Down the Rabbit Hole
I am fond of prefacing conversations about eating disorders with: “If, everything you know about eating disorders you learned from an ABC Afterschool Special or Lifetime TV movie, you don’t know anything.” A frightening aspect of this disease is that most people—including doctors and other clinicians—wrongly assume full authority on the topic.
Many people don’t remember that until Rain Man came out in 1988, society largely thought autism was caused by cold, unfeeling “refrigerator” mothers. Eating disorders need a blockbuster movie — if you’re a movie producer, call me!
Just How Thin Was She?
My dau...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - July 23, 2014 Category: Pediatricians Authors: Jennifer Denise Ouellette Tags: Perspectives Eating Behavior Eating Disorders Teens & Behavior Teens & Nutrition Source Type: blogs
When Choice Isn’t A Choice
Long before I knew the term “disordered eating,” I knew its environment. My stunningly beautiful mother maintained her perfectly-proportioned, svelte figure with Carnation Instant Breakfast, cigarettes for hunger control during the day and an enormous, home-cooked, delicious meat, potatoes, salad and vegetable dinner every night. Sweets and sugar were forbidden, but sour cream was encouraged—low-fat, of course. I was skinny, my sister was husky and food and weight were frequent topics of discussion. As an adult, I recognized this wasn’t healthy.
Purposeful Parenting
Because I lacked modeling to be the type of par...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - July 22, 2014 Category: Pediatricians Authors: Jennifer Denise Ouellette Tags: Perspectives Eating Behavior Eating Disorders Raising Girls Teen Girls Teens & Behavior Teens & Health Source Type: blogs
You Are What You Sleep
Dr. Greene’s take on sleep and obesity in children…
How your children sleep may change their body composition – their lean body mass, total body fat, abdominal fat, and waist and hip circumference. A fascinating new study showed tight links between kids’ not getting enough sleep as babies, toddlers, and preschoolers and becoming obese by age 7.
Researchers at Harvard’s Mass General Hospital followed more than a thousand children from 6 months old until they were 7. Their results, from the longest sleep study of its kind, were published in June 2014.
They defined insufficient sleep at less than 12 hours p...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - June 7, 2014 Category: Child Development Authors: Dr. Alan Greene Tags: Dr. Greene's Blog Childhood Obesity Sleep Toddler Sleep Source Type: blogs
Should Infant Formula Be Sweetened: Mother (Nature) Knows Best
Breast milk is a marvelous, complex whole food, perfect for growing babies. The composition of breast milk varies from month to month, from day to day, and even within a single feeding. But whenever it’s sampled, breast milk is also pretty sweet.
On average, there are about 10g of lactose (milk sugar) in every 100 calories of breast milk.[i] Lactose is the ideal sugar for baby humans and other baby animals. It fuels their growth – and also the growth of beneficial bacteria (lactobacilli) in their guts. Lactose also helps in the digestion of important minerals such as iron and zinc.
Each molecule of lactose is made up o...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - May 27, 2014 Category: Child Development Authors: Dr. Alan Greene Tags: Dr. Greene's Blog Breast vs. Bottle Formula Source Type: blogs
I Was Wrong about the Environment
Time and again the magic begins the same way. Sperm and egg come together to create an absolutely unique cell. Then this cell divides to create two identical cells., These cells divide, and divide again, and divide again. At first all the cells are the same, but something changes. Soon the cells become different from each other. Within 8 weeks the developing baby has hair follicles and knees and toes, each with a unique toe print.
How do identical cells lead to cells with such different destinies? It’s a subtle environmental influence. As the cells divide, some of the cells are on the inside and some are on the outside. ...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - May 3, 2014 Category: Child Development Authors: Dr. Alan Greene Tags: Dr. Greene's Blog Baby Environmental Health Newborn & Baby Sleep Source Type: blogs
It ’s Hard to Say Goodbye
Today we say goodbye to a very dear friend. No, she’s not “gone”, but Truddle is leaving the DrGreene.com Team after fourteen years and we couldn’t let her move-on to the next phase of her life without acknowledging what an integral part she has played in the lives of parents around the world, thanking her for her devotion, and telling a few stories.
MsGreene and I first met TruddleBug (Beverly Richardson) in 1997. We were writing and hosting pediatric content on DrGreene.com (mostly Q&As), but we weren’t doing any kind of community. ParentSoup invited us to chat on their site to answer questions liv...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - January 21, 2014 Category: Child Development Authors: Dr. Alan Greene Tags: Dr. Greene's Blog Source Type: blogs
Coping with the Crying
She’s not fine, I thought.
She keeps crying.
I’m doing something wrong.
I have no idea what to do.
These are the things I remember thinking in the first few months of my twin daughters’ lives.
Motherhood was instantly not at all what I thought it would be. I thought my children wouldn’t cry that much — and if they did, I thought I would take care of them so well that it wouldn’t last long.
But the crying continued, sometimes in the evenings for hours.
What was I doing wrong? Why couldn’t I make my babies happy? What is wrong?
These are the many unhappy thoughts that crossed my mind. I didn’t kno...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - January 2, 2014 Category: Pediatricians Authors: Shawn Fink Tags: Perspectives Mental Health Parenting Source Type: blogs
Avoiding a Mommy Meltdown
We’ve all been there. A really, really long day. The children haven’t been listening or they have been fighting or crying non-stop.
