Category: Health

Dangerous season for quirky kids

Posted on by Suki

It’s that time of year again: School has started up. Families are getting busy doing whatever they do. And the holidays are marching toward us.

It’s an especially hard time of year for those who have children with special needs. First of all, we’re dealing with our kids’ education. Some of us are fighting for services. Others are fighting to get our kids out of special classes. Many of us are breaking in new teachers. All of us are dealing with the daily grind of having a kid who doesn’t fit in.

During the summer, it looks like a long time between the start of the school year and the pile of holidays that are coming, but suddenly it’s not even October and the stores are full of Halloween. Thanksgiving is just around the corner.

When you’re a parent with an unusual kid, it’s hard ever to be prepared for the stuff that keeps coming at you these few months. Holidays bring their own special kind of stress.

I’m most familiar with the plight of families who have kids with behavioral differences—autism, ADHD, and whatever-you-want-to-call-it kids who have what we like to call their “quirks.” I’m sure families with kids of other kinds of special needs have similar stories—feel free to chime in.

But for those of us with quirky kids, here’s how it works:

First of all, the holidays themselves. Holidays are exciting. Excitement is unsettling. Our kids are hard enough to deal with when they’re settled. The other day my daughter had a major meltdown because I agreed (oh, mommy, will you never learn?) to check if our local party store was going to have Voldemort costumes. All of a sudden it was all so overwhelming: What is a girl to do when she could be Voldemort (though they didn’t, it turned out, plan to carry a costume), or buy a better Gryffindor robe and be Harry (she did, after all, just get those super-cute Harry Potter glasses), or – or – or…

Quirky kid brain on meltdown. It’s not pretty. I had to drag her to the car and banished all talk of Halloween until it’s actually October.

The other thing that comes with holidays is get-togethers. Dinners, parties, all sorts of fun with other people. Our quirky kids want to have fun, too. The thing is, their idea of how to have fun might not go so well with societal expectations. Family members and friends, well-meaning as they think they are, generally just don’t get how hard we’re working to get through an evening.

Take the kids’ table. At family functions, this is often a given. The kids sit together and get to be kids. The grown-ups sit together and talk about boring stuff, without kids to interrupt them and tell them how boring they’re being.

My kids, however, have never handled the kids’ table very well. Child #1 was always more interested in talking to adults than to children. He’d rather sit next to his parents listening to talk about world events or the latest fumble a tech company has made than sit at the kids’ table and do… whatever it is they do at kids’ tables. He was never terribly interested in kids, unless they were kids like him who liked to talk about computers, high tech companies, and sushi.

Child #2 has a different set of needs. She loves being with other kids, but she knows that she easily gets out of control in groups. We’ve been working on life skills, with the help and understanding of the other adults she spends time with. At school, she is allowed to go hang out with the office manager if she feels like she needs a break from being in groups. The office manager puts her to work sorting library books, or just chats with her about whatever is going on. When she’s ready, she goes back to the group activities, recentered.

My parents have been helping as well. She is their unusual grandchild. When she spends time at their house, she likes to have a purpose. They give her jobs like helping out in the garden or taking care of the cats. At big family gatherings, however, she is often at loose ends. And when she’s at loose ends, her self-control starts to unravel. Soon she finds herself doing things that she knows she shouldn’t do. Later, she agrees that she should have behaved differently, but in the heat of the moment, it’s like a switch gets flipped, and she loses control.

I know that it’s hard all around: My siblings see us treating her differently, and they worry that their kids will feel that she’s being given special treatment. But on the other hand, I know that if she is going to navigate a family gathering successfully, she in fact does have to be given special treatment. It’s not special treatment that caters to her desires, but rather special treatment that caters to her needs. If we gave in to her desires, she’d be at the kids’ table more often than not. She’s a kid who wants to be a kid. She wants to be normal.

But while she hasn’t gained complete self-control, she has gained a lot of self-understanding. She has learned, at school, to say “I need to go to the office.” She has learned, at parties or other gatherings, to say “I need to be with my mom or dad.” More and more I see her being able to remove herself from a difficult situation and calm herself before coming back and trying again.

The thing is, our quirky kids aren’t going to just become normal for other people’s comfort. And some adults seem to think that’s an option. They think that our kids’ repetitive noises or behaviors, their hypersensitive ears, or their unusual fears are somehow under their control. Parents with usual kids sometimes seem to think that no one has ever told our kids to stop, as if they have a magic touch and it’s just a case of lax parenting that has led to this unusual child.

