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Is anything quite so unsettling as waiting for people who should be responsible adults to stop fighting and arrive at a consensus, especially when so much is hanging in the balance? I mean, how long is it going to take Focus Features to pick an actor to play the hot young billionaire-sadist Christian Grey? According to an article in Variety, the problem is that all the really sexy leading men in Hollywood are...my age. That’s right, George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Will Smith, Hugh Jackman, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Vin Diesel, all of them are 45 to 50 years old. I know because we all work out together.
My own theory has less to do with the movie business than with the varied nature of human sexuality. Since 2011, E.L. James’s Fifty Shades... books have sold more than 70 million copies worldwide, with many a dog-eared volume being passed among friends over cosmopolitans. That means there have to be, like, 140 million different and intensely vivid ideas of what Christian Grey looks like. No matter who gets picked for the role, 139 million readers will be tweeting that he’s all wrong. When the producers finally do settle on an actor, 139,999,999 boyfriends and husbands will be going, “But I thought you said I was your Christian Grey!” And one dude is going to be like, “Yesss!”
Carpe diem
Is it too early to start compiling the pre-New Year’s list of fads from 2013 that are officially over? Can we compost kale? Can we give gluten sensitivity back to people who actually have celiac disease? And is it now finally time to send alternative vaccine schedules wherever it is Psy went? And, if there’s room, can we also send Miley Cyrus?
As if the professional humiliation of Andrew Wakefield and unprecedented outbreaks of measles and whooping cough were not already sending a message, a new study in JAMA Pediatrics should give serious pause to parents who delay vaccinating their children against measles because they think it’s safer. As it turns out, late measles vaccination nearly doubles the risk of febrile seizures, compared with timely immunization. That, and it leaves children unprotected from measles. That second one should be self-evident, but, well, you know.
Lead author Dr. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar of the University of Washington, Seattle, lives at the epicenter of vaccine resistance in the United States, but he reached out nationally to include more than 850,000 children in his study (take that, alpha error!). He found that giving kids fevers at the time of life when they’re most likely to have febrile seizures (16-24 months) made them more likely to have febrile seizures. I know, right? Will these results finally stop a few of our colleagues from flogging their pseudoscientific books on talk shows and social media? I’m guessing that if actual epidemics of measles and pertussis didn’t do it, then Dr. Rowhani-Rahbar will still have plenty of subjects for his next study.
Lights out
There has been much hand-wringing about the overuse of prescription stimulants to treat attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), partly because the side effects of these stimulants include hand-wringing. The search for alternative cures for childhood behavior problems has led from fish oil to gluten- and dairy-free diets, but could it be possible that one solution is as simple as a light switch? New data from the U.K. suggest that just putting kids to bed at the same time every night can substantially improve their behavior, and it doesn’t leave a fishy aftertaste.
We’ve known that sleep deprivation and conditions like obstructive sleep apnea can detract from children’s behavior and academic performance, but a trio of authors from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, wondered if irregular circadian rhythms would have the same effect independent of actual hours of sleep. Their study of more than 10,000 7-year-olds demonstrated not only a correlation between irregular bedtimes and behavioral problems, but they showed something much more important: Kids whose bedtimes became more regular improved their behavior. Fellow parents of whiny children who don’t want to go to bed, I say to you, “Booyah!”
Of course, before we start treating behavior problems with nothing more than an alarm clock, we must acknowledge some limitations of the study. Perhaps the most glaring is that irregular bedtimes are likely a good proxy for all sorts of limit-setting issues in families, as well as for a generally chaotic household. But don’t think for a minute I’m letting my kids know about that. Every night at 8:30, their lights are out, and if they complain they can’t sleep, I’m just going to threaten to read this study aloud to them. Good night!
Just say no
Does anyone remember the early days of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, when police officers would stand in front of your class and tell you dope is for dopes? It launched when I was in high school, and I had friends who would only attend the lectures stoned. It took years of research and a major shift in the program’s content before it became nominally effective at its goals of reducing youth drug use and gang violence. Could the new crop of bullying-prevention programs be the DARE of our age? Why, yes, they could.
Or they could be worse. According to a study of bullying-prevention programs in the Journal of Criminology, students are more likely to be bullied at schools with prevention programs than at those without them. Lead author Seokjin Jeong suggests that perhaps the programs provide a script for budding bullies to follow so that they don’t have to be creative. With all the attention given to bullying right now, I’m optimistic that we’ll eventually figure out how to intervene in a way that doesn’t just serve as an instructional video for jerks. One day our children will grow up in a world where the only sadists are handsome billionaires, and we can all agree what he looks like.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television, and Internet outlets.
