In high school sports, girls’ soccer is the second highest source for concussions among all athletes – with 36 injuries per 100,000 players. Only high school football has more: 47 injuries per 100,000 players. The source of most girls’ concussions: colliding with another player or the ground. A header is not the major source; the impact with the ball is not sufficient to injure. However, many collisions occur when two girls are trying to head the same ball. Additional studies show that girls are more prone to concussion and take longer to recover.

The Blue Lake take on it: 
You might think your daughter should avoid sports after reading coverage about girls’ concussive injuries. But, like so many things, injuries are still relatively rare, and if your daughter loves sports, it would be a mistake to take her away from that. Instead, make sure you and your daughter understand the most common injury-inducing maneuvers, and use protective gear where applicable.

Taking your family down the organic highway can be time consuming – and expensive. Wouldn’t it be nice to apply the 80/20 rule here? It turns out you can. If you buy organic options of just the five items below, you will have gotten the most benefit with the least effort.

1. Milk
2. Potatoes
3. Peanut butter
4. Ketchup
5. Apples

Why? These are the most common kid foods in which the organic version is significantly less toxic than the non-organic option. Many foods, including broccoli, onions, and foods with peels like avocados, bananas and oranges, come to market with much less pesticide residue even when they are not grown organically.

The Blue Lake take on it:
We love this type of thinking. You don’t have time to keep up on every bulletin or develop a 10-page plan for strategic grocery shopping. Thank you, Dr. Alan Greene, the author of Raising Baby Green, for this simple guideline. If you want to read more on this topic, and see some interesting parent responses, visit Tara Parker-Pope’s blog in the New York Times Health section.

A pair of unrelated studies were published in September. Both of them brought good news about the safety and efficacy of vaccines in young children. UNICEF reported that annual child deaths fell below 10 million for the first time since records have been kept. As they point out, 9.7 million deaths of children under 5 years is “unacceptable”. But the trend is good. Most of these deaths occur in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and they are preventable. Much of the credit for the recent good news is the success of measles vaccination programs around the world. Add to this that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined the record of over 1,000 children who were exposed to thimerosal in the 1990’s and found no link to neurological problems. (more…)

In August, we found out that financial aid offices at universities were getting paid by student loan providers for creating a situation in which prospective students saw limited loan options. Later in the month, one of my favorite New York Times investigative reporters, Diane Jean Schemo, wrote about a similar market-fixing situation among popular “study abroad” programs. In some cases, it is charged that colleges received cash rebates for restricting a student’s choice of programs international to the chosen few. While the office of New York Attorney General investigates these alleged misdeeds, the major industry trade association is starting to make noises about writing guidelines and self regulation. (more…)

Didn’t we always suspect that this was a Nature trounces Nurture phenomena? How else could the child of foodies insist on Kraft? Now there is proof. In August, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published the findings of a study that tracked the eating habits of over 5,000 pairs of twins. One conclusion is that a child who is averse to trying new foods has most likely inherited that trait from a parent. (more…)

I am considering coming out of the closet. For decades, I have been afraid to voice my strongest feelings about the effects of TV on our society. My style is to be a consensus builder, and when that is your goal, it pays to be able to understand (and to some extent, support) both sides of a debate. And so for years I have been repeating some version of “Too much TV is never good, but there are some very high quality programs. I do understand that today’s parents need (1) to allow their kids to experience TV in order to be part of the culture, and (2) a break – a way to have their child fully engaged by something else – so that they can have some time to concentrate on their own lives.” All of this is true. But the statement is a polite version of what I really think. TV is a very addictive bad habit. Like watching a friend struggle with a drug or drinking problem, I see people of all ages who watch too much TV and they are: in a bad mood when they don’t get enough, incapable of imagining life without TV, and in denial about the toll TV is taking on their physical and mental health. (more…)

First off – I am a salt person, not a sweet tooth. However, when I was in sixth grade, I wrote a report on candy. This was decades before the internet, and my method was to copy paragraphs neatly out of World Book Encyclopedia, Volume C. I did tape some wrapped hard candies to the cover, and I think that may be why I got an A. I don’t follow the candy industry, but lately I have been hearing about organic candy, and skeptic that I am, I had to look into it. No World Books available, I started with Google. I found a very well-written candy blog by Cybele May, a playwright. As she points out, there are not that many “green candy” options at the big chain grocery stores. Cybele’s research convinced me that if you are willing to get online to find them, there are some substantially better candy products on the market today. You might even get your sixth-grader to write a report on it. (more…)