meta-dad

Is your child more prone to ear infections?

Ear infections are pretty common in children, but what causes them? I had lot of ear infections as a kid, bad ones. Now, it pains me (of course) to see my kids experience the same pain and discomfort. I have found there are a variety of factors that can lead to ear infections for toddlers and children, some preventable.

The American Academy of Family Physicians lists these common risk factors for ear infections in children:

• Being around cigarette smoking.
• Having had ear infections before, frequent colds, or having a family history of ear infections.
• Going to a day-care center.
• Being born premature or at low birth weight.
• Going to bed with a More »

The cough & cold conundrum – Should they stay home?

Every parent, has struggled with this problem at some time, do I send my marginally sick kid to daycare or school or should I keep them home? The boogery truth about this is most of us parents have probably dropped off our dosed kid to school wondering if they were going to be able to make it through the day or would we get a call from the school nurse saying that we need to pick up our feverish kid.

Most adults are likely to have a common cold two to four times a year. Children, especially preschoolers, may have a common cold as many as More »

5 helpful Dad ‘hacks’ for babies

I know very little about parenting, the number of questions, curiosities and perplexities of being a solid Dad and raising healthy kids is breath-taking. That said, through the natural course of More »

Play it safe this 4th of July

The latest report from U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) indicates that there were reports of seven fireworks-related deaths and an estimated 7,000 hospital emergency room treated injuries in 2008. In 2007, CPSC had reports of eleven deaths and an estimated 9,800 injuries. Injuries have More »

Expansion of second recall for Jardine brand cribs

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has received 31 incident reports of slats breaking, including two reports of children becoming entrapped in the gap created by the broken slat on the crib models identified below. In 10 of these incidents, consumers reported More »

World’s smartest child prodigy

Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants on 1898 in New York City, the young William James Sidis could read the New York Times by 18 months, reportedly taught himself eight languages (Latin, Greek, French, Russian, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian) by age eight, and invented More »