Is anything quite so unsettling as waiting for people who should be responsible adults to stop fighting and arrive at a consensus, especially when so much is hanging in the balance? I mean, how long is it going to take Focus Features to pick an actor to play the hot young billionaire-sadist Christian Grey? According to an article in Variety, the problem is that all the really sexy leading men in Hollywood are...my age. That’s right, George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Will Smith, Hugh Jackman, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Vin Diesel, all of them are 45 to 50 years old. I know because we all work out together.
My own theory has less to do with the movie business than with the varied nature of human sexuality. Since 2011, E.L. James’s Fifty Shades... books have sold more than 70 million copies worldwide, with many a dog-eared volume being passed among friends over cosmopolitans. That means there have to be, like, 140 million different and intensely vivid ideas of what Christian Grey looks like. No matter who gets picked for the role, 139 million readers will be tweeting that he’s all wrong. When the producers finally do settle on an actor, 139,999,999 boyfriends and husbands will be going, “But I thought you said I was your Christian Grey!” And one dude is going to be like, “Yesss!”
Carpe diem
Is it too early to start compiling the pre-New Year’s list of fads from 2013 that are officially over? Can we compost kale? Can we give gluten sensitivity back to people who actually have celiac disease? And is it now finally time to send alternative vaccine schedules wherever it is Psy went? And, if there’s room, can we also send Miley Cyrus?
As if the professional humiliation of Andrew Wakefield and unprecedented outbreaks of measles and whooping cough were not already sending a message, a new study in JAMA Pediatrics should give serious pause to parents who delay vaccinating their children against measles because they think it’s safer. As it turns out, late measles vaccination nearly doubles the risk of febrile seizures, compared with timely immunization. That, and it leaves children unprotected from measles. That second one should be self-evident, but, well, you know.
Lead author Dr. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar of the University of Washington, Seattle, lives at the epicenter of vaccine resistance in the United States, but he reached out nationally to include more than 850,000 children in his study (take that, alpha error!). He found that giving kids fevers at the time of life when they’re most likely to have febrile seizures (16-24 months) made them more likely to have febrile seizures. I know, right? Will these results finally stop a few of our colleagues from flogging their pseudoscientific books on talk shows and social media? I’m guessing that if actual epidemics of measles and pertussis didn’t do it, then Dr. Rowhani-Rahbar will still have plenty of subjects for his next study.
Lights out
There has been much hand-wringing about the overuse of prescription stimulants to treat attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), partly because the side effects of these stimulants include hand-wringing. The search for alternative cures for childhood behavior problems has led from fish oil to gluten- and dairy-free diets, but could it be possible that one solution is as simple as a light switch? New data from the U.K. suggest that just putting kids to bed at the same time every night can substantially improve their behavior, and it doesn’t leave a fishy aftertaste.
We’ve known that sleep deprivation and conditions like obstructive sleep apnea can detract from children’s behavior and academic performance, but a trio of authors from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, wondered if irregular circadian rhythms would have the same effect independent of actual hours of sleep. Their study of more than 10,000 7-year-olds demonstrated not only a correlation between irregular bedtimes and behavioral problems, but they showed something much more important: Kids whose bedtimes became more regular improved their behavior. Fellow parents of whiny children who don’t want to go to bed, I say to you, “Booyah!”
Of course, before we start treating behavior problems with nothing more than an alarm clock, we must acknowledge some limitations of the study. Perhaps the most glaring is that irregular bedtimes are likely a good proxy for all sorts of limit-setting issues in families, as well as for a generally chaotic household. But don’t think for a minute I’m letting my kids know about that. Every night at 8:30, their lights are out, and if they complain they can’t sleep, I’m just going to threaten to read this study aloud to them. Good night!
Just say no
Does anyone remember the early days of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, when police officers would stand in front of your class and tell you dope is for dopes? It launched when I was in high school, and I had friends who would only attend the lectures stoned. It took years of research and a major shift in the program’s content before it became nominally effective at its goals of reducing youth drug use and gang violence. Could the new crop of bullying-prevention programs be the DARE of our age? Why, yes, they could.
Or they could be worse. According to a study of bullying-prevention programs in the Journal of Criminology, students are more likely to be bullied at schools with prevention programs than at those without them. Lead author Seokjin Jeong suggests that perhaps the programs provide a script for budding bullies to follow so that they don’t have to be creative. With all the attention given to bullying right now, I’m optimistic that we’ll eventually figure out how to intervene in a way that doesn’t just serve as an instructional video for jerks. One day our children will grow up in a world where the only sadists are handsome billionaires, and we can all agree what he looks like.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television, and Internet outlets.