I’m sure that people want to help—I can’t imagine that they’re intervening out of a wish to cause the parents greater distress. But those who want to help should consider simple acceptance. Most people simply have no idea what it’s like to raise a child with special needs. They don’t see the enormity of difference between parenting, which is incredibly hard, and parenting an unusual child.

Those who want to help need to accept that this child is different, and will be different no matter what. They need to support the parents, because the parents’ job is hard enough without the judgment and criticism they get in tough situations.

It’s a dangerous season for quirky kids. Do a good deed today and give their parents a break.

So what’s with the marshmallows?

Posted on by Suki

I love reading studies about the brain and how it works, and especially as they pertain to raising kids. Studies like these range all over the map from serious, in-depth, well-designed work by professionals to headline-grabbing, seriously flawed studies by people who think they know what they’re doing. In either case, the results from these studies—which should always be taken with a large grain of salt and a deep, calming breath—can help parents question their parenting. In my view, it’s not about being a perfect parent, but about being a conscious parent. As long as you’re thinking about what you’re doing, you’re probably doing a pretty good job.

One of the psychological studies that has been referenced a lot lately was the “marshmallow study” done with the children of Stanford grad students forty years ago. The researchers asked the children to sit in a room with a marshmallow and not to eat it. If they didn’t eat it, they’d get two when the researcher returned. Then the researcher went out of the room and watched while the kids squirmed and fought with their inclination just to eat the darn thing and get it over with.

The cool thing about this study is not the marshmallow. The cool thing is that these kids were the children of Stanford grads, and they agreed to be followed as they grew and made choices in their lives. (As anyone knows, if you want to make sure you can find people, just hire the Stanford Alumni Association to do it. For a period of about twelve years I moved at least once a year, and they always found me!) So this study is what’s called “longitudinal”—it doesn’t just test in a lab environment, but also in the real world.

These kids, one could argue, had everything: educated parents, excellent schools, a higher than average standard of living. But the researchers found that, in fact, not all of them had what they needed, and that thing they didn’t have was self-control.

You can read this piece at EdWeek to get details. It turns out that self-control correlates much more than pretty much anything else with a student’s future success as an adult. IQ, it has been shown, has no relationship to success. (One of my favorite statistics is the percentage of Terman’s “genius” students who won a Nobel Prize: 0%. That’s right, being designated a genius by an IQ test is not a prerequisite to reaching the top of your chosen field.) Even grades in high school are not a great determiner of future success.

I find this study interesting because it clearly aligns with what all of us see about successful people: They are more focused than the rest of us, they set goals, and they don’t give up. They say that the thing that successful people have in common is failure: They were more likely to have failed and persevered through more failure. The rest of us fail and give up.

I have a bit of a beef, however, with the original researchers and with the follow-up detailed in the EdWeek piece: What’s the deal with the marshmallows? As soon as I read about the original study, I saw a flaw in their reasoning. So I decided to question my daughter, who is famously lacking in self-control in some ways, but also completely honest about her intentions and able to think through situations to decide if she even wants to have self-control.

“So if I gave you a marshmallow and told you I’d give you another one if you held off eating that marshmallow for fifteen minutes, what would you do?” I asked her. Now, I realize that asking a kid and actually doing the experiment are different. But I had a hunch I’d get an interesting answer. Here’s what she said.

“Well, I’m not really crazy about marshmallows,” she told me. “They’re OK toasted over a campfire in s’mores. But if it was just a cold marshmallow, I’d probably just eat it right away.”

“Why?”

“Because cold marshmallows aren’t very good,” she explained. “So I wouldn’t want a second one anyway.”

Here’s self-control for you: Since our last camping trip, we’ve had a half-full bag of marshmallows sitting in plain view in the pantry. My daughter, great lover of junk food, goes in there daily and stares—we call it pantry TV or refrigerator TV in our house—trying to find something, anything that has no redeeming nutritional qualities. That bag of marshmallows remains untouched.

Similarly, I know that I can’t keep bad stuff that I love in the house. I recently made a cheesecake and the leftovers made it, small slice by small slice, into my stomach and straight to my hips! But that bag of marshmallows? I have no problem whatsoever letting it sit there. I second my daughter’s opinion: s’mores twice yearly while camping is marshmallow enough for me.

So to all you parents who are fretting about your child’s self-control, I ask you to reconsider this study: Instead of “does my child have general self-control,” ask yourself, “does my child have self-control when it pertains to a specific goal?”

The press tells us that Barack Obama can’t seem to resist a few daily cigarettes. But he made it to the presidency, which most of us would agree is a measure of success. I bet he wouldn’t have eaten that marshmallow, either.

