Longevity is decreasing. Children of today may be the first generation who live a shorter life span than their parents. We are (not so) slowly but surely destroying our future health with the obesity epidemic. Obesity in children has tripled since the 1970’s. I guess this is not so surprising when you consider that two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. Yup… two-thirds.

More and more children are getting adults diseases, such as Type-2 diabetes. It is called “advanced aging” and it means that these children will have a lower life expectancy. And it is important to point out again that annual health care costs of of treating obesity and its complications currently run at $70 to 100 billion a year.

And it is also important to consider not only the life expectancy, but the quality of life, which probably will be hindered if dealing with obesity and its further complications. So please do your children a favor and permit them a childhood where they grow up with healthy and active habits.

A bowl of cereal a day to have a baby boy. It has been proven that a woman can further influence the chance of having either a boy or a girl by the foods she eats. Eating a bowl of cereal (calcium), more bananas (potassium), salty foods (sodium) and eating generally more calories overall can increase chances of conceiving a boy. 59% of women eating a bowl of cereal per day had baby boys, compared to 43% of women who ate 1 bowl or less per week. To be honest, I am not sure how that works considering it is the male sperm that determines gender, but apparently it does. Go figure.

Watch out for lemonade! A dad in Detroit has his son removed from the home by authorities for a few days while they determined whether or not he was negligent. He was at a ballgame with his 7 year son and accidentally got him drunk on “Mike’s Hard Lemonade”. Dad did not realize there was alcohol in the drink. In the end, the child’s blood test showed no signs of alcohol and the family has since been reunited.

Important FDA notification out today: The FDA is expected to issue a warning telling parents not to give any cold medicines to children under two years old “because serious and potentially life-threatening side effects can occur.” We first heard about this last fall, when there was a recommendation not to give medicines to children under six, however today’s announcement is the first time the government is ruling on this, as there are fears that parents did not take the previous warning seriously enough. So please, have a look in your medicine cabinet and safely dispose of these medicines.

Girls can face prejudice in college applications. Recently, I wrote about how girls are outperforming boys in school. Well, this is turning into a negative thing when it comes to applying for college. Some colleges admit to accepting boys of lesser qualifications than their girl counterparts only to keep enrollment somewhat equal in the schools. NBC has an interesting series, The Truth About Boys & Girls, and in one of their most recent segments they speak about this. I imagine a lot of girls are not happy, and personally (from a female POV) I don’t like this and would be disappointed if someday my daughter did not get accepted to a college for this reason. Likewise, I would not want my son to be accepted if he did not have the real qualifications required.

I remember years back when I applied to school and I was filling out the forms where they ask a lot of personal information. I remember being frustrated that some minorities were being accepted with lower scores so that schools can meet their quotas, and I am thinking that this is not too much different than that. However, it is really disappointing to know that you had what it takes to get into your school of choice, but it didn’t work out due to reasons out of your control. If this happens to my daughters, I am going to offer up some good ole “mom advice” that everything happens for a reason and sometimes we don’t understand why, but we just need to have faith that it will all work out well in the end.”

Gain Weight, Get a Boy? A new study of 220,889 women who had successive pregnancies between 1992 and 2004 finds that an increase in body weight from the beginning of one’s first pregnancy to the beginning of a second seems to increase the chances that the second pregnancy will produce in a boy baby. “The results are provocative because few biological factors are known in humans to influence the chances of either conceiving or carrying to term a baby boy or girl. Our study suggests that maternal nutritional factors might play a role,” said Eduardo Villamor, assistant professor of international nutrition at HSPH and lead author of the study. However, the researchers caution against gaining weight in order to try to influence the sex of a baby. “Weight gain before pregnancy carries significant risks to the mother and the baby, and should not be practiced to influence the odds of having a boy,” said Villamor. “Other factors of which weight gain is only an indicator could be at play here.”

Good News for Barry White: A new study published in the journal Biology Letters finds that men with low-pitched voices have more offspring than those with higher-pitched voices. Previous studies have shown that men with low voices have more “reproductive success” because women tend to find them more attractive, dominant, and healthy-sounding. Men, meanwhile, have generally been found prefer women with higher-pitched voices, finding them to sound younger, more subordinate (hmmmmm…), and healthy than women with low-pitched voices. For this current study, the researchers looked at the Hadza of Tanzania, who have no birth control. Of these people, the men with low-pitched voices had more children than their high-talking peers.

