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Equally sharing childcare duties may cause conflict

 

Fully sharing childcare responsibilities may cause parents to be more critical of one another than when the father has a more play-oriented role, finds a new study from the University of Ohio.

Researchers worked with 112 two-parent families, each with a four-year-old child. The parents were given a survey to complete, asking how much time they each spent on caregiving activities, such as feeding and bathing the child, versus play activities.

The family was then observed while the child tried to complete some age-appropriate but difficult tasks that required guidance from the parents. 

In those families where the father had indicated a more play-oriented parenting style, the couples tended to support each other as they cooperated to help their children complete the task. However, researchers noted that the parents who shared the caregiving role more equally tended to undermine and criticize one another

"If the mother is solely responsible for child care, she gets to determine how it is done. But if she is sharing those duties with the father, there is more opportunity for conflict about how tasks should be done," explained Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, co-author of the study, which was published in the journal Developmental Psychology.

"There is more than one path to an effective co-parenting relationship," she concluded, ““Effective co-parenting is not necessarily synonymous with equally sharing caregiving duties." 

 

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Parental divorce may increase risk of suicidal thoughts

Children who experience divorce before the age of 18 are more likely to contemplate suicide as adults, suggests a new study published in the journal Psychiatry Research.

Researchers at the University of Toronto worked with 6,647 adult volunteers, of whom 695 had experienced parental divorce in childhood.

They found that growing up in a divorced household made men more than three times as likely to consider suicide as adults, while women were 83 percent more likely.

The link between divorce and suicidal thoughts grew stronger when other problems were present in the home, such as physical abuse, unemployment, or parental drug or alcohol addiction.

After adjusting for these factors, male and female reactions began to further diverge. In women, the absence of any of these additional issues all but negated the link between parental divorce and suicidal thoughts, but "…[t]he association between parental divorce and suicidal thoughts in men was unexpectedly strong, even when we adjusted for other childhood and adult stressors, socioeconomic status, depression and anxiety,"  said lead author Esme Fuller-Thomson.

Researchers stress that not every child who experiences divorce will grow up to have suicidal thoughts, and the "data in no way suggest that children of divorce are destined to become suicidal."

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Environmental risks make parents more protective

Parental care is not hard-wired into a species but can change depending on the riskiness of the environment, finds a new study published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

Scientists at Oxford University used mathematical models to analyze how mortality rates influence the degree of care parents give their offspring.

Researchers discovered that unpredictable environments caused parents to be much more caring and protective in order to ensure the survival of their offspring.

"What this new research shows is that many more species are likely to ‘hedge their bets’, changing how much they care for their offspring depending on how challenging the environment is," said Dr. Mike Bonsall, author of the study.

The team set out to investigate how parental care evolved from a neglectful state in which parents leave offspring to fend for themselves. Using mathematical models, the researchers looked at the costs and benefits of increased parental care in increasingly unpredictable environments.

"People tend to think of parental care as something that is ‘hard-wired’…either species care for their young or not. What our research shows is the precarious balance between the costs and benefits of caring which may have caused parental care to have evolved, or been lost, many times in the history of life," said Dr. Bonsall.

 

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U.S. passport form to allow for same-sex parents

 

The United States is updating the passport application form for children under 16 in order to better accommodate a growing number of non-traditional families.
 
Where the previous form had asked for "mother" and "father", these fields will now be replaced with spaces for "parent 1" and "parent 2", in a move that is being heralded as a big step forward for gay rights.
 
"Changing the term mother and father to the more global term of parent allows many different types of families to be able to go and apply for a passport for their child without feeling like the government doesn’t recognize their family," said Jennifer Chrisler of the Family Equality Council, an LGBT parenting group.
 
While gay rights supporters might be rejoicing at the news, others are less happy with the change. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian organization that promotes the traditional family unit, claims that the change is "clearly designed to advance the causes of same-sex ‘marriage’ and homosexual parenting without statutory authority."

 

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How dangerous is the Internet for kids?

The Internet may not be as dangerous for children as parents suspect, reports a new survey out of the European Union, which finds that parents and kids perceive online risks differently.

Researchers with the London School of Economics and France’s National Center for Scientific Research surveyed 25,140 EU children aged 9 to 16 about their Internet habits, as well as how often they had encountered risks, such as seeing sexual images, communicating with strangers, or being bullied. 

Only 12 percent of all children surveyed said that they had experienced something online that left them bothered or upset. For instance, 14 percent of children have encountered sexual images online, but only two percent said they were upset by them.

By contrast, only six percent of children had received bullying messages, but over half of those were fairly or very upset by them – however bullying is still more likely to occur offline than online.

Overall, 40 percent of children reported encountering at least one risk online, and within this group, parents often remained unaware. Of those children who had seen a sexual image, 40 percent of parents did not know, and with regards to cyber-bullying, 56 percent of the victim’s parents were not informed.

