There is a newly popular holiday tradition for kids that really creeps me out. Full disclosure: I’ve never been completely comfortable with Santa Claus. If he’s omniscient and just, then how come the bully who wrecked my bike got cooler presents than I did, huh? I’d say the "jolly old elf" may be nipping more than cookies at, oh, every house in the world.
But now, like so many large multinationals, Santa is outsourcing. It seems he’s giving the omniscience job to a growing workforce of little red-clad dolls, assigned to perch in a new location every day and spy on kids then fly back to the North Pole nightly and report to their superiors like tiny KGB officers. Personally, I’m not about to populate my kids’ bookshelves with snitches; I’m already doing enough to make them neurotic.
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When considering which fancy new toys Santa will place under the tree, keep the fragile eardrums of young children in mind.
According to Dr. Hamid Djalilian and collegues at the University of California, Irvine, I may also be making them deaf, at least if I buy the wrong toys. The Irvine group identified toys that generated sounds in excess of 85 decibels, enough to cause hearing loss with prolonged exposure. Among the worst offenders were the I Am T-Pain Microphone, an auto-tune device that allows the user to sing with perfect pitch and suffer hearing damage just like a real performer!
Other winners included Lightning Rods Road Rippers, cars which, to be fair, zoom away on their own to a distance at which their noise level is safe, and the Marvel Super Shield Captain America, soon to be renamed the Marvel Shield-Your-Ears Captain America. Of course it could be worse. So far no one this year is selling Electro-Who-Cardio-Schlooks.
I do always try to make room in my kids’ stockings for gifts that inspire them to be more active, like roller skates or chocolate Santa Clauses. I know what you’re thinking, but before they can unwrap and eat the Santas I hurl them into the back yard as far as I can. According to a new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, however, it’s not the younger kids we should worry about so much as their older siblings in college.
Based on longitudinal studies of Canadian students, it appears that especially males see precipitous declines in their activity levels after they start college. I long suspected it was the same twelve guys playing Ultimate Frisbee on the quad in all those college catalogues. Of course like any study this one is subject to nit-picking. For example, we don’t know that the results would be the same in the US as in Canada. Not only is it colder up there, but they have better beer, and they watch hockey like, all the time. Other potential confounders include differences in maple syrup consumption, sketch comedy quality, and police uniform color. Clearly more study is needed.
Speaking of needing more study, I particularly enjoyed the spin associated with a report given early online publication by the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine this week. After analyzing over 65,000 Danish mother-child pairs to evaluate the potential fetal effects of maternal inhaled glucocorticoid use, first author Marion Tegethoff had the following to say: "Our data are mostly reassuring and support the use of inhaled glucocorticoids during pregnancy." She might have added, "except for that little thing about the increased risk of endocrine and metabolic diseases. That part was not so reassuring."
Personally, I’ve always viewed inhaled glucocorticoids for asthma as having among the greatest risk:benefits ratio of any class of medications we use. So I was a little alarmed to read they may have significant deleterious effects on infant health when used by pregnant women. I’m not going to hyperventilate until some other study validates the results, but suffice to say there’s nothing about the words, "endocrine and metabolic abnormalities" that gives me the warm fuzzies.
What would give me the warm fuzzies would be to run down to my local discount store and pay off someone’s layaway account, like the growing number of "Secret Santas" making the news this holiday season. But first I want to see their list and make sure it doesn’t include any of those creepy little elf dolls.