Prevention | Parenting Medical Resource

Getting your dog used to children

Many families have dogs. When a new-born arrives into the family this is often an issue. Dogs are seen as unpredictable. Family members do not want to risk bringing dogs and small kids together. But if you happen to ask families that have had plenty of dogs and plenty of children you would know. Dogs can be taught to be really gentle on small children. In fact even ferocious dogs are gentle on small kids.

If you want to bring-up a dog, the best time would be when it is a puppy. During its growth you can change its personality to suit your needs. Training dogs is easier at the puppy stage. When dogs become big, they find it difficult to learn certain core skills.

Build a bond with your dog

A bond of trust and understanding has to happen between the dog and the master. This will help the master control the dog better. The dog responds to its master better if the bond is strong. In the future, when you have new-borns it will be easy for you to control your dog, and influence its behavior the way you want it to be.

Don’t tie the dog and get it used to children

When getting your dog used to children, don’t fasten it somewhere. You should hold your dog, while letting your children come and touch it. Children can be intimidating to the dog. Children have fast motions, will make eye-contact, and raise their voice. All this might startle the dog initially. But if you have a firm grip on it, it should be OK after some time.

Filed Under: Need to Know, Prevention Tagged With: Child, Dog, Family (biology)

Finding the Best Nursing Home for Your Parents

Image by Travis Jon Allison via Flickr

As your parents age, the roles in your relationship reverse and you begin to act as the parent, and they begin to act as the children. You need to recognize that you may not be able to help your parents every day. You may need to instead consider a nursing home. There are three things to consider as you make this decision.

Quality care. Your primary concern is the care your parents will receive. Elder abuse or neglect can be a big problem, as Los Angeles nursing home abuse attorney Peter K. Levine can attest. It is important that you research your options. You may also want to seek a professional opinion to see what services are—or are not—recommended in your area.

Type of care. You should first consider what kind of care your parents now require and what kind they may require in the future. If they are still fairly mobile, they may be able to settle into an assisted living apartment. However, if your mother has Alzheimer’s, you should consider looking for an Alzheimer’s unit.

Location. A nursing home can provide the support for your parents that you cannot. However, you may still need to help your parents with doctor appointments or finances. Consider finding a nursing home that is close to you or your siblings so that you can easily visit your parents when you need to, especially in an emergency situation.

Choosing a nursing home is one of the most important decisions you will make for your parents, and these suggestions can help you make the best choice.

Filed Under: Medical Care, Prevention Tagged With: Alzheimer's disease, Assisted living, Nursing home

What to Do When Your Pet Starts Attacking Your Kids

You have had your pet for a long time. You are undoubtedly in love with your pet and have a very strong bond with one another. Then one day, your pet starts attacking your kids. You feel afraid, or you may even feel angry enough to kill your pet. Before you go nuts, you will want to stop, breath, and consider the advice recommended here concerning how to handle such a troubling situation.

If your pet can be worked with, you can try working with your pet on this matter. This will require a lot of time and effort on your part. Watch you’re pet closely. When you see your pet going for your kids, discipline it right away. If you find that you do not have the time to do this, you can send your pet to a behavior school that deals with matters like this. Of course, you will have to pay a nice amount of money, but you will be working with experts.

If you do not think that working with your pet is a possibility or if you do not want to do it at all, you can do the next best thing. You can find a nice home for your pet. You can put an ad in the paper, letting people know about your pet; however, explain that the pet will do better in households where there are no kids. If you do not feel that this option is feasible and feel that you must get rid of the pet right away, you can give it to an animal shelter. The animal shelter will keep your pet safe and help him or her find a new home.

Filed Under: Need to Know, Prevention Tagged With: Animal shelter, Pet, Pet store

The Basics of Keeping Children Safe Around Pools

: Image via Wikipedia

Backyard swimming pools can be a wonderful highlight of summer and a great place for families with children to spend time together. Pools can also be dangerous when children aren’t educated about pool safety from an early age.

Adult Supervision
The swimming pool should always be closed off from the rest of the yard with a gate so that children cannot enter the pool area unsupervised. This is important for the safety of not only your children, but other neighborhood children who could wander through.

Children should be taught that swimming can take place only when a designated adult is available to supervise pool activities. Even sitting on the edge of the pool or playing near a pool without an adult should be off limits to children who have not yet learned to swim or who are not strong swimmers.

Behavior Guidelines
It is important for children to learn to follow special behavior rules when they are around a swimming pool. Rough and wild behavior is one of the leading causes of swimming pool accidents. There is no running around the pool area and this rule should be strictly enforced for both parents and children alike. Older children will need rules regarding swimming, jumping, and diving.

Restrictions Based on Skill Level
While some swimming pool rules will be the same for everyone-like avoiding wild behavior- other pool rules will vary based on skill levels. Young children can be taught that as they grow up and improve their swimming skills, they will be able to do more and more in the pool. It is a good idea to have a special area of the pool for children who are not yet swimming. This can be accomplished with a pool rope to section off an area in the shallowest area. If there is not an appropriate area, keep a children’s wading pool nearby for the littlest swimmers.

