I wish your family health and happiness.

Angeline Duran Piotrowski

The following was written by Association for Psychological Science:

Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you’ve pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you’re not alone— for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student’s particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public.

The wide appeal of the idea that some students will learn better when material is presented visually and that others will learn better when the material is presented verbally, or even in some other way, is evident in the vast number of learning-style tests and teaching guides available for purchase and used in schools. But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their own unique style?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, according to a major new report published this month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The report, authored by a team of eminent researchers in the psychology of learning—Hal Pashler (University of San Diego), Mark McDaniel (Washington University in St. Louis), Doug Rohrer (University of South Florida), and Robert Bjork (University of California, Los Angeles)—reviews the existing literature on learning styles and finds that although numerous studies have purported to show the existence of different kinds of learners (such as “auditory learners” and “visual learners”), those studies have not used the type of randomized research designs that would make their findings credible.

Nearly all of the studies that purport to provide evidence for learning styles fail to satisfy key criteria for scientific validity. Any experiment designed to test the learning-styles hypothesis would need to classify learners into categories and then randomly assign the learners to use one of several different learning methods, and the participants would need to take the same test at the end of the experiment. If there is truth to the idea that learning styles and teaching styles should mesh, then learners with a given style, say visual-spatial, should learn better with instruction that meshes with that style. The authors found that of the very large number of studies claiming to support the learning-styles hypothesis, very few used this type of research design. Of those that did, some provided evidence flatly contradictory to this meshing hypothesis, and the few findings in line with the meshing idea did not assess popular learning-style schemes.

No less than 71 different models of learning styles have been proposed over the years. Most have no doubt been created with students’ best interests in mind, and to create more suitable environments for learning. But psychological research has not found that people learn differently, at least not in the ways learning-styles proponents claim. Given the lack of scientific evidence, the authors argue that the currently widespread use of learning-style tests and teaching tools is a wasteful use of limited educational resources.

To read further on teaching and learning practices science does support, see the following articles:

“Increasing Retention Without Increasing Study Time” by Doug Rohrer and Hal Pashler in Current Directions in Psychological Science. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118000121/abstract

“The Read-Recite-Review Study Strategy: Effective and Portable” by Mark A. McDaniel, Daniel C. Howard, and Gilles O. Einstein in Psychological Science. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122269051/abstract

“Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention” Henry L. Roediger, III, and Jeffrey D. Karpicke in Psychological Science.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118597351/abstract

For a PDF of, “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence” in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, or any of the reports listed above, please contact Ms. Kevin Lyn Sisson at 202-293-9300 x117 or ksisson@psychologicalscience.org.

Studies have shown that the use of hand sanitizers are effective at reducing absence rates in schools, and reducing illnesses in college dorms, but only if the right kind of sanitizer is used.  According to the Center For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) alcohol based hand sanitizers must contain a 60% to 90% concentration of ethanol or isopropanol in order to be effective germicides.  Some products that are marketed as antimicrobial actually do not reduce bacteria count on hands at all.  In fact, some even increase the bacteria count on hands after they are applied.   Sanitizers with 40% gel and 40% ethanol will reduce some fungus (fungi?), but won’t do anything to kill bacteria.

If you want your hand sanitizer to be the effective tool you are hoping for you should make sure it contains at least 60% ethyl or isopropyl alcolohol.

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For further reading:
Emerging Infectious Diseases letter “Hand Sanitizer Alert” by Scott A Reynolds, Foster Levy, and Elaine S. Walker

Myth #1. Sitting too close to the TV will damage your child’s eyes.

Fact: “Sitting in front of the TV or a computer screen for four hours may hinder your child’s intellectual development but it will not damage their eyes,” notes Dr. Mark Borchert, division head of The Vision Center at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

Nearly half of all kids spend four hours or more per day using computers and electronic devices, according to a recent national survey. Dr. Borchert notes that children can develop blurred vision, headaches and other problems when focusing too long on one object, such as a computer screen. Long video game sessions may have adverse consequences such as reduced social interaction or less time doing homework, however, they will not permanently damage a child’s eyes.

