A frequent dose of sunshine is the right tonic to keep your kids hale and hearty if you reside where winters are long and the days short. Here is what you should know: 1. Sunlight helps minimize being sad and having SAD.  Sad (small letters) is having the “winter blues.”  SAD (capital letters) stands for [...]

Posted in Outdoor Recreation, Prevention Comments Off
Tags: antidepressant medication, artificial light, children, counseling, cranky, depression, Dr. Karl Neumann, Forest Hills Pediatrics, Health, kids, Kids Travel Doc, kids travel doctor, mental health, pediatrician, SAD, safety, seasonal affective disorder, sunlight, winter blues

Backpacks here. Backpacks there. Backpacks practically everywhere. Kids of all ages wear them – and, increasingly, so do adults. Toddlers wear them for the sake of wearing them, often empty and sometimes in the shape of cartoon characters. Older kids use them for books and sporting equipment and when hiking and traveling. For high school [...]

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Tags: backpack etiquette, backpack kids, backpacks, body weight, bodyweight, children, heavy backpacks, kids, shoulder straps, sporting equipment, Toddlers, waist strap

I recently received this email: “Dear Dr. Neumann: Do you think it’s OK to place a leash on my 20-month old daughter? I use it mostly for travel, especially at airports and amusement parks, but also at malls. What an attention-getter! Some strangers tell me that leashing children is cruel and stunts curiosity and independence [...]

Posted in Ask Dr. Neumann, Outdoor Recreation, Safe & Healthy Travel No Comments »
Tags: child leashes, children leashes, Dr. Neumann, freedom, infant, Kids Travel Doc, kids travel doctor, leashes

Ask pediatricians whether infants and young children can travel by air with ear infections and the likely answer is, no, they cannot. Ask pediatricians if they have ever seen a child with serious ear issues resulting from air travel and the likely answer is, no, they have not.  There is virtually nothing in the medical [...]

Posted in Air Travel, Outdoor Recreation, Prevention, Safe & Healthy Travel No Comments »
Tags: Air Travel, Ear infections, ear problems, ear problems air travel, flight, Infants, pediatric travel advice, safe to travel, travel safety, young children

Blame well-meaning parents for many an infant’s miserable air travel.  Conventional wisdom says that infants become dehydrated in flight unless you keep pouring fluids into them. Columnists write, “Make infants drink a bottle for every hour in the air.” “Never let a flight attendant pass by without asking for fluids.” “Make them drink, drink, drink.” [...]

Posted in Air Travel, Destinations, Outdoor Recreation, Safe & Healthy Travel, Travel No Comments »

Hi Readers. This is a first for our website, a posting by someone other than myself. This posting is by Chris Van Tilburg, MD, author of Introducing Your Kids to Outdoor Adventure (Stackpole, 2005).  The question I get most often regarding adventuring with kids is, is it safe?  When people read in magazines about my [...]

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Tags: adventuring, backpack, biking, breast-feed, camping, child-carry backpack, Chris Van Tilburg, Columbia River, exploring outdoors, Health, hiking, Infants, kids, nutrition, Oregon, safety, skiing, Vancouver Island, young children

To prevent children from being burned at cookouts, establish a “circle of safety” or a “forbidden zone” around cooking grills and campfires. Draw the line in the ground (literally, if possible) or delineate the area in some other way.  Even though such burns are preventable with reasonable precautions, each year more than 3,000 American children [...]

Posted in Food & Water Precautions, Outdoor Recreation, Prevention No Comments »
Tags: barbecues, burns, campfire safety, campfires, campgrounds, children, circle of safety, coals, cooking grills, cookout-related burns, cookouts, grills, kids, kids campfire, Kids Travel Doc, kids travel doctor, marshmellows

Picnics/Food safety/Kids According to the dictionary, a “picnic” is a relaxed, pleasurable event, often family-oriented, at which meals are eaten outdoors, preferably in idyllic surroundings. The meaning of the phrase “It’s no picnic” is a non-pleasurable event. (Perhaps, referring to becoming ill from eating spoiled food at a picnic?)  According to the Centers for Disease [...]

Posted in Food & Water Precautions, Outdoor Recreation No Comments »
Tags: bacteria, food preparation, food safety, gastrointestnal illness, irradiated food, kids, kids health, kids travel, Kids Travel Doc, kids travel doctor, kidstraveldoc.com, non-refrigerated, picnic basket, picnics, safety

Mother Nature provides us with an infinite array of wonders. But it seems that she also possesses a mischievous streak, perhaps to remind us that “natural” is not synonymous with “beneficial,” as many people like to think. Poison ivy is a case in point. It affects countless millions of Americans each year.               Here what you [...]

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Tags: poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, rash, urishiol

In the Northern Hemisphere, June is the month that the sun is most hazardous for eyes, especially the eyes of infants and young children.   The sun is closest to Earth, is straight above and there are more hours of sunshine. And the weather is generally cooler than in July and August, lulling adults into thinking [...]

Posted in Outdoor Recreation, Prevention, Sun No Comments »
Tags: alert, kids sunglasses, Sun, sunglasses, ultraviolet, UVA, UVB radiation