One such death was that of 13-month-old Aiden Truett who stopped eating and began vomiting. Doctors attributed the symptoms to a viral upper respiratory infection, but were forced to re-evaluate after treatment only led to worsening symptoms.

X-rays revealed the baby had swallowed a button battery, which was quickly removed surgically. Two days later, however, the baby started coughing blood and soon died.

Before doctors could remove the small battery, it had already burned a hole in the baby’s esophagus and damaged his heart. In the past, such batteries were not strong enough to cause such massive damage, but today’s batteries are supercharged for their small sizes and have caused a sevenfold increase in serious injuries and death since 1985.

Deaths are still very rare, fewer than 10 since 2004, but 3,500 button battery ingestions occur annually and today’s stronger batteries are causing more serious injuries. Every organ that encounters a button battery is a risk.

Vocal chords have been damaged, leaving children suffering from a lifelong whisper. Digestive tract injuries have caused children to undergo multiple surgeries and require feeding tubes. Children are not the only population at risk for these injuries. Our elderly have mistaken the buttons for candy and medication.

The worst offenders are batteries that begin with the number 20. They measure 20 millimeters and are the strongest of today’s tiny power plants. Batteries numbered 2032, 2025, and 2016 cause more than 90 percent of serious injury.

In 60 percent of child injuries, the child has removed the batter from an electronic device, not found it loose. Store your battery powered devices in a safe place.

Read the full article here.

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.

They can’t tell us what’s wrong so our fears are left unchecked. To make matters worse, symptoms that we would easily recognize in older children and adults are often different in babies.

Here’s your chance to learn about the most common medical conditions that are difficult to spot in children younger than 2, and help your pediatrician make the right diagnosis.

Type I Diabetes

The early signs of type I diabetes often mimic symptoms of common illnesses like the flu or can even be mistaken for healthy, thriving behavior. Parents are likely to consider increased thirst and appetite a great sign that healthy growth is proceeding as it should. More frequent urination can also be chalked up to a side effect of that “growth spurt.”

Children with type I diabetes are often tired, but then again, most babies are. And what about the fruity-smelling breath that’s another sign? Parents are likely to delight in that. Lastly, your child will not be able to alert you to the blurring of her eyesight.

The best way to diagnose type I diabetes may be the proactive step of requesting a blood sugar or urine sugar test before your suspicions are aroused. Even if your baby begins showing more serious signs of type I diabetes, they can often be misdiagnosed with pneumonia or gastroenteritis leaving the diabetes untreated which can cascade out of control leaving your baby in the intensive care unit.

Keep an eye out for the early warning signs and note any changes in your baby’s behavior. Type I diabetes does not run in families so you can not use that as a predictor. Most of the time, no known relative has the disease.

Head Injuries

If you see your baby fall and then later develop vomiting, that’s an undeniable sign of a brain trauma which needs medical attention. New research reveals most children with head trauma should not receive an immediate CAT scan but should be watched closely. However, head injuries accompanied by vomiting should at least be looked at by a doctor.

But what if you don’t see your baby hit her head? What if it happened while a caregiver was watching her while you were at work and you were not notified? Vomiting can be quite normal for young children. What you want to look for are changes in your baby’s pupils, lethargy, sensitivity to light, increased emotional displays, confusion and whether or not your baby continues to move normally.

No one knows your baby better than you, if you suspect she’s just not herself and displaying a combination of the above symptoms, tip your doctor off that a head injury should be considered.

Epilepsy

Think epilepsy is a no-brainer diagnosis? Think again. In babies, symptoms are different. A common type of seizure in young children involves nothing more than staring.

It can appear as if your baby is just zoning out. The key factor is whether or not you are able to snap your baby out of it. If you can snap your fingers and she responds, then that is normal.

However, if nothing distracts her from the staring behavior, a neurological examination is likely a good idea. If you can, video tape the staring behavior so your doctor can have as much information as possible with which to make the diagnosis. Use a phone video camera if necessary, even a short video can help immensely.

Pertussis (Whooping Cough)

Kids with pertussis cough so hard they can vomit. However, the characteristic whooping sound is rare in babies younger than 6-months-old which makes their symptoms look very much like those of pneumonia, asthma, croup or a viral upper-respiratory infection.

To make matters worse, babies with pertussis may not even cough at all and babies younger than 6 months are the most at risk of serious complications from pertussis.