Summer screen time

Posted on by Suki

We’ve always been pretty restrictive of screen time for our kids. The first studies showing the ill effects of screen time were just coming out when my son was a baby, and TV has never become a part of our family’s life. We simply forget to turn it on.

Computers, however, are another thing altogether. My husband and I both work on computers, and our son was interested in programming from quite a young age. Our daughter mostly used the computer to send e-mail to Grandma and to watch Magic School Bus videos.

But this summer, something new happened: Minecraft.

For those of you not in the know, Minecraft is a cooperative game in which users get together in a “world” they build. The world is made of blocks, and after that, the rules and the point of the game are wholly determined by the players. I would never have given in except for the social aspect of it: the kids who were playing it were not only creating their own little society within the game — they were actually talking to each other outside of the game world.

This is a big thing, given that our son was having trouble connecting with other kids once he started homeschooling. All of a sudden he had a way in to their conversations.

Then the connection spread: Our daughter wanted to play, and for the first time in their lives, our kids were spending extended time playing — not fighting — together. It was really quite extraordinary.

But then we came right back to the screentime issue. My kids would have been happy spending their lovely summer inside, in a world where they can build houses from diamonds and if it becomes nighttime when they don’t want it to, they can just bring the sun back up.

I, however, would not have been happy. So I sat down with the kids, a bunch of colored markers, and a sheet of nice paper. At the top I wrote “To earn computer time, choose two.”

Then, I had the kids suggest non-computer activities that could earn them computer time. Here’s what they came up with (with just a few suggestions from me):

Computer time poster
Note the final annotation, which is what makes this work so well!

Playing piano
Play outside
Gardening
Clean room (requires parent sign-off)
Ride bike/scooter
Read
Cook
Hike to stream
Paint/art
Learn something new
Sing 4 songs (in a nice voice, with words, not to anger anyone, no poopie words)
Touch typing practice
1 full board game (no shortcuts)
Non-screen activity out of house
*Complaints cancel activity

Now, perhaps you don’t have a household that resembles the Supreme Court. Ours, however, makes the Supreme Court look like child’s play. So we had to add little notes and reasonable amounts of time to each activity to forestall the inevitable arguments.

The amazing thing is that it’s working. The other day, my son played piano in order to buy computer time. Afterwards he said to me with this amazed expression on his face, “That was fun!” Yeah, kids. You can have fun in the real world, not just in Minecraft. What a concept!

The great part of this is that along with the “Our Fun Summer” poster we always make, which has all of our summer goals on it, we can make sure that we get out and do things in the real world.

This week we had some of the kids they play Minecraft with online over for a party. One of the siblings professes to hate Minecraft, and I was commiserating with her that she didn’t have anyone to play with. “Why don’t you like Minecraft?” I asked her.

“Because it’s not real,” she said. “You spend all this time building something, but then it’s stuck inside the computer and you don’t have anything to show for all your work.”

Good point, kid. That’s why I like our contract. Along with Minecrafting, my kids have spent the summer playing with Legos, making music, taking photos, hiking in the woods, and helping me create a garden. Though not all of these activities has a tangible product, they are each valuable in their own way, and they balance the time my kids are spending inside their computer world, learning to get along.

7 surprising things to consider about “natural” products

Posted on by Suki

One thing that really gets my goat is how people who don’t understand chemistry and biology in the least like to make grand claims about “natural” ingredients. The latest is this article about sunscreen from Natural News, 7 surprising things you’re not supposed to know about sunscreen and sunlight exposure, which takes as its premise that anything natural is necessarily good for you. Reading this piece is like a lesson in shoddy argumentation techniques, but it provides a useful lesson in how to cast a skeptical eye when manufacturers use the word “natural.”

#1) The FDA refuses to allow natural sunscreen ingredients to be used in sunblock / sunscreen products

Note the inflammatory verb: refuses. Actually, the FDA provides a process to file claims that any natural product has medical properties, but someone has to do the research. That means someone has to pay for the research. And supplement companies are very happy to take in your money, but not so happy to have to prove that their claims are true. I’d like to see the multi-billion dollar supplement industry start to prove their claims rigorously, because that’s the way to prove that you’re not just selling snake oil.

Also, one of the problems of so-called “natural” products is that they are not stable — they change over time. One of the most important properties of a packaged sunscreen is that it be shelf-stable and, very importantly, stable enough in your hot car and sitting in a drawer. Most natural products won’t pass this test (which is a very good reason not to put money into testing them). For example, I read a claim that green tea provides some sunscreen protection. Have you ever brewed years-old tea? Yuck! It degrades, as all natural things do. (Of course, chemical compounds of all sorts break down, which is why you should be careful to replace old sunscreen regularly.)