“If a child is sitting too close to the TV or computer screen, it is probably because he needs glasses to see well. Sitting very close to the screen will not cause them to need glasses,” said Dr. Borchert.

To make your child’s computer station more comfortable, make sure the screen is at eye level. Reduce screen glare by using a desk lamp with a dimmer so there isn’t a big contrast between the brightness of the screen and the room. Make sure your child can’t see her own reflection on the screen.

Enforce the 20/20 rule. Have your child take a 20-second break for every 20 minutes of screen time, either by getting up and stretching or by looking out the window.

The concern about TV screens damaging young eyes originated in the 1960s when some early color TV sets were discovered to be emitting high amounts of X-rays. The problem was soon corrected and modern TV monitors, including older tube-type sets and new LCD models, are safe and do not emit any dangerous rays.

Myth #2. Eating lots of carrots will improve a child’s eyesight.

Fact: Carrots do contain Vitamin A, which is a key ingredient in good overall nutrition, however, eating a lot of them will not improve your eyesight. Recent research findings have found that eating foods rich in Lutein, a plant nutrient, may help prevent age-related macular degeneration, one of the most common causes of blindness in older adults. Lutein is a carotenoid, natural pigment, found in dark green leafy vegetables such as spinach, plus various fruits and corn.

“The research is very preliminary, but it does suggest that Lutein can help protect against adults developing macular degeneration. Eating a balanced diet with plenty of green vegetables should be sufficient for most families,” said Dr. Borchert.

Carrots reputation as eyesight enhancers is partially due to the fact that Vitamin A sources are helpful in treating night blindness, also called nyctalopia, which can be caused by Vitamin A deficiency.

Myth #3. Only adults can wear contact lenses safely.

Fact: Children of all ages, even infants, can wear contact lenses safely if the correct procedures are followed. Under the age of 10, an adult will need to insert, remove and clean the lens. Many children over 10 can handle the contact lenses (wearing and cleaning) themselves.

According to Dr. Borchert, ophthalmologists may prescribe contact lenses for infants and very young children to enhance vision development when the eyes have very different prescriptions after cataract surgery, corneal scarring or diseases like Retinopathy of Prematurity.

Dr. Borchert said older children could manage their own contact lens care if they are mature and responsible. “If they make their own bed and shower on their own, they can probably safely handle their contact lens.”

He noted that it is not a good idea for elementary school children to wear contact lenses just for cosmetic reasons. Also, all contact lenses should be obtained through a physician, either an ophthalmologist (M.D.) or a doctor of optometry (O.D.).

Myth #4. Running with scissors is the leading cause of eye injury in children.

Fact. A recent national survey found that approximately 59% of pediatric eye injuries occur during sport and recreational events. The National Eye Institute also states that baseball is the sport responsible for the greatest number of eye injuries in children aged 14 and younger. However, basketball is the leading cause of eye injuries in those aged 15 to 24.

According to Prevent Blindness America, 72 percent of all sports-related eye injuries are to those aged 25 and younger. Yet, only 15 percent of children wear eye protection. Children should be encouraged to wear the appropriate safety eyewear, such as goggles or face masks, for every sport in which they participate.

“We need a cultural change in this country. Children who play contact sports such as basketball and baseball should be wearing eye protection – most do not. Twenty years ago, very few children wore bicycle helmets, now a parent would be considered irresponsible if she sent her child out riding without a helmet. We need the same sense of concern when children play sports,” said Dr. Borchert.

Myth #5. It is impossible to get young children to wear sunglasses.

Fact. “It is very important that young children wear sunglasses and the newer products with strap-on frames are easy for them to wear,” said Dr. Borchert.

