Daily Dose of DrGreene

The Babymoon

What comes after the triumph of birth and the very first meal? When an athlete is named MVP of the Super Bowl, his next stop is a celebration trip to a famous theme park. When a couple gets married, they often enjoy a honeymoon to celebrate their new relationship. A friend of mine named Ann Douglas, a parenting author chock full of practical wisdom, recommends a babymoon to celebrate your new family.

I like her name for this important idea. On a honeymoon, the couple sets aside ordinary responsibilities to focus on enjoying each other and building a foundation of closeness for the years ahead. During a babymoon, the couple likewise sets aside other work and home responsibilities to focus on learning about and establishing the new family. Both can be magical, unique times, building memories to last a lifetime.

But I contend that a honeymoon and a babymoon are also very different. While honeymooning, your time is spent on some combination of intimacy, adventure, relaxation, and indulgence. It's a very special kind of vacation. But on a babymoon, time is spent in the seemingly ceaseless cycle of the most basic bodily tasks, feeding and burping and changing diapers. It's a very special kind of work.

A honeymoon is a going out, a break from day to day life. A babymoon is a drawing in, a narrowing, a concentration on the very core of day to day life. And as you get to know each other in the mundane, you grow a new dimension, a new depth.

One of my vivid memories from childhood (back before DVD's and Tivo), is watching The Wizard of Oz on TV. (Don't tell - I used to hide behind the couch during the flying monkeys.) I remember my wonder at the sudden transition from the dull, sepia beige landscape of Kansas to the dazzling 3-strip Technicolor of Oz. And I had mixed feelings about Dorothy's insistent longing to leave the boldly colorful magical land, as she repeated, “There's no place like home.”

A babymoon is entering Oz and Kansas rolled into one. It's learning to see you're a hero on a quest, while stuck in one place with a burp cloth on your shoulder. It's finding vibrant color and magic in the everyday world of home.

Alan Greene MD FAAP

This is an excerpt from: From First Kicks to First Steps: Nurturing Your Babys Development from Pregnancy Through the First Year of Life, McGraw-Hill, 2004, Pp. 197-198

The Tooth Fairy Lives in Texas. And Has a New Purpose.

In 2003 I wrote an article about the very sensitive subject of stem cell research. However, I wasn't writing about fetal stem cell harvesting; I was discussing stem cells found in baby teeth. Preliminary research then showed that stem cells preserved just the right way were loaded with living stem cells the next day. At the end of the article I speculated it wouldn't be long before it would be practical to keep baby teeth for their stem cells, and I hoped it would happen before my youngest son lost all of his teeth.

When the last two teeth of my youngest child were already loose and wiggling,, I received a phone call from Jeff Johnson of Austin, Texas who had read my article on stem cell research. He had decided to start his own bank for stem cells from baby teeth.. He thanked me for what I had written,, and asked me if the son I mentioned in the piece had lost all his teeth yet. We talked for awhile, and I decided to try to send my son's last baby teeth to BioEden. We would have to move fast. He called on a Monday. My son already had an orthodontist appointment scheduled for Thursday that week, where the last teeth would fall. Jeff rushed our family a “tooth preserving kit” that contained instructions, vials (the teeth were to be placed in the vials along with fresh milk), icepacks, and a light-weight ice chest inside a shipping box..

When the big day arrived, my son was off to the orthodontist's office. Although the “tooth preserving kit” makes the process of packaging and caring for the tooth simple, we had quite the adventure that afternoon. After accidentally leaving the kit at home, preserving the teeth in organic milk (something my wife Cheryl believes was essential for success-conventional milk just wouldn't do), and after having many mishaps with FedEx, we were tired and just hoping that there would be enough stem cells to culture for our family's future safety.

After a few weeks, Jeff called us back to tell us whether the stem cells were successfully harvested. We were relieved and exhilarated to hear that my son's teeth worked with flying colors. Now anyone in our family might benefit and use his stem cells to repair damaged teeth - or perhaps even spinal cord injuries, diabetes, or degenerative diseases. We are excited to have this new medical safety net, and look forward to seeing how the Tooth Fairy's role changes in the years to come.

Note: I have no financial relationship with BioEden and other companies that perform this service which may be available now or in the near future.

Alan Greene MD FAAP

Raising a Resilient Child

It's natural for parents to wish that they could prevent their children from experiencing heartache. But at some point in life, we will all experience disappointment and loss. We can't stop all painful events from happening, but can we change how painful events affect our children? Researchers looked into the stories of almost 9000 ten-year-old children to see what could be learned. Archives of Diseases in Childhood released the results on August 3, 2006. The classroom teachers of the children were asked a single question - Is the child “worried or anxious about many things?” on a scale from 0 to 50 (very anxious). To examine the effects of a common major stress, the researchers focused on whether the children's parents had divorced or separated in the last 5 years. They learned something very powerful. Not surprisingly, divorce and separation are linked to higher worry and anxiety. But some kids were far more likely to react this way to the pain of separation or divorce than others.

Breast-fed kids whose parents had divorced or separated were about twice as likely as other breast-fed kids to be highly anxious. But bottle-fed children who had gone through the same thing were more than 9 times more likely. The breast-fed children proved strikingly more resilient, even after accounting for a number of other variables.

There are a lot of possible ways to explain this effect. We know that, in some animals, the early close physical contact of nursing can physically change the way the brain is built. Stress hormone receptors are enhanced in the hippocampus of the brain. Serotonin effects are changed compared to those who received bottled breast milk. But beyond this, breast milk itself influences brain development. Perhaps the leptin in breast milk reduces stress by its actions on the hippocampus, hypothalamus, and the adrenal glands. Or maybe the breastfeeding is just a sign of closer attachment, on average, between parent and child. Or of something different in the personalities of the parents. It will take years to sort out exactly what is going on and why. My hunch is that all of these factors - and others - play a role.

I want to give my children the gift of resilient optimism…to teach them, wherever they may find themselves, to ask, “What is the best way forward from here?”

What do you want to give your children?

Alan Greene MD FAAP