level phthalate exposure. His preliminary research shows that phthalates may contribute to infertility in men. A study led by Shanna Swan of the University of Rochester in New York shows that prenatal exposure to phthalates in males may be associated with impaired testicular function and with a defect that shortens the space between the genitals and anus.
The Environmental Protection Agency does not require chemical manufacturers to conduct human toxicity studies before approving their chemicals for use in the market. A manufacturer simply has to submit paperwork on a chemical, all the data that exists on that chemical to date, and wait 90 days for approval.
Jennifer Wood, an EPA spokeswoman, insists the agency has the tools to ensure safe oversight.
“If during the new-chemical review process, EPA determines that it may have concerns regarding risk or exposure, the EPA has the authority to require additional testing,” she said. EPA records show that of the 1,500 new chemicals submitted each year, the agency asks for additional testing roughly 10 percent of the time. The EPA has set up a voluntary testing program with the major chemical manufacturers to retroactively test some of the 3,000 most widely used chemicals.
Trasande believes that is too little, too late.
“The problem with these tests is that they are really baseline tests that don’t measure for the kind of subtle health problems that we’re seeing,” Dr. Trasande said.
In the three years since her family went through body burden testing, Michelle Hammond has become an activist on the issue. She’s testified twice in the California legislature to support a statewide body burden testing program, a bill that passed last year. Michelle also speaks to various public health groups about her experience, taking Mikaela, now 8, and Rowan, now 5, with her. So far, her children show no health problems associated with the industrial chemicals in their bodies.
“I’m angry at my government for failing to regulate chemicals that are in mass production and in consumer products.” Hammond says. “I don’t think it should have to be up to me to worry about what’s in my couch.”
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/10/22/body.burden/index.html
Fetal immune system not so naive after all.
When a pregnant mother receives her recommended flu vaccine, she’s not the only one whose immune system gears up to battle the virus. Her fetus can also mount an immune response against the flu, say researchers in the United States.
The finding runs contrary to the stereotypical view of the fetal immune system. For more than 50 years, this has been thought of as at best wimpy, capable of some basic, general responses but not the elegant, finely targeted defences found in adults.
But allergy researcher Rachel Miller of Columbia University, New York, and her colleagues found that about a third of babies born of vaccinated mothers were equipped with cells tailor-made to fight off the flu virus.
“This indicates that the baby’s got a pretty well-developed immune system by the time it’s born,” says immunologist William Burlingham of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Whether the immune cells are enough to ward off infection from the virus has not been tested. But their existence shows that the neonatal immune system can make immune cells to fight specific antigens.
The findings could have important public health consequences if the babies do become resistant to flu, says Ofer Levy, a physician and immunologist at Harvard Medical School. “This raises the possibility that if you optimize vaccines, you might be able to protect both the mother and the newborn,” he says.
Some researchers believe that exposure in the womb to antigens from, for example, specific foods or cigarette smoke can affect the development of later allergies. But Miller urges caution before extrapolating from her results to other antigens.
“This was a very strong stimulant,” says Miller of the vaccination. “We don’t know how generalizable that will be.”
Fetuses fight back
The fetal immune system was thought puny because newborn babies are highly susceptible to infection. And they have few of the immune cells involved in recognizing specific antigens. Also, says Burlingham, researchers often study the question in mice, which have a less developed immune system at birth than humans.
Recently, there has been some evidence that the neonatal immune system is more sophisticated than once thought. But it is difficult to detect T cells targeted against a specific antigen, and previous work used techniques that were criticized for their lack of specificity.
To home in on the baby’s immune system, Miller used a fluorescent molecule that mimics the antigen, and lights up when the appropriate immune cell sticks to it.
The researchers screened umbilical-cord blood from babies born to women who’d been vaccinated against the flu during their second or third trimester. They found that about one in three babies had produced antibodies and T cells designed to attack the flu virus.