Filed Under: Need to Know, Parents Needs, Prevention Tagged With: Home and Garden, Pool fence, Swimming pool, Swimming Pools and Spas

Explaining Evacuation to Children

Explaining the possibility of an emergency evacuation to small children can seem like a daunting task for parents. It can be hard to explain in terms that make sense without scaring them or causing added stress for children and parents alike. Still, it’s important to be honest and clear with children and provide them with the right amount of information for their current age and maturity level.

Understanding Disasters
Use children’s books to explain the idea of thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. There are many great options out there that will do a good job explaining what happens. You can also talk about which disasters are things that they probably will never see and which are more common, but can sometimes be harmless (like a thunderstorm).

Discuss Preparedness
Be sure that children understand that parents make plans for these situations to keep everyone safe and that there are lots of other people, like rescue workers, whose job is to help families in emergencies. We make plans not because we think bad things will happen, but because they can help keep everyone safe if something does.

Be Clear
Things that seem obvious to adults can be the missing piece for small children. Be sure to explain clearly that evacuations and disasters are temporary. You’re leaving until things are safe again and then you can come home. It can be tough for children to understand time, so be patient as they struggle to grasp what two weeks equates to in their mind, or how long it will be until they can return home. Evacuations are stressful for everyone, but for children who don’t fully understand what is happening, they can be extremely scary. Reassure and then reassure again that disasters are bad, but usually happen quickly and are over. Things will be normal again.

Filed Under: Emergencies, Prevention Tagged With: Disaster, Emergency evacuation, Natural disaster, Parent

Health

Breast Cancer Research

The National Center for Policy Research for Women and Families is examining what research tells us about the options facing women who are diagnosed with breast cancer. These articles reflect our concerns that women are not always given all the information they need to make the choices that are best for them.

This article is based on “The Need for Improved Informed Consent for Breast Cancer Patients”, published in the fall 2000 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association.

Unnecessary Mastectomies:

Are Breast Cancer Patients Given Accurate Information About their Options_

By Diana Zuckerman, Ph.D.

It is shocking but true: approximately one out of every two American women who have a breast removed as treatment for cancer do not need such radical surgery. Whether a woman undergoes a mastectomy or a lumpectomy (which removes the cancer but not the breast) depends less on her specific diagnosis than on other factors, such as where she lives, her income and health insurance, where she receives medical care, her age, and when her doctor was trained.

Although it’s been known for years that lumpectomy and other breast-saving surgeries are just as effective as mastectomy for patients in the early stages of breast cancer, in most parts of the country most of the women who receive an early-stage diagnosis will undergo the more radical and disfiguring surgery. Limited information and biased recommendations are undermining breast cancer patients’ choices.

Articles published in some of America’s most prestigious journals show that many of the more than 182,000 women who are newly diagnosed with breast cancer every year do not have access to all the information they need to make the treatment choices that are best for them. This raises questions about what doctors know and what they are telling their patients.

In addition, mastectomy is often followed by “reconstructive” breast surgery that involves the use of synthetic breast implants or tissue transfers from other parts of the body. These reconstructive surgeries have risks, but the lack of published epidemiological studies means that many of the women making these decisions have limited information about their safety.

After all the research that has been done on the safety of lumpectomies, why are so many women undergoing mastectomies they don’t need and then having reconstruction that can cause serious problems_ One reason may be economic. In many facilities, it’s actually cheaper to remove a breast than it is to perform a lumpectomy and provide the necessary follow-up radiation therapy.

Some striking research findings include:

In some hospitals, all breast cancer patients had mastectomies, regardless of their diagnosis. In one large urban hospital serving mostly poor women in Texas, 84% of the women with early stage breast cancer had mastectomies and only 16% had lumpectomies.

In a study of 157 hospitals, patients treated by doctors trained before 1981 were less likely to have lumpectomies or other breast-saving surgery than women who had younger doctors.

One study indicated that women getting mastectomies were more likely to have followed their doctors’ recommendations, but women getting lumpectomies were more likely to have obtained a second opinion, and felt more actively involved in making the decision.

A study of 175 surgeons found that even doctors who know that lumpectomy is as safe as mastectomy may persuade their patients to get mastectomies by making subtly biased recommendations. Other studies showed that some women were not even told that lumpectomies were an option.

Women deserve better. Breast cancer patients should make the choices that are best for them, wherever they live and no matter how affluent they are. We need to do a better job of making sure that all doctors and their patients have accurate, unbiased information so that women can make those choices, no matter who they are, or who provides their medical care.

The National Center for Policy Research (CPR) for Women and Families is an independent, nonprofit think tank in Washington, DC, which “translates” medical and scientific information into news that can be used by consumers, policy makers, and the media. Contact us for more information or visit our Web site at .

Please visit our Newsroom for the Press Release of this article.

To read the article as it appears in JAMWA, click here.

Filed Under: Medical Care, Need to Know, Prevention