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Concussions In US Youth Could Be As High As 500,000 Per Year

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Concussions are concerning in US youth

Concussions are frequent among children and teens, but they are usually in mild forms.

STATES CHRONICLE – The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research data states that emergency rooms annually see over 248,000 diagnosed cases of concussions in teens and children.

Currently, medical specialists speculate that the actual number of yearly cases of concussion in children and teens could well be double the number of registered diagnoses. The reason why so many cases of concussions are slipping between the cracks is due to the fact that adults and supervisors do not always identify accidents as being that bad.

Children And Teenagers Quickly Recover From Concussions

Licensed health officials are not startled by the hypothesis, however. Children between the age of 10 and 15 years old will usually quickly recover from mild concussions. Anything more severe than a mild concussion would also be obviously noticeable in the child’s behavior. Teenagers between the age of 15 and 19 years old are also able to quickly bounce back after some respite.

In the past years, in average 56 percent of all concussions in children and teenagers were diagnosed in an emergency room, and 29 percent in a licensed physician’s office. The difference in proportion is clearly showing that concussions in children and teens are taken very seriously by their parents and guardians.

Most importantly, the reason why medical specialists are not too bothered with the numbers is because the main causes for the concussions were outdoors physical or sports activities. These activities give children and teens more health benefits than the drawbacks brought by a potential mild concussion.

Nevertheless, orthopedists thoroughly advise children, teens, parents, and guardians to ensure that helmets and other protective equipment are used during physical activities whenever actual damage could be inflicted.

The same calm attitude cannot be had when considering that the number of total concussions among children and teens are not almost five times greater than they were in 2010. Doctors say, however, that the numbers are easily justifiable.

In order to combat the obesity crisis that the United States are dealing with, the majority of middle schools and high schools have introduced several sports programs which have had greater appeal to the youth of today. Many of the sports also have an aggressive side which would lead dedicated athletes to report multiple mild injuries per season.

Apart from that, doctors say, children and teens have been roaming with their faces buried in their smart devices a lot more since 2010, leading them to all manner of accidents.

There is currently no evidence to prove that the increasing rate of concussions in teens and children is due to abuse or mental aloofness.

Image Courtesy of Pixabay.

Breakfast Is Very Important for Students

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Children having two breakfasts might be healthier than those who skip breakfast

STATES CHRONICLE – If you happen to be a fan of the Lord of the Rings you definitely know the very long list of meals that hobbits have in only one day, which included two breakfasts. While that was fantasy, it turns out that having two breakfasts is actually better for children and you could probably convince them to eat by telling them about Merry and Pippin.

How can eating two breakfasts help? After all, we are all afraid that our children will be eating too much and too unhealthy and will become overweight. Well, according to a new study conducted by a team at Yale School of Public Health, middle school students who eat breakfast at school are less likely to become overweight or risk obesity than the ones who skip breakfast.

So, even if your kid has had breakfast at home, you might want to encourage them to eat at school too. This isn’t the first study that looks at the benefits of having breakfast at school. Previous studies have showed that eating breakfast in school can be associated with a healthy body weight, better health overall and improved academic performance.

However, it was feared that a second breakfast might lead to gaining too much weight, but this recent study proves there is no need to worry. The study showed that students skipping breakfast or having it inconsistently were twice as likely to become obese than the ones who had double breakfasts. Moreover, comparing the ones who ate two breakfasts with the ones who ate only one, there was no difference in weight gain from 5th to 7th grade.

The problem is that many of the America’s obese people are children. One-third of the kids between 6 and 11 are either overweight or obese and everyone is working to find solutions to these problems.

Children need to have a balanced diet, which means not only to eat healthy, but also to eat at normal hours without skipping any meals. Policy makers are thinking that a good solution would be introducing and promoting breakfast in schools but studies are being conducted to make sure this plan will work and will not lead instead to en excess of calories.

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Children with Younger Siblings Are Healthier

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"younger siblings help you not become obese"

Kids with younger siblings are less likely to have weight problems

STATES CHRONICLE – After having one child, some parents are having trouble deciding whether the child should have a sibling or not. According to a new study, it seems that children who have younger brothers or sisters might benefit from this, being less likely to become obese.

However, there is a catch. You should have a sibling by the time you have to go to school. Apparently, after you start first grade, the odds of you having health problems increase even if you get a sibling. The findings of the study suggest that children who start school while still being an only child are three times more likely to experience weight issues.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that being an only child will make you become obese. What the study does suggest is that having a second child in the family makes parents revisit some of their lifestyle choices, which leads to a healthy family overall.

Another thing that happens when a younger child comes into the family is that the elder is going to become more active, and he or she will be less likely to become sedentary. For example, they will play with their sibling instead of watching TV.

Moreover, mealtimes and eating habits might also change. Parents who have only one child tend to over-focus on that child’s diet, and they can either be too restrictive with the kid’s diet or try to pressure them into eating more than they actually need.

Once the second child comes into the family, the parents’ attention gets divided, and they also tend to get more relaxed about the children’s eating habits, without restricting them too much. This will allow the older child to regulate their own eating behavior which should lead to a healthy weight.

