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.

The Blue Lake take on it:
There will always be lingering doubts about vaccines – and this will always be a highly charged topic. The CDC study above did not examine links to autism. A separate study on that issue is expected in one year. A good source for reasonable advice to parents on vaccine safety is the American Academy of Pediatrics. The CDC also has an interesting comparison of the risk from vaccine vs. contracting a preventable disease.

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.

The Blue Lake take on it:
A victimless crime? I don’t think so. Student loans and study-abroad programs seem like “good” things – all “good” parents want their child to get a higher education, and if the university has hand-picked these providers of student loans and semesters in Europe, why should they challenge them? Yes, there are much more serious white-collar crimes out there, but it really gets under the skin when the deception is practiced by those in the education arena. If you want to read about what happens when student are steered toward private loans with hard to discern interest rates, Schemo uncovered some gems. Maybe it’s time we realize that higher education, like health care, is an industry that has long since move on from it’s “not for profit” roots.

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.

The Blue Lake take on it:
Thank you Dr. Lucy Cooke of University College London for leading this effort. My sister calls me a “blanc”etarian based on my preference for plain (preferably white) food. Now instead of blaming this on lax attitudes by my parents (my husband’s pet theory) I can point to scientific research that says: it is the fault of no one. Stop blaming yourself. There are worse things you can do to your child than feed them spaghetti and salt every day. And if you need more support to feel better about your situation, check out the experiences of a Bon Appétit editor and parent of picky eater.

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.

The surprising part of my temptation to speak more freely about my significant opposition to TV-watching is that it came from a small button produced by a big company. “Turn Off TV. Turn On Life. Kaiser Permanente®.” Last Thursday, I was seated next to a Kaiser executive at a breakfast program featuring Tom and Kate Chappell, founders of Tom’s of Maine. As I took in the button, with a background photo of kids playing outdoors, I did a double-take. This is brave, I thought. While you are not surprised when you see a preaching-to-the-choir “Kill Your TV” sticker on a ’64 VW Bus in a national park, you don’t often see a successful big business in our consumer society taking such clear aim at the backbone of our advertising-driven culture. Clearly, they have their motives, and they can’t be completely altruistic, but that’s OK with me. If Kaiser has decided that their business is more profitable if people watch less TV and improve their physical health, more power to them for addressing the topic head-on.

My internal dialogue was further stimulated by Tom and Kate’s very inspiring talk about using your own personal values as a guide in business. It is no accident that my team and I spend our energy creating magazines for today’s kids. We believe reading is THE core skill that children should have, and that in a media culture increasingly dominated by electronic fare, we want to develop printed materials better suited to compete for the attention of today’s child. It’s no accident that we don’t accept advertising. We know that children get too many marketing messages already, and that in their formative years, they cannot distinguish between ad and non-ad content. We already try very hard to make business decisions based on our values. But I have avoided discussing, even with my team, my personal belief that TV is a very bad way to spend your time. For me, the topic is like religion or politics – I just don’t want to go there.

I am not quite sure where my newfound courage to speak out will take me. I will start with this piece of advice: Use TV with the strongest degree of moderation. I am talking about two hours per week, and not on school nights. I do believe that young kids need to understand what TV is, and completely avoiding TV leaves them more vulnerable to its allure when they are old enough to make their own decisions. By limiting yourself to two shows per week, your family will be more critical in making TV-watching decisions. Take a hard look at the examples you are setting. Children mimic their parents. By having a “favorite show” every Thursday that becomes a highlight activity, you are helping your child begin a similar relationship with TV as their main source of fun. Yes, TV is very engaging and entertaining, the producers of TV are masters of capturing your mind. That’s how they sell ads. With the advent of today’s DVRs, they know you are skipping the ads, and that’s why they sell product placements. The question is “What is your mind doing while it’s in captivity?” Not much.

Years ago, I attended a lecture by Lorrie Moore, author of Birds of America and professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. She was commenting on whether she felt there was such a thing as quality television. She began her response by recognizing that there is a qualitative difference between a sitcom and a well-researched documentary. What she said next has stayed with me ever since: A TV program, good or bad, continues on, exactly as designed, with or without the viewer. A book requires your participation and understanding – it cannot proceed without an engaged mind choosing to read it. I am sure her words expressed this idea even better, but I hope you get the point.

