Early Motherhood

Regular well-child examinations by your child’s doctor are essential to keep your child healthy and up-to-date with his or her immunizations to prevent many diseases. A checkup also gives your doctor an opportunity to talk to you about developmental and safety issues and gives you an opportunity to ask any questions you might have about your child’s overall health. As your child grows older, he or she can also bring his or her own questions about their health and changing body to the visit.

Every step a child takes toward learning to read leads to another. Bit by bit, the child builds the knowledge that is necessary for being a reader. Over their first 6 years, most children

When you were old enough to begin kindergarten, chances are you went to the public school around the corner, or perhaps to the religious school a short bus ride away. For your parents, the choice of schools was probably pretty simple.

Not any more. Today education is a complex and compelling topic in our national dialogue. Questions about school quality, accountability, curriculum, and teacher training arise each day, and we explore them in the newspapers, during political debates, and over kitchen tables all across the country.

National 5 A Day Week has an important goal, getting people to eat 5 or more servings of fruits and vegetables every day.

Meeting this goal will help you stay within the Food Guide Pyramid guidelines of eating 3-5 servings of vegetables and 2-4 servings of fruit.

But how do you get kids to eat more fruits and vegetables, especially when they may only want to eat chicken nuggets and french fries and you are not supposed to force kids to ‘clean their plate’ or make meals a power struggle?

All children have fears at some point in their life and it is usually considered to be a normal part of development. These fears are only abnormal if they are persistent or keep the child overly preoccupied with the subject that is feared, so that it interferes with normal activities, if the child can not be reassured or distracted away from the fear (becoming a phobia), or if it is an irrational fear. Whether or not a fear is irrational depends on a child’s age and developmental level.