Therapist Unlimited Blog

Parents who wants to keep their children healthy better act as role model for them.
Children are more likely to watch high levels of television if their parents do, but parents do not need to be physically active to help their children to be active, a new study has found.
The paper, Parent and child physical activity and sedentary time: Do active parents foster active children? by Dr Russell Jago and colleagues in the Department of Exercise, Nutrition and Health Sciences at the University of Bristol is published online in BMC Public Health.
The study has been funded by a grant from the British Heart Foundation.
Among children and adolescents, physical activity has been associated with a lower BMI and a reduced risk of heart disease.
Regular physical activity is also known to help to prevent the development of type 2 diabetes, obesity and some cancers and is also associated with improved mental well-being.
The study found that higher parental TV viewing was associated with an increased risk of high levels of TV viewing for both boys and girls.

 

For girls, the relative risk of watching more than four hours of TV per day was 3.67 times higher if the girl’s parent watched two-four hours of TV per day, when compared to girls who watched less than two hours of TV per day.
For boys, the relative risk of watching more than four hours of TV per day was 10.47 times higher if the boy’s parent watched more than four hours of TV per day when compared to boys who watched less than two hours of TV per day. There were no associations between the time that parents and children spend engaged in physical activity.
Dr Russ Jago, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Exercise, Nutrition and Health Sciences, said: "Physical activity has many positive effects on children’s health while TV viewing has been associated with adverse health outcomes. Many children do not meet physical activity recommendations and exceed TV viewing guidelines.
"Our research suggests that parents do not need to be active for their children to be active. Parents should therefore look at ways in which they can help to facilitate physical activity for their children such as by encouraging walking to school or promoting outdoor free-play in safe areas close to home."
Dr Mike Knapton, Associate Medical Director at the BHF said: "Parents and children rooted to the sofa watching over four hours of television each night paints a worrying picture of kids’ daily habits.
"Ideally parents and children should lead an active lifestyle together but if this isn’t possible then parents need to take charge and ensure a healthier way of life for the next generation. It’s time to switch off the box and get the nation’s kids moving again."
Year six children and their parents were recruited from 40 primary schools in Bristol to participate in the study to examine parents and children’s physical activity patterns. Parental and child physical activity and inactive time was assessed using accelerometers. These are small devices that provide accurate and reliable indices of physical activity among both children and adults.
The study is part of a larger project, the Bristol 3Ps Project, which examines the influences of peers and parents on physical activity participation in 10-11 year old children.

 

 

 

 

 

Source:
Joanne Fryer
University of Bristol

 

A recent medical study has shown that offspring of two parents with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder appear more likely to develop the same illness or another psychiatric condition than those with only one parent with psychiatric illness.
According to a report in the March issue of Archives of General psychiatry, the offspring of two parents with psychiatric illness represent an extremely high-risk group.
Studying these children permits researchers to assess the risk associated with two sources of genetic predisposition to mental disorders.
"Such risks will be of use to genetic counselors to inform personal decisions with regard to marriage, family formation, adoption and health insurance planning," the authors write.
Irving I. Gottesman, Ph.D., Hon.F.R.C.Psych., of the University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, and colleagues studied a
population-based cohort of 2.7 million individuals born in Denmark.
The researchers matched records in a general registry of the population with a database of psychiatric admissions.
They identified individuals whose parents had both been admitted to psychiatric facilities for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and compared the rate of psychiatric admissions for these individuals to those of offspring with one or no parents admitted to psychiatric facilities.
Rates of schizophrenia were highest among offspring of two parents with schizophrenia. Of the 196 couples who both had schizophrenia,27.3 percent of their 270 children were admitted to a psychiatric facility, increasing to 39.2 percent when schizophrenia-related disorders were included.

This compared with a rate of 7 percent among 13,878 offspring of 8,006 couples in which one parent had schizophrenia and 0.86 percent in 2.2 million offspring of 1 million couples in which neither parent was admitted for schizophrenia.
Similarly, the risk of bipolar disorder was 24.9 percent in 146 offspring of 83 parent couples who were both admitted for bipolar disorder (increasing to 36 percent when unipolar depressive disorder was also included).
This compared to a risk of 4.4 percent among 23,152 offspring of 11,995 couples with only one parent ever admitted for bipolar disorder and 0.48 percent in 2.2 million children of 1 million couples with neither parent ever admitted.
When one parent had bipolar disorder and the other had schizophrenia, offspring had a 15.6 percent risk of schizophrenia and an 11.7 percent risk of bipolar disorder.
The risks in this population "are of such a magnitude that they command clinical and national public health attention in countries with health care roughly similar to Denmark’s," the authors write.
"It is important to keep in mind that the yields from genetic epidemiology and the strategies implemented are applicable to groups of people, not to the individuals themselves," they conclude.
"However, by joining advances in molecular genetics that are adapted for use in epidemiological genetic screening, our kinds of data with the risk groups described might lead to a large and rapid step forward in the understanding of the etiologies of major mental disorders."

