Month: May 2017

It’s no secret that pregnancy is hard on the body, and it can definitely make getting to sleep quite a chore. Here’s why you can’t fall asleep—and what you can do about it.

Longing for a full night’s sleep?

Here are some common reasons why pregnancy can disrupt your sleeping habits, a few positions that can help you finally get a good night’s sleep, and some general tips for sleeping better while pregnant. It might seem impossible at first, but believe us, you can eventually get there. TODAY shares a few of their most practical tips as well.

Why am I uncomfortable?

Even for women in the beginning stages of their pregnancies, getting comfortable during the night can be a hard thing to accomplish. The obvious reason for this is because of your expanding belly, but what about women who aren’t even that big yet?

The SOS

The name of this position might make it sound like you’re in distress somehow, but it actually stands for “sleep on side.”

Prop yourself up.

If you tend to experience heartburn and acid reflux during the night while you’re pregnant, elevating your head while you sleep can do you a world of good.

Don’t just lie there.

Whether you’re pregnant or not, we all toss and turn from time to time as we lie in bed and try to fall asleep. If you find that you’re experiencing this more and more frequently, don’t just take it lying down—instead, get up!
It might seem counterintuitive, but taking a quick walk around your house or taking a few minutes to do a little chore you’ve been avoiding can help you slow down and feel more tired—essentially, it’s almost like you’re boring yourself to sleep.

Make the bed a sleep-only zone.

We all know that our beds are obviously there for sleeping, resting, and doing the deed, but it can be hard for our bodies to remember that when we choose to use them for work.

Put the phone away.

Even if you’re not using it to do work, it’s a good idea to put your phone down before you climb into bed. As you’re scrolling through Instagram, there are any number of random things that could make you excited or suck you in, taking you out of sleep mode pretty quickly.

Comfort is key.

There’s not a person alive who enjoys sleeping on a crappy bed, and any aches and pains you get from using a bad mattress will only be amplified while you’re pregnant. Unfortunately, it’s not always in the budget for everyone to just run out and buy a brand new mattress, but there are a few things you can do to get one for cheap or spruce up the one you have.

Turn down the thermostat.

It’s no secret that pregnant women can get hot pretty easily, and this is especially true when they’re under the covers during the night. Although you can always kick the covers off, many people would rather be hot than sleep without anything covering them—even if it means they keep waking up because they’re hot.

Skip midnight snacks.

We know that you’re eating for two—maybe even more—but right before you decide to head to bed isn’t the time you should be walking toward the refrigerator looking for a snack. Eating and then lying down can make it even more likely that you’ll experience some acid reflux, and it might just make you feel more uncomfortable during the night.

Avoid long naps.

Pregnancy can definitely make you feel worn down, and you might find yourself taking more naps throughout the day to recharge. There’s nothing wrong with this, but try not to fall asleep for hours during the middle of the day.

Often the experience of traveling to different places has the effect of reminding us just how similar we all are. You get to know people of other countries and cultures and think: Yes, our shared humanity connects us.

But if there’s anything that can cause swift division among groups and individuals, it’s the loaded issue of child-rearing. This is understandable: How we choose to raise the small humans we are wired to love more than any others in the world is touchy, not only because of that all-consuming love, but also because it means so much about who we are, how we have been shaped by our own parents, and who we want to be.

Bringing a human into the world entails certain responsibilities and sacrifices many people don’t seem to consider ahead of time. At the same time, there seems to be a uniquely American parenting ethos—one that says the world should be childproofed rather than the child be raised to live in the world, and that parents’ personhood (or at least mothers’) should be sacrificed at the altar of Perfect Parenting™.

America’s brand of Perfect Parenting™ is often not only an impossible standard for parents to achieve (mere human beings, after all), but also one that isn’t particularly healthy for children, who will come to find (some in more jarring ways than others) that the world is not childproof at all.

Still, we are all products of our culture—not to mention our own upbringing—so it takes some effort not to dismiss parenting that runs counter to these impulses as weird, negligent, or even kind of monstrous.

It’s a fun and useful exercise to examine your gut reactions to new pieces of information that don’t fit in your already established framework of How Things Are or Should Be. Give it a try! Read on for eight global parenting customs that may make you feel things.

Leaving Your Child on the Sidewalk While Dining and Shopping

If you saw that viral footage of a 4-year-old girl being snatched up in a Philadelphia store while standing a few feet away from her mother, it probably seems like a given to you that no mentally sound adult would leave their most precious cargo unattended on the sidewalk.