The lens of a child allows 70% more UV rays to reach the delicate retina than in an adult. Most parents are aware of the critical need to protect their children’s skin from UV exposure with sun block, yet few insist their children wear sunglasses.

“If it is bright enough outdoors for you to be wearing sunglasses, your child should also be wearing them,” said Dr. Borchert.

New, colorful sunglasses with Velcro straps, designed for infants and toddlers are available in stores and via the Internet. They are comfortable and provide excellent protection from UV rays and foreign objects. Most young children adapt to them easily.

The Vision Center at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles is an international referral center known for its family friendly environment of children afflicted with all forms of eye disease and provides a full range of inpatient and outpatient services. It is the largest pediatric ophthalmology program in the nation with multiple subspecialty programs that are considered to be among today’s finest resources for diagnosis, treatment and research. . The Saban Research Institute of Childrens Hospital Los Angeles is among the largest and most productive pediatric research facilities in the United States.

Founded in 1901, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles has been treating the most seriously ill and injured children in Los Angeles for more than a century, and it is acknowledged throughout the United States and around the world for its leadership in pediatric and adolescent health. Childrens Hospital is one of America’s premier teaching hospitals, affiliated with the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California since 1932.

Since 1990, U.S. News & World Report and its panel of board-certified pediatricians have named Childrens Hospital Los Angeles one of the top pediatric facilities in the nation. Childrens Hospital Los Angeles is one of only 10 children’s hospitals in the nation – and the only children’s hospital on the West Coast – ranked in all 10 pediatric specialties in the U.S. News & World Report rankings and named to the magazine’s “Honor Roll” of children’s hospitals.

New research hints that the common belief that kids who go to daycare have lower rates of asthma and allergy later in life might be nothing more than wishful thinking. While young children in daycare definitely do get more illnesses and experience more respiratory symptoms as a result, any perceived protection these exposures afford against asthma and allergy seem to disappear by the time the child hits the age of eight.

“We found no evidence for a protective or harmful effect of daycare on the development of asthma symptoms, allergic sensitization, or airway hyper-responsiveness at the age of eight years,” wrote Johan C de Jongste, M.D., Ph.D., of Erasmus University in the Netherlands and principle investigator of the study. “Early daycare was associated with more airway symptoms until the age of four years, and only in children without older siblings, with a transient decrease in symptoms between four and eight years.”

The results are published in the September 15 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, a journal of the American Thoracic Society.

The researchers prospectively followed a birth cohort of nearly 4,000 Dutch children over the course of eight years in the Prevention and Incidence of Asthma and Mite Allergy (PIAMA) Study. Parents completed questionnaires during pregnancy, at three and 12 months, and then yearly until the child reached the age of eight, and reported their children’s airway symptoms annually. At the age of eight, more than 3,500 of the children were also assessed for specific allergies. Some also underwent testing for lung function and airway hyper-responsiveness.

Daycare use was assessed each year, and the children were categorized in early attendees (first attendance before two years of age), late attendees (first attendance between two and four years of age) and non-attendees.

They found that children who started daycare early were twice as likely to experience wheezing in the first year of life compared to those who didn’t go to daycare. However, as the children aged, there was a shift: by age five, there was a trend for less wheezing among early attendees: they were about 80 percent as likely as non-attendees to wheeze, but this was not statistically significant. What’s more, the shift reversed itself by age eight, when there was no association between early daycare attendance and wheezing at all.

Late daycare attendees had similar, but less pronounced and statistically nonsignificant effects. The effects of daycare on wheeze were not different between boys and girls, but were more marked in children with older siblings.

“Children with older siblings and early daycare had more than fourfold higher risk of frequent respiratory infections and more than twofold risk of wheezing in the first year compared to children without older siblings and daycare,” said Dr. de Jongste. “Importantly, children exposed to both early daycare and older siblings experienced most infections and symptoms in early childhood, without a protective effect on wheeze, inhaled steroid prescription or asthma symptoms until the age of eight years.”

