Is it wrong that I’m now criticizing my kids’ fashion choices? I mean, that’s a hazardous endeavor for someone who once wore a Members Only jacket and parachute pants. With a muscle shirt. And yet...yet I worry that my 9-year-old son is going to suffer frostbite of the knees. This is because he and all his little friends insist on wearing shorts and mid-calf athletic socks under any and all weather conditions. In other years, this uniform might work for coastal North Carolina, but the last 2 months here have been like living in Minnesota, only with worse drivers.
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Family meals seem much more productive now that we don't have to talk to each other.
To be fair, the socks are impressive: bright, thick synthetic constructions with “R” and “L” woven into them so that if you lose a left one from one pair you have to lose the right one from another or you’ve wasted more than socks should reasonably cost. (How is it a child can keep track of Right and Left socks when he can’t find his own laundry bin?) Now if I can only get him to wear a pair that comes up to his shorts.
Sound of silence
Don’t you hate those conversations where halfway through you think, “I should probably just stop talking now”? According to a new study, if you’re counseling vaccine-hesitant parents, shut up, like right now. Zip it. Hush! If your lips are still moving, you’re just making it worse.
We now know scientifically that there is nothing at all you can say that will change their minds about vaccines and much that will strengthen their resolve to make their own children and the rest of us sicker. Move on to another topic: “Sure has been cold around here! Can you believe my son wore shorts today?”
A study released in Pediatrics examined the effectiveness of four logical-seeming strategies used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to encourage parents to give their kids measles vaccine: correct misinformation, present information on measles risks, use a dramatic narrative to make the risk of measles more salient, or display visuals so that people understand that measles temporarily gives you an unattractive complexion and then sometimes kills you. If vaccine resistance were rational, we would be talking about which of these strategies worked best.
Instead, we’re talking about how they ranged from not working at all to making parents more convinced than ever that measles vaccination is a worldwide conspiracy organized by a super-villain who hopes to build an army of autistic children in order to, to, oh, who knows? Does it matter? The point is, as cognitive psychologists already know, people first make emotional decisions and then search for reasons. When you bring up evidence that doesn’t match their beliefs, you just make them mad. Which is why, from now on, I’ll be conducting my wellness exams in mime.
Kick
Sometimes the scariest part of being a parent is that you have to set an example, like, all the time. That’s exhausting! Just once I want to lie down on the floor in the candy aisle and scream, but can I? No, I cannot, at least according to the grocery store manager.
When it comes to playing with cell phones and other mobile devices, however, it turns out that many parents are worse than their kids. We know this because a group of researchers from Boston University sat around in local restaurants pretending to eat french fries while surreptitiously documenting the behavior of children and their caretakers, then actually eating french fries.
What they saw wasn’t pretty. Forty out of 55 adults observed were riveted to their mobile devices, often completely ignoring the children in their care, not to mention the researchers who kept staring at them and scribbling in ketchup-stained notebooks. In the clinical language of the report, “one female adult kicked a child’s foot under the table; another female caregiver pushed a young boy’s hands away when he was trying to repeatedly lift her face up from looking at a tablet screen.”
Some kids responded to the parental neglect by ramping up attention-getting behavior. Others were so used to it that they simply entertained themselves, periodically texting their parents to ask for help getting to the bathroom. The researchers gained valuable insights into how mobile devices alter parenting behavior, as well as an average of 15 pounds.
Big difference
History is littered with innovations once considered wondrous that turned out to be more damaging than anyone had initially imagined: radium, DDT, Justin Bieber. A new study further suggests that this catalogue of infamy should expand to include antibiotics, potentially life-saving medicines whose overuse may ultimately be as damaging to society as reality TV.
We’ve known for a while that antibiotics contribute to allergic reactions, asthma, diarrhea, and the development of highly resistant “superbugs.” Now an all-star team of epidemiologists from around the country implicates recent antibiotic use in increasing cases of childhood intestinal infections with Clostridium difficile (“Come for the cramping. Stay for the bloody diarrhea.”).
Sadly, there are still a fair number of docs out there who’d rather cave to parents demanding antibiotics for a cold (and yes, green snot is part of a cold) than explain that not only will the antibiotics not fix the problem, they’ll cause all sorts of new ones. Next time a parent is insisting on a script, for the sake of us all, grow a spine and tell them to put a sock in it. If they don’t have a sock, no sweat, I have a spare: it’s a Left.