Maybe not. But there will be a thousand child-rearing decisions you will make before your baby leaves for that gap year in Kenya: Organic Oreos? Speech therapy for the minor lisp? Private driving lessons? And there is no way every single one will be optimal. It’s hard to believe when you’re brand new at parenting, but breastfeeding is just one of those many decisions, and, like all the rest, it is not the be-all and end-all that will determine your baby’s health and happiness. (Even though busybodies may tell you it is. Walk away, fast, or you’ll end up with a twelve-year grudge.)
There is evidence that breastfeeding provides some advantages to a baby, but not big ones you’d be able to spot a mile away. Chiefly it seems to cut down on ear infections (by 19 percent), recurrent ear infections (80 percent), and diarrhea (50 percent). These are usually not illnesses with long-term effects. Some studies also suggest that breastfed babies may have slightly higher IQs, but who knows if that’s because they were breastfed or because breastfeeding moms may have higher IQs or because breastfed kids grow up in houses filled with books (on breastfeeding)? And are you trying to raise a genius or trying to raise a child and doing it as best you can? As Rebecca Kukla says, our obsession with long-term breastfeeding “seems to be much more about our image of appropriate motherhood than the nutritional well-being of infants.” And she’s a professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and philosophy. She thinks hard about healthy babies!
As for bonding and such, Kukla points to a 2008 study, reported in the journal Pediatrics—the largest study ever to assess the long-term effects of breastfeeding on child behavior—that found no difference in baby-mommy bonding whether moms breastfed exclusively or not. The study followed a whopping fourteen thousand mom-kid pairs for six-and-a-half years, and the researchers frankly admitted that if nothing else, they had expected to find “behavioral advantages conferred by more exclusive or prolonged breastfeeding.” But they didn’t. Whether breastfed for a long time or not, given lots of bottles or none, the tykes were interchangeable.
Meantime, a recent study of infants and toddlers at Children’s Hospital in Boston found that the breastfed ones were up to ten times more likely to be deficient in vitamin D, a condition that can lead to the bone-softening disease rickets, because they were not getting the extra vitamin D that’s added to formula. I write this not to terrify any breastfeeders but just to point out that once again, there’s no absolutely “right” way to raise a child.
Two of my close friends could not breastfeed, and it was not for lack of trying. They called in lactation consultants. They sat for hours with aquarium-sized mechanical pumps, trying to squeeze out more than a drop or two from the breasts they resented like hell. They felt like failures when, actually, they were great moms. They didn’t let their kids starve. They swallowed their disappointment and went and got formula and gave it to their babies who are now just fine young women, virtually indistinguishable from their bosom-fed buddies.
A lot of moms tend to think that if they don’t do everything that natural way—natural childbirth, natural baby feeding, natural whatever—they are less than perfect, and their kids will be too.
But guess what? There’s no such thing as perfection, and aiming for it will only drive you crazy. So breastfeed if you can and if you want to. But please don’t beat yourself up if you don’t. And don’t let anyone else beat you up, either.
BPA Poisoning in Baby Bottles, Sippy Cups . . . and Everything Else
Bisphenol A, otherwise known as BPA, is a chemical used to harden plastic. It’s in everything from bike helmets to canned food liners to the real bone of contention: baby bottles. In fact, it’s been used in baby bottles for the past twenty-five years. The question is, is it dangerous for your kid? And are you a reckless, life-threatening parent if you allow your baby any contact with BPA whatsoever?
In 2008, the Canadian government banned BPA from baby bottles, calling it “toxic.” The health department there believes BPA could have some neural effects on young children and pregnant women, and declared its official stance, “Better safe than sorry.” Stores including Wal-Mart and Toys“R”Us announced plans to phase out BPA in children’s products, too.
At the same time, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared that at the levels we are exposed to BPA in normal, everyday life, it’s safe, even for children. And although the agency continues to study this chemical, its findings were right in step with Europe and Japan, both of whose health ministries found BPA safe, as did the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.
The worry is that BPA sometimes, when administered to rodents, seems to disrupt their hormones. But what the folks at Harvard found is that these claims “have generally been based on small-scale studies, using non-validated protocols, and the results have not been independently replicated.” Nor were the adverse results “found in much larger-scale multigenerational studies.” In other words, the studies just did not hold up scientifically, in the opinion of this Harvard panel. The panel was chaired by the former medical director of the March of Dimes—the nonprofit organization dedicated to eradicating birth defects. It’s unlikely that he would give a pass to any chemical he truly found worrisome.
Another heavyweight who believes BPA is safe is Calvin Willhite, a toxicologist at the California Department of Toxic Substances Control. Yes, California, a state not known to take its toxic threats lightly. Willhite points out that “many of the studies that show adverse effects in rodents given small doses of bisphenol A used subcutaneous injections.” That is, the rats or mice were given shots of the chemical. But babies aren’t shooting up BPA. They’re exposed to it when they drink from plastic cups and bottles. Turns out that when the rats and mice were exposed to it that way, too—orally—most studies “did not show adverse effects, even at high doses.”