The cells contained protein sequences encoded by DNA inherited from dad, ruling out the possibility that the cells were acquired direct from mum. The results are published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation1.
“This says that the antigens introduced to the mother through vaccination are transferred to baby, and the baby’s immune system is responding,” says Burlingham. “There’s the potential here that these babies could have some useful immunity.” Burlingham says that his lab has achieved similar results using other antigens.
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070528/full/070528- 12.html
BEIJING, (Xinhuanet) — A Canadian researcher has called for an investigation into why children from broken marriages are twice as likely to be prescribed attention-deficit drugs as children whose parents remain together.
University pf Alberta professor Lisa Strohschein reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal more than 6 percent of 633 children from divorced families were prescribed Ritalin, compared with 3.3 percent of children whose parents stayed together.
“It shows clearly that divorce is a risk factor for kids to be prescribed Ritalin,” Strohschein said.
The study of more than 4,700 children started in 1994, while all the families were intact, Strohschein said. They followed the children’s progress to see what happened to their families and to see what drugs were prescribed.
Other studies have shown that children of single parents are more likely to get prescribed drugs such as Ritalin. But is the problem caused by being born to a never-married mother, or some other factor?
Ritalin, known generically as methylphenidate, is a psychostimulant drug most commonly prescribed for the treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.
There is a big debate in much of the developed world over whether it may be over-prescribed — given to children who do not really need it. In March, a University of California, Berkeley study found that the use of drugs to treat ADHD has more than tripled worldwide since 1993.
Strohschein said it is possible that some mental health problems pre-date the divorce, so “it is possible that these kids had these problems before, but are only being identified afterward.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning pharmaceutical manufacturers, suppliers, drug repackers, and health professionals who compound medications to be especially vigilant in assuring that glycerin, a sweetener commonly used worldwide in liquid over-the-counter and prescription drug products, is not contaminated with diethylene glycol (DEG).
DEG is a known poison used in antifreeze and as a solvent. Today, the agency is issuing guidance to industry recommending methods of testing glycerin and other controls to identify any contamination with DEG before use in the manufacture or preparation of pharmaceutical products.
At the present time, FDA has no reason to believe that the U.S. supply of glycerin is contaminated with DEG, though the agency is cognizant of reports from other countries over the past several years in which DEG-contaminated glycerin has caused human deaths. FDA is emphasizing the importance of testing glycerin for DEG due to the serious nature of this potentially fatal problem in combination with the global nature of the pharmaceutical supply chain and problems that continue to occur with this kind of contamination in some parts of the global supply of glycerin.
DEG poisoning is an important public safety issue and FDA is exploring how supplies of glycerin become contaminated. In addition, FDA is working with a variety of manufacturing and pharmacist organizations to raise awareness of this risk and to put into place controls to ensure that this problem does not happen in the U.S. or elsewhere.
The most recent incident occurred in Panama in September 2006 and involved DEG-contaminated glycerin used in cough syrup, which resulted in dozens of hospitalizations for serious injury and more than 40 deaths. In late 1995 and early 1996, at least 80 children died in Haiti due to DEG-contaminated glycerin in acetaminophen syrup.
Between 1990 and 1998, similar incidents of DEG poisoning reportedly occurred in Argentina, Bangladesh, India, and Nigeria and resulted in hundreds of deaths. In 1937, more than 100 people died in the United States after ingesting DEG-contaminated Elixir Sulfanilamide, a drug used to treat infections. This incident led to the enactment of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which is the nation’s primary statute on the regulation of drugs.
FDA reminds pharmaceutical manufacturers, compounders, repackers, and suppliers, as well as brokers and distributors, that all pharmaceutical manufacturing operations, including the re-packaging and re-labeling of ingredients like glycerin, must conform to current good manufacturing practice (CGMP). The guidance provides recommendations for complying with CGMP and is intended to help manufacturers, compounders, repackers, and suppliers avoid the use of glycerin that is contaminated with DEG and prevent incidents of DEG poisoning.