P.S. I checked out the Kaiser TV Turnoff website and their downloadable Screen-time Reduction Toolkit. I am impressed by the significant resources that went into these well thought out materials. Just when I thought I could lump all healthcare industry players into a bucket of “companies I don’t respect,” I have to say that Kaiser seems to have something else going on. I have worked for big companies, and I know how hard it is to get budget and buy-off for “non-core” projects. I salute the people within the big organization who steer a portion of resources to projects like TV Turnoff.

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.

The Blue Lake take on it:
OK, it is still sugar. And we have made it clear our belief that kids are getting too much sugar (with lots of help from the marketers of sugar-laden cereals, “fruit drinks” and the like). Still, it’s hard to deny candy at Halloween, and we like the idea of supporting companies that make the effort to offer additive-free, naturally flavored and colored sweets. So if you are looking for a simple and different option for this year’s neighborhood goblins, you might try these organic lollipops from Yummy Earth (founded by two dads). They have cool flavors (pomegranate, mango, watermelon) and only 22 calories per lollipop. The calories are all sugar, but you can feel pretty good about the ingredient list. We just ordered the bonus pack of 220 lollipops, and with shipping it works out to about 14 cents each. If you get your child interested in the topic of organic food by starting with candy, they might be motivated to learn more about healthy and earth-friendly food production.

Lately, we have been inundated with news headlines about toys being recalled: the lead paint on Dora dolls from China; the tiny yet powerful magnets in Magnetix that end up in kids’ tummies and cause internal injuries and death; and hundreds of other toys for young children. There is plenty of blame to go around, and we consumers need to ask ourselves why so many of the things we buy are manufactured in ways that put our children at risk. It is great that we can buy so many fun things for $2-$3. But there are at least two downsides to continuing to demand ever cheaper products:

1) The cheapest forms of manufacturing will always be the ones that prize efficiency over safety

2) If we reduce all of our playthings to the inexpensive trinket level, are we training kids to be “disposable” consumers?

The Blue Lake take on it:

Unfortunately, it is that scary. Watch this video about Magnetix danger and death that was produced for The Chicago Tribune. If you haven’t already done so, check out the somewhat overwhelming U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s summary of recalled toys and Mattel’s list of Fisher Price Recalled Lead Painted Toys (with very helpful photos) . We are just starting to think about manufacturing our magazines overseas – and these events make us realize how lucky we are that our local printer is a family-owned business that enthusiastically sources soy-based inks, water-based coatings and FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) paper to meet our standards for The Tessy & Tab Reading Club. If and when we add new printers to our roster, we need to have the best references and reliable QA checkpoints. We understand that parents want the best deal for their purchases, and the $48 for 24 issues is not cheap. On the other hand, we don’t want to cut costs to get down to $35 if it means that the natural behavior of a 2-year-old (“Now I think I will put my magazine in my mouth!) becomes a threat to their health.

Last month, the FDA issued this advisory warning to parents: NEVER give cough and cold medicines to children younger than 2 years old unless your doctor has instructed you to do so. The agency is very concerned about the hundreds of adverse reactions and several deaths resulting from popular children’s medicines containing dextromethorphan (often DM in a drug’s brand name) and pseudoephedrine (a decongestant). Adverse effects include hallucinations and abnormal movements (dextromethorphan) and increased blood pressure and irregular heartbeats (pseudoephedrine).

Accidental overdoses happen for at least three reasons:

Parents buy different branded products that have the same active ingredient, and they give the child a double dose

“Infant” formulations are about triple-strength to “children’s” strength (with a special dose-measurer because babies can only swallow so much fluid) and sleep-deprived parents can easily give the infant too much medicine

A child with several well-meaning relatives and caregivers can be given medicine by each without the other’s knowledge. Pharmaceutical companies are now substituting the decongestant phenylephrine in place of pseudoephedrine in their over-the-counter versions due to FDA legislation

The Blue Lake take on it:

This is a tough one. Children in the U.S. average 6-10 colds per year, many more than adults. When your child is sick, you would do almost anything to “make it go away.” It’s not worth the risk to give OTC cold/cough medicines to the under-2-years set without first talking to your pediatrician. But it is important to know that these active ingredients were approved for use in children years ago, before testing on children was required. Most children’s cough and cold formulations still have not been thoroughly tested in children, and recent studies show that they work no better than placebos. Read The American Medical Association’s article to find out more. We agree with the position of Dr. Wayne Snodgrass, the chair of The American Academy of Pediatrics who says, “Personally in a common cold in a young child, I wouldn’t recommend these agents.” Dr. Snodgrass is one of the authors of a petition to the FDA to ban marketing of these drugs for children less than 6 years of age. If you do decide to use these drugs, pay close attention to labels and educate yourself on dosages. The East Coast grocery chain Wegman’s has an online explanation of children’s medicines including dosage guidelines.