Remember, too, that if you don’t heat your bottles, there is even less chance of anything leaching. So if you love plastic containers but are still a little leery, you can give your kids unheated drinks. There’s no law that says they have to drink their milk warm.
Dr. F. Sessions Cole, who, among other things, is head of newborn medicine at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital, understands the fears. “We’ve actually looked at this pretty carefully, because [BPA] is in all of the tubing in the neonatal intensive care unit. We’re running a lot of liquid through this tubing into a lot of very sick babies, and if the concern is raised to a sufficiently high level, we’d be among the first to stop using it. I don’t want to make babies unsafe! On the other hand, I don’t want to throw away strategies and equipment that are working fine. I have a lot of babies doing great, getting medicine through BPA tubes.”
If very sick preemies are not being adversely affected by BPA, it’s hard to imagine anyone else is. But of course, this is yet another one of those parenting decisions that’s up to you. If you’d feel better using glass bottles, there’s no reason not to. There just doesn’t seem to be a clear and compelling reason not to use the plastic ones either, if that’s what you prefer.
Cell Phones and Brain Cancer (but Not, Alas, “Cell Phones and How Come Your Kids Never Answer When You Need Them To”)
Is there a connection between brain tumors and cell phones?
Not according to Nirit Weiss—and she’s a brain surgeon. “The vast majority of studies show absolutely no correlation,” says the specialist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. “National studies, European studies—nothing has pointed to either malignant or benign brain tumors.”
Still, some people remain terrified, so Weiss went on to explain, “Brain tumors in my world are very common, but in the real world, they are very uncommon.” When patients come in for surgery and wonder if they caused their own cancer by too much chatting, “I always say forget it. There’s absolutely nothing related to it at all.” (Then the patients say, “Sorry—what were you just saying? I was listening to my messages.”)
In the book Future Files, Richard Watson points out that humans greet most new technologies wi
th fear, just as we’re doing today. “The invention of the telegraph created a widespread belief that signals would interfere with the weather, while the introduction of trains and automobiles was predicted to create a variety of physical and mental disorders.” When electric street lights first replaced gas lamps, people feared them the way we fear cell phone towers today.
And the phones themselves.
Neurosurgeon Weiss says that while the studies she cites have been done on adults, not kids, she believes that the safety benefits of a child carrying a phone “far outweigh any known risks associated with cell phones.”
Whether the benefits of having your kid spend all day texting her friends outweigh any other risks—that’s up to you.
Choking on Food and All the Other Little Things Around the House
“Keep Kids Safe!” screams the warning on the box of Fruit Gushers candy. “To avoid choking, give Fruit Flavored Snacks only to children who can easily swallow chewy foods. Children should be seated and supervised while eating.”
Because, of course, candy eating is right up there with knife throwing—or so the warnings make it seem. But what kind of threat does choking really pose?
The statistics, as collected by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), show that in 2000, 160 children under the age of fourteen died from inhaling or ingesting something that choked them. About half the time that something was food; the other half of the time it was an object, like a coin.
The children most likely to choke on food are under age four and especially under age one—simply because the very young don’t have a lot of teeth. So the CPSC and just about every other body that concerns itself with child safety recommend that you avoid feeding your young kids round, firm foods, such as grapes and hot-dogs and carrots. If you do feed your kids these foods, they suggest you cut them into pea-size pieces.
The food, that is.
This seems like fine advice, but it’s not something I did consistently, nor do most parents. When you’re at the zoo and you get your over-one-year-old a hot dog, the odds that he will die from choking at that very moment—or any moment that year—are about 1 in 350,000. Small.
Still, it certainly makes sense to try to keep the kid areas in your home as free as possible of small objects such as buttons, change, hearing aid batteries, marbles, and even balloons, since kids (and if you happen to live underwater, fish and turtles) can accidentally suck these in.
Foods to watch out for? The aforementioned hard, round ones, as well as nuts, seeds, hard candy, and chunks of cheese. Avoid chunks of meat, too, because those can be hard even for us experienced eaters to chew successfully.
Your kids will have plenty of time for tough meat when they get to college.
And by the way, remember how you were never supposed to hit anyone on the back if he was choking because it would only make things worse? Well it’s back to making things better. The American Red Cross now recommends leaning the choker over and giving five sharp blows to the back, followed by five abdominal thrusts—ye olde Heimlich maneuver—from the front. And don’t forget to call 911 if these aren’t doing the trick. (With any luck, you have not thrown out your phone for fear of it causing brain cancer.)
Cough and Cold Medicinitis
Parents spend $2 billion a year on over-the-counter cough and cold medicine for their kids—and that’s not counting all the Lipton chicken noodle soup. Is it dangerous?
Well, for sure not the soup (unless we start that whole discussion about too much salt in the diet, but let’s not. I love salt). As for the drugs, the Food and Drug Administration does not recommend using any of the over-the-counter cough and cold meds on children under age two. Recently fearing that the FDA might bump that age up to six, most drug manufacturers voluntarily changed their labeling to say that their cough and cold meds are no longer meant for children under age four.