The study included 697 American children followed from birth and until the age of 6. The findings showed that, reaching this age, children without siblings were a lot more likely than the others to have a higher weight.

However, the study is quite limited as it did not include data on different life events such as job loss, divorce or move, which are believed to be factors worth taking into consideration when discussing the risk of obesity in a child.

Although there isn’t enough information to understand why children with siblings have lower chances of becoming obese, the study does show some interesting facts and further research should be done to find out more about this phenomenon.

Image source: www.bing.com

ADHD Children Fidgeting Could Help Them Learn

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ADHD kids might find fidgeting helpful when they have to do a task

STATES CHRONICLE – Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have problems focusing and staying put. What they usually do is fidget and get bored and pass from one activity to another more quickly than kids who don’t have this disorder.

These “symptoms” become an issue when the child goes to school and is required to stay in his seat and pay attention. Many teachers cannot handle children with ADHD and claim they are disrupting class activities because they fidget too much.

However, according to a new study, fidgeting could actually help kids with ADHD to learn. The study was conducted by a team of researchers from the Florida State University trying to show that hyperactivity is not a core problem in ADHD.

The study had 25 participants of both sexes between 8 and 12 years old. All of them had ADHD, and they were asked to do some memory tasks so the researchers would monitor them and see how much they actually fidget while resolving the tasks.

The tasks were as it follows: the first required students to remember dots appearing on the screen and put them in the same order of color after they disappear; then they were given letter and numbers to memorize and reorder from smallest to biggest.

Although the children fidgeted all the time during the test, they fidgeted even more when they couldn’t remember what they had to memorize. Therefore, the researchers concluded that if there is a high demand on the memory, children become more stressed, and the level of hyperactivity increases.

Another study shows pretty much the same results suggesting that kids with ADHD do well or even better when they fidget. However, scientists are not yet sure why children do this. There are two main reasons: fidgeting either helps them think, either is a result of anxiousness.

Either way, both parents and teachers should start focusing on the results of the kid and not the process through which they get to that result. In this way, although children will continue to fidget, they will be more able to focus only on the task at hand and not on the parent’s or teacher’s opinion, which will be less stressful for the kid.

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Build a Computer with the Kano Computer Kit for Kids

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The whole world is turning their faces towards the almighty tablet and starting to ignore personal computers; the new Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet is so powerful that it can even replace your laptop. But there is a new product that can help change that: the new Kano computer kit lets children built their own computer and even teaches them a thing or two about programming.

Kano Computer Kit

Kano is a company that launched a simple product yesterday: the Kano computer kit is aimed at children between the ages of 6 and 14. It is a kit that allows kids to build their own personal computers, by providing them with a keyboard, a tiny speakers and parts that snap together to make a small personal computer.

kano computer kit

The Kano computer kit sells for $150 and comes without a monitor (you can use the computer with any monitor you have lying around the house or you can even connect it to your TV). Once it’s built, children can learn how to code and make simple modifications to games such as Minecraft and Pong. Once you learn the ropes, you can even create your own app from scratch!

You can surf the web, watch videos and stream music; check your email and run productivity suites. It’s a nice and nifty computer for a child that is just starting out in using technology. It’s also a great way to get kids to be excited about programming and technology.

The Kano computer kit’s booklets are brilliantly done and will help the child not only understand how the computer is built, but also have fun with it!

Are you interested in getting a Kano computer kit for you or your child? Keep in mind that shipping is free. Drop us a line in the comment section below and tell us all about it.

Parents think before yelling at your kids, caution scientists

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Parents often yell, scold and shout at their children in an apparent attempt to make them learn good habits. But scientists caution against such behavior. A new US study has found that shouting and yelling at teenagers could be actually increasing kids’ risk of depression and troubled behavior.

The study states even if parents enjoyed a close relationship with their son or daughter, harsh verbal discipline adopted by the parents hardly yield any fruit. Such behaviour was found to have a dramatic impact on emotional development of the teenagers.

Such behaviours of the parents land up children making feel humiliated and frustrated.

Study

Scientists examined 976 two-parent families in the US, majority of which were middle-class. They found that many shifted from physical to verbal discipline as their children entered adolescence.

It was discovered that the parents use more severe forms of harsh verbal discipline in most of the houses.

parent-yelling

The researchers found if parents use such punishment when their child is 13, the teenager was more likely to have behavioural or emotional problems later.

Children in the age group 13-14 suffered more depressive symptoms than children who were not disciplined in this manner. They were also more likely to have conduct problems such as misbehaving at school, lying, stealing, or fighting, the researchers stressed.
Significantly, the researchers also found that parental warmth, love, emotional support, and affection for their adolescents failed to lessen the effects of the verbal discipline. The sense that parents are scolding their child for their own good does not mitigate the damage inflicted. Neither does the strength of the parent-child bond.

“This is one of the first studies to indicate that parents’ harsh verbal discipline is damaging to the developing adolescent,” said lead researcher Ming-Te Wang, assistant professor of psychology in education at the University of Pittsburgh.

The study was published in the journal Child Development.

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