Dumb Move: Former Australian cricket champion Shane Warne reportedly blew his last chance to save his newly-reconciled marriage because of an errant text message. Mr. Warne sent the following electronic missive out from his cell phone: “Hey beautiful, I’m just talking to my kids, the back door’s open.” The message that came back: “You loser, you sent the message to the wrong person.” It was from his wife.

If you’ve ever had a baby shower after finding out whether your bundle-to-be was a boy or a girl, you were probably up to your eyeballs in pink or blue - clothing, bibs, pacifiers, rattles - it all comes color-coordinated by gender!

In modern society, it is perhaps almost offensive to stereotype colors by gender. However, most of us still probably cringe at a man in a pink shirt, for example (my father-in-law wears pink sometimes and does it well, but DH won’t touch it) and my 2yo daughter is already showing fondness for that most frilly color. Why does pink seem to be such a feminine hue?

Well, it turns out that there may be scientific reasons for that preference. New research seems to suggest that, while there is actually a universal preference for blue, the sexes differ greatly when it comes to the color pink.

In the study, the researchers asked a group of men and women to look at about 1,000 pairs of colored rectangles on a computer screen in a dark room and pick the ones they liked best as quickly as possible.

Afterwards, [neuroscientist Anya] Hurlbert and colleagues plotted the results along the color spectrum and found that while men prefer blue, women gravitate towards the pinker end of the blue spectrum.

Researchers speculate that there is evolutionary support for women’s preference for reds and pinks. Pink is a healthy skin color; red signifies ripeness in various fruits and vegetables. These colors would have been preferred as women gathered fruit and other food for their tribes in days past.

Men had no need to develop a preference for pink/red above their natural affinity for blue, since they were primarily hunters and merely needed to identify a moving target as a food source.

The next time my daughter insists on wearing her pink dress instead of her almost identical blue one, I’m not going to argue with her. I’ll just smile to myself and pull it over her head, knowing that her color preferences may well be much older than either of us.

Posted by Sunshine.

Would make for an interesting email address… A Chinese couple wishes to name their new baby “@”. Many Chinese speakers pronounce the symbol “ai ta”, roughly sounding out the letters “a” and “t”, and this resembles a word that means “love him” in Mandarin. The new dad did not report whether or not the name has been approved, but the Chinese government has been cracking down lately on names that use foreign or non-traditional characters.

Botched Sterilization Lawsuit: An Oregon woman is suing a hospital because she became pregnant after she believed she was given a tubal ligation. Alba Avendano underwent the surgery after the birth of her third child. She subsequently learned that she was pregnant. After giving birth again, Ms. Avendano underwent a second surgery, where doctors learned that one of her fallopian tubes had been left intact. She is suing for $1 million for raising the child, $1 million for emotional distress, and $30,000 in medical expenses. (Via Feministing.)

I got into a bit of a friendly scuffle with my niece last week. It began, as most scuffles do, because of Angelina Jolie. Specifically, I was defending Ms. Jolie’s stated plan to adopt another girl from Africa at least in part to lend some balance in the family, as currently her daughter Zahara is the only black person in the Jolie-Pitt clan. I didn’t take this to mean that achieving said balance was her only motive for adopting, but rather that in her quest for more children, she would take the makeup of her family and what she sees as the peculiar needs of her children into consideration (just as she seemed to do when she decided to adopt another -boy from Asia). But having a checklist when seeking to adopt (black/girl, or Asian/boy, or whatever) didn’t sit well with Daisy:

You’re not supposed to get to choose your children. You’re supposed to love them and be a good parent to them however they are. That’s the only way the parent/child dynamic works, right? Unconditional love?

If you adopt a child based on some characteristic she can’t control, it seems to me that, at least in the abstract, it adds a condition: Would you still love me if I were a girl? If I were deaf?