Despite the widespread acceptance of the idea that these early exposures pay off in later health benefits, the data in this study do not support that belief. If anything, this study suggests that these exposures cause more airway symptoms early in life with no counterbalancing benefit later.

“Early daycare merely seems to shift the burden of respiratory morbidity to an earlier age where it is more troublesome than at a later age,” said Dr. de Jongste. “[E]arly daycare should not be promoted for reasons of preventing asthma and allergy.”

The following is written by Washington University In St. Louis.

Nighttime bedwetting, or primary nocturnal enuresis, is a common condition in children, and most outgrow it. About 15 percent of five-year-olds and about 5 percent of 10-year-olds wet the bed involuntarily unrelated to an underlying medical condition. The condition happens more often in boys than in girls and tends to run in families. Nighttime bedwetting becomes a real problem when it starts affecting children’s socialization – when they can’t go on sleepovers or attend camp.

Bedwetting is not due to a behavioral or mental problem or laziness of the child, says Paul Austin, M.D., associate professor of surgery at Washington University in St. Louis and a pediatric urologist at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Rather, some of the most common causes of bedwetting include:

• Genetic factors: Children with one or both parents who wet the bed as children have a much higher risk of wetting the bed.
• Problems with the kidney: lack of a hormone that is produced at night. The hormone, anti-diuretic hormone (ADH) or vasopressin, is produced normally at night to limit the formation of urine during sleep.
• Problems with the brain: a full bladder fails to wake up the child.
• Problems with the bladder: the bladder is too small for his or her age. The bladder should hold, in ounces, the child’s age plus two.

All of these common causes are temporary and resolve as the child matures. Parents should exercise patience with their child and understand that their child is not wetting the bed on purpose. In addition, parents should encourage the child and let him or her know that they will eventually be able to stay dry at night, Austin says.

Some other steps parents can take include:
• Limiting liquids two hours before bedtime.
• Encouraging the child to go to the bathroom before bed.
• Waking the child during the night to go to the bathroom.
• Making sure the child gets enough rest and doesn’t get overtired.
• Avoiding foods before bed that may cause sensitivity or increase urine production, such as dairy, carbonated drinks, caffeine, chocolate, artificially colored drinks, candy, licorice, citrus and melons.

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Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked third in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

No less a revered medical institution than the Mayo Clinic, the saviors of severely medically challenged children nationwide, have studied and declared that anesthetics used during cesarean births do not cause children to have brain problems.

Mayo Clinic researchers have found that children exposed to anesthesia during Cesarean section are not at any higher risk for learning disabilities later in life than children not delivered by C-section. These findings are reported in the current issue of the journal Anesthesiology.

“We found that the incidence of learning disabilities was equal between children who were delivered vaginally and those who were delivered via C-section but with general anesthesia,” says Juraj Sprung, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist who led the study. “It’s reassuring that the anesthetics required for Cesarean delivery do not appear to cause long-term brain problems.”

The study was conducted with data from the Rochester Epidemiology Project. Researchers analyzed the medical records of 5,320 children born between 1976 and 1982 to mothers living in Olmsted County. They compared birth records with scholastic achievement and IQ tests administered to the children later in life as part of their schooling.

The study builds on a previous project, reported in March, which found that children exposed to a single dose of anesthesia during the first three years of life had no increased risk for learning disabilities, but those exposed multiple times had an almost doubled risk for later identification of learning disabilities.

Prolonged exposure to anesthetics has been shown to cause brain abnormalities in young animals, which was the impetus behind these two studies. Scientists think that the brains of young animals and humans are more vulnerable to a variety of problems because they are undergoing rapid growth. The brain is forming vital connections between cells during this time.

Not only did the researchers find that the use of anesthesia during delivery was not harmful to the baby, they found that babies delivered by Cesarean using an epidural anesthetic (which numbs only the lower region of the body and does not involve the mother going to sleep) had a substantially reduced risk for learning disabilities later in life. “The risk was reduced by about 40 percent compared to children delivered vaginally and those delivered via Cesarean section but with general anesthesia,” says Dr. Sprung.