Yet that’s exactly what parents do in Sweden and Denmark: leave their children curbside while they go shopping or eat in a restaurant.

This doesn’t sit well with American folks, even (especially?) on the East Coast. One couple from Denmark was held for a weekend in police custody after leaving their 14-month-old alone in a stroller outside an East Village restaurant in New York City, and a Swedish woman in Amherst, Massachusetts, was reported after leaving her 1-year-old unattended outside for about 10 minutes while she ordered food inside a restaurant.

Scandinavian parents didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, since (we guess) Northern Europe is like a weird utopia. As the New York Times reports:

“In Copenhagen, a city of 1.3 million with a low crime rate and few child kidnappings, parents were astonished at Ms. Sorensen’s arrest. ‘Come on, we do this all the time,’ Line Vang told the Associated Press as she sat in a cafe while her 7-month-old son, Mathias, dozed out of reach. ‘We go in for a cup of coffee, sit so we can see the stroller, go out and check once in a while and that’s it.'”

Putting Your Babe Down for a Nap Outside in Subzero Temperatures

Lol, WHAT? Literally, what? Okay, Scandinavia, we’ve got our eye on you. We can maybe forgive some cultural lost-in-translations like misguidedly assuming that the city that inspired Gotham City is anything like an idyllic Northern European capital, but sub-zero naps? How? Why?

As Helena Lee reports for BBC News, “The theory behind outdoor napping is that children exposed to fresh air, whether in summer or the depths of winter, are less likely to catch coughs and colds—and that spending a whole day in one room with 30 other children does them no good at all.”

Naps outside typically last between one-and-a-half and three hours, according to Finnish researcher Marjo Tourula. Tourula says that –5 degrees C (23 degrees F) is considered the ideal temp for outdoor snoozing, though some parents reportedly put their children out at –30 degrees C (–22 degrees F).

“Martin Jarnstrom, head of one of the Ur och Skur group of pre-schools, is another big advocate of outdoor naps, though he emphasises that while the weather may be cold, the child must be warm,” Lee writes.

Jarnstrom highly recommends t
hat children wear wool close to the body and that they be wrapped in warm clothing as well as a warm sleeping bag.

Leaving Your Newborn for a Month

When you think of a newborn baby and a mother, you probably think of lots of sweet moments involving cuddling, sink baths, and staring into each other’s eyes. Also there’s that whole thing, typically, about being desperately in love with a new human and terrified that something bad could happen to them, which can make parting ways for the first time incredibly difficult (or so we’ve heard).

That’s why the Chinese practice zuo yuezi, intended to allow new mothers to recuperate after giving birth, may seem counterintuitive to some, because it can entail mother–baby separation of a month or longer.

As Cracked explains:

“[T]oday’s [Chinese mom] has a few more options, like checking into a resort that pampers you for weeks on end while your baby is tucked away safely out of sight. The moms who patronize these new confinement facilities can chill out, watch TV, enjoy the spa, and eat specially prescribed food from a cart brought to their rooms, all while their brand-new babies are cared for by nurses down the hall.”

Avoiding Eye Contact With Your Infant

Oh yeah, about that whole “staring into each other’s eyes” thing? Not everyone is into it—for example, Kisii, or Gusii, moms in Kenya, who avert their gaze from their children to assert their power over them. As Emily Lodish writes for NPR:

“It’s likely to sound harsh to a Western sensibility, but within the context of Kisii culture, it makes more sense. Eye contact is an act bestowed with a lot of power. It’s like saying, ‘You’re in charge,’ which isn’t the message parents want to send their kids. Researchers say Kisii kids are less attention-seeking as a result.”

Although it’s true that it sounds harsh, it does make sense, especially when put into context. “In the Western world, avoiding eye contact looks like guilt or shyness [but] [i]n the Gusii world, eye contact has power, and there are very strict rules about who you look at,” Cracked points out. “For Gusii moms, their babies are already demanding their time, their attention, and their [breasts], which is a lot of energy in a culture that needs the mom’s labor.”

Letting Babies Babysit Your Baby

Okay, so maybe “babies” is a bit of an exaggeration—but not much. According to Mei-Ling Hopgood, author of How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm: And Other Adventures in Parenting (from Argentina to Tanzania and Everywhere in Between), once children learn how to walk in Polynesia, they are handed over to other children to care for.