Signs of serious pertussis are enough to send any parent to the emergency room, but it does not have to get that far. The best way to protect your baby from pertussis is for you and all other caregivers to get a booster vaccination.

Today’s researchers are now finding that many things that we traditionally thought of as innate human traits such as happiness and talent are actually more a result of nurture instead of nature. That means that we have control over how happy or talented we are. It’s a mistaken belief to think that some people are born more talented or happy than others. Studies show that talented and happy are the way they are because of their actions and behaviors, not any innate trait.

I recently read a fascinating review by Nancy Shute of USNews.com of the latest book to show us that there are many steps we can take to make ourselves happier parents. The book, Raising Happiness, was written by Christine Carter, a sociologist who studies happiness and also a mother.

Carter’s advice to parents is founded on solid science and provides often simple solutions such as why praise is a much more powerful tool to promote good behavior than punishment or nagging.

The book review mentions two simple steps to more familial happiness. You determine when you are happiest with your kids and what part of your normal day with your family routinely causes suffering. Step two is to structure your day so that you routinely get those happiest moments every day and so that you eliminate those routine pain points.

The review gives the example of bed-time reading being the favorite time of day for the author, but she couldn’t always be home at that time so she switched the bed-time reading to after-school reading so she could be sure she would have that time.

Another thing the author did at that bed-time reading session was to talk with her children about three good things that happened that day. This is another simple but powerful technique that research has shown makes significant improvements in happiness and self-confidence.

The review said that Raising Happiness is full of simple, powerful steps you can take to increase your happiness as a parent and the happiness of your children. It comes well-recommended.

To make matters worse for medical malpractice plaintiffs, of those 27-36 percent of courthouse winners, fewer that half receive any money at all. So only 13.5-18 percent of medical malpractice victims who win their case in court receive any money to compensate them for their medical bills and other damages. That I why I will never guarantee that I can recover money to help pay a medical malpractice victim’s medical bills.

Medical malpractice cases are some of the toughest around. That’s why we accept very few of them for representation. They are so expensive to litigate that it is not cost-effective for victims to bring lawsuits in all but the most serious cases. I’ve seen many cases with legitimate, substantial injuries caused by negligence that I decided not to accept because I did not think that I could recover enough money to cover the costs of bringing the case. I always feel badly explaining to people that I’m not saying their injury is trivial or small (it never is to them) but that it is just not catastrophic enough to warrant filing suit in this harsh medical malpractice climate.

Every so often though, we do accept a medical malpractice case. The only strategy in a medical malpractice suit (and most lawsuits for that matter) that affords a victim with any degree of control over the outcome is to settle out of court before trial. If you go to trial, you are submitting your fate to a group of strangers whose only qualification to render judgment on your case is that they hold driver’s licenses.

Whether a malpractice case settles or goes to trial, it is tough road to hoe. Make sure you work with an attorney you trust to handle your case.

In essence, toddler’s brains are only about as developed as the brains of our ancestors the cavemen were. When adults throw tantrums, we refer to it as “going ape” for similar reasons. When adults lose our temper, the left side of our brains literally shut down and we revert to emotional and not logical beings.

However, toddlers are constantly going prehistoric on us as parents and we would be better off communicating with them in a way they can recognize and respond to. So instead of using a soothing voice to tell a toddler to calm down, researchers suggest we communicate to their right brains, their emotional caveman brains.

The way we do that is to repeat short phrases while slightly mirroring their emotional state. Now this gets really interesting because research and experience shows that adults instinctively do this already when children are happy.

For example, if a child is happy about learning a new word or doing something else good, adults often say something like, “Yes, yes, yes, wow, great job, great job,” in an excited tone of voice that mirrors the child’s mood. However, we usually do the opposite when children misbehave. We use soothing tones and give them reasons why they shouldn’t behave that way.

Researchers suggest we would receive much better outcomes if we communicated to children’s right brains when they’re misbehaving.

Researchers also point out that adults do this with other adults sometimes which makes sense because we too become cavemen when we’re angry because our left brain shuts down. If you’ve ever found yourself using a charged tone of voice to say something like, “sorry, sorry, sorry, I can explain myself, but I’m sorry,” that is effective communication with the right brain. It’s mirroring the other’s emotional state while repeating short phrases.

Try it sometime with your toddler and see if they don’t respond better.

ANSWER: Under Florida law, there is no specific age at which children become old enough to be held negligent. The rule is that children behavior is tested by what is reasonable under the circumstances, including age, experience and state of mental development of the child.