ST. PAUL – High school girls in Minnesota were twice as likely to take diet pills in 2004 than they were five years earlier, according to the results of a new survey.
University of Minnesota researchers followed 2,500 young women from 1999 to 2004 and surveyed them on a variety of issues related to diet, exercise, weight and body image. The early results showed 7.5 percent used diet pills, but the later results jumped to 14.2 percent.
One in five women ages 19 to 20 used diet pills, according to the Project EAT (Eating Among Teens) survey released Monday. One in five also admitted using diet pills or laxatives, vomiting or skipping meals – strategies the researchers characterized as very unhealthy.
“These numbers are startling, and they tell us we need to do a better job of helping our daughters feel better about themselves and avoid unhealthy weight-control behaviors,” Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, the lead researcher for the project, said in a prepared statement.
The survey, which covered students in the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Osseo school districts, also showed that less than 20 percent of teenage women are overweight, though a majority of them are worried about their weight.
As young women reach their teen years, they feel more pressure and they also have greater financial resources and access to diet pills and laxatives, said Sharon Berry, a psychologist with Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.
“That’s when the comparisons to others occur, at a time when you want to feel just like everybody else,” she said. “So the pressure intensifies.”
Meanwhile, a comparable number of young men followed in the study were only half as likely to attempt very unhealthy methods of weight loss. Young men also reported more than six hours of exercise per week, while young women reported less than four hours.
ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) — Scientists now say a third of infant deaths are due to premature births — a much larger percentage than previously thought.
In the past, “preterm birth” has been the listed cause of death in fewer than 20 percent of newborn fatalities. But that number should be 34 percent or more, said researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That’s because at least a dozen causes of newborn death are actually problems that go hand-in-hand with premature births, such as respiratory distress syndrome caused by underdeveloped lungs.
“This brings preterm birth, as a cause of death, to the kind of level that we think it deserves,” said the CDC’s Dr. Bill Callaghan, the lead author of a study appearing Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
The revised statistic may lead to greater efforts to counsel pregnant women about taking care of themselves and avoiding actions that can lead to preterm births — such as smoking and drug use.
It also may help organizations lobbying for more research into why some women who follow medical advice still have preterm babies. The March of Dimes is advocating to expand federal research into preterm labor and delivery and the care and treatment of premature infants.
At issue is how to label the causes of deaths for infants who die before they reach their first birthday.
“Preterm birth” generally describes infants who are born before 37 weeks gestation, and the term is also used as an official cause of death. Two-thirds of infant deaths occur in children who were preterm, but their cause of death is often attributed to one of the several specific problems that can occur in preterm babies.
“The only way that an infant gets assigned (“preterm birth”) is if there’s nothing else on the death certificate,” said Callaghan, a senior scientist in the CDC’s maternal and infant health branch. “That may result in an underestimation of what the real problem is.”
Callaghan and other researchers reviewed about 28,000 U.S. infants that occurred in 2002.
More than 4,600 of those — or 17 percent — were attributed only to preterm birth. But the researchers also grouped in about 5,000 other deaths that were attributed to preterm-related conditions including respiratory distress syndrome, brain hemorrhage and maternal complications such as premature rupture of membranes.
In that counting, nearly 9,600 births — or 34 percent — could be classified as preterm, Callaghan said. The researchers believe that figure is conservative and most likely underestimates the true picture.
Experts have generally understood the burden of preterm birth on infant deaths, but the new study sorts out the data and provides specific numbers, said Carol Hogue, an Emory University professor of maternal and child health.
“It isn’t just an exercise in moving deck chairs around on the Titanic,” said Hogue.
Article found here
by Dr. James Howenstine, MD
Medical journals and textbooks typically portray iodine as an unimportant substance which should be taken in small amounts because of it’s dangers. Actually approximately one third of humanity has iodine deficiency.
