Staying off busy roads is not enough. More than half the 135 children who die in bike-related car accidents are killed on minor roads or in residential areas. They don’t have to – bike helmets reduce the risk of severe brain injury by 88 percent.

Make sure you set a good example for your child. You are a role model whether you like it or not. Your approach cannot be “do as I say, not as I do.” Children are always watching you for what is acceptable behavior.

Use hand signals in traffic and always ride responsibly. Ride on the right side of the road with traffic. Don’t let your child be one of the 75 to 85 percent of children who ride bikes without helmets. Show them that using a helmet is the only way to bicycle.

Even though you may be riding responsibly, sometimes injuries occur due to the fault of others. Helmets significantly reduce your risk of needing a Daytona Beach personal injury lawyer.

Stocking hangers have become popular as a way to hang those well-loved holiday stockings without drilling holes or using other hardware in you home. These heavily weighted ornaments come in all shapes and sizes: stars, penguins, reindeer, you name it.

However, the stockings that hang from them are very attractive to children, with their bright colors, bells and bows. Within one hour of a Florida mother hanging a stocking on a star shaped hanger, her 18-month-old son pulled on the stocking causing the heavy hanger to fall off the mantel and strike him right between the eyes. Luckily his father was a plastic surgeon with some surgical supplies at home. He patched the boy up on the spot.

Not every child has been so lucky. Another suffered a deep puncture wound to the forehead and another child’s toe was crushed from these heavy stocking hangers. No deaths have been reported yet, but one child began vomiting (a symptom of brain trauma) after a stocking hanger fell on his head. He suffered no permanent injury.

Most of the injuries children suffer from falling stocking hangers probably hurt the parents more than the children. The vomiting boy’s mother said she was sick to her stomach with worry as she rushed her boy to the emergency room. For that reason alone, I’d keep my hangers packed and save them for later years.

Dads have to be careful too during the holidays. The Consumer Product Safety Commission reports that 13,000 Americans suffer holiday decoration related injuries that require emergency room treatment. Whether it’s falling from a ladder or a staple gun accident, the holidays are not a time to throw caution to the wind.

When you’re cutting through packaging, slow down. Also Make sure your candles are in safe places. Both these situations have caused injuries in holidays past. Make your holiday a merry one. Play it safe.

Experts also reassure us that we should not worry – that stealing things as a child does not indicate a future propensity for theft or other crime. Perri Klass recently wrote a wonderful blog in the New York Times about her experience with this phenomenon and reports that a prominent pediatrician says “most children with take something sometime” and that it is just as much a part of growing up as sleep problems, toilet training, the terrible twos, ad infinitum.

Parents must realize that because stealing is just as much a part of maturing as all the other things mentioned, we should not blame ourselves or our child for such behavior. But that does not mean that parents should ignore it. Children of different ages steal for different reasons and should be dealt with differently.

Toddlers who take things cannot even be considered to be thieves because they just can’t understand rules at that point. Klass recommends setting limits is the best way to care for a child that age. They should begin learning that not everything they touch becomes theirs and that they need to share.

How you set those limits is up to you. Renowned author Stephen Covey tells a story of teaching his daughter to share in which he concludes that young children cannot share until they feel like they have owned an object. At the daughter’s birthday party, she received many toys. Covey allowed his daughter to possess her toys for enough time for her to develop a sense of ownership before asking her to share the toy.

Now what about the 5- or 6- or 7-year-old child who steals? They are old enough to know the rules. What if you find them stealing from you, a friend or even a store? Again, do not worry. This type of behavior is extremely common. Though parents don’t always catch them, it is likely unusual for a child to go through childhood without ever stealing anything

Older children steal for different reasons than younger ones though. We, as parents, must understand what is going on there so we can best address the issue. Older children most often steal as part of a testing phase. They’re testing the boundaries of behavior. They’re looking to see what, if anything, happens as a result of different behaviors.

We should use these teachable moments when we catch children stealing to fully explain and demonstrate the ramifications of their actions. That doesn’t mean reading them the riot act or touring them around the county jail in a scared straight attempt.