That is unless the child is doing something that usually only adults do like driving a car or boat or flying an airplane. Then the child is held to a higher standard of behavior – they are required to do the activity with the skill and care of an adult.

If the child is engaged in normal behavior for children, then the question is whether or not the child has the experience, intelligence, maturity, training or capacity to act with the care the situation requires. If so, then the child can be held liable for negligence. If not, then they can’t. That question is one that only a jury can answer. It is not for lawyers or judges to say. The specific facts of each circumstance and each child must be weighed by the jury. Every case is almost always very different.

As for the instructor or facility, the question of whether or not they can be liable for your daughter’s injuries is also a very fact intensive question. If either had a duty to protect your child from injury and breached that duty, they may be held liable. Answering those questions requires further information.

A jury would have to consider it reasonably foreseeable that injury could result from leaving the two girls without supervision. If a jury did decide it was reasonably foreseeable, that jury could find negligence if the instructor told the kids to stretch and then left the room to make a phone call.

However, if the instructor taught the children proper stretching form and watched them while they performed all their stretches, then it’s unlikely a jury would hold the instructor liable for your daughter’s injuries.

The specifics of each case are most often discovered during interviews called depositions where lawyers have an opportunity to question witnesses under oath. One important issue in a case like this is whether or not you as a parent signed a liability waiver. If you waived your right to sue the instructor and facility, then that document is binding.

The world of preteen and teen sexual exploration has changed dramatically since today’s parents were that age. Since our culture pushes our kids to be ’sexy’ before puberty begins, it’s more important than ever that we give our children the best “owner’s manual” that we can to their newly developing bodies.

The Talk helps parents explain the power of sexuality in a way that promotes healthy, age-appropriate behavior and draws connections between sexual biology and the portrayal of sex as seen in this techno-erotic culture of ours.

Much earlier than we imagine, our daughters especially begin noticing the new power that comes with developing a tween or teen female body. They are bombarded with marketing messages insisting that being ’sexy’ is critical to social acceptance.

If you as their parents do not step in to shape your children’s beliefs and character and provide some sane and trustworthy guidance, then they will learn it from their friends or worse, the television and other media where sex is a commodity to be traded and bartered in the pursuit of other desirable things like social status, affection or otherwise.

The Talk helps parents explain the social power that comes from looking sexy, and the personal responsibility each of us has to use that power appropriately.

I was impressed by the connections that Maxwell draws between biology and culture. She argues that tweens and teens don’t understand why Victoria’s Secret is such a powerful draw. Maxwell says that tweens and teens can benefit greatly from learning about the sexual drive in a context that describes it as part of the miracle of procreation.

Maxwell argues that if we properly explain the biology of sexuality, intercourse and pregnancy, then our youth will be less confused by our hyper-sexual culture and will be more apt to behave responsibly.

Every year in places like Daytona Beach, Orlando and Jacksonville, the number of drownings increases during the summer. Drowning is one of the most common causes of death among children so following a few simple safety precautions can go a long way in keeping your summer an enjoyable one.

Follow these safety tips to keep our children safe:

• Respect the water. The ocean, lakes and pools can be dangerous places. Treat them as such
• Most child drownings happen when an adult is not present. Always supervise your children around water of any kind. It is possible to drown in just a few inches of water.
• To ensure you can always be present when your children are near your pool, keep a phone near you at your poolside so phone calls don’t take you away from supervising your children and so, if an emergency does arise, you can call 911 immediately.
• Even strong swimmers drown. Do not assume that your child is immune from drowning because he or she has taken swim lessons. In addition, flotation devices can fail or may be discarded, don’t let them lull you into a false sense of security.
• If you have a pool at home, use a device to alert you when doors to your pool area are opened. That way you’ll never be caught off guard and you’ll always know if your children are near your pool and require your supervision.
• Long hair can get sucked into pool drains and vacuum hoses. If your child has long hair, secure it to the head, braid it, or stuff it into a hat.
• Get swim lessons and CPR lessons for everyone in your family, especially if you own a pool. Make sure everyone knows what to do if they see someone in trouble in the water.
• Install pool fencing.
Here’s the corresponding video blog:

The details of this bill were discussed in this previous Florida Child Injury Lawyer Blog post. The Florida Legislature was considering a bill that overturn a Florida Supreme Court decision and allow parents to waive their children’s right to sue businesses if the children are injured.

The legislative session ended on May 1 and the bill was not passed.