“Preschool-aged children learned to calm babies and toddlers became self-reliant because they were taught that that was the only way they could hang out with the big kids,” Hopgood writes.

Husband-and-wife anthropology team Jane and James Ritchie, who studied similar practices in New Zealand and the Polynesian islands, believe that the tradition wouldn’t sit well in other parts of the world.

“Indeed in Western societies, the degree of child caretaking that seems to apply in most of Polynesia would probably be regarded as child neglect and viewed with some horror,” they write in their book Growing up in Polynesia.

Sending Your Kidlet to the Subway Alone

In a place like New York City, the idea of sending out 7-year-olds to ride the subway by themselves sounds absolutely bonkers.

For parents living in Japan, however, it’s a normal occurrence to give children—even kids as young as 4—this kind of freedom. (Yes, 4-year-olds are riding subways alone in Japan.)

As NPR reports:

“Christine Gross-Loh, author of Parenting Without Borders, lives in Japan for part of each year, and when she’s there she lets her kids run errands without her, taking the subway and wandering around town as they may.”

Gross-Loh says, though, that she wouldn’t do the same in the U.S., since allowing her children to go solo subwaying in the States at such a young age would mean getting child protective services called on her. She’s probably correct.

Lenore Skenazy, for example, wrote a 2015 piece for The Washington Post headlined, “I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone. I got labeled the ‘world’s worst mom.'”

Forcing Bébé to Like Foie Gras

If you’ve been following the parenting trends, you’ve probably already learned that French parents do literally everything better than parents from…anywhere else. (Go ahead, give it a Google. A search of “French parents better” will yield such articles as “Why French Parents Are Superior” in The Wall Street Journal and “Why French Parents Are Better Than American Parents” in Business Insider.)

Apparently, another reason they’re better is that they can create children who are not picky eaters. As Lodish writes in NPR:

“Set mealtimes; no snacking whatsoever; the expectation that if you try something enough times, you’ll like it. These are among the ‘food rules’ in France that are taken as given. The result is French kids who eat what adults eat, from foie gras to stinky cheese. Tell that to my nephew.”

American Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, tells NPR, “We [Americans] assume…a little more that kids have inherent likes and dislikes, whereas the French view on food is the parent must educate their child and that appreciation for different food is something you cultivate over time.”

Training Your Little One Like Pavlov’s Dogs

Here’s something bizarre: You can train an infant to pee on command. Some Vietnamese moms begin training their newborn babies by making a whistling sound every time they urinate, so that the child comes to associate the sound of the whistle with urination.

As Cracked describes:

“By the age of 3 months, the moms hold their kids over toilets, give a little whistle, and their kids urinate on command, like magic. By 9 months, they’re done with diapers altogether, like some kind of…pee prodigies. By contrast, it takes American kids two and a half years or longer to shake the diaper habit.”

We could get on board with this. To me, this parenting habit makes the most sense of any of them. Then again, what do I know?

A friend and I recently got into a disagreement over parenting rules. Yeah, neither of us has kids.

Have you ever walked into a room, noticed how the kids were sitting, and thought to yourself, “Geez, how can they possibly sit that way? If I sat that way, I’d never be able to get up!” Actually—you’re probably right. Compared with adults, kids are much more flexible and have joints that are hypermobile.

As they grow, kids’ tendons, muscles, and ligaments slowly become tighter. In most cases, the greater range of motion that they’ve experienced in their joints will gradually disappear. You’ve probably felt yourself getting less flexible as you get older too.

Stretching is good for you, and it feels good to stretch and be flexible. But sometimes, as is often the case with kids, being able to overstretch can be a problem. The hyperflexibility that kids enjoy allows them to put themselves into crazy positions because, well, they can—and it’s not uncomfortable for them to do so.

But just because their bodies are able to tolerate those positions doesn’t mean it’s okay for them to do it. Unfortunately, it often ends up hurting them over time. Such is the case with what’s known as the W position.

Google the W position and you’ll be bombarded with websites of physical therapists, doctors, and healthcare professionals weighing in on how detrimental it is for kids’ bodies.

In your search, you’ll also get conflicting opinions from others, including moms, alternative healthcare practitioners, and massage therapists offering their opinions on why the W position isn’t so bad and that there are so many more important issues to worry about regarding the health and wellness of kids.

