Good Reads

Fight Junk Food Marketing to Kids {WebMD}
But how much influence does food marketing have on your preschooler, grade-schooler, teen, or even you? A recent study showed that after viewing snack food advertisements, children and adults were more likely to eat more, regardless of reported hunger. Seeing the commercials trained them, in a way, to want the food.
HT: Sarah

Rear-Facing Seat {Be Seat Smart}
New recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration state that children should ride rear facing until age 2. Many parents and care givers have questions. “Why so long rear facing? Won’t his legs get hurt? What’s he do with his legs? Won’t she be squished? It was good enough for my kids 20 years ago, why isn’t it good enough anymore?”

Sounds of Arguing Affect Babies’ Brains, Even While They’re Asleep {HuffPost}
Graham and her colleagues scanned the brains of 20 sleeping infants, ages 6 months to 12 months, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (a technique that measures blood flow as a proxy for brain activity). Inside the scanner, the babies heard nonsense sentences spoken by a male adult in very angry, mildly angry, happy or neutral tones.

Strollers, Baby Carriers, and Infant Stress {boba}
But the truth is that the average Western infant between three weeks and three months of age is carried a little more than two and a half hours a day (Heller, 118.) We end up carrying the baby to the car in a container, through the store in a container, to eat lunch in a container, back to the car in a container and home in a container*. Sometimes from there to the swing that we can click right into without touching the baby so we can make dinner, into the bouncy seat while we eat, and soon after to sleep in a crib. The west has diverged from eons of child rearing and has gotten to the point so that objects are defining our baby’s existence more so than our bodies.

Move {Rick Mereki, Tim White, Andrew Lees}