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Friday, January 11, 2008

Never take a chance with your baby's life.

In Singapore, an Indonesian maid did not tell her employers that their baby boy had knocked his head against the toilet bowl while she was bathing him until almost six hours later, a coroner's court heard.
Two-month-old Jordan Teo Ka Jun died of bleeding in the membrane of the skull as a result on Sept 10 last year.
On Thursday, the maid, named a potential defendant at an inquiry into baby Jordan's death, elected to remain silent.
The investigating officer, said the maid had fed the baby that morning at her employers' flat before bathing him in the master bedroom toilet. The maid was squatting to bathe him in a tub beside the toilet bowl when she turned left while still holding the baby on her left arm to retrieve a towel on the lid of the toilet bowl. Just then, she heard a knock as Jordan's head hit against the side of the toilet bowl. He started crying. She gave him a pacifier and he stopped crying about three minutes later. She put the baby back into the stroller and dressed him up.

Meanwhile, Jordan's grandmother was in the kitchen toilet when she heard the baby cry. She then went to check on the baby. The maid kept mum about the head knocking incident as she was afraid of being reprimanded. The baby kept crying on and off and refused to drink his milk.
At about 1.45pm when he started to cry again, the maid told his nine-year-old half-brother who had just returned from school that Jordan had refused to drink milk and had been crying non-stop. Later, when the baby continued to cry, the maid told the boy to call his mother, Madam Lau. She told her to rub some medicated oil on the baby which she did. The maid observed that the baby's cries became softer and his face became pale. He also appeared to be weaker.

At about 3.05pm the baby's grandmother noticed the baby's intermittent breathing, she immediately carried him to a clinic nearby where the doctor performed cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on the infant.

An ambulance was called and Jordan was taken to hospital where he died.

Anxious babies have more bad dreams as preschoolers

NEW YORK - PRESCHOOLERS' odds of having nightmares may be related to their temperament as infants, which may be noticed as early as 5 months old, new research suggests.
In a study that followed 987 children from infancy to age 6, Canadian researchers found that the majority had an occasional bad dream, while a few had them frequently. The odds of having nightmares - and of having them consistently through the preschool years - were higher among children who were considered to be more anxious or 'difficult' as babies.

The findings suggest that young children's bad dreams 'are trait-like in nature and associated with personality characteristics measured as early as 5 months,' the researchers report in the medical journal Sleep.

A previous study with identical and non-identical twins suggested that people may inherit a certain vulnerability to having nightmares, Dr Tore Nielsen, one of the researchers on the new study, said.

In this study, 'bad dreams' as early as the age of 2.5 were predicted by signs of anxiety at the ages of 5 months and 17 months, explained Dr Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal.

Environmental stressors - starting school for the first time, for instance - may conspire with an inherited vulnerability to spur young children's nightmares, according to Dr Nielsen.

The study found that the percentage of children having an occasional bad dream held steady from the age of 29 months to age 6 - about two thirds at each age, according to parents.

Similarly, less than 2 per cent of children had frequent nightmares at each age.

When the researchers looked at mothers' reports on their children's temperaments during infancy, they noted differences between children who had no bad dreams and those who had them consistently through early childhood.

Children in the latter group tended to be more restless and cry more at the age of 5 months, and they were more difficult to calm at 17 months, according to mothers' reports.

The results raise the possibility that calming infants' persistent distress may relieve them of some bad dreams later in childhood, according to the researchers.

However, he added that based on other research, a good starting point would be to improve children's early bonding, or 'secure attachment', with their parents.

For older children who are having distressing dreams, Dr Nielsen said he and his colleagues have found that having the children 'draw the dream' and share it with their parents can be helpful.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Mother jailed for dumping dead son in rubbish

In Hong Kong, a 29-year-old mother was jailed for 32 months on Tuesday for dumping the body of her three-year-old son in the rubbish after he choked to death on a sticky dumpling.

Leung Man Ki, a single mother, was sentenced in Hong Kong's district court for 32 months for preventing the burial of a corpse, according to a judiciary spokeswoman.

The court had heard how Leung had fed her son a glutinous chicken dumpling for breakfast last June, but it got lodged in the child's throat and caused his death.

She then discarded the boy's body in a plastic bag and left it with other trash on the street. The body was taken away by a rubbish truck to a landfill and has never been recovered.

Leung had originally been charged with murder, but the charge was reduced to the lesser offences of cruelty and prevention of burial.

Friday, January 04, 2008

Please be careful with your children.

In Malaysia, a two-year-old boy was killed yesterday when a schoolbus ran over him. He is believed to have walked out of his house unnoticed and crawled under the bus that had stopped in front of his house. His mother was taking her two other children to the bus when the incident happened at 11.20am. A traffic police spokesman said the bus driver heard a sound from the rear as the bus moved. The mother then discovered, to her horror, that her son had been crushed. The boy, who suffered head injuries, was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival.