parenting

It seems like every couple of years there are some new baby rules. Don’t lay them down on their stomachs. Don’t lay them down on their backs. Do yoga while pregnant. Don’t do yoga while pregnant. Breast feed. Don’t breast feed. In light of a new study, the latest piece of baby advice you might hear from your doctor may be “don’t conceive in the spring or summer.”

We’ve all heard the news: We’re getting fat. Americans are inactive, McDonald’s-eating smokers with diabetes, right? That’s certainly a generalization, but you know what they say. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Tons of research dollars have been poured into studying this historic obesity epidemic. While some may imagine that obesity begins once a child is tall enough to reach the top shelf where mom and dad keep the cookies, a new study points to an even earlier age that jump starts obesity: infancy.

Parents of hyperactive kindergarteners, beware! According to researchers from the Université de Montréal in Canada, your inattentive five-year-old may be prone to develop a gambling addiction later in life. And when I say later in life, I mean your child might begin participating in recreational gambling as early as middle school.

The stereotype of pregnant women experiencing bizarre cravings has long had people believing that all expectant mothers go a little crazy when it comes to food and drink over the course of nine months. Though the image of a petite woman screaming at her husband at 2:00 in the morning, "I WANT BROCCOLI AND STRAWBERRY SYRUP!" may lead us to imagine that all pregnant women gain extra, non-baby weight, a recent study shows that those who are more likely to over-gain weight during pregnancy are overweight or obese mothers-to-be who underestimate their weight at the beginning of term.

Babies with Down's Syndrome typically learn how to stand upright and walk a year later than other children. But Dale Ulrich of the University of Michigan has found that by getting the infants to work out on a tiny treadmill eight minutes a day, five days a week for six to eight months, he can speed up the process by as much as four months.