Study co-author and Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist Randall Flick, M.D., cautions that because this study is preliminary, changes to medical practice should not be considered at this point. “What we’ve found is an association between two things,” says Dr. Flick. “One is the way a child was delivered, either vaginally or under regional or general anesthesia. The other is a difference in the incidence of learning disabilities as the child attended school. It’s important to recognize there may be many other factors that impact learning disabilities.”

The team is investigating whether use of an epidural on a mother during natural labor has similar effects on the incidence of learning disabilities in children as a C-section with an epidural.

Dr. Flick says the research team also is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on a related study that looks more closely at young children with specific medical conditions who have been exposed to anesthesia and compares them to children with similar medical conditions who were not exposed to anesthesia. The study is part of a national SAFEKIDS Initiative that the FDA is undertaking with several academic and clinical institutions to study the effects of anesthetics and sedatives on brain development in infants and young children.

Funding for this study was provided in part by the Mayo Clinic Center for Translational Science Activities (CTSA). The Mayo Clinic CTSA is part of a national consortium working to improve how biomedical research is conducted across the nation. The consortium, funded through Clinical and Translational Science Awards, shares a common vision to accelerate the time it takes for laboratory discoveries to become treatments for patients and to engage communities in clinical and translational science. It is also fulfilling the critical need to train the next generation of clinical researchers. The CTSA initiative is led by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health.

Additional co-authors include Robert Wilder, M.D., Ph.D.; Slavica Katusic, M.D.; Tasha Pike; Mariella Dingli, M.D.; Darrell Schroeder; William Barbaresi, M.D.; Andrew Hanson; and David Warner, M.D. Another co-author is Stephen Gleich, M.D., of the Primary Children’s Medical Center, Salt Lake City.

The authors’ suggested eating plan includes six to nine daily servings of fruits and vegetables and no more than one or two servings of high-protein foods such as meat, dairy and eggs daily. Why? Because protein is composed of amino acids. As the body digests high-protein foods, the blood becomes more acidic, leaching calcium from the bones.

For example, have you ever taken Tums for acid indigestion? Its active ingredient, calcium carbonate, neutralizes stomach acid because it’s highly alkaline. To neutralize excess acid in the bloodstream, the body draws the same compound from bone. A high-protein diet of meat, dairy and eggs draws calcium from bone and eventually causes osteoporosis, the authors say.

Of course, fruits and vegetables also contain some protein, but much less than meat, dairy and eggs. Fruits and vegetables also contain a great deal of alkaline material. When you eat these foods, only a small amount of acid enters the bloodstream along with a great deal of alkaline material, which neutralizes the acid. Therefore, the body does not have to draw calcium compounds out of bone.

“Fruits and vegetables keep calcium in bone where it belongs,” said Lanou.

To further back up their theory, Lanou and Castleman pored over completed human clinical trials and found that they also refute the calcium claim. Since 1975, 140 clinical trials have explored calcium’s effects on osteoporotic fracture risk. Two-thirds of these studies show no benefit from high calcium intake. Overall, the clinical trials dealing with fracture prevention run two-to-one against calcium, the authors noted.

Finally, the authors reviewed research on the impact of exercise on bone health. They found that the consensus of research shows that just 30 to 60 minutes of daily walking is enough exercise to build strong bones.

“The good news is that you don’t have to join a gym or sweat buckets,” said Castleman. “But you do have to walk every day.”

Lanou, who holds a doctorate in human nutrition from Cornell University, joined the UNC Asheville faculty in 2005. She has played an instrumental role in creating programs and coursework for UNC Asheville’s North Carolina Center for Health & Wellness, which focuses on childhood obesity, workplace wellness and healthy aging. Previously, she taught nutrition at Cornell University and Ithaca College. She is the author of “Healthy Eating for Life for Children” and has written or delivered more than 50 scientific articles, reports and presentations on bone health, dairy products or the health benefits of plant foods. Lanou also serves as senior nutrition scientist for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to preventative medicine through good nutrition.

