March, 2009

Having a baby is usually considered a joyous event, but all those dead-of-night feedings, pushy in-laws and general jitters can make life miserable for any new mom. To make matters worse, some women experience serious post-natal depression, which leads to a vicious cycle of fatigue, fights and even more stress. This can be particularly distressing for family members caught in the crossfire – a stressed-out mama can turn from “sweet-and-nurturing” to “hellfire-and-brimstone” at the drop of a hat.

Thus for new parents-to-be the recent announcement by US researchers that “measuring levels of a hormone midway through pregnancy may predict a woman's risk of postnatal depression” should be welcome news. The study focused primarily on the relationship between post-natal depression, which usually “starts four to six weeks after giving birth” and “affects around 10 to 15 percent of mothers,” and “pCRH (placental corticotropin-releasing hormone)” – a type of hormone that produces cortisol, which the body produces in greater amounts during pregnancy to help mothers-to-be deal with stress.

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Browsing for interesting articles online, my visual senses were overwhelmed with headlines reading ‘Teenagers Need Long Lie Ins’ and ‘Teenagers Improve Grades With Lie Ins’. Whilst teens might agree, parents no doubt find the concept of pandering to their children’s whining complaints of exhaustion ridiculous.

Parents should prepare to be shocked though as a test carried out at Northwestern University in Illinois shows that teenagers do actually need more sleep than children and adults. If that doesn’t convince parents to let teens spend all morning in bed, experiments performed by the Chairman of Circadian Neuroscience at Brasenose College, Oxford have revealed that teenagers brains perform better in the afternoons.

In a controversial move, Dr. Paul Kelley, headmaster at a school in the U.K has announced that he will delay the start of the school day until 11am because teenagers need more sleep and denying it could impact their mental and physical health and in turn education. ‘Teenagers are not lazy. We are depriving them of the sleep they need through purely biological factors beyond their control’ said Kelley.

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The coming of spring means more family outings, and like all Beijing parents we are starting to amass a list of “usual haunts” to take our baby. The selection is paltry for now – just a few spots here and there – as we have neither the time of the energy for elaborate day trips (at least not yet); but we expect it to grow in the coming spring and summer months.

Part of the reason we haven’t branched out very far lies in our own compound, Pingod. The ample garden is so nicely landscaped it draws families from the neighboring compounds (even the more expensive ones), and most days you’ll find it filled with a gaggle of babies, toddlers, ayis, moms, dads and grandparents chatting each other up about growth spurts, ayi salaries, strollers and the like.

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I often hear parents despair that children don’t read enough nowadays, given all the other distractions in kids’ lives.
Playing devil's advocate, I once asked a friend why it mattered. She responded, slightly annoyed, that she was worried her children wouldn’t learn enough vocabulary.

This is not a problem for Jacky Qiao, a 7th grade student at BISS who recently reached the final round of China’s first national English spelling bee. He went on to beat 5,000 other contestants, standing in front of a room full of strangers and winning the bee with the triumphant spelling of the word heliolatry (worship of the sun). His victory has already been described as a “monumental achievement”.

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This week’s blog is dedicated to the new members of Beijing’s expat community who may be struggling to deal with some unwanted attention from inquisitive locals.

I was at my local fruit shop (shui guo dian 水果店) picking up 2kgs of bananas (I have a banana addiction), when I had the familiar sense of someone staring at me. Normally I wouldn’t even bat an eyelid, but I couldn't help but turn around to see who exactly was so keen on observing a foreigner’s purchasing habits. Bad decision.

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Pass the kung pao chicken
Researchers in the US have announced a new method of treating peanut allergies based on experiments in which microscopic amounts of peanuts were given daily to a group of “33 severely allergic children” for two years. Doctors surmise that the experimental treatment works by desensitizing the body to the reactions over time and they claim that five of the test subjects showed “no sign of any remaining allergy.” This is welcome news for the growing number of kids who, for reasons unknown, develop this allergy – though it may be too late for epipen-taking adults who have had to forgo peanuts their whole lives.

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In the May issue of beijingkids, the team spent a long time chatting with Beijing families to find out where they spend their hard-earned money and how they pinch pennies during these tough economic times. After scouring the money feature at least three times, I decided to take a closer look at how I spend my cash. My discovery? My caffeine addiction costs me more in a week than my entire phone bill costs in a month. Foreigner or not, it is a crime against all that is goodly to spend RMB 560 a month on a beverage.

So today I am departing from my Chinese language adventures to share some small steps to save money.

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Traditional Chinese Medicine may seem mysterious, if not hokey, to some*, but one area that seems to hold the most weight is acupressure (tui na, 推拿), and its twin discipline, acupuncture (zhen jiu，针灸). Both practices are based on a system of pressure points located along meridians throughout the body, and though there is “no known anatomical or histological basis for the existence of acupuncture points or meridians,” pressure points have been studied extensively to the point that the concept has more or less been accepted by Western medicine (the American Heart Association, for instance, recognizes at least 11 pressure points on the body).

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Slate.com offers a couple of stinging rebukes to an op-ed piece in the New York Times on the latest “hand wringing” study citing forward-facing strollers as a cause of declining linguistic development in babies.

While I can certainly agree that the “unsubstantiated conjecture,” “endless ‘mays’ and ‘mights’,” and "anecdotal evidence” that the author, a developmental psychologist, uses in her argument probably qualifies this as just another example of “bogus trend spotting” in the media; you’ve got to hand it to these experts for coming up with increasingly creative ways to exploit parental angst.

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My first week back at school has been a sensory overload. The reading, the writing, the having to constantly feign understanding while my teacher discusses traditional Chinese farming practices. All I gleaned from that lesson was how to say “sheep skin turban” in Chinese; trust me when I say you will never need to lean how say that.

My supply of Chinese friends who are willing to hear me prattle on about school (one of the few topics I can hold more than a two minute conversation about) is fairly limited. So how do I practice my spoken Chinese? In my effort to be a good student (hen nu li de xue sheng 很努的力学生) I’m on a mission to talk to every single taxi driver (chu zu che si ji 出租车司机) in this fair town. Taxi drivers are easy prey, they can’t tell you to shut-up and they have nowhere to hide from your horrible grammar.

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Be a Part of the Team!

Beijingkids is currently looking for editors and interns. Check out the available positions here.

Want your baby to start talking sooner? Try buying a backward-facing stroller. New studies from the University of Dundee in Scotland have found that caregivers talk to infants more when the kids face them in strollers. Researchers observed how mothers behaved with infants in two kinds of strollers – one in which babies sit facing away from the mother, and one in which babies sit facing the mother. The result: Moms talk to their kids twice as much when facing them. This means more language development and social interaction.

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Kids in the News

Designer Babies?
A fertility clinic with branches in New York and Los Angeles is allegedly offering its patients the “ability to choose their unborn baby’s eye color, hair color, and skin color,” according to news agencies. The clinic has been allowing parents to choose the gender of their child for some time, according to its primary practitioner, and now he predicts that very soon, his patients will be able to customize their kid’s physical traits – a situation that draws parallels to eugenics experiments of days past and young Frankenstein.

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Global financial crisis got you down? Well, we can’t prop up your dwindling investments, but we can start a conversation about what everyone’s doing with their money these days. So come, all ye financial voyeurs. How do Beijing families approach saving and spending? How much does it cost to splurge on the high life in the capital? Can you really squirrel away a lot of cash without giving up precious luxuries?

Five Beijing families – expats and locals – share their financial philosophies as well as their budgets in the latest beijingkids.

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