 

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Parental support key to reducing kids screen time

Australian researchers have found that parental support is the key to helping overweight children move away from the TV and computer screen, and towards sports and healthier eating habits, according to a study published in the American College of Sports Medicine journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

Researchers tested three intervention strategies – a physical activity skills development program, a dietary modification program, and a combination of the two – on 165 overweight Australian children, ages 5 to 9.

By helping their kids modify behaviour and replace sedentary activity with physical activity and healthier diets, parents were able to help their children cut back on daily TV and computer screen time by an average of 55 minutes after six months, and 39 minutes after one year.

Children in the dietary modification program initially reduced their screen time by 65 minutes per day, but gained it all back by the end of the year. Researchers suggest that one explanation is the lack of targeted parental support related to screen time.

"In the physical activity skill development program (which was also included in the combination group), we targeted screen behaviours directly through a single behaviour-change session with parents and follow-up telephone calls during the six month program," said Dylan Cliff, Ph.D., the lead author. "The findings suggest that parental support could be the missing piece to help overweight children change their screen time behaviours."

The study concludes that the most durable and effective TV-watching intervention is physical activity skills development, and that parental support has a major influence on the child’s behaviour.

 

 

 

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Parental punishment today: No Internet!

Instead of ‘No TV for a week,’ to punish their kids, more and more parents are saying, ‘No Internet or TV,’ says a new study from the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California.

Today’s parents are making less and less of a distinction between television and the Internet. While two thirds of parents restrict their kids’ access to TV as punishment – a number that hasn’t changed in the last decade, the number of parents who also ban Internet use has almost doubled.

Researchers at USC’s Annenberg Center for the Digital Future reported these findings after an April 2010 survey of approximately 2,000 Americans.

The study found that in recent years, traditional parental punishment has changed. While 32 per cent of parents restricted access to the computer in 2000, ten years later, that number has almost doubled to 57 per cent.

With the growth of social networking and young people spending more and more time online, parents say they find computer use less intrusive than television.

According to 71 per cent of parents surveyed, the time their children spent on the Internet was "just right,” as opposed to only 51 per cent who felt that way about television.

 

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Inconsistent dosage directions on kids’ medications

There are serious inconsistencies between dosage directions and measuring devices in 200 children’s liquid non-prescription medications, according to a U.S. study in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

About 75 percent of the products came with a measuring device, of which 99 percent had some degree of inconsistency between the device and dosing instructions on the package. Nearly one quarter of all devices lacked sufficient markings.

Inconsistent units of measurement also posed a problem. In almost 90 percent of the products, the units stated in the instructions were different than those marked on the device. Almost all of the products used different abbreviations for millimetre rather than the standard mL, and the majority did not spell out the abbreviation.

As a result of their findings, study authors recommended that all non-prescription liquid medications should come with a measuring device, that this measuring device should be consistent with all dosing directions, and that the units, abbreviations and numeric formats should be standardized across all products.

In the interest of public health, especially for children as the cold and flu season approaches, study results have been released online ahead of print publication.

 

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Parental pressure and picky eaters

A recent British study examined the relationship between parental pressure about food and children’s eating habits.

Researchers looked at parental tactics that pressure kids to eat healthy, clean their plate, and try different foods. A number of previous studies showed that strict parental control was likely to cause less than ideal eating habits in children.

"Child enjoyment of food was linked to lower maternal pressure to eat," said Jane Wardle, lead author of a study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

After surveying 213 mothers of 7- to 9-year-old children, researchers found an overall correlation between the mothers’ pressure to eat healthy food and children’s degree of fussiness over food. However, no causal relationship has been proven, and it is still unknown whether fussy eaters cause more parental mealtime control, or vice versa.

"With growing evidence of a genetic basis to eating behaviour and food intake in children, the present results are consistent with the idea that mothers’ feeding practices are, to some extent, responsive to their children’s predispositions toward food," said the study.

The researchers emphasized the importance of recognizing that children may both influence, and be influenced by, their parents’ diet management.

 

 

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Effects of second-hand smoke on children

Parents who smoke in the family home are creating a toxic environment for their little ones. A recent study discovered that in homes with at least one smoker, 90 per cent of the children had tobacco-related carcinogens in their urine.

The level of tobacco metabolites in those children was about 8 per cent of the level found in smokers, while adult passive smokers had about 1 to 5 per cent carcinogens in their urine.

“This finding is striking, because while all of the researchers involved in the study expected some level of exposure to carcinogens, the average levels were higher than what we anticipated,” said lead researcher Janet L. Thomas, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.

There was a direct correlation between the amount of cigarettes smoked daily in the home and the level of tobacco metabolites found in the child.

According to the study, researchers believe tobacco carcinogens affect a child’s DNA and respiratory system. The consequences are unknown but it is likely that the presence of such carcinogens could result in bringing about some kind of DNA changes in cells which in turn could contribute to lung damage, and potentially lung cancer.

 “We need to act now to ensure that all parents have the facts they need to make informed decisions to protect their families from this completely preventable health hazard,” said Thomas.