 

 

 

Researchers have found new evidence showing that parents play a key role in whether or not their adolescent children who experiment with tobacco progress to become daily smokers before they graduate from high school.
A study published on-line and in the September issue of journal Pediatrics shows that parents can be a positive or negative influence on their children’s future smoking habit.
"If parents really don’t want their children to smoke they need to communicate that by establishing clear guidelines in their families about not smoking and discuss them with their school-age children." said Min Jung Kim, a research scientist with the University of Washington’s Social Development Research Group and lead author of the study.
At the same time, parents can increase their children’s chances of smoking by their own use of tobacco.
"If parents smoke, teens have more access to cigarettes than teens who have non-smoking parents. A second preventive measure for smoking parents is to quit smoking themselves," said Kim.
The study included 270 adolescents who had begun smoking by the eighth grade but had not advanced to daily smoking at that time.
Daily smoking was defined as smoking one cigarette a day for the past 30 days prior to annual interviews. By the time the students were in the 12th grade, 156, or 58 percent, had become daily smokers.
The children in the study were 51 percent male and 85 percent white. They were drawn from a larger study looking at the development of healthy and problem behaviours among children at 10 suburban schools in the Pacific Northwest. Information about their smoking habits was collected during annual interviews from the seventh through 12th grades.
Aside from parenting and parental tobacco use, other factors that predicted teen smoking were having friends who smoked and involvement in other problems behaviours such as skipping school, getting into fights and engaging in vandalism.

Kim said most smoking prevention programs to not directly address the role of parental smoking or the link between anti-social behaviour and smoking, which commonly occur together.
"Parents need to know that they are still important and can make their children feel good when they do something right and also know that there are consequences when they do something wrong. Many parents think adolescence is the time for children to have their independence. But it is important to maintain good supervision of your teen. Parents who smoke also need to understand that they are modeling behavior and if they quit smoking they send a strong message to their teenager," said Kim.
She recommends that parents "should not ignore children’s experimental smoking at any age because it put them at great risk of progressing to daily smoking." To do that, parents should:
    * Set and enforce clear guideline about tobacco.
    * Monitor to ensure that your children are following your guidelines.
    * Know and monitor your children’s friends.
    * Provide clear, consistent and positive consequences for following those guidelines and appropriate, consistent negative consequences for violating them.

A recent study has shown that new parents have less knowledge on child-injury risks that could jeopardize the life of their treasured angel.
According to the study made by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Psychology new parents identified less than half of the safety hazards in a simulated home environment, and most perceived that their children were less vulnerable to injuries than other children.
UAB doctoral student Joanna Gaines, M.A., the lead author of the study, and UAB pediatric psychologist David Schwebel, Ph.D., is its co-author, explained based on their study they found out that parents recognized only 47 percent of the safety hazards placed inside a home setting.
The researchers said while there were no benchmarks to assess whether this is a good or bad rate of recognition, it is concerning if it approximates behavior in real homes.
The researchers added one would hope that parents might recognize all or almost all of the safety hazards present, since they cannot act for prevention, thus placing their children at risk of serious injury if they do not know the risks involved.

 

 

New parents need to orient themselves on possible injuries their child faces to protect them from harm from injuries inside their own home.

 

Gaines said surprisingly, when asked to identify hazards they considered dangerous for their own children, the parents identified only 40 percent of the hazards.
She said the results suggest that parents tend to perceive their children as being somewhat invulnerable or smarter, safer or developmentally more advanced than other children.
Earlier studies have shown that unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for toddlers in the United States, according to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC).
In fact, the NCIPC reports that more than 1,300 1- and 2-year-old American children died from accidental injuries in 2005.
Based on the study it was discovered that formal education was not related to hazard recognition.
The researchers explained parents with fewer years of education recognized safety hazards just as well as parents with more education.
However, the researchers revealed the study also found that more hazards were identified by adults with more parent-related education, which suggests these classes and magazine articles focused on injury prevention may benefit child safety.
Moreover, the researchers said the parents, however, recognized more hazards than the professionals who worked with children daily.
The researchers revealed the health professionals recognized only 29 percent of the hazards, and the day-care workers recognized 37 percent.
The researchers explained parents spend more time with toddlers than day-care employees and parents have more invested in safeguarding their own children.
In addition, the research team said parents have more experience watching children in a home environment than most child-care professionals.

