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

It appears that stress doesn’t just make adults seek refuge in a bag of potato chips. Kids also turn to food to avoid dealing with stressful situations. According to a recent Reuters UK report, children raised in stressful home environments are more likely to be fat.
The data is from a study of nearly 7,500 Swedish families that were tracked from the time the family’s children were born until the children turned 5 or 6. Parents were asked to report on various stress factors including family accident or illness, death, divorce, unemployment, exposure to violence, as well as parenting difficulties, spouse …read more