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.

Right now, they’re giving away free car seat IDs. Now is your chance to be better safe than sorry. Car seat ID tags may not seam very important now, but in the event you happen to be involved in a car wreck, truck accident or other type of traffic injury, a car seat ID will provide potentially life saving information to emergency responders, not to mention family contact numbers.

All car seat IDs from My Precious Kid come with self sealing lamination and a luggage loop. To be eligible to receive one of the free IDs, you must currently be pregnant or have given birth or adopted a baby on or after August 1, 2009. If you are not eligible, the IDs are available for sale also.

In addition to this offering, the blog boasts great information like how to obtain free stuff (diapers, etc) for your baby, and insightful product reviews. I recommend a visit to all my parent readers.

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.

If you have already enrolled a child in daycare, you have at least some experience to go by. If your friends or acquaintances have their kids in daycare, you can ask them. If you don’t have any of those resources to draw upon, then you’ll need to research daycare facilities on your own. Internet chatgroups and websites can be helpful, but the first place to start is with the government agency that regulates childcare.

Chatgroups and other internet information can be biased and inaccurate. A bad review can be caused by a trivial misunderstanding between daycare operator and parent. Perhaps a parent was having a bad day and then became offended because
the parent mistook the tone of a daycare employee. Then the parent posts something negative online. Those are unreliable reports and should be double checked.

The best place to get reliable information about the quality of daycare facilities is the Florida Department of Children and Families.  From its homepage, click on “programs” and then “childcare.” At that page, you can search all the childcare providers in your zip code by clicking on “provider search.” All you have to do is select which county you’re in, input your zip code and select which provider type you’re looking for.

Once the list of daycare providers appears, you can view their inspection records to see if they regularly live up to the quality standards required by Florida law. If a provider has been “reinspected,” it is because it has not meet the inspection requirements and were given a second chance to correct the issues.

Some facilities I investigated had violations ranging from improper record keeping to failing to have a staff person properly trained in first aid and CPR to not having the required protective mats under their swingset. If these violations are corrected, no further action is taken. However, repeat offenders are subject to administrative action. Information about providers that have been subject to administrative action is coming soon.

At the same screen where you click on “Provider Search,” you can click on “Administrative Actions, Publications, Reports” along the left hand column. Once the government starts posting information there, you’ll be able to discover the worst daycare facilities in Florida.

A great tool to utilize when you’re doing a provider search is the checkbox for “Gold Seal Accredited” childcare providers. By checking that box, the search return will only display the very best of daycare facilities in your zip code. Gold Seal Accredited programs provide a level of care that exceeds the minimum child care licensing standards established by Florida law by meeting the higher standards of the approved accrediting agencies.

Online pictures, videos and conversations remain online and can easily be made public. What was once a private, fleeting moment of adolescent foolishness can now quickly become a lasting, public display that may impact on a child’s life well into college and even beyond.

Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that studies children’s media behaviors, recently conducted a poll of teenagers and parents. The study found that parents don’t know how their children use internet sites like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, but also that children don’t know how closely they are being watched.

This latter point is interesting because it begs the question: if 82 percent of parents check their child’s online profile regularly, and less than one quarter of children think they’re being watched, how is it that parents are so clueless? Well here are the facts:

* 49 percent of parents reported that their child was 13 or older before they used the Internet unsupervised. However, only 14 percent of teenagers said they waited that long.

* 23 percent of parents thought their children log onto social networking sites more than once a day while in actuality 51 percent of teens use them more than that.

* Just 4 percent of parents thought their children use social networking sites more than 10 times a day; 22 percent of teens said they’re online at least that often.

* Only 2 percent of parents suspected their child had posted explicit photos or videos of themselves or others online. However, 13 percent of teens admitted they had done so.

While 13 percent is a relatively small number, that corresponds to the one of the most extreme categories of online behavior. More telling I think is that nearly 40 percent of teens say that have posted something online that they later regretted and that almost 30 percent shared intimate and personal details online that they would not have shared in public.

As parents, we should make sure our children understand that while it’s easy to post things online because you are in the privacy of you own home usually, that online information is far from private. Even on sites like Facebook that provide various privacy features, that information can easily and quickly become very public.

In addition, because internet postings can be almost permanently public, actions that kids regret can come back to haunt them in the future. It’s important to understand that for those 54 percent of teens that say they had posted derogatory comments about teachers and those 24 percent of teens who report “hacking” someone else’s social network account.

These type of youthful indiscretions used to dissipate on the wind. Now that they are etched electronically into the public domain, they have the potential to derail college applications or job offers.

51 percent of parents say they know their child’s online profile password, but only 14 percent of teens think their parents know that information. Spying on our kids is not the answer. We need to teach our children to have a healthy life online as well as off. We need to talk to them about the ramifications of their actions.

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.

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.

Some of you parents no doubt send your children to the same summer camp you attended as a youngster. For those parents who don’t already know what summer camp would be best for their kids, the Orlando Sentinel has published a summer camp guide full of details on which camps specialize in what activities.

Whether your child is interested in arts, athletics or science, there’s a camp for him or her. The Sentinel stresses its guide is not comprehensive and that camps can fill up quite quickly. So don’t delay.

Fortunately, the large majority of child injuries suffered at summer camp are your garden variety scrapes, bruises and maybe the errant bee sting. However, if a catastrophic injury does occur this summer, you’ll have many questions. The child injury lawyers of Zimmet & Quarles will listen to you and help provide some peace of mind. We’ll answer your questions and explain your options.

For more information on keeping your child safe around water this summer, watch this Child Injury Lawyer Video Blog.