#2) Nearly all conventional sunscreen products contain cancer-causing chemicals

I could counter this with the same claim: nearly all natural compounds contain cancer-causing chemicals. Go ahead, try to prove me wrong. This is a broad, unprovable statement. Yes, many compounds, natural and synthetic, cause cancer when you force-feed them to lab animals. Whether they are causing cancer when used correctly by a large population of people is something much harder to study. If people using sunscreen are getting cancer from the sunscreen, that data can be gathered and analyzed, and should be.

#3) In a nation where over 70% of the population is vitamin D deficiency, sunscreen actually blocks vitamin D production

First of all, the 70% is highly debatable. New studies have come out showing what seems to be vitamin D deficiency in a large percentage of people studied, but those studies also point out that they are really not sure how much vitamin D we need.

Also, you need to look further past this statement. Up to 80% of Americans are considered overweight. Overweight people have a layer of fat under their skin, which absorbs the vitamin D and keeps it from being distributed in the body. How much of the vitamin D deficiency is actually just a by-product of the obesity epidemic? Furthermore, now that close to 50% of Americans have dark skin, fewer of us actually use the sun to manufacture vitamin D in our bodies.

Finally, how much sun exposure is necessary for proper vitamin D manufacture? My Northern European ancestors spent months in cold and dark, with their skin covered by thick clothing. They clearly weren’t making any vitamin D at that time. Their descendent is now living in California, where the native population had dark brown skin. I clearly don’t need to spend very much time outside my house getting sun exposure equal to what my ancestors got in a year.

#4) You can boost your internal sun resistance by changing what you eat

It’s likely that there’s some truth to this, but it’s hardly a substitute for other sun protection: No one with my skin is going to suddenly start manufacturing more melanin by eating fresh vegetables. If I ate the absolute perfect skin-protecting diet for a year, do you really think I’d be able to go out in California sunshine and not get burned to a crisp? If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you! Arguments like this simply assume that we are stupid.

#5) UV exposure alone does not cause skin cancer

Cancer is complex. Nutrition is complex. Life is complex. So yes, this statement is technically correct. But we do have enough data to know that people who get skin cancer have certain things in common. The highest correlation is with getting blistering sunburns. Avoiding blistering sunburns is the number one way to take yourself out of the pool of possible skin cancer sufferers. Of course, I’m sure if you found a large group of people who had never gotten any UV exposure, you’d find that some percentage of them would get skin cancer. But that doesn’t mean that you should just throw out the sunscreen and let yourself burn.

#6) Not all “natural” sunscreen products are really natural

I appreciate this point. The word “natural” is not regulated and can be applied to any box or bottle no matter what it contains. But I take issue with what the writer thinks is natural. So anything starting with the prefixes methyl, propyl, butyl, etc. is unnatural? But micronized zinc oxide is natural? What exactly is natural about taking a mineral from the ground and processing it till you make it into a clear cream?

This argument also rests on the supposition that natural is equivalent to “good” or “healthy.” But if everything “natural” is “better,” then should we start adding peach pits to our smoothies? Yum, cyanide! How about munching on rhubarb leaves? And let’s start giving our babies soft lead toys to suck on. Socrates really loved that hemlock shake, and I’m sure it was the added chemicals that really killed him!

Reasonable people know that “natural” is basically an empty term. What we need to know is whether something is safe, and safe is much harder to prove than natural. The longer we study things, the more we learn. So something that might look safe now might be proven to be unsafe in the future. That doesn’t mean that the scientists of today are somehow trying to hurt you. It means that we learn as we grow, which is… natural!

#7) Many “chemical free” sunscreens are loaded with chemicals

Here’s a fact that any educated person should know: all of life is made of chemicals. Chemical names can be given to any natural compound. Just because I call it dihydrogen oxide doesn’t mean drinking it will give me cancer. In fact, I bet you’ve ingested it today and assumed it was healthy because it was “natural.” The natural outputs of fermenting fruit and other natural compounds have many of the scary prefixes the writer mentions (ethyl! propyl! butyl!) and are as natural as nature can provide.

***

Let’s face it: The data on sun exposure and sunscreen is not all in yet. Our understanding has changed radically in the last thirty years, and will continue to change radically as more research is done. Many of the things the writer of this article claims may turn out to be true, but that doesn’t mean that they are proven true now. What we now know about skin cancer is pretty straightforward:

1) If you get blistering sunburns in childhood, you are much more likely to get skin cancer. Therefore, do whatever you can to keep your kids from getting blistering sunburns. As of yet, no other strong correlations have been proven.

