Pediatric health Archive

Instilling good eating habits in children is not easy, especially when they are young. It’s important for parents to set rules and limits around meals and snacks, and just as important to stick to them, which is the difficult part. It can take a many tries before a child figures out that healthy foods like kale, strawberries, or brown rice taste great.

Planning ahead of your child’s annual check-up can help you and the doctor get the most out of the visit. And be sure to take advantage of the resources available to you, such as email portals and the nurses and other staff in the doctor’s office. You might even consider making an appointment before the checkup. Doing so can be really helpful, especially when there is something complicated going on — like asthma acting up, school problems, worries about behavior, or a family crisis.

Some research suggests that disclosing deep emotions through writing can boost immune function as well as mood and well-being. Conversely, the stress of holding in strong feelings can ratchet up blood pressure and heart rate, and increase muscle tension.

Deeply troubling situations, such as suicide or a violent death, are best explored with the help of an experienced therapist. You might want to seek professional support to help you start to deal with your grief before trying journal writing. If you'd like to try keeping a journal to help you process feelings of grief, keep these things in mind:

At a time of loss, it's important to focus on maintaining your health and getting the support you need.

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Losing a family member, a close friend, or even a beloved pet can be devastating. All the small details of daily life—getting out of bed, making meals, going to appointments, taking care of children, handling responsibilities at work—may seem monumentally hard or inconsequential. Yet, even as you grieve, you've probably been reminded that life must go on. But working through the emotional pain can be difficult, particularly during the holidays, when you may feel you are supposed to be celebrating.

The normal process of grieving

Understanding the three Rs —reminder, routine, and reward—can help you create healthful habits.

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Everyone has bad habits they want to break, but instead of scorning yourself for being helpless to break them, use the fundamentals of forming habits to your advantage.

Habits, good or bad, follow a typical three-step pattern. One way to describe this is as three Rs: reminder, routine, and reward. By breaking down the cycle of a bad habit, you can identify what triggers the routine and begin to address what really needs to change. This way you can establish a pattern for new and healthier habits.

Older adults who stay busy scored higher on cognitive function scores compared with more idle people. The greatest effect is with episodic memory, which is the memory of past events like times and places.

E-cigarette smoking among teens is on the rise, and teens are more likely to transition from smoking e-cigarettes to smoking traditional cigarettes. E-cigarettes are marketed towards young people, emphasizing the need for dialogue between teens and the adults in their lives on the health risks surrounding this trend.

The best time to get an annual flu shot is in mid-October. However, it’s not too late to get the shot in December, since people are still at risk of getting flu for several more months.

Some drugs go too far, dulling emotions across the spectrum. A dose adjustment or a switch to a different medication can help.

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When your doctor prescribes a medication for depression, the goal is to reduce painful feelings of sadness or hopelessness. The majority of people taking the most commonly prescribed antidepressants—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)—improve substantially. But sometimes, SSRIs go beyond improving mood and make a person feel too little emotion. "Some people feel like they've lost the richness of daily life," says Dr. Michael Craig Miller, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Serotonin and SSRIs

What you should do

Experts now recommend that new parents sleep in the same room as their new infant for the first 6-12 months of his/her life. While this might wake the parents up more, it’s much safer for the child. Sudden unexplained infant death (SUID) happens much less frequently when the parents sleep in the same room as their baby. And six months will go by faster than you think.