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.

Mother's stress has impact on her view of child's behaviour.

NEW YORK: Mothers with a history of prenatal drug use who are stressed out by parenting are known to view their babies as more reactive, and as having a more difficult temperament. Now, a new study shows that this is as true for stressed-out moms with no history of drug use.
The findings suggest that it is possible to help women cope better with their parenting role by focusing on their individual characteristics, "and not on whether they used drugs before or after pregnancy," according to study author Dr. Stephen J. Sheinkopf, of Brown Medical School in Rhode Island."If mothers are highly stressed as parents, this will affect the ways that they think about and interact with their babies. This can have long term effects on how children develop and how families function," he added.

As the researchers report in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, an infant's behavior at 1 month of age predicted both the mother's ratings of the infant's temperament at 4 months and the mother's level of parenting stress.
In particular, extreme reactivity among young infants, as determined by an objective assessment of factors as varied as the infant's posture, movement, irritability, and consolability, predicted higher ratings of the infant's reactivity a few months later by their mothers. This was primarily true for mothers who reported higher levels of parenting-related stress, however, the researchers found.
"This is saying moms who are exposed to a lot of stress in parenting may be sensitive to their child's behavior in a way that makes them view their child as more difficult, more reactive," Sheinkopf said.
"Because we now know that this effect is true both for mothers with and without a history of drug use, this supports our view that we can help mothers with drug use problems be happier and more effective parents," the researcher explained.
Sheinkopf added that "though this is not a treatment study, it would suggest that moms should seek out help and utilize help out there to be happy, successful, well-adjusted parents." - Reuters

To be or not to be... an unmarried teen mother

NEW YORK - IN the new hit movie Juno and now in real life with Jamie Lynn Spears, 16-year-old girls get pregnant and decide to bear the child rather than opt for abortion. For social conservatives, it's a challenging story line - they condemn the teen sex but hail the ensuing choice.
Mr Bill Maier, a vice president of the conservative ministry Focus on the Family, said,
'We should commend girls like Jamie Lynn Spears for making a courageous decision to have the baby. On the other hand, there's nothing glamorous or fun about being an unwed teen mother.'

Spears, younger sister of pop star Britney Spears, has said she plans to raise her child in her home state of Louisiana.

The news about Spears was greeted with mixed emotions by Ms Leslie Unruh, a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, activist who has campaigned against abortion and for abstinence-only sex education. 'When I heard the story, I felt sad at first,' Ms Unruh said. 'Already her life is not the norm of other 16-year-old girls.You have a lot of teens who look at those people as role models,' she said. 'There's a danger of them thinking: 'She got pregnant? I guess I can have a baby too.' The message from Ms Unruh and others: It's not that simple.

The Roman Catholic Church, while firmly opposed to premarital sex, embraces the message that adoption is among the best options if an unmarried teen does become pregnant, said Ms Deirdre McQuade, a spokesman for the US Catholic Bishops Conference.
'The admirable choice for an unplanned pregnancy is to make the best parenting plan possible - whether that means making all the sacrifices necessary to raise the child or generously placing him or her in an adoptive family,' Ms McQuade said.

Juno is the latest in a series of recent movies in which the heroine, faced with an unexpected pregnancy, chooses not to have an abortion.
Dr Vanessa Cullins, vice-president for medical affairs at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said these story lines - generally with upbeat endings - oversimplify the tough choices facing real-life girls and women. Each year, more than 1 million of them in the United States opt to have an abortion.
'In the real world, it's important to weigh all the possible options and then come up with the best one for the teen, the family and the child,' Dr Cullins added. 'That will be different for different circumstances.'

National statistics released earlier this month showed the teen birth rate on the rise for the first time in 15 years.

Ms Demie Kurz, a sociologist who co-directs the University of Pennsylvania's women's studies program, noted that the Juno heroine and Jamie Lynn Spears come from well-off families and do not represent the many girls from low-income backgrounds who get pregnant.
'Some of them have the babies as part of their path to what they see as adulthood, but they often put their education on hold, and it makes life a lot tougher,' Ms Kurz said.
'Do we want to put burdens on these teenage girls by encouraging them to think that having a baby is cool?' She said it was reflective of the US political climate that few movies depict abortion as a valid option.

While Jamie Lynn Spears may have the financial resources to raise her child in comfort, psychotherapist Linda Perlman Gordon of Chevy Chase, Maryland, - who has written about teenage girls - said daunting emotional challenges likely await.
'Having to be a selfless parent is totally contradictory to the development of a teenager,' Ms Gordon said. 'To do it right, she's got to subsume her needs. She's going to have to give up the part of growing that would have allowed her to become an autonomous, independent person.' -- AP