Above that age? It’s up to you. The chance that your child will die from these meds is microscopically small. In 2004-2005, there were three cases of infant death due to ingesting cough and cold remedies. But those were infants, who aren’t supposed to take that medicine anymore. And of course, you should never give your kids any of the adult meds you have lying around, be they over-the-counter or prescription. And keep them all out of reach, etc., etc., even though most adults can barely get them open, much less a toddler. (Blister packs are the worst, agreed? I have actually forgone some medication because I couldn’t peel back the paper and puncture the Kryptonite bubble.)
Anyway, the real reason to be skeptical about over-the-counter kiddie cold remedies is that “bottom line, they don’t really work.” So says my own pediatrician, Harris Burstin, who teaches pediatrics at New York University. Once in a while he will recommend an antihistamine, like Benadryl. But mostly he recommends using a humidifier or vaporizer, or even steaming up the bathroom for sniffly kids.
And I personally recommend salty, yummy chicken soup.
Death by Stroller
If you go on the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Web site, you will find an alert reminding parents, “Infants Can Die When Their Heads Become Trapped in Strollers.”
Which is true. Infants can die when their heads become trapped in anything, and it’s an awful thing to contemplate. But how many children under age five die when their heads become trapped in strollers? The answer is . . . one to two a year.
If we worry about every incident that can harm one or two children out of about twenty million kids under age five, there is no way we can possibly let them do anything at all. Eat? They could choke. Sleep? There’s SIDS. Crawl? They could die from a concussion. Take a bath? They could drown. Just sit there not doing anything (but not in a stroller)? Sounds like a plan!
In Australia just a few years back, two infants died when the strollers they were in rolled away from their caregivers and down into a river. This led to a huge outcry, against not the river gods but lax stroller standards. From now on, all strollers should come equipped with wrist straps, the public demanded. Strollers should not budge unless an adult is actively squeezing the handle to unlock the brake. A spokeswoman for a group called Standards Australia announced, “If any good can come of this tragedy, it is that better standards will be introduced.”
But when it comes to stroller safety, standards are extremely high already. In the United States, for example, a company called Regal Lager recalled its “e3” buggies in 2006 because it learned that children could touch the rear tires when in the stroller’s add-on seat, creating an “abrasion hazard.” The company had received one report of a child who had scraped his arm this way. One report! Of a scrape! Another company recalled twenty-five thousand of its “Ranger” strollers after it received thirty-nine reports of a lock mechanism breaking, with one report of a baby’s arm being pinched.
We are so convinced that we can make the world 101 percent safe that the idea of a child suffering even a pinch or scrape seems mercilessly, litigiously cruel. And I guess we have to thank the litigiously minded folks who came before us and created such a safe, accountable world of baby products. But the other legacy of that litigation is our now impossible-to-assuage fear that any product can and may well kill our kids.
Too bad they don’t sell pacifiers for adults. We need something to calm us down. (Then again, they’re probably a choking hazard. Or addictive. Or toxic.)
Eating Snow
Go ahead and eat it. It’s the other other white meat.
Despite headlines like “White Stuff Is Full of Bacteria” and “Snow Eating Now Endangered Kid Pleasure” and “Study Warns Against Snow,” it turns out that the study that caused this media flurry (sorry) did not warn against eating snow.
But it should have warned against slow news days.
What happened was that in 2008, an article in the magazine Science reported that when snow forms, it clings to little particles and—this was the big news—sometimes those particles happen to be the bacteria that cause disease in some plants, incl
uding tomatoes and green beans.
So if your child is a tomato or green bean, steer clear. Otherwise? Don’t worry. As Joel Forman, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on environmental health, was quoted as saying, “I can say that I’m not aware of any clinical reports of children becoming ill from eating snow. And I looked.”
It does not matter to our health how snow forms. What matters—and always has—is whether it’s yellow.
Germs, Antigerms, and Shopping Cart Liners
If only Howard Hughes had been born in our day, he might have been seen as a perfectly normal guy, instead of as a bizarre, billionaire germophobe.
Well, he’d still be a billionaire (unless he invested in Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Bear Sterns, real estate, CitiBank, or newspapers). But at least he could carry around a pump of hand sanitizing gel and no one would find it loopy. He could swab every surface in sight with antibacterial towelettes. He could bring his own disposable placemats to restaurants (albeit covered with characters like Dora the Explorer) and his own disposable kiddie gloves (covered with penguins). They really do sell those gloves now, so kids don’t have to touch anything. They’re called “gLovies,” but I’d call them “OCD Training Mitts.”
Anyway, once Howard got to the supermarket, he could plop his mittened moppets into a shopping cart liner—a cloth basket you bring with you that fits into the part of the cart you normally put a kid in, with little holes for the legs. That way no part of the child need ever come in contact with what some parents apparently consider a leper colony on wheels: the cart they may well have already disinfected with the free wipes many groceries now provide at the entrance. All of which begs two questions:
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