These are not the top child health problems

Childhood obesity, bullying, and drug abuse are the top child health problems, according to respondents to a national survey for Mott’s Children’s Hospital in Michigan.The survey participants got it wrong on two of those priorities.  Their responses are more a reflection of what’s been getting media attention, rather than the real problems affecting America’s youth.

I was glad to see that childhood obesity, listed by 60 percent of the participants, achieved the number one ranking.  It’s hard to overemphasize the serious medical and mental health implications of this epidemic.However, those who listed bullying (58 percent) and drug abuse (53 percent) as the most serious child health problems got it wrong.Bullying is an important issue, but the prevalence is not increasing, and may in fact be declining. Schools are taking this problem very seriously, and many states have laws that help insure that our kids can go to school in an emotionally safe environment.

While drug abuse is a serious issue, it’s more of a symptom of underlying problems.If I was completing the survey, I’d list child abuse and neglect as the second most serious health problem for our kids. The overall rates of neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse remain alarmingly high.  This is a safety issue that demands our focused attention.

I’d rate stress as the third most significant health issue, one that is related to so many other problems identified in the survey.Childhood stress is difficult to comprehend. Most of our kids are privileged, entitled and raised in financially secure environments. They have economic advantages unknown to any other generation. With so many benefits, why is stress such a serious health issue?

I’d list stress as one of my top priorities because we are raising a generation of entitled and overprotected kids who are horrible at dealing with life’s problems. When confronted with difficulties, they respond by abusing drugs, smoking, bullying or developing mental health issues.

These problems are symptoms. We don’t need more education to teach kids that bullying, taking drugs, and smoking are bad. Instead, we need to teach our children better ways to deal with unpleasant feelings, difficult people, failure and frustration.

What kids are calling “stress” today was once viewed as just a normal part of living that kids figured out how to manage.

The solution is for parents to stop solving problems for their kids, and start teaching them how to deal with difficulties on their own. Your job is to do more coaching and less controlling, helping our kids to be strong and independent, not victims of life’s normal pressures.

TEFLON CHEMICAL LINKED TO CHILDHOOD OBESITY

Children born to mothers who were exposed during pregnancy to higher levels of PFOA, the non-stick chemical DuPont formerly used to make Teflon, tend to put on more weight and do so more quickly than children of less-exposed women, a new study by researchers at Brown University found.

Ten years ago, independent research commissioned by EWG and the public health non-profit Commonweal showed that PFOA could pass from a mother to her unborn child in the womb. In 2012, a study by researchers in three Nordic nations showed that children whose mothers had been exposed to high levels of PFOA while pregnant were more likely to be obese at age 20.

Exposure to PFOA has also been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease and other diseases.

The new study provides more evidence of the link between PFOA and obesity. It followed 204 mothers in Cincinnati and their children from birth to age 8. The researchers divided the mothers into three groups based on the amount of PFOA in their blood. They found that children born to mothers in the two most highly exposed groups weighed less at birth and at age 2, but by age 8 they had put on one to two-and-a-half pounds more body fat than the average child in the study.

Joseph Braun, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown and leader of the research team, said the amount of extra fat was small, but still enough to increase a child’s risk of developing diabetes later in life. In the university’s news release, he said: “There isn’t a threshold at which we say you shouldn’t add more fat mass – any more fat mass is bad fat mass.”

Starting in the 1950s, DuPont used and later manufactured PFOA at its Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, W. Va. The company dumped PFOA waste in area landfills and the Ohio River, contaminating the drinking water of nearby communities and far downriver

Cincinnati is almost 200 miles from Parkersburg. Its water has been filtered to reduce levels of PFOA since 2002, and officials of the city’s water works said the levels of PFOA are lower than the federal government’s recommended level. However, recent research? has shown that the federal recommendation – which is not a legally binding limit – is hundreds of times higher than the level that would fully protect human health.

Under pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency, DuPont and other chemical companies agreed in 2005 to phase out PFOA by the end of 2015. It is no longer made or used in the U.S., but the chemical industry is now using similar chemicals that may also be harmful but have not been adequately tested for safety.

A huge personal injury lawsuit, consolidating 3,500 claims against the company by people who got sick after drinking PFOA-laced water, is underway in federal court in Columbus, Ohio. In the first test case, the jury found DuPont liable for an Ohio woman’s kidney cancer and awarded her $1.6 million in damages.

CORRECTION: The original version of this blog post erroneously stated that levels of PFOA in Cincinnati’s water exceeded federal safety recommendations.?

Originally published on EWG’s EnviroBlog
By Bill Walker, Investigations Editor