If you are reading this, you are probably a parent whose goals include helping your child get the best start in life. Whether your child is 2, 8 or 16, you have probably spent lots of time thinking about how your child can be a success down the road. Today many parents start talking to their kids about college, even tangentially. My nephew Everett informed us at six that he and his best friend Noah would be roommates in college. At seven, he announced that he would be going to Boise State because they have a blue football field. I am all for painting a picture of higher education in your child’s mind – college years allow a teen to mature to a young adult in a reasonably safe place outside the home, and a college degree almost always increases your child’s options and earning power as an adult.

But is college the most formative stage on your path to a productive and satisfying adult life? It wasn’t for me – and I only really thought that through after being asked in an interview “What was the key life experience in your early years that has had the greatest impact in your entrepreneurial success?” Without even thinking about it, I said “My job at Winn Dixie”, and then I found I needed to explain myself.

For those of you who haven’t done your grocery shopping in the southern states of the U.S., Winn Dixie is a large grocery store chain. It may have changed in the 30 years since I lived in North Miami Beach, but I would say it serves the mid- to lower- end of the income demographic. I really don’t remember how I got the job, but as in so many of my key moves as a young person, my sister Jean (17 months older) actually made the decision first. So, at 16, I went down to Winn Dixie, filled out that application, and was thrilled to get the job. It paid $2.55 an hour, and you got two sky blue and white polyester uniforms. The full day of training was paid for, and I worked 3 nights per week and all day Sunday (double time pay!). All four of us kids took multiple jobs in our teen years, covering a broad spectrum of what an inexperienced kid could pick up quickly (popcorn stand cashier at the 163rd Street Movie Theater, busboy and hostess at Steak & Ale, “floater” at Jordan Marsh department store). It was not because we had to have money (that was nice of course). Our parents were public school teachers, and our basic needs were more than adequately covered. What was so great about that job? It boils down this: a menial job gives a teenager an exposure to “real life” that you simply can’t replicate. And that exposure is an education that prepares you for life.
For $2.55/hour, here’s what I learned:

• You get nervous when you apply for jobs. But you survive that. Like a lot of things that are scary to contemplate doing, once you have done it, it’s exhilarating, and you are proud of yourself for getting through something that made you nervous.
• Your attitude towards people will be reflected back at you. In most cases, being friendly and helpful to others has a real benefit to you.
• Some people will be rude to you. After this happens a few times, you realize their rudeness has nothing to do with you personally, and you learn to take a deep breath any move on.
• There will be ethical decisions in life, and you will be affected by them. One woman tried to pay with fake food stamps. I said I had to show them to my manager, and she left. I felt OK about that. Another woman wrote a suspicious check – I signaled in a hidden way to my manager, and he had her detained. She was arrested. She looked poor and scared. I wished I had just told her I couldn’t take that check, and let her leave.
• A lot of people have less than you. Your parents always tell you that. But when you find out that your favorite busboy shares a room with 5 siblings, takes a bus home (2 transfers) at 10 p.m. and gives his mom some of his paycheck for food – well, that sinks in a way that seeing starving kids on TV in a faraway land does not.
• When you have a job, you have to figure out how to get there. You are lucky if your parents let you take the station wagon.
• It’s important to get to work on time, and not to take longer breaks. Yes, you might “get away with it.” But people who do that get a reputation for being lazy, and then they don’t get important random opportunities that might come along – like managing the outdoor pumpkin stand sales.
• Uniforms can make your life easier. You can go directly from track practice to work and look crisp in 100% polyester. But, you feel grimy because you are. With better time management after practice, you can squeeze in a shower.
• A paycheck is a powerful thing. It has your name on it. It shows you how many hours you worked to get that money. It shows you that you paid taxes. You get to learn about taxes. At the end of the year, you can get some of them back if you take the time to do your tax returns.
• Once you realize that you can get paid for working, and that it can be fun (even stacking soup cans), you are hooked. I had happily applied for and took “menial” jobs all through college. They were fun, I met interesting people, and I always had a little extra cash.
• Stealing is bad. Again, your parents and teachers will have already told you this. But a real experience can drive it home. Stealing also makes you feel bad. One of the older, cooler cashiers showed me how at the end to the night, she would count her till, but before she would turn it in, she asked the assistant manager what her till should be, according to the computer. If she was “over” she would pocket most of the difference – she thought she deserved it. The night she told me about this, I did the same thing with her. I went home with a $1.50 “bonus” in my pocket. The money might not really have “belonged” to Winn Dixie, but it sure didn’t belong to me. I felt awful about taking that money. I still do. The silver lining is that the experience gave me the correct knee-jerk reaction for any future temptations to take something that isn’t mine.
• Some people don’t have the same values as you, and if you hang out with them, you might get in trouble. That till-skimming cashier and the assistant manager turned out to be in cahoots, and eventually, they were caught in a store audit. It also seemed like they were dating. Except he was married. At the time, I didn’t really put all these things together, but I think I internalized the lesson of “it’s a slippery slope” when you start to justify your bad behavior. And “friends” who help you do that are not your best bet.
• If you go above and beyond in the workplace, you get noticed. You get promoted. You get a raise. You get to meet the top managers when they come to tour the place. People think you are smart, and they trust you to manage yourself.