What should you do with your own children? Who is right? Well, in truth, they all are. Here’s the scoop.

What is the W position?

The W position is a seated position in which a child is basically sitting upright on their knees with their legs fanned out in opposite directions—making the shape of the letter W. At first glance, it would seem awfully painful to sit that way—and it would be, if your knees weren’t flexible.

But kids’ lower bodies are super flexible, and they can do it easily. However, studies have shown that excessive use of this position during kids’ growing years can lead to future orthopedic problems.

Why do kids sit like that?

Kids love to play and be active, and the floor is often their most preferred space. They grab toys, twist themselves, and contort their bodies according to the need of the activity that they’re doing.

Kids intrinsically know what’s comfortable for them and what will give them the greatest “edge” in play. They realize pretty quickly that the W position offers them the most balance by giving them added trunk and hip stability to allow easier toy manipulation and play.

What harm does the W position cause?

Sitting once or twice in the W position will cause no long-term harm, but if a child uses this as their go-to way of sitting for multiple hours a day every day, that’s when it can become a problem, both physically and developmentally.

In the W position, the muscles, ligaments, and joints are put in unnatural positions. As a result, the lateral muscles in a child’s legs will begin to tighten and cause the insides of their legs to become weak and loose.

This imbalance can affect th
e development of their motor skills, balance, and coordination. It also can cause some major problems with their knees and ligaments, including kneecap tracking issues, tendinitis, dislocation, and ligament strains.

Issues of not sitting properly will affect not only a child’s knees but also their hips, back, and core. Improper alignment of their muscles can tighten their hips, wreak havoc on the muscles in their back, and cause their core to be weak. Because proper posture is not required in this position, the back and core muscles don’t have to do much work, and strength will start to deteriorate.

Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a ripple effect. When the back and core become weak and posture is compromised, the neck and head can be affected, often painfully.

Part of the issue with the W position is the inability of a child to move around properly and naturally. Sure they’re more balanced and “fixed” through the trunk, but it doesn’t allow for trunk rotation or lateral weight shifts (like twisting to reach for things).

It’s easy to see why this position appeals to children, but experts believe that the more a child sits in the W position, the more likely they are to miss developing more mature movement patterns that are necessary for higher-level skills.

What other positions are bad for kids?

Unfortunately, the W position is only one of many common seated positions that aren’t great for kids.

The cross-legged position (“criss/cross applesauce”) places a child’s legs in much the same position as the W, and children who do this often will also suffer from the same issues (tightening of the outside of the legs and loosening of the inside, posture problems, and weak core).

Additionally, further issues occur when a child crosses the same leg over every time. It can set up unhealthy imbalances and throw their body even more out of alignment.

Sitting on the heels is considered a slightly better position, but not great either. It puts added strain on the knees and also compresses the knee joint and puts pressure on knee cartilage. This can cause pain, strain, and eventually, possible dislocation.

It can weaken the core and back, and it puts strain on the anterior portion of the ankle, which can lead to instability. Minor injuries can occur, such as twisting and sprains, or in some cases, more major ones, like fractures.

The hurdler stretch is a more exaggerated version of the W stretch, and the issues that go along with this stretch are, accordingly, a lot worse.

Most fitness programs and school athletics no longer use this stretch and have traded it for the healthier figure 4 stretch instead.

The hurdler stretch puts strain and pressure on the knee, most particularly the medial collateral ligaments (MCL), and also the inner thigh and hip ligaments. This position should be avoided at all costs.

So how should kids sit?

By now you might be shaking your head and are so confused that you’ve resolved to have your child just stand for the rest of their life. There’s no need to worry! Through daily practice of proper seating, you’ll be able to change your child’s sitting habits to healthier ones.

When children are sitting on the floor, the most recommended position is sitting with both knees bent, to the front of the body. Their arms can be back behind them or hugging their knees.

They can also sit with their legs completely extended to the front with their arms behind them. If a wall is nearby, it may be helpful to lean against it.

Normal sitting position tucks the sacrum (tailbone) underneath the body and puts pressure on the lower back. If the child is sitting on the floor—in any position—it’s helpful to put a towel or pillow under their rear end.

Sitting on an exercise ball is actually the best sitting position for a child (and adults, too!) It puts them in proper position, keeps the lower back aligned, and helps activate the core. Plus it’s fun!