I recently received a wonderful letter from the mother of a 10-month-old boy who had been born with a left clubfoot. She wanted to be sure I would let parents everywhere know about a gentle, effective solution to clubfoot that she found online - a method that she says can eliminate the need for major [...]

What Mom eats during pregnancy appears able to help protect her kindergarten-aged child from asthma and eczema. A little over ten years ago, researchers at the University of Aberdeen proposed that the recent dramatic increase in asthma and related conditions in affluent societies might be partly do to the decline of antioxidants in the diet. [...]

Should all 11 and 12 year old girls be vaccinated against sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV)? Michigan appears poised to be the first state to enact this requirement for all girls entering middle school (though parents could opt out for religious or medical reasons). Many other states are likely to follow suit quickly. Cervical cancer [...]

.As soon as the FDA E. coli warning is over. This week, .Don’t eat spinach. headlines have been trumpeted appropriately across the United States. However, you haven’t seen dramatic headlines urging .Stop Driving Cars!. .Cancel Your Next Plane Flight!. .Don’t Go Swimming!. or .Walking is Dangerous . Avoid Being a Pedestrian!. Nevertheless, even at the [...]

Originally, one of the hardest organic substitutions for me was changing to organic wines. You might think this one would be easy for me. I was especially motivated to make this switch because my wife Cheryl.s childhood bedroom was just a few feet from rows of grape vines. One of her most haunting childhood memories [...]

If fluid from the middle ear space is draining out of the ear in a child with an acute ear infection (acute otitis media), there must be an opening in the eardrum - the air-tight membrane that separates the middle ear from the ear canal and helps us to hear. If fluid can get out [...]

I often hear from parents who expect that their cute, chubby young children  will naturally thin out as their height spurts up. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tend to work out that way. Instead, making changes as a family is usually needed to help kids thin out as they grow. Researchers followed the growth of over 1,000 [...]

Blue is a normal color in the rainbow of parenting emotions. Postpartum depression is much less common than the blues. But, if the blues are lasting more than a week or two, if you find you can’t sleep (because you can’t, not because the baby won’t), if you don’t want to eat, if you lose [...]

You may be more exhausted than you have ever been. Whenever people are sleep deprived they are more subject to swings of emotion and to feelings of inadequacy. This, by itself, is enough to cause a blue period (ask any practicing pediatrician).
To make matters worse, research has shown that women with the postpartum blues tend [...]

Moms who have adopted their babies also commonly go through a blue period. And now that investigators have begun to look into it, we know that most dads (though less weepy) go through a blue period of feeling unhappy, insecure, left out, and moody. One day I expect we’ll discover that even dads and adoptive [...]

You may feel a rainbow of emotions during the days following your baby’s birth, sometimes in bewildering succession, sometimes several conflicting emotions at the same time.
As magical as the journey of parenthood is, it often begins with a period of feeling blue. Women’s bodies are the scene of a powerful changing tide of hormones in [...]