When humans lack iodine the thyroid gland enlarges (goiter), nodules appear in the thyroid gland and over a period of time cancer may appear in a thyroid nodule. Conventional medicine treats thyroid gland enlargement with thyroid hormone without considering the possibility that the hypothyroidism and goiter may be due to lack of iodine.
This failure to diagnose and treat iodine deficiency can lead to an increased risk of breast cancer and the longer the diagnosis is missed the greater the chance that breast cancer will occur. Women taking thyroid hormone appear to be twice (12.1%) as likely to develop breast cancer as women not using thyroid hormone (6..2%). Women who had taken thyroid hormone for 15 years had a 19.5% incidence of breast cancer whereas women who have only taken thyroid hormone for 5 years had only a 10% incidence of breast cancer. Why is this?
The essential trace element iodine may be the most important least publicized mineral in existence. Iodine is the only element needed in hormones and in the production of hormones. The iodine containing hormones are involved in the creation of embryos, development of brain function, growth, metabolism and maintenance of body temperature.
This means that proper amounts of thyroid hormone, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, insulin, growth hormone etc. can not be made when iodine is lacking from the body. One third of all individuals on Earth are functioning with subnormal levels of iodine. Low intake of iodine is the leading cause for intellectual deficiency in the world.
There is strong evidence that iodine lack predisposes to breast cancer. One out of seven women in the U.S. has deficiency of iodine proven by urine iodine screening tests (urine I less than 50 ug/L). This is the same incidence for breast cancer seen in U.S. women. Without bothering to check urine for iodine, physicians visited by a woman with a goiter or symptoms of hypothyroidism are routinely prescribing thyroid hormone therapy.
Hintze et al compared the results of 400ug/L of Iodine with 150ug of T4 (synthyroid) for 8 months and then four months after stopping therapy. The results clearly favored iodine therapy. Both treatments led to similar suppression in the size of the goiter. However, four months later the size of the thyroid had returned to pre-treatment levels in the group treated with T4 hormone.
The group who had received iodine therapy continued to have normal sized thyroid glands four months after therapy was stopped. Several investigators have concluded that iodine lack is a probable cause for breast cancer in women.
Demographic studies in Japan and Iceland revealed that both countries have a high intake of iodine and low incidences of goiter and breast cancer. In Mexico and Thailand where iodine intake is low there is a high incidence of goiter and breast cancer. Thyroid gland size measured by ultrasound is significantly larger in Irish women with breast cancer than control women.
Administration of thyroid hormone to iodine deficient women appears to increase the risk of developing breast cancer. In a group of women undergoing screening mammograms the incidence of breast cancer was twice as high in the women taking thyroid hormone. for hypothyroidism (probably caused by iodine lack) than in women not taking thyroid supplements.
The mean incidence was 6.2% in controls and 12.1% in women on thyroid hormones. The incidence of breast cancer was twice as high in women taking thyroid hormone for more than 15 years (19.5%) compared to those on thyroid hormones for only 5 years (10%).
In the state of Michigan, during a period of iodine supplementation in bread (1924-1951) the prevalence of goiter diminished from 38.6% to 1.4%. Of interest the incidence of breast cancer remained unchanged during this time frame. This information was used to suggest that iodine supplementation had no effect on the incidence of breast cancer.
However, Ghent and Eskin were able to show in women and female rats that the amount of iodine needed to protect against fibrocystic disease of the breast and breast cancer was at least 20 to 40 times greater than the iodine needed to control goiter.
In the 1960s mandated iodine containing dough was equivalent to the RDA of 150 ug per slice of bread. At that time the incidence of breast cancer was only 1 in 20. In the past 20 years the use of iodine supplementation in bread was eliminated and a goiter producing substance toxic to the thyroid gland (bromine) was introduced as replacement for iodine.
