Today, October 5, 2009, National Child Health Day in the United States.

This year’s topic is Medical Home, providing all children with a medical home. What is a medical home? It is a continuous, comprehensive, family-centered, coordinated, compassionate, and culturally effective way of providing medical care.
OK, that’s fine, but what does that mean to you as a parent, as a caregiver, or as a child? The American Academy of Pediatrics has made available PDF documents for you to learn more about medical homes. In the documents, you learn about what to expect from a pediatric team, how to make medical home …read more

I’m no food Nazi. I’m not going to force my son to eat if he’s not hungry. I think that can only instill a natural desire to overeat in adulthood – or even earlier. So I was absolutely mortified when my girlfriend told me the principal at her kids’ new school pours leftover scraps the kids leave behind after lunch into buckets marked for each grade. He then weighs the buckets and the grade with the lightest load at the end of the semester gets a prize. The ritual is to encourage kids to eat all the food prepared for …read more

We’ve written here about childhood obesity before, but I just caught this statistic: “About a third of children today are obese starting at age 2,” according to Joseph Skelton, M.D., assistant professor of pediatrics at Brenner Children’s Hospital.
A third?

Apparently so. One organization says that the way to prevent childhood obesity is by the entire family embracing a healthy lifestyle. A spokesperson for TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly) says “parents are the single most influential factor in children’s lives when it comes to weight.” I believe that. Parents can encourage children to get exercise, …read more

Do you think that school lunches are healthy? I remember growing up- pizza, sloppy joe, burger and fries… Now there is baked chicken, spaghetti and meat sauce, tuna on wheat, peanut butter celery and a salad and veggie on every tray. Much better then what I remember. Do you think school lunches are heart healthy?
When my eldest started school I packed her lunch out of fear of ‘what the heck would she get on a school lunch tray’? Now with my older two at school- they buy lunch about 50% of the time. To be totally honest, I think the …read more