"child" news and stories

All sorts of safety issue plague parents and children these days. Playground equipment and activities are carefully monitored and toys are painstakingly screened, especially if, unlike video games, they involve movable parts that the kids might play with too vigorously, thus injuring themselves, or eat, injuring themselves further. When it comes to food, most safety issues have to do with concerns about food allergies, but perhaps in light of the burns allegedly caused by Starbucks hot chocolate in the hands of a very small child, some groups are looking to ban hot drinks altogether, rather than supervise their consumption.

The Pat-a-Cake Playgroup, which meets at a library in Rawmarsh, South Yorkshire in England, has been "banned from serving tea and toast on health and safety grounds." The risk for burns is, apparently, far to high for the city council's liking, so the parents running the group have been told that they cannot boil water in the room where children are present, and that adults must drink their hot drinks in a separate area, far from the children, if not a separate room entirely.

As you can imagine, the parents are considering disbanding the group to escape from the oversight of the council before they demand that children be outfitted in protective gear at all times to avoid papercuts.

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Scientists and researchers have no definitive answer about what causes anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder characterized by a strong, sometimes life-threatening, desire to avoid food. Many theories attribute its development to body image issues, while other studies have linked it to depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other preexisting psychological conditions. A boy in Britain with an unusual eating disorder may provide some insight both into the cause of the disorder and the treatment.

The boy, who is only two years old, has refused all solid foods and almost all liquids since his birth, though he was physically capable of ingesting food without problems. As a result, his growth and development were stunted and a feeding tube had to be implanted to provide him with sufficient nutrition. Convinced that the problem was psychological, doctors at an Austrian hospital, working with the parents, tried a controversial technique of starving the child into eating. The tube was removed and the boy was surrounded with food, as well as by people who helped encourage him to eat. The theory is that the psychological problem cannot be resolved unless the affected person actively wants to eat.

At first, the boy ate nothing, but during the course of the three-week treatment he made progress. He began with water and progressed to milk, yogurt and finally to solid foods. His delighted parents say that he is now eating progressively more every day.

Is this a treatment that will work for everyone afflicted by anorexia? Probably not, but this case does provide support for the notion that, for at least some people, the problem has a psychological root and that it is not something untreatable.

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An Indianapolis couple, Michael and Alexis Brennan, is suing Starbucks, claiming that they served their daughter a cup of hot chocolate, which subsequently spilled and left her with serious burns. The daughter, whose age was not given, but was young enough to fit in a car seat, was said to have been riding strapped into that car seat in the back of the car when she spilled the drink. The mother stopped the car and got out to discover that the "skin on [her] leg was falling off of her."

Starbucks is supposed to serve their kids sized drinks at about 20 degrees less than their standard temperature, putting those drinks at about 140F or so, which is hot, but not incredibly so when you consider the size of the cup and the fact that they are often topped with an inch or more of cold whipped cream, as this particular drink was. The baristas can make it at a lower temperature if requested. A high percentage of parents test the temperature of their kids' drinks by taking a sip themselves, but Ms. Brennan only subjected the drink to a visual inspection before handing it to her daughter. A small child holding a drink of any kind in the backseat of a moving car, especially if he or she is small enough to have to be confined to a car seat, sounds like a recipe for disaster, regardless of whether the drink is hot or not. The parents are, of course, seeking (unspecified) damages.

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The calls for restrictions on how much and how often food is advertised to children have not gone unheard. While some companies previously cut their kids' advertising, a new initiative shows that more are getting involved. Ten of the largest food and beverage manufacturers in the US, including McDonald's and Coca-Cola, vowed that at least half of their "advertising directed at children under the age of 12 would promote healthier foods or contain messages that encourage healthy lifestyles." The companies also agreed not to advertise at elementary schools and to promote only healthy or nutritious foods in most forms of marketing, including in interactive games, which were a primary concern to many who felt that they children would not realize it was advertising.

Critics are predictably critical. Instead of viewing this as a step forward in the battle against childhood obesity, which is how many parents and politicians see it, they simply state that this isn't good enough. The industry is planning to self-regulate and executives could not cite specific changes that would result from this decision. On the other hand, given that nothing like this has been done before, it is not surprising that it is hard to say what, precisely, will be the result. In any event, a decision to work towards promoting a healthy lifestyle is far better than the total ban on advertising that the critics want.

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What would you do if your child were punished because you did not pack a lunch that met the schools' guidelines?

In Kent, England, a 10-year old boy was made to leave the lunchroom and eat outside under supervision because his lunch contained "one more snack than allowed". At Lunsford Primary School, a lunch is only permitted to contain two snacks (the type and quantity of other food items was not specified) and young Ryan Stupples's lunch had cheese biscuits, a cake and a fromage frais yogurt. We can assume that the school felt that the contents of Ryan's lunch would have a negative impact on the eating habits of the other children, or else they would not have sent him outside to eat. "Ryan said he...felt upset and frightened and feared he was 'going to be suspended'."

The school defended the decision to remove the child from the lunchroom, stating that they had given the father a warning about packing appropriate lunches.

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