Won't somebody please think of the children? Oh, don't fool yourselves! Americans under the age of 12 now spend or influence the spending of $565 billion a year - up from $2.2 billion in 1968, and kid-spending has roughly doubled every ten years for the past three decades, tripling in the 1990s. Which means someone is always thinking of the children. The American Association of Pediatrics (pdf) cites this bludgeoning of kidvertising as creating in children "a fever for shopping and spending, swollen expectations about material needs, decreasing immunity to the assaults of advertisers, self-concepts defined by brands of clothing, and a rash of of debt by the time they leave college". [more...]
posted by taz on Sep 19, 2005 - 55 comments

In the emotive world of child abuse, Professor Sir Roy Meadow became a celebrity in the last 25 years. He described Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy in which parents were said to have confabulated symptoms in their children in order to obtain medical treatment. Among child and health workers, Police and Social Workers, his eponymous law held that multiple childhood deaths in individual families were indicative of abuse and infanticide.
He was of course a popular forensic expert and his testimony resulted in murder convictions and removal of at-risk children from their families. But the Court of Appeal in UK has found that Prof. Meadow's statistical assertions and scientific reasonings were themselves confabulated and there have been a number of convictions overturned. He is now fighting for his professional reputation before the General Medical Council in London. [More Inside]
posted by peacay on Jun 28, 2005 - 17 comments

The number of children with flattened heads (aka positional plagiocephaly) is on the rise. The cause? "Back to Sleep," the government program that urged parents to prevent SIDS by putting their babies to sleep on their backs. The condition can be treated through surgery, the use of an orthotic helmet, or just letting the kid be, in the hopes of growing out of it.

According to this article, though, the medical establishment has been less than willing to acknowledge the problem and deal with it proactively.
posted by greatgefilte on May 12, 2005 - 39 comments

Jason's incredible day is the most moving blog entry I've read this year, if not ever. It's going in my bookmarks under "amazing stories that can move me to tears."
posted by mathowie on Apr 12, 2001 - 20 comments

Vaccine linked to Autism? Something every parent should know. I don't know if it's true or not, I mean it's not proven, but it is kind of scary.
posted by premiumpolar on Mar 6, 2000 - 0 comments