It means telling your children that stealing is wrong and why it’s wrong. It’s important to make those ideas concrete to them by doing things like eliciting an apology and requiring that they have to either give the item back or pay for it.

Unfortunately, some children do exhibit troubling patterns of theft that should sound alarm bells for parents. So-called symbolic theft should be addressed differently. An example of symbolic theft is stealing someone’s valuables and destroying them. In addition, repeated theft should be dealt with professionally right away.

Other than those two situations, we shouldn’t worry ourselves about childhood stealing. The key in dealing with it is being evenhanded. Demonstrate consequences, discuss ethics and morals, but don’t treat your child like a criminal.

If you give birth in America, chances are good your doctor will use a fetal monitoring device during delivery. In fact, doctors use fetal monitoring devices in more than 85 percent of births in this country. They do this despite any evidence the devices are beneficial in any way.

“Honestly, the technology got rolled out before we knew if it worked or not,” said one St. Louis obstetrician.

In use since the early 1970s, fetal monitors have failed to reduce the risk of either cerebral palsy or newborn deaths. In addition, fetal monitors have significantly increased the incidence of both Cesarean surgeries and forceps deliveries.

Cesarean surgeries are much more costly than traditional births and extend the new mother’s recovery time.

Fetal monitoring technology was supposed to reduce the risk of either cerebral palsy or newborn death by giving doctors early warning signs of when a baby was not receiving enough oxygen to its brain during child birth. The thinking was that the early warning would give doctors more time to take corrective action and save the baby from injury or death.

The flaw in that reasoning is that 70 percent of cerebral palsy cases are caused before labor begins. Only 4 percent of cerebral palsy is caused solely from a mistake during childbirth. The remaining 26 percent of cases are caused by a combination of factors that can occur before, during or after childbirth.

In summary, fetal monitoring has the potential to prevent only 4 percent of cerebral palsy children and it has failed to do even that. Physicians’ new understanding of the technology is not expected to result in a lower incidence of cerebral palsy, but hopefully it will result in a lower incidence of unnecessary, costly Cesarean surgeries.

The reason for such hope is that the new guidelines refine what once were two categories of fetal monitor data into three categories. Previously, data was categorized as “reassuring” and “nonreassuring” so doctors would err on the side of caution and often intervene in the “nonreassuring” cases when in fact the babies would have been perfectly healthy without intervention.

Now the categories are “normal,” “nonreassuring” and “abnormal.” The “normal” babies clearly do not require intervention like Cesarean surgery or forceps delivery. The new guidelines go as far as to say that “abnormal” babies do not require immediate intervention but should instead be quickly evaluated for other means of providing the baby with oxygen such as giving the mother oxygen, changing her position, treating her low blood pressure or ceasing the artificial induction of labor.

The “nonreassuring” category now calls for much more thorough evaluation of additional factors before doctors are encouraged to intervene. Previously, where a doctor was apt to intervene in “nonreassuring” cases based solely on the fetal monitoring data, the guidelines now call for doctors to “look at the entire clinical picture, not just the [fetal monitor data].”

The entire clinical picture includes things like the mother’s blood pressure, heart rate and temperature, what medicines she might have been given, the frequency of contractions and how fast labor is progressing.

Immediate delivery is discouraged by the guidelines so hopefully that will save future mothers from the pain and costs of unnecessary Cesarean surgery. Further refinements of the guidelines are expected to be released next year.

The study’s conclusion is important for two reasons. First, folic acid benefits women of all ages, races and additional health factors. Second, premature birth is a substantial risk factor for birth injuries and complications like cerebral palsy, blindness, mental retardation and chronic lung disease.

Reducing these devastating injuries will not only reduce human disability but also the economic costs of caring for the disabled.

This recent study supports what doctors have been telling women for years – that they should injest 400 micrograms of folic acid every day if they are able to become pregnant. Doctors have known for quite a while that increased folic acid intake before pregnancy and during the first trimester can substantially reduce the risk of serious birth defects of the brain and spinal cord.

The study, published in the journal PLOS Medicine looked at 38,033 participants.