Proving my theory that babies and toddlers are constantly searching for new ways to scare the hell out of their parents, a new study comes out showing that an average of 2,270 children under three are treated in hospital emergency rooms every year for injuries involving pacifiers, bottles and sippy cups (the majority are one-year olds).  According to the study, which looked at ER data for the past 20 years, two thirds of the accidents involved bottles and 86 of the injuries involved falling down. In 14.3% of cases, the culprit was the seemingly harmless sippy cup.

Some of the reported injuries included lacerations to the mouth, cuts and bruises to the lip or tongue and a variety of dental injuries. ”Teeth were either knocked out, chipped, pushed back up into the gums or knocked sideways,” says Sarah Keim, lead study author and a researcher at the Center for Biobehavioral Health at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

The researchers were nice enough to point out that kids–especially those who are just learning to walk–are capable of choking on or cutting themselves on just about everything. So all you can do–short of wrapping the kids in bubble wrap–is to take reasonable precautions. The most reasonable being to not run around the house with anything in the mouth (babies shouldn’t have anything in their mouths either).

The study was published in the June 2012 edition of the journal Pediatrics. You can get a few more details here.

Every 90 minutes, a child under 18 goes to the emergency room for a battery-related incident, according to a new study by the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. That’s twice the rate from 1990. The number of batteries swallowed by children more than doubled from over the past 20 years. More than 80 percent of the time, the culprit is a button battery.

A lot of toys and games have those annoying panels that you have to unscrew to insert or replace batteries. But fewer than a third of the batteries showing up in kids’ throats or stomachs are actually from toys. The rest are from products that weren’t actually meant to be used by young children, including watches (14 percent), calculators (12 percent), flashlights (9 percent) and remote controls (6 percent).

If you’ve got a child under 18 around the house, do your family a huge favor and make sure anything and everything that has a battery either has a screw-on panel or is taped securely enough so that a child can’t get into it. Then tape it again, since we all know that kids make a science of opening things they aren’t supposed to be able to open. And keep all of your spare batteries far out of the reach of your kids. Then move them even farther away.

Police in Farmington, New Mexico were called in when a neighbor spotted the 4-year old outside by herself. Her year-old sister was found a while later–fortunately in good health–in an unfenced irrigation ditch a few feet from the trailer where Wellito was supposed to have been watching the kids while their mother was at work.

The children’s mother told police that “she had spoken to Ms. Wellito before going to work and had told her not to drink any alcoholic beverages until after she got off work at 5 p.m.” Excuse me, do you really need to have a conversation with a baby sitter about when it’s appropriate to start drinking?

According to police reports, officers searched the trailer and found “a 750 ml bottle of Crystal Palace Vodka that was nearly empty on the kitchen counter, an empty 375 ml bottle of Crystal Palace in the trash can, and an empty six-pack of Smirnoff alcoholic drinks the floor in the living room.” No big surprise the Wellito’s blood alcohol was .30, nearly four times the legal limit of .o8.

New Jersey mother of seven, Patricia Krentcil, is facing child endangerment charges for allegedly taking her 5-year old daughter into a tanning booth. Krentcil, who, as you can see from the pictures, is a regular tanning salon customer, denies the charges. She says that her daughter got sunburned by being outside on an especially warm April Day (ever heard of sunscreen?) But the daughter, who was itching from the sunburn, told administrators at her school that she had been in the tanning booth with her mom.

When a TMZ reporter asked whether Krenctil thought the case against her was some kind of witch hunt, Krentcil said, ”Yes. Yes. There’s somebody out there on my whole life that doesn’t like me because they’re jealous, they’re fat and they’re ugly.”

Witch hunt or not, Krentcil has been banned by more than 60 tanning salons in the New Jersey/Tri-State  area. According to the New York Post, some salons have even put up Wanted posters so employees can be sure to keep her off the premises.

More on this story here.

Hilton, whose daughter has significant special needs, has been a tireless advocate for military families–especially those coping with a child who has disabilities. Oh, and he’s also pursuing a graduate degree at George Washington University.

In his profile the magazine, Hilton wrote, “In my free time (who are we kidding; I’m writing this at 0500 before the kids get up), I like to play poker, watch football and try to squeeze in the occasional workout.” He also loves dates with his wife “when we can actually talk.”

You can read a bit more about this here.

My entire post on this topic is at the Talking Men’s Health Blog. You should read it here.

A study done in Denmark just found that children who wake up at night and are allowed to fall back to sleep in their parents’ bed feel more secure and are less likely to overeat. Looking at it from the other side, “children that never entered the parents’ bed during night had a risk that was over 3-times higher of being overweight compared to those that did enter their parents’ bed every night.”

Read more about this study here.