• Last updated 2/5/13 by Melanie Mayo

By Ramiel Nagel    Author of Cure Tooth Decay: Remineralize Your Teeth & Repair your Teeth Naturally with Good Food   This article is also excerpted in Mothering's recent guide Healing Teeth Naturally. Check it out for a wealth of information.      My Daughter Had Severe Tooth Decay   At a little over one year old, my breastfed daughter developed a small white spot on her tooth. The spot later turned brown and then, at around the age of a year and a half, the tooth crumbled apart. Her mouth became riddled with cavities. We ate organic food and did... read more

• Last updated 11/8/12 by Keya Chatterjee

Dear President Obama,   This has been a good week for you, politically-speaking.    But it's also been a devastating few weeks for parents across America because of Superstorm Sandy.   Last week when Sandy hit, our family here in Washington DC was a few hundred miles from the worst of the storm. As I listened to the wind whip around trees outside our house and even pull some large ones right out of the ground, I felt blessed to be safe.    It was painful to hear the accounts of those who weren't safe.  That night, we heard about the NICU in New York... read more

• Last updated 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

• Last updated 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

• Last updated 9/21/12 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

• Last updated 10/19/12 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

• Last updated 10/19/12 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

• Last updated 9/7/12 by Mothering Editorial

By Stacey Greenberg Web Exclusive In the land before children, my husband and I had many a circumcision debate over dinner and drinks with friends. I always humored him as he made the comparison between circumcision and female genital mutilation, secretly knowing that I would trump his concerns with my Judaism card. He had agreed to a Jewish wedding and a Jewish household, and well, Jews circumcised their boys. End of story. I'm not the most religious Jew ever, and my friends and husband have often wondered how I can even call myself a Jew. (Obviously they... read more

• Last updated 9/27/12 by Mothering Editorial

Make a simple baby massage oil by adding 2 drops of lavender and 2 drops of rose oil to 1 ounce of sweet almond or grapeseed oil. If your baby has a fussy period in the day, massage her half an hour before that period; to aid her digestion, massage her a half an hour after a feeding. Get a soft towel and sit outside or near a sunny window. Lay the towel on the ground, or over your lap. Place your naked baby on the towel. Gently, but firmly, massage his stomach in a clockwise motion with your fingertips. Do this with baby’s legs outstretched as well as... read more

• Last updated 3/30/13 by Cynthia Mosher

Managing Asthma with Natural Medicine By Randall Neustaedter Web Exclusive Natural medicine can significantly strengthen immune function, preventing asthma attacks and even curing the underlying cause of symptoms. The most successful approach to asthma, and the easiest for parents to adhere to, is constitutional homeopathy as practiced by an experienced, certified, classical homeopathic practitioner (see www.homeopathicdirectory.com ). The constitutional medicine is a single substance that corresponds to the overall picture of a child's physical symptoms,... read more