The risk for breast cancer is now 1 in 8 and this risk is increasing by one percent each year. The decision to replace iodine in an iodine deficient population with a goitrogen was illogical lacking in common sense. The damaging effects of bromine on thyroid tissue also appears to contribute to the development of auto-immune diseases in the thyroid gland (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis).
The mammary glands have a trapping system for iodine similar to that of the thyroid gland. The breasts effectively compete with the thyroid gland for ingested iodine. This distribution of iodine to both breast and thyroid gland in pubertal girls explains why goiter is 6 times more common in girls than pubertal boys.
The disappearance of iodine into breast tissue in women leads to decreased ability to supply the thyroid gland with an adequate amount of iodine. The development of a goiter in young girls indicates deficient distribution of iodine to both breast and thyroid tissue. Treating such a patient with thyroid hormone is not sensible and appears to increase the risk of breast cancer.
Study of radioiodine uptake in normals and women with fibrocystic breast disease FDB reveals that the FDB breasts were able to take in 12.5% of the iodine dosage compared to only 6.9% in normal breasts. This proves the existence of considerable iodine depletion in the breasts of women with FDB.
There is considerable evidence for an increased risk of thyroid cancer as well as breast cancer in persons with iodine deficiency. Untreated iodine deficiency leads to goiter, thyroid nodules and eventually some of these nodules become malignant. The decreasing intake of iodine has resulted in an increase in thyroid nodules and increase in thyroid cancer. In 2001 there were 19,500 new cases of thyroid cancer in the U.S. with 14,900 of these cases occurring in women.
Iodine has a role in promoting general well being as well as protecting against infections, degenerative diseases and cancer. Iodine promotes the normal killing of defective and abnormal cells (apoptosis). Thus, iodine helps the body’s surveillance system to detect and remove abnormal cells. Additionally, the presence of iodine triggers differentiation away from the more dangerous undifferentiated type of cell toward normal cells.
The presence of adequate levels of iodine in the body (Japanese diet with lots of sea vegetables and fish) reduces reactive oxygen species (ROS). in the body which decreases the oxidative burden in the body This results in slowing of degeneration disease processes and decreasing the risk of cancer.
Nearly every physician in the United States will reach for a prescription pad to order thyroid hormone when he sees a patient with goiter or symptoms of hypothyroidism. This can be exactly the wrong thing to do if the patient has deficient stores of iodine. Insist on obtaining a 24 hour urine collection for iodine to eliminate iodine lack as the cause for your symptoms (values below 50 ug/liter are abnormal).
Thyroid hormone therapy in the presence of iodine deficiency increases the risk of breast cancer and probably thyroid cancer as well. Endocrinologist, Dr. Guy Abraham, formerly of the U.C..L.A. Department of Endocrinology, is convinced that everyone needs to be on iodine therapy until their iodine stores have been fully restored. After this time frame periodic intake of iodine will help insure that the many body functions requiring iodine run smoothly.
A dosage of two tablets of Iodoral twice daily for three months followed by one Iodoral tablet daily for a year will restore iodine stores for most persons. At that point periodic taking of an Iodoral tablet daily one month out of 4 to 6 months etc. will be adequate to maintain iodine stores. Iodine stores can be easily monitored by taking 4 Iodoral tablets (50 mg iodine) and collecting a 24 hour urine sample for iodine content. If 80% of the ingested iodine is found in the urine collection the iodine stores are normal. Iodoral can be obtained from Optimox Corp. Torrance, Cal. To purchase a referral from a health care practitioner is needed.
About the author
Dr. James A. Howenstine is a board certified specialist in internal medicine who spent 34 years caring for office and hospital patients. After 4 years of personal study he became convinced that natural products are safer, more effective, and less expensive than pharmaceutical drugs.
When students at a Lynnwood alternative high school thought administrators were cracking down on hugging recently, they launched a petition drive.
Within a day, they’d gathered signatures from 80 of the school’s 250 students insisting on their right to hug.
Turns out there was no ban, just concern about some hallway hugging the principal said went on too long.