2) Some amount of sun exposure is fine and probably healthy, but that doesn’t mean that any amount of sun exposure is healthy. Look at your body, your family history, and your reactions to sun exposure, and make healthy decisions.

3) The easiest way to lessen risk is to avoid it. If you want a 0% chance of dying in a car accident (a much higher risk to all of us than skin cancer, by the way), don’t leave home. If you are in a high risk skin cancer group, and you want to lessen your risk of skin cancer, use whatever methods you can to avoid too much sun exposure. Get your kids long-sleeved swim shirts, make them wear hats on the playground, wear long sleeves and hats on sunny hikes, and use sunscreen appropriately.

4) All cancers are best treated through early detection. Learn what risk group you and your kids are in. Learn what sorts of changes to watch for. And consult a medical professional (not your health food store employee) if you are concerned about any change in your skin.

We should all support dedicating money to studying the causes of skin cancer and studying new and less dangerous ways to lessen our risks. But in the process, don’t let the word “natural” turn you into a thoughtless consumer of so-called “natural” products. Mother Nature invented tigers, cobras, and black widow spiders. She’s not out to protect your children.

That’s your job.

Follow-up article: In Defense of “Natural”

Sugar fixation

Posted on by Suki

We were standing in line on the Staten Island Ferry, New York City, land of great street food, and all my daughter wanted was a soda.

How did this happen?

My kids know the lecture: There are three reasons the American population has gotten so fat. One is screentime, which leads to lack of exercise. We took care of that one very early by cutting out all TV watching in our house. These days, we’re so used to it, we forget to watch TV! Reason two is packaged food full of processed ingredients. In this case, we all love to cook and eat really great, healthy food, so the only problem we have to watch is my daughter’s love of crackers. The third reason is soda.

So there we were, standing in line behind a young man well on his way down the road to obesity, and she’s asking for a soda. I can’t remember the day it started, but it probably went something like this. She asked for a Snapple. I really wanted a Snapple. Darn it, occasionally a woman deserves a big hit of sugar and caffeine in the middle of a hectic day. So I said, OK.

She’s the sort of kid who watches for weakness in any structure, then pounces. She found a crack, and she dug a finger in.

Next we go visiting the relatives in New Jersey. At every stop: soda, juice. We allow her a cup of seltzer. Finally, friends in the old neighborhood offer ginger ale. The puppy eyes come out. “I’ve always wanted to taste ginger ale…. Pleeeeeease???”

Once the crack is opened, the flood of requests pour in, and I have to start up the propaganda machine again.

“Let’s start at the beginning. Do you remember why so many people in this country are fat, obese, and suffering from completely preventable diseases like Type II diabetes?”

She plays dumb, my kid who is so obsessed with the human body that she has a whole bookshelf of knowledge on why the body starts to need insulin injections to survive.

“It’s because of soda. Remember what happens when you put too much sugar in? Sugar gives us energy, but most Americans don’t use the energy they put into their bodies. So it gets stored as fat. They get fat and unhealthy. Then the functions in their bodies break down. Their bodies can’t process sugar correctly anymore. They have to inject drugs for the rest of their lives. They are the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will be lower than their parents’.”

The size, sweetness, and saltiness of sodas keeps rising along with Americans' waistlines and diabetes-related deaths.
The size, sweetness, and saltiness of sodas keeps rising along with Americans' waistlines and diabetes-related deaths.

She actually got the short version of the lecture. I could have opened up Youtube on my phone and searched for Dr. Robert Lustig’s video on fructose that went viral last year. That’s fructose as in “high fructose corn syrup,” the major ingredient in American sodas. Fructose, which he calls “poison.” I could have reminded her about how we learned why sodas are so high in salt: they add all the salt to mask how sickly sweet the sodas are (all that cheap HFCS), and also to make us more thirsty. They don’t want us to drink just one soda, you know. That wouldn’t be good for business.

But I didn’t have time to go on. “We’re next!” my daughter announced bouncily, as the soon-to-be-obese young man stepped up to the counter.

“What’s your largest size of soda?” he asked.

“Twenty ounces,” the clerk said.

“Gimme one of those,” he said.

Apparently my lecture didn’t spoil his fun. My daughter, however, ended up sulking her way through a box of milk. She should be happy, though. All that healthy food gives her the brain development and energy to plot new ways to exploit the cracks in my health-conscious veneer.

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