Is Your Child An Orchid or a Dandelion?

Most kids grow like dandelions. They bloom everywhere, growing up sturdy and strong in the most desolate neighborhoods or the ritziest.

Others seem to come into the world fragile. They’re sensitive kids who are prone trouble, but also brilliance. The kind who grow up to poets or addicts or both.

In the new issue of Atlantic Monthly, David Dobbs outlines the “orchid hypothesis,” an emerging genetic theory that offers some insight into how, and why, our genetic differences shape how we grow and who we become. Continue reading »

Mom Sues School for Causing Daughter’s Anorexia

A Pennsylvania school district accused by a mom of not stepping in to stop bullying against her daughter is now being sued - for causing her anorexia.

The unidentified mother says boys began harassing her daughter about her weight in sixth grade, and the trouble continued into the seventh. Continue reading »

Condom Use Will Make You Crazy: Doc Says So

Welcome to a little section we like to call: insanely stupid study results of the week! Because here you were thinking that people who use condoms just didn’t want any more kids (or any at all)?

Wrong! A psychologist at a Scottish university says condom users are ripe for suicide and depression!

All this over a thin sheet of latex? Do tell. Continue reading »

They Say: Thousands of 3-Year-Olds Depressed

Sometimes a grumpy kid is just that: a grumpy kid. And sometimes a grumpy kid is actually, clinically, depressed. At least according to new research may show depression can be chronic in children as young as 3.

Three!

Clinicians used to think that kids younger than six couldn’t be chronically depressed — that they were too immature to actually experience depression. Then an more recent study claimed 2 percent of all preschoolers — nearly 160,000 were depressed at one time or another.

This new study, out of Washington University in St. Louis medical school and published in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, tracked 200 3- to 6-year-old preschoolers, 75 of whom had been diagnosed with major depression.

From the AP: Continue reading »

Post-Adoption Depression Peeks Out of the Closet of Secrecy

As post-partum depression begins to slowly come out into the light and be spoken about openly by brave mothers on blogs, in magazines and books, its lesser-known cousin, post-adoption depression remains mostly hidden.

Adoptive parents can feel especially ashamed and guilty for experiencing doubts, anxiety or even just a post-big-event let-down once a longed-for child arrives at last.

Perhaps the pressure of Continue reading »

Kids Forbidden to Bike or Walk to School

Here’s a rich one for our desperate-to-get-the-kids-more-exercise society: In the upstate New York town of Saratoga Springs, children at some schools aren’t allowed to bike or walk to school. In fact, when one student rode to school, with his mother, on a bike path, his bike was confiscated (the rule had never been publicized).

The principal goes on at some length rationalizing the rule. Mostly he’s scared of traffic and stranger abductions. Continue reading »

Violence Between Parents Carries Into the Next Generation

I am sure it will come as no surprise to Strollerderby readers that children who witness violence between their parents are more likely to suffer all kinds of mental health problems in their own adulthood.  What I did find surprising, however, was the extremely high rates found in a new study. Continue reading »