Family Entertainment Blog

Soaring levels of childhood obesity may be fuelled by babies and toddlers getting too little sleep, say researchers.They found youngsters who slept less than 12 hours a day were at double the risk of being overweight by their third birthday than children sleeping longer.
The most likely to gain weight were those who got less sleep and watched high levels of television.
Previous research has identified a link between insufficient sleep in older children and gaining weight in later life, but this is the first study to look at infants and toddlers.
It is thought lack of sleep affects the regulation of hormones governing hunger and energy expenditure, while TV viewing of two hours a day or more has been independently linked with weight gain in children.
In the UK, Government-backed surveys suggest around one in five children is overweight or obese by the age of five.
The latest findings were published yesterday in the medical journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
The U.S. team studied 915 infants who were weighed and measured several times up to three years of age.
Mothers reported how many hours their child slept per day on average at six months, one year, and two years.
Parents were also asked to report the average number of hours their children watched TV.
At the age of three years, 89 children in the study - nine per cent - were overweight.
THose getting less than 12 hours sleep were twice as likely to be overweight at the age of three.
Children who slept less than 12 hours a day and watched more than two hours of TV were most at risk of being overweight. The average length of sleep was 12.3 hours.
Elsie Taveras, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School department of ambulatory care and prevention, who led the study, said: “Mounting research suggests that decreased sleep time may be more hazardous to our health than we imagined. We are now learning that those hazardous effects are true even for young infants.
“Our findings lend support to childhood overweight prevention interventions that target both reduction in television viewing and ensuring adequate sleep duration.”
Research in the same journal found children who sleep less may be more likely to report symptoms of anxiety, depression and aggression later in life.
The findings were based on research by Dr Alice Gregory of the University of London, and colleagues, who collected sleep data on 2,076 children who were aged four to 16 years old at the beginning of the study.
The children later reported their own emotional and behavioural symptoms at ages 18 to 32.
Those whose parents reported they slept less than others had high scores on scales measuring anxiety, depression and aggressive behaviour.
The authors concluded: “Physicians should inquire about sleep problems during child development and should be aware that some, but perhaps not others, may constitute risk indicators of later difficulties.”
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ELDORADO, Texas - More than 400 children, mostly girls in pioneer dresses, were swept into state custody from a polygamist sect in what authorities described Monday as the largest child-welfare operation in Texas history.

The dayslong raid on the sprawling compound built by now-jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs was sparked by a 16-year-old girl’s call to authorities that she was being abused and that girls as young as 14 and 15 were being forced into marriages with much older men.

Dressed in home-sewn, ankle-length dresses with their hair pinned up in braids, some 133 women left the Yearning for Zion Ranch of their own volition along with the children.

State troopers were holding an unknown number of men in the compound until investigators finished executing a house-to-house search of the 1,700-acre property, which includes a medical facility, a cheese-making plant, a cement plant, a school, numerous large housing units and an 80-foot white limestone temple that rises discordantly out of the brown scrub.

“In my opinion, this is the largest endeavor we’ve ever been involved in in the state of Texas,” said Children’s Protective Services spokesman Marleigh Meisner, who said the agency was also involved in the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.

The members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints spent their days raising numerous children, tilling small gardens and doing chores. But at least one former resident says life was not some idyllic replica of 19th-century life.

“Once you go into the compound, you don’t ever leave it,” said Carolyn Jessop, one of the wives of the alleged leader of the Eldorado complex. Jessop left with her eight children before part of the sect moved to Texas.

Jessop said the community emphasized self-sufficiency because they believed the apocalypse was near.

The women were not allowed to wear red — the color Jeffs said belonged to Jesus — and were not allowed to cut their hair. They were also kept isolated from the outside world.

They “were born into this,” said Jessop, 40. “They have no concept of mainstream society, and their mothers were born into and have no concept of mainstream culture. Their grandmothers were born into it.”

Meisner said each child will get an advocate and an attorney but predicted that if they end up permanently separated from their families, the sheltered children would have a tough acclimation to modern life.

Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety, said the criminal investigation was still under way, and that charges would be filed if investigators determined children were abused.

Still uncertain is the location of the girl whose call initiated the raid. She allegedly had a child at 15, and authorities were looking for documents, family photos or even a family Bible with lists of marriages and children to demonstrate the girl was married to Dale Barlow, 50.

Under Texas law, girls younger than 16 cannot marry, even with parental approval.

The church members were being held at Fort Concho, a 150-year-old fort built to protect frontier settlements, to be interviewed about the 16-year-old girl and whether, in fact, the teenager was among them.

State investigators on Sunday got a second, wider search warrant for records related to the birth of any child to a mother aged 17 and under. The initial warrant was only for the records related to the girl who called to report abuse last week.

Attorneys for the church and church leaders filed motions asking a judge to quash the search on constitutional grounds, saying state authorities didn’t have enough evidence to search the grounds and the warrants were too broad. A hearing on their motion is scheduled Wednesday in San Angelo.

FLDS attorneys Patrick Peranteau said Monday that “the chief concern for everyone at this point is the welfare of the women and children.”

DPS troopers arrested one man on a charge of interfering with the duties of a public servant during the search warrant, but it was not Barlow, Mange said.