 

A recent study has shown that parents who are suffering from distress could cause tooth decay among their children.
Based on the research conducted by a group of scientists from The Ohio State University it was discovered that the more stressed parents are, the more likely their children were to have decay
The researchers said they also found out that apparently having one’s child’s dental decay treated actually could decrease the stress of being a parent.
Furthermore, the researchers said through their study they found out that dental professionals need to be ready not only to repair childhood decay, but also to assist families in finding the help they need to decrease the stress of life.
The parents for its part should strive hard to avoid stress in their lives so that their children would not suffer from tooth decay.

 

 

 

Parents need to avoid stress to avoid possible tooth decay among their children.

 

Here is a piece of good news to parents around the world.
A latest study has revealed that children who have a great relationship with their parents have less chances of suffering from alcohol addiction.
In a research published at the Journal of Studies on Alcohol, and Drugs it was discovered that children who have close with their parents refrain themselves from the drinking habit and just drink alcohol in moderation when they are already adult.
According to Dr. Emmanuel Kuntsche, of the Swiss Institute for the Prevention of Alcohol and Drug Problems in Lausanne, Switzerland and lead author of the study revealed most often those children who started drinking early have higher tendencies of becoming an alcohol addict than those who take up the drinking habit when they already adult.
Kuntsche said parents who have close ties with their children can also offer sound advices for them to keep away from drinking at a young age.
He said the finding was based on the study they conducted on 364 teenagers they have surveyed over two years.
The lead researcher explained those children who refrain from drinking at a young age positively gain from having great relationship with their parents since they were able to discuss their problems with them and that their parents respected their feelings.

 

 

 

Parents need to exert effort to forge a smooth relationship with their children to keep them away from alcohol addiction.

 

 

Kuntsche said the study has also clearly shown that having close relationship with their parents could lower the risk of alcohol problems.
The medical expert urged parents to exert efforts to have a great relationship with their children so that both can freely discuss whatever problems and keep away their children from alcohol and other vices.
He said the young generation is considered as the hope of this planet so parents should make sure these people achieve their full potential by keeping them away from vices through having a smooth relationship with their children.

 

One of the effective means to keep children fit and away from obesity is to play with them regularly.

A recent medical study revealed that parents who play with their children at least an hour a day keep them fit and healthy.
The study shows that any form of activity such as exercises, sport and other recreational activities will do as long as it keep the children active for an hour everyday.
Robert Malina, professor emeritus of the University of Texas-Austin said parents who plays with their children do not only make them keep a normal weight but also strengthen their bond.
Malina strongly suggest that parents focus more on doing a daily exercise since most the children today are  too sedentary which lead to excess weight in one-third of children in the USA.
He said parents who play with their children would likely influence them to keep the habit in a regular basis since they have a vast influence on the latter.
It was revealed that in most occasions, children always emulate what their parent does.
To fight obesity and keep their children healthy at all times parents should not make it a point to play regularly with their children.

 

 

Parents who regularly play with their children keep them fit and away from obesity.

 

Prescription drug abuse has becoming the new trend among teenagers, especially when it can be purchased inside the school grounds.

Just recently, three girls were rushed to the hospitals after taking prescription drugs before lunch. This abuse has been caused when two of their classmates supplied and gave them drugs. Police even believes that two Cedar Hill students, who are the suspects for such a crime, talked the three into taking the drugs.

This incident triggered the students and the parents to react. Many of them found it hard to believe the incident since the students don’t look like they’d take drugs and that they aren’t smart enough to think things through. Parents, clearly, expressed their concerns about their kids’ welfare.

Read more about this story in:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22105926/

Teens and parents usually develop a gap that cannot be avoided easily. Parents want to protect them while teens want to explore their world. This may cause communication breakdown, lack of understanding to one another, and worse, failed parental relationship. And when you get alarmed in this thought, bear in ming that there are many ways to avoid it.

For parents:  Remember that you once had the tendency to get rebellious and might even be a real one when you were teenagers.  That you wanted privacy and to know more about life. The point is, as a parent and even as being teenagers once, you should be able to empathize with them. Understand their needs.

And be cool. Don’t approach them in an authoritative manner. Be friendly to them while you remind them about their limitations.

For teenagers: If you were in their position, you’d probably do the same thing too.  You want to protect your kids and sometimes, you do some means to do that, which can be off to them. But you have a point right? And this is what yur parents usually feel when they try to do some lectures to you.