• Created on 10/1/12 by Melanie Mayo

Natural Remedies for Winter: Homeopathy for Cold and Flu By Katharina Sandizell Winter can be a time of dread for many parents who know that their kids might catch any number of colds and flus. It’s always hard to watch our kids get sick, especially when they are small and just beginning to be exposed to these bugs in pre-school or from older siblings. First of all, don’t panic, your child is building her immune system and colds and flus are normal. In fact, they are nature’s way of building the muscle of your child’s immune system and his future resistance to... read more

• Created on 9/30/12 by Melanie Mayo

Sorry that I disappeared for the past two months. I’ve been busy gearing up for the launch of my new book. It comes out this week. The book is a (hopefully) hilarious and (hopefully) inspiring yoga memoir. I like to think of it as Eat, Pray, Love rewritten by Bill Cosby or maybe Louis CK. It tells the story of how I found yoga, how yoga helped me get off medication and heal my colitis, and how yoga allowed me to grow and find my heart. There’s also a bit about a dog, an accidental visit to a prostitute (I thought she was a massage therapist), lots of... read more

• Created on 9/27/12 by Mothering Editorial

Straight Talk on the 100-Day Cough by Lauren Feder, MD Issue 164 January-February 2011 Please see the accompanying article by Dr. Jay Gordon for more information on whooping cough and the pertussis vaccine. You can also purchase this article along with "The Problem with Pertussis Vaccines,” by Barbara Loe Fisher in the Mothering Shop.  In June 2010, news reports confirmed that whooping cough was now an epidemic in California.1 Physicians were inundated with calls from concerned parents. As the disease spread in California and across the nation, it became important that... read more

• Created on 9/27/12 by Mothering Editorial

By Philip Incao "What should I watch for?" is a question I am often asked by mothers when their children are working through an acute inflammatory illness. Many mothers don't trust themselves to be able to discern the difference between a routine illness that can be managed at home and one that requires a visit to the doctor.In my experience, mothers have every reason to feel confident in their powers of observation, and in their intuitive sense of what's happening with their child during illness and healing. I have found that, most often, a mother's assessment is... read more

• Created on 9/23/12 by Melanie Mayo

This is a sponsored post. As a leader in the special needs software and assistive technology industry, VTree LLC Studios develops products to make a real difference in the lives of children and adults with special needs, enabling them to achieve a higher level of satisfaction in their lives. To us, the most important part of our mission is to make learning fun. The following article, “Sports Games Boots Tim Mather’s Quality of Life” by John M. Matthews illustrates the impact VTree’s games have had on the learning ability of Tim Mather. Tim is an... read more

• Created on 9/18/12 by Mothering Editorial

By Karen BurkaIssue 132, September/October 2005 Routine infant circumcision continues to be the most commonly performed surgery on children in the US, with about 1.2 million newborn boys circumcised each year.1 The US also continues to be the only industrialized nation that circumcises the majority of its newborn baby boys for nonreligious reasons. The health-based reasons have been criticized and are controversial.2 Despite these facts, the rates of routine infant circumcision (RIC) in the US have steadily declined for more than a decade, and dropped more than 11... read more

• Created on 9/13/12 by Melanie Mayo

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that protection from whooping cough wanes quickly after the final dose of the vaccine is administered to children around age seven. Most children whose parents chose to follow the recommended schedule receive the vaccine in five doses beginning as an infant. Acellular pertussis is just one of the three vaccines contained in this DTaP series, which also includes diphtheria and tetanus. The new results showed a dramatic drop in continuing protection from the vaccine after the final dose... read more

• Created on 9/10/12 by Melanie Mayo

When talking to children about tragic events, understanding individual temperament can be a great help. In my earlier 9/11 post, I focused mainly on two important aspects for the parent: the fundamental need for some measure of self-possession and calm amidst outer events a level of honesty and clarity in speaking to the child about the events that is not the norm in our culture Especially related to that second point — honesty and clarity for the child — I want to dive a bit deeper and look at the importance of knowing your individual... read more

• Created on 9/10/12 by Melanie Mayo

Eleven years since 9/11. Eleven years ago last night, our daughter Eve — then ten years old — was so excited that the next morning she was going to wake up by herself for the very first time, using the radio alarm clock we had given her for the occasion. She chose the station carefully (classical was it? maybe soft pop?), but when the radio clicked on at six a.m. in her Los Angeles bedroom it wasn’t music that woke her up. The second plane had just hit its target. Nobody yet had clarity on what was happening, let alone the news media. A fragmented noise... read more

• Created on 9/9/12 by Melanie Mayo

  Image: CC 2.0 by Mike Baird Today’s kids are awash in environmental toxins from conception on. Some of those chemicals are implicated in the ever-earlier onset of puberty plaguing many girls. Over the last 100 years, the average age when puberty arrives fell from around 16 to 17 years of age to 12. It continues to drop. Experts say some of this can be attributed to better health. And some of it has to do with high rates of childhood obesity. But there’s a growing body of scientific evidence linking it to a variety of toxins. The... read more