I admit, this question now has me rattled, even though it’s currently a purely academic one (as my husband and I are at this time broke and exhausted, we wouldn’t wind up at the top of the “potential adoptive parents” list at any agency around now). But here goes: We have two boys.  When we used to talk about adoption, we never thought of gender. Now we do.  And I just assumed it was OK to say “We’d like to adopt a girl.” What’s wrong with that?

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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked that exact question. Usually it’s Europeans who think that Dorian, my name, should belong to someone with different plumbing (read: male). I’m not really sure what possesses people to even say something like that, especially when they’re standing in front of me and I’m pretty obviously female…

I digress.

It seems the baby name game is one that keeps all expectant parents guessing.� Is it too plain, too original� Should it be Kohl or Cole, Emily or Emilee…you get my drift.

What about parents who want to give their child a great unisex name� Well, according to U.S. Social Security Administration data, these are the top 10 unisex names in the United States. Sadly, Dorian is nowhere on the list.

1. Jordan
2. Alexis
3. Angel
4. Riley
5. Peyton
6. Taylor
7. Cameron
8.� Jayden
9. Avery
10. Jaden

Posted by Dorian.

According to this University of Michigan study, looking at the behavior patterns of families, Dads are finally spending some time in the kitchen…or with a vacuum, broom and some Windex. On average, fathers are working 7 hours a week around the house, contributing to the cooking & cleaning, which is up from 3.5 hours in 1968.� But, does that really qualify as a headline� According to this article, “Moms are getting a break though. In 1965, they scrubbed and cleaned around the house for 2,000 hours a year. Now, working moms devote roughly 1,000 hours a week to housework.” (Note: I believe the article means to say that working moms devote roughly 1,000 hours a YEAR on housework).

I’m not really clear on how women “getting a break” is equivalent to us doing more than double the housework of our husbands. (1,000 hours/year divided by 52 weeks per year = 19.2 hours/week spend cleaning by working wives). For me, reaffirming a bias we’re already quite aware of (and disgusted with if you’re me), hardly justifies a headline. When Daddy is doing the dishes, laundry and putting the toilet seat down, I’ll be ready to read about how the times have changed. For now, it’s just more of the same.

Posted by Dorian.

Well, as the old wives’ tale goes, if you’re carrying low, it’s a boy; high, it’s a girl.� If you look like you’re smuggling a basketball, it’s a boy.� I’ve also heard a girl will “steal your beauty”, so if you’re broken out like a teenager, swollen all over, you’re carrying a girl.

Is any of this true?� Well, for me the predictions worked.� I looked like I swallowed a basketball with both of my pregnancies (see left), and I had two boys.� But is this a reliable way to predict the gender of your baby?� Apparently it is, about 50 percent of the time.� Heh.

Amazingly enough, someone actually did a study (at Johns Hopkins, no less), on 104 pregnant women.� Suprisingly, they found belly shape was not an accurate way to predict gender.� Stunning.

But some interesting facts from the study did emerge:

• Women with more than 12 years of education (do they mean a high school degree?) accurately predicted their baby’s gender 70% of the time.� Less educated women were correct only 43% of the time.
• Predictions based on dreams and feelings were more accurate than how a woman carried her pregnancy.

So, how did your preggo bellies shape up?

Posted by Pager12.

How far would you go to accommodate your child’s nonconformity in terms of gender identity�

So-called “gender identity disorder” (GID) is rare in young children, but more mental health experts are apparently advising families to allow children to dress and act as they please, in part because of the high incidence of depression and suicidal feelings in transgender children of previous generations. Of course, a child who wants to identify as the opposite sex may just be experiencing a phase; but it’s possible that he or she is actually expressing what for the child is an emotional, and�even biological, reality.

This NYT�article profiles a couple whose son began to show a preference for girls’ clothes shortly after his third birthday.  By the time he was five, he began strongly identifying as a girl, asking to be called “she”, and dressing for school in jumpers and pigtails.  (I find the clothing and hair details interesting.  It seems like a rather extreme version of “girlness”.  Most of the girls I see trotting off to school wear pants, and pigtails are fairly old fashioned these days…but maybe the boy feels he needs to balance his male anatomy with a particularly feminine look?)

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