“For the most part, residents at the ranch have been cooperative. However, because of some of the diplomatic efforts in regards to the residents, the process of serving the search warrants is taking longer than usual,” said DPS spokesman Tom Vinger, who declined to elaborate. “The annex is extremely large and the temple is massive.”

Attorneys for the church and church leaders said Barlow was in Colorado City, Ariz., and had had contact with law enforcement officials there. Telephone messages left by The Associated Press for Colorado City authorities were not immediately returned Monday.

Barlow was sentenced to jail last year after pleading no contest to conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor. He was ordered to register as a sex offender for three years while he is on probation.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headed by Jeffs after his father’s death in 2002, broke away from the Mormon church after the latter disavowed polygamy more than a century ago.

The group is concentrated along the Arizona-Utah line but several enclaves have been built elsewhere, including in Texas. Several years ago it paid $700,000 for the Eldorado property, a former exotic animal ranch, and began building the compound as authorities in Arizona and Utah began increasingly scrutinizing the group.

The compound sits down a narrow paved road and behind a hill that shields it almost entirely from view in Eldorado, a town of fewer than 2,000 surrounded by sheep ranches nearly 200 miles northwest of San Antonio. Only the 80-foot-high white temple can be seen on the horizon.

Jeffs is jailed in Kingman, Ariz., where he awaits trial for four counts each of incest and sexual conduct with a minor stemming from two arranged marriages between teenage girls and their older male relatives.

In November, he was sentenced to two consecutive sentences of five years to life in prison in Utah for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl who wed her cousin in an arranged marriage in 2001.

The investigation prompted by the girl’s call last week was the first in Texas involving the sect.

Westside, one of largest and fastest growing chains of retail stores in India, is on an expansion path these days. The retail chain has just launched KIDSWEST, a kids program that incorporates learning with playing, in its stores operating in Delhi, Bangalore and Pune. This announcement comes after the store received excellent response from the audience in Mumbai, where it launched KIDSWEST last year.
 
It is a program under which the retail chain organizes special workshops and activities for kids. KIDSWEST has been designed keeping in mind the interests and requirements of kids in the age group of 6-12 years. Till date, the program has organized workshops and activities that have been based on themes like ‘learning magic’ and ‘wealth of waste’. The kids are awarded points on the basis of their participation in events, workshops and quizzes, held on a regular basis.
 
Apart from that, points are also given on the amount of shopping done. The points collected by the kids can be redeemed against vouchers that can be used for shopping, buying food, watching movies and indulging in other forms of entertainment. Thus, the kids get an opportunity to shop, learn, play, have fun and get rewards too. The basic mantra behind the launch of ‘KIDSWEST’ has been, ‘learning to play and playing to learn‘.
 
As a part of the integration of the two aspects of a child’s life, study and play, the program also includes the launch of an interactive website for kids. The website will comprise of features like quizzes, games, style center, updates on events, etc. This will help the kids play, learn as well as remain in touch with the program at all times. So, what are you waiting for? Just get your kid enrolled for ‘KIDSWEST’ and see him enjoy learning.

Baby boys are much more likely to die in the first year than baby girls - and medical advances have widened this gap.The analysis of centuries of birth and death records from 16 countries including England and Wales concluded that baby boys are 24 per cent more likely to die in their first year than baby girls.

Although this difference is down from a peak of 31 per cent in 1970, it is still more than double the rate it was in the 1750s, the U.S. study said.

Baby boys are more vulnerable because of their size and weaker immune systems

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said baby boys are more vulnerable because their bigger size raises the risk of a difficult birth, they are more likely to be born prematurely and they also have weaker immune systems.

The study of three centuries of birth and death data in countries spanning three continents clearly showed boys to be more vulnerable in the early months of life than girls.

In the 1750s, baby boys were ten per cent more likely to die than girls, but by the 1970s the gap had widened to over 30 per cent, despite major advances in public health.

The University of Southern California researchers said that while both sexes had benefited from modern healthcare, girls had benefited more than boys.

Before 1950 poor hygiene and nutrition weakened all babies and mothers, making the gender gap less visible because death rates were high for both girls and boys.

But by the 1970s vaccination, antibiotics and better hygiene had cut deaths from infection, which made birth complications and premature babies the leading cause of death, and these potentially fatal problems are more common in baby boys.

Since then improved treatment of premature babies and increasing use of Caesarean sections for risky births have narrowed the gap to 24 per cent in 2000.

Nature also works against the trend of male infant mortality by selecting more males. In western nations 105 boys are born for every 100 girls.

However, stress can affect the gender ratio, with studies showing fewer boys are born after stressful events, for example in New York after the September 11 attacks, or to mothers with stressful lifestyles.

It has been suggested that higher levels of stress hormones may make it more difficult for male embryos to implant in the womb, or somehow increase the likelihood that male foetuses are miscarried.

Because we started this blog about 7 months after Lucy was born, there is much of her life we didn’t get a chance to share via our blog. So I’d like to take you on a trip down Memory Lane to re-live some great moments and share adorable photos.I suppose it would be appropriate to start at the beginning (a very good place to start). Lucia Isabella Jackson was born June 11, 2006. Weighing in at 7 pounds 2 ounces and measuring 20 1/2 inches. As her tiny little head was making its way out, Vic saw how much hair she had and feared I was giving birth to a kitten. Alas, it was just a squishy faced little angel who looked like an old man for the first few weeks of her life and who I lovingly liked to call “Bilbo Baggins”