Is anything quite so unsettling as waiting for people who should be responsible adults to stop fighting and arrive at a consensus, especially when so much is hanging in the balance? I mean, how long is it going to take Focus Features to pick an actor to play the hot young billionaire-sadist Christian Grey? According to an article in Variety, the problem is that all the really sexy leading men in Hollywood are...my age. That’s right, George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Will Smith, Hugh Jackman, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Vin Diesel, all of them are 45 to 50 years old. I know because we all work out together.
My own theory has less to do with the movie business than with the varied nature of human sexuality. Since 2011, E.L. James’s Fifty Shades... books have sold more than 70 million copies worldwide, with many a dog-eared volume being passed among friends over cosmopolitans. That means there have to be, like, 140 million different and intensely vivid ideas of what Christian Grey looks like. No matter who gets picked for the role, 139 million readers will be tweeting that he’s all wrong. When the producers finally do settle on an actor, 139,999,999 boyfriends and husbands will be going, “But I thought you said I was your Christian Grey!” And one dude is going to be like, “Yesss!”
Carpe diem
Is it too early to start compiling the pre-New Year’s list of fads from 2013 that are officially over? Can we compost kale? Can we give gluten sensitivity back to people who actually have celiac disease? And is it now finally time to send alternative vaccine schedules wherever it is Psy went? And, if there’s room, can we also send Miley Cyrus?
As if the professional humiliation of Andrew Wakefield and unprecedented outbreaks of measles and whooping cough were not already sending a message, a new study in JAMA Pediatrics should give serious pause to parents who delay vaccinating their children against measles because they think it’s safer. As it turns out, late measles vaccination nearly doubles the risk of febrile seizures, compared with timely immunization. That, and it leaves children unprotected from measles. That second one should be self-evident, but, well, you know.
Lead author Dr. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar of the University of Washington, Seattle, lives at the epicenter of vaccine resistance in the United States, but he reached out nationally to include more than 850,000 children in his study (take that, alpha error!). He found that giving kids fevers at the time of life when they’re most likely to have febrile seizures (16-24 months) made them more likely to have febrile seizures. I know, right? Will these results finally stop a few of our colleagues from flogging their pseudoscientific books on talk shows and social media? I’m guessing that if actual epidemics of measles and pertussis didn’t do it, then Dr. Rowhani-Rahbar will still have plenty of subjects for his next study.
Lights out
There has been much hand-wringing about the overuse of prescription stimulants to treat attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), partly because the side effects of these stimulants include hand-wringing. The search for alternative cures for childhood behavior problems has led from fish oil to gluten- and dairy-free diets, but could it be possible that one solution is as simple as a light switch? New data from the U.K. suggest that just putting kids to bed at the same time every night can substantially improve their behavior, and it doesn’t leave a fishy aftertaste.
We’ve known that sleep deprivation and conditions like obstructive sleep apnea can detract from children’s behavior and academic performance, but a trio of authors from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, wondered if irregular circadian rhythms would have the same effect independent of actual hours of sleep. Their study of more than 10,000 7-year-olds demonstrated not only a correlation between irregular bedtimes and behavioral problems, but they showed something much more important: Kids whose bedtimes became more regular improved their behavior. Fellow parents of whiny children who don’t want to go to bed, I say to you, “Booyah!”
Of course, before we start treating behavior problems with nothing more than an alarm clock, we must acknowledge some limitations of the study. Perhaps the most glaring is that irregular bedtimes are likely a good proxy for all sorts of limit-setting issues in families, as well as for a generally chaotic household. But don’t think for a minute I’m letting my kids know about that. Every night at 8:30, their lights are out, and if they complain they can’t sleep, I’m just going to threaten to read this study aloud to them. Good night!
Just say no
Does anyone remember the early days of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, when police officers would stand in front of your class and tell you dope is for dopes? It launched when I was in high school, and I had friends who would only attend the lectures stoned. It took years of research and a major shift in the program’s content before it became nominally effective at its goals of reducing youth drug use and gang violence. Could the new crop of bullying-prevention programs be the DARE of our age? Why, yes, they could.
Or they could be worse. According to a study of bullying-prevention programs in the Journal of Criminology, students are more likely to be bullied at schools with prevention programs than at those without them. Lead author Seokjin Jeong suggests that perhaps the programs provide a script for budding bullies to follow so that they don’t have to be creative. With all the attention given to bullying right now, I’m optimistic that we’ll eventually figure out how to intervene in a way that doesn’t just serve as an instructional video for jerks. One day our children will grow up in a world where the only sadists are handsome billionaires, and we can all agree what he looks like.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television, and Internet outlets.