Source: University of North Carolina at Asheville

This article was written by The Corn Refiners Association so many will choose to take this article with a grain of … sugar, but even though it is written by the most interested party, I am satisfied that my parental questions and objections have been answered with a minimal amount of sugar coating.

Just to be clear, for those who tend to skim instead of read (and then make all kinds of angry comments), this article does not claim that high fructose corn syrup is as healthy as natural sugar consumed concurrent with, say, a slice of watermelon.  It simply says that it is no better or worse than any other refined sugar.

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Three top researchers corrected inaccuracies and misunderstandings concerning high fructose corn syrup’s impact on the American diet. They also examined how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) considers this sweetener in light of the upcoming 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans in a session, High Fructose Corn Syrup: Sorting Myth from Reality, at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California.

“Contrary to its name, high fructose corn syrup is essentially a corn sugar,” stated sweetener expert John S. White, Ph.D., president of White Technical Research. “Recent marketing claims that sugar is healthier than high fructose corn syrup are misleading to consumers.”

“By every parameter yet measured in human beings, high fructose corn syrup and sugar are identical. This is not surprising since high fructose corn syrup and sugar are metabolized the same by the body, have the same level of sweetness and the same number of calories per gram,” noted James M. Rippe, M.D., cardiologist and biomedical sciences professor at the University of Central Florida.

“This is a marketing issue, not a metabolic issue,” stated David Klurfeld, Ph.D., national program leader for human nutrition in USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and editor of the June 2009 Journal of Nutrition supplement, “The State of the Science on Dietary Sweeteners Containing Fructose,” in response to recent reformulations by manufacturers of products that once contained high fructose corn syrup. “The real issue is not high fructose corn syrup. It’s that we’ve forgotten what a real serving size is. We have to eat less of everything,” he noted.

Increased Caloric Intake, Not a Single Sweetener, the Likely Cause of Obesity
Fructose-containing sweeteners — such as sugar, invert sugar, honey, fruit juice concentrates, and high fructose corn syrup — are essentially interchangeable in composition, calories, and metabolism. Replacing high fructose corn syrup in foods with other fructose-containing sweeteners will provide neither improved nutrition nor a meaningful solution to the obesity crisis, according to Dr. White. “In light of similarities in composition, sweetness, energy content, processing, and metabolism, claims that such sweetener substitutions bring nutritional benefit to children and their families appear disingenuous and misguided,” White says.

Growing Body of Evidence
The American Medical Association helped put to rest a common misunderstanding about high fructose corn syrup and obesity, stating that “high fructose syrup does not appear to contribute to obesity more than other caloric sweeteners.” Even former critics of high fructose corn syrup dispelled myths and distanced themselves from earlier speculation about the sweetener’s link to obesity in a comprehensive scientific review published in the December 2008 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

To learn more about the latest research and facts about sweeteners, please visit SweetSurprise.com.

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CRA is the national trade association representing the corn refining (wet milling) industry of the United States. CRA and its predecessors have served this important segment of American agribusiness since 1913. Corn refiners manufacture sweeteners, ethanol, starch, bioproducts, corn oil, and feed products from corn components such as starch, oil, protein, and fiber.

UPDATE: 9/26/10

Commentator “Mark” (below) is passionate about proving what a dimwit I must be to have published this post and his/her point is well taken.  I would assume that my readers accept that I do not have a university degree in Myth Busting. I’m a blogger who encourages parents to do their own research, referring to “primary sources” (look it up) for information instead of listening to people, especially bloggers, about important issues related to parenting.  That is the entire point of this blog. Commentator “Stockholmer” (below — same person as Mark?) is an excellent example of a person who is making a supreme effort to research a topic that he/she thinks I’ve gotten dead wrong and has convinced him/herself and perhaps many of you that he/she is right by also presenting his/her sources (which aren’t half bad as press releases go) in the comments below. Nice work, Stockholmer.  Way to set an example as a proactive critical thinker. A+ for the research and for being more polite and circumspect than Mark (if you are indeed different people).