But the students’ sharp sense of injustice suggests just how much hugging has come to mean to adolescents. From middle school to high school, from athletes to band geeks, students are throwing their arms around each other. The hug, a greeting once reserved for young children and out-of-town relatives, is how teenagers now say hello and goodbye.
“Boys are hugging boys. Girls are hugging girls. Girls are hugging boys. They’re a hugging generation,” said Joyce Stewart, principal of Evergreen Middle School in Everett.
Grown men hugging each other can make the news, as when Chinese President Hu Jintao hugged a Boeing supervisor during his April visit, largely because Chinese officials are known more for formality than spontaneity.
King County Executive Ron Sims, who has made a career of hugging, sees a sort of global warming when it comes to the affectionate embrace.
“Around the world, everybody hugs,” Sims said.
But in the hallways of the region’s schools, all that hugging makes some administrators nervous.
“We try to discourage it,” Stewart said, citing concern that such a gesture, given to the wrong person, could be interpreted as harassment or an unwanted sexual advance. Stewart said teachers at Evergreen avoid hugging students and try to prevent students from hugging them for the same reason.
At Brier-Terrace Middle School, Principal Bill Fritz said student hugs must be limited to three seconds. After three seconds, the gesture enters the red zone of Public Display of Affection.
“Some kids try to go there, but we put an end to it,” Fritz said.
In the Lakewood District northwest of Marysville, students are sometimes late to class because of all the hallway hugging.
“We only have a four-minute passing period. It gets disruptive when students want to stop and hug everyone,” said Lakewood Middle School Principal Crystal Knight.
So what’s up with hugging? Why has it become the teenage greeting of choice? And how many variants are there?
Take a group of teenage girlfriends at the mall. Before they part company, each girl hugs every other girl. Say there are six girls. That’s 15 hugs.
“Exponential hugging” is how Jason Coffman, a coach for Mount Baker Rowing Club on Lake Washington, described it. After practice this spring, the 40-some high-school girls who rowed crew hugged each other after practice. Not all of them every time, but large groups of them.
“They’re very demonstrative. It’s a gender thing and an age thing,” he said.
At Mount Baker, the boys don’t hug after crew practice. The college women he previously coached did not hug after practice. And when he last coached high-school girls for Mount Baker, they didn’t hug.
“Ten years ago, they weren’t as demonstrative, but they also weren’t as tight-knit,” Coffman said.
At Mountlake Terrace High School, an entire hallway was devoted to hugging during the recent “Care Week.” Students were encouraged to hug each other as they passed to show their concern and affection. The adjacent “Wink Hall” was deemed “too cheesy” and went largely ignored, said Sharon McClintock, a freshman and self-described “hugging expert.”
McClintock said hugging at Mountlake Terrace often goes with extracurricular activities.
“Students in band hug each other. Two guys in drama hug all the girls before leaving. The ASB [Associated Student Body] kids hug a lot,” she said.
McClintock likened today’s hugs to an earlier generation’s handshakes: a greeting and an acknowledgment of familiarity, “only less formal.” And there are several popular variations.
There’s the “drive-by” hug, in which friends quickly grasp each other while hurrying to class.
There’s the “true friend” hug, in which boys lift up girls they’ve known “forever” and swing them around.
There’s the “fantastic news” hug, as when a good friend got admitted to culinary school. That hug, McClintock said, featured accompanying sound effects.
There’s also hugging to get warm and hugging to be consoled.
“When someone’s feeling bad, it’s just natural that you hug them,” she said.
McClintock said she may be so attuned to hugging because she attended a Christian middle school where only same-sex embraces were allowed.
“If something terrible happened to someone, you could hug them, but only from the side,” she said.
Similarly, Leah Pope, a junior at Mountlake Terrace High, said her middle school allowed only “grandma hugs,” with nothing touching below the shoulders.
Pope said that in high school, discomfort may arise when someone offers an exploratory, I-like-you-do-you-like-me? hug.