An internship is not the same. Often, your school, your parents or their friends help you get it. Just like home and school, you will be surrounded by people with similar backgrounds, and miss the exposure to the rest of local humanity and culture. You often don’t get paid so the work/reward connection is still abstract.

Not that teens really had that option in the seventies. If internships had been around, and if everybody thought it was the smartest thing to do, I suppose I might have been tempted to try and get one. You probably are thinking about this for your child. I read a very insightful editorial piece in The Wall Street Journal about the decline in paid work by teens (Today, 35% of teens have a paying job. In 1979, the figure was about 50%). The contributor was Kay S. Hymowitz, a well-known author on family and child development issues. You can read the article (www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_wsj-service_learning.htm) on the website of The Manhattan Institute, where Ms. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon fellow. In her WSJ piece, Ms. Hymowitz provides an excellent overview of why an internship, which on the surface seems to be a much better job for “resume-building,” is actually not as valuable as just a regular job at a restaurant or retail establishment. She also offers this observation from Neil Howe, an expert on age cohorts: Kids are so used to seeing immigrants doing that sort of work that they assume “I don’t have to mess with food or cleaning stuff up.” Ironically, the same kids whose parents are paying $4,000 for them to go to Oaxaca to build houses for the poor can’t imagine working for money next to Mexican immigrants at the local Dunkin’ Donuts.

I have talked with parents who don’t want their kids to take “jobs” in high school – they think their kids will be better served by concentrating on class work and extracurricular activities. They don’t need the money. Summers can be filled with more interesting activities that would look better on college applications*. Everything has its place – the best teachers showed me that it’s fun to use your mind, joining the track team taught me about discipline and endurance, but that job at Winn Dixie shaped me for a life in the real world of taking responsibility for myself, and gave me the foundation that serves me well as an entrepreneur and mentor today.

Oh, and I bought a really cool stereo with a turntable to take to UNC when I followed Jean there the next year.

* P.S. Your kid can write a killer essay for their Stanford application about why they decided to work at Ross Dress For Less instead of volunteering in Vietnam or working for free in the local congressman’s office. I think that will get her noticed. If it doesn’t work out, call me and I will give her a job.

Many people believe that if they give their children food that is less heavy in calories, they will snack more later, and so eventually take in those calories regardless. A study by the Obesity Society reported that is not true. For one week, a group of kids was given breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, and the next week, they received the same menu and portions, with lower calorie substitutes for milk, fruit and pasta sauces. As long as the volume of food stayed the same, the children were no more likely to snack during the week of eating fewer calories than during the high calorie week.

The Blue Lake take on it:
We are reminded of the old phrase used to describe “hearty” food: It really sticks to the ribs. Well, it seems it really just sticks to the stomach! If your child has any issues with weight, you would be doing him or her a big favor by trying some of the substitutions that worked in this study. And don’t do it secretly – kids are capable of learning with you about what works to keep weight off.