This guest post has been reprinted with permission from Lenore Skenazy, author of the book Free-Range Kids . Lenore’s hot-off-the-press book is about “Giving Our Children The Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry”. It is a fast, funny, full-of-facts, must-read book for all parents who remember a simpler time and want it for their children. After you have pieced together enough silent moments (in between cleaning up spills and tying shoes) to finish reading Lenore’s book you will feel a lot better about hustling the kids outside to play while you put your feet up to read your next book in peace. Here is an excerpt from Free-Range Kids that busts the myth about Halloween candy poisonings.

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Heck, even I grew up being told not to eat candy that had been obviously unwrapped. But why? Was there ever really a rash of candy killings?

Joel Best, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, took it upon himself to find out. He studied crime reports from Halloween dating back as far as 1958, and guess exactly how many kids he found poisoned by a stranger’s candy?

A hundred and five? A dozen? Well, one, at least?

“The bottom line is that I cannot find any evidence that any child has ever been killed or seriously hurt by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick-or-treating,” says the professor. The fear is completely unfounded. Now, one time, in 1974, a Texas dad did kill his own son with a poisoned Pixie Stix. “He had taken out an insurance policy on his son’s life shortly before Halloween, and I think that he probably did this on the theory that there were so many poison candy deaths, no one would ever suspect him,” says Best. “In fact, he was very quickly tried and put to death long ago.” That’s Texas for you.

And then there was a time in 1970 when a five-year-old died from ingesting heroin. But it turns out that in that instance, the boy got into his uncle’s stash and accidentally poisoned himself. Afterward, the family sprinkled heroin on some candy to make it look as if a stranger had done this hideous thing.

And, OK, there was one other time some kids were given poison on Halloween. “A woman in the 1960s was annoyed with children that she thought were too old to trick or treat, so she put ant poison in their bags,” says Best. “But it was labeled, ‘ANT POISON.’ She probably thought it was funny. Until the police arrived.”

So despite this wacky woman (who made her intentions pretty clear), we now have zero recorded instances of death by strangers’ candy. And yet look at all the things that have sprung up in response to this myth.

First and most obviously, we’ve killed the whole idea of, God forbid, baking treats for the local kids. Any cookie a kindly neighbor makes is going to be automatically dumped in the trash, so why bother? Ditto, most fruit. I’m not saying the candy companies concocted these scary rumors, but they sure aren’t knocking them down.

Then we have the concerned but misguided authorities reinforcing the fears that shouldn’t even exist. In 1995, for instance, no less a maven than Ann Landers warned her readers (basically everyone in America who wasn’t reading her twin sister, Dear Abby), “In recent years there have been reports of people with twisted minds putting razor blades and poison in taffy apples and Halloween candy.”

Reports? None substantiated. Rumors? Yes, indeed. Rumors like the ones she was spreading! And those rumors ended up actually changing the holiday. To this day, Nationwide Hospital in Columbus, Ohio — one of the biggest children’s hospitals in the country — offers free x-rays of any Halloween candy a parent is worried about. …says Pam Barber, the hospital’s spokeswoman, “We have never ever discovered anything questionable…It would be great to bring back some of those [Halloween] childhood joys.”

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Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children The Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry by Lenore Skenazy is available on Amazon.com  Here’s the link to the book http://tinyurl.com/q6y7oc where there is even a charming little video featuring the author herself.  My favorite part is when she uses the expression “darn tootin’”.  She’s adorable.  The book is fantastic. Rush right out an buy it. It’ll change your perspective and you’ll never look back.