“That can be awkward, but life is awkward,” she said.
Some see the potential for world harmony and multicultural understanding in the rise of the hug.
King County Executive Sims has embraced so many people in so many venues that he has been labeled a “serial hugger.”
“I’m so well-known as a hugger that if I don’t hug someone, they think I’m mad at them,” he said.
Sims takes a military protocol approach to hugging. He may spontaneously hug someone of equal or lesser rank, say, a Republican county councilman, but he said he asks permission of anyone of greater rank, such as a senator or president.
He delights in recounting the story of a White House reception in which Bill Clinton shook and shook his hand and would not let go. Finally the president said, “Aren’t I going to get one of those famous Ron Sims hugs?”
Sims believes, as did his father, that hugs break down barriers and disarm defensiveness.
“They say, ‘I’m comfortable in your space and you’re accepted in mine.’ ”
He believes the popularity of hugging among young people is a reflection of our increasing world perspective. People here travel to countries that are more expressive and physically affectionate. People from those countries have brought their hugging here.
“I think we’re going to see it take hold throughout the country,” Sims said. “If everyone did it, the world would be a better place.”
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — “Clean your plate or else!” and other authoritarian approaches to parenting can lead to overweight children, a new study finds.
Strict mothers were nearly five times more likely to raise tubby first-graders than mothers who treated their children with flexibility and respect while also setting clear rules.
But while the children of flexible rule-setting moms avoided obesity, the children of neglectful mothers and permissive mothers were twice as likely to get fat.
“The difference between the different parenting groups is pretty striking,” said the study co-author, Dr. Kay Rhee of Boston University School of Medicine. The study of 872 families appears in the June issue of Pediatrics, released Monday.
Mothers and children in Lawrence, Kansas, were among those in 10 U.S. cities who participated in the study.
Rhee speculated that parents who show respect and warmth within a framework of rules may help their children learn to make good decisions about food and exercise. Or it could be that strict parents create a stressful household where overeating becomes a comfort and escape, she said.
Other studies have shown the flexible parenting style, also called authoritative, has other good results for children such as higher achievement in school and lower incidence of depression, said John Lavigne, chief psychologist at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
Lavigne, who was not involved in the new study, said most parents can learn a different way of handling their children.
“Some parents might have difficulty changing their style. But a lot of other parents are very amenable to change, if they only have the right kind of advice,” Lavigne said.
Not enough fathers participated in the study to measure their effects on children’s weight, Rhee said. And since more than 80 percent of the study participants were white, the findings may not be applicable to other racial groups, she said.
The study also did not take into account the weight status of the mothers, so the researchers couldn’t rule out that a mother’s weight might influence both her parenting and her children’s weight. However, a previous study showed that parenting style is not linked to weight status, Rhee said.
To determine parenting style for the new study, researchers surveyed the mothers and observed them interacting with their children when the kids were 4 years old. The children’s body mass indexes were measured later when the children were in first grade.
Seventeen percent of the children of strict disciplinarians were overweight compared to 9.9 percent of the children of neglectful parents, 9.8 percent of the children of permissive parents and 3.9 percent of the children of flexible rule-setters.
“Children need adults to set some limits and as the child matures they need to learn responsibility and self-regulation gradually,” said Dr. Nancy Krebs, co-chair of the task force on obesity for the American Academy of Pediatrics, who also was not involved in the new study.
The researchers studied mothers and children in Little Rock, Arkansas; Irvine, California; Lawrence, Kansas; Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Charlottesville, Virginia; Morgantown, North Carolina; Seattle, Washington, and Madison, Wisconsin.
In homes where parents are firm but flexible, “the rules can be bent a little or modified a little to accommodate the situation. But ultimately there are rules,” Rhee said. “You still maintain the rule that the child has to have a vegetable at dinner, but the child gets to pick which one and how much of it they eat.”
Courtesy of CNN – Read full story here