And we haven’t had a chance to take care of ourselves.
The little things that poke at our patience start to add up. We start to question what we’re doing wrong. We start to wonder why things are not going more smoothly for us. We try so hard to make everyone happy.
And then we burst. Explode. Screams begin. Tears fall.
Anger takes over.
What I’ve learned as a mother these past almost eight years is that those moments of bursting — of melting down — and then feeling disappoin...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - January 1, 2014 Category: Pediatricians Authors: Shawn Fink Tags: Perspectives Mental Health Parenting Source Type: blogs
3 Causes of Mom Burnout
It’s not just all that hard work and those daily battles wearing you out.
You NEED time for yourself. You know you do.
And sometimes, you even get a little — but not nearly as much as you wish or need.
Mostly you are just really busy being that person everyone else relies on so much.
And when your time away is over and you return to the family, you feel good — for about an hour.
But once the daily battles begin again you are back to feeling zapped and overwhelmed.
I know. I’ve been there.
The symptoms of an overwhelmed mama aren’t pretty. We snap a lot at those we love. We fall into bed...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - December 31, 2013 Category: Pediatricians Authors: Shawn Fink Tags: Perspectives Mental Health Parenting Source Type: blogs
The Art of Happy Mornings
I really love mornings.
I love the newness of the day, the opportunity — the chance to get it all right, for once.
And I love the coffee.
But what I don’t love is when the really early alarm goes off — and by alarm I really mean just a tap, tap, tap on your arm in the dark from a toddler or a child — and I’m not ready. I don’t love feeling unprepared to meet the day that early.
This kind of off-schedule pattern can really wreck families lives and create serious tension.
Early wake ups have happened many times since my twin daughters’ were born. My daughters have always been early risers ̵...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - December 30, 2013 Category: Pediatricians Authors: Shawn Fink Tags: Perspectives Mental Health Parenting Source Type: blogs
Gifts that Return
This story is reprinted by permission from a work originally published in 1987, with special thanks to Linda Fogg Phillips.
It was early Christmas morning. We kids had opened all of Santa’s gifts with nimble fingers in record time, and though Santa had only brought Mom one gift (“she must not have been very good the year I mused), she was still unwrapping it.
She started out opening a great big box, and then she found another smaller one inside, and on and on. As she worked her way down, unwrapping and opening, to a very small box, I momentarily forgot about my new Lite Brite set and the colorful clown I was crea...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - December 27, 2013 Category: Pediatricians Authors: BJ Fogg Tags: Perspectives Parenting Winter Holiday Source Type: blogs
Gifts of the Heart Return to the Giver
Traditions are the threads that sew the hearts of families together throughout the generations of time. One such tradition started when I was a child in my family of seven children. Our tradition was drawing a sibling’s name and then making a handmade gift for them for Christmas. No buying allowed. It was always these handmade gifts that were the most anticipated. Not because of the monetary value, but because they were truly gifts of the heart from the giver.
I recall that one year my teenage brother, Mike, made me a wooden toilet paper holder. He was so excited to present me with his gift. He had worked l...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - December 27, 2013 Category: Pediatricians Authors: Linda Fogg Phillips Tags: Perspectives Parenting Winter Holiday Source Type: blogs
Holidays, Kids and Life
There’s a poorly decorated, fake Christmas tree standing in the corner of my living room. It is not the fresh evergreen, decked in frosted glass balls that I dreamed I would have as a grown up. The tree skirt is rumpled into a ball below it.
My husband made a train track on a wooden circle that we set the tree in the middle of every year, but we rarely set the train up on it. Our children are young.
They pluck the train from the tracks and throw the cars at each other. The cars wind up in random places, like halfway sticking out from under a bed or dangerously close to a toilet bowl.
Our children can’t be trust...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - December 26, 2013 Category: Pediatricians Authors: Jill Krause Tags: Perspectives Parenting Winter Holiday Source Type: blogs
What the Holidays Mean to Me: The Gift of Presence
Depending on your stage in life, the biggest part of the holidays can be the presents or your presence.
Children are anxious to wake-up and see what presents are under the tree, while elderly people are simply happy to be in the presence of their children.
Many adults, like myself wear several hats in their lives. With each hat the holidays can mean something slightly different – but it can all come back to the gifts we have been blessed with.
For Me:
As an author: The holiday’s can mean more opportunity to write about how we can give back to our communities and other topics that are important to us a t...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - December 24, 2013 Category: Pediatricians Authors: Sue Scheff Tags: Perspectives Mental Health Source Type: blogs
The Ultimate Opportunity
Develop a legacy of compassion around the holidays
My wife and I are blessed with three great kids, now ages 19-26. Something we’ve learned along the way is the importance of tradition to kids, so we’ve developed a family tradition of making charitable giving decisions together during the holidays. The compassion for others, through sharing of one’s resources, offers a recurring theme which a family can rally around in a fun and meaningful way, year after year. Such a bond can be a saving grace as cultural, personal and economic forces can fragment many families’ connectedness.
Here’s my recom...
Source: Conversations with Dr Greene - December 23, 2013 Category: Pediatricians Authors: Paul Nourigat Tags: Perspectives Parenting Source Type: blogs
