The Dangers of Coats & Car Seats

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Winter brings cold weather and potentially slick roads, but families still need to travel every day. We bundle up our children to help them brave the elements, but a bulky coat and a car seat can be a dangerous combination. The bulk from the coat can keep the harness too loose to safely protect the child in the event of an impact or accident.

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There are ways to safely transport children in child car seats while still keeping them warm. Here are some tips for providers and parents to follow from the experts at Consumer Report’s Auto Test Center:

Step 1: Put the coat on your child, sit him or her in the car seat and fasten the harness. Tighten the harness until you can no longer pinch any of the webbing with your thumb and forefinger.

Step 2: Without loosening the harness at all, unhook it and remove your child from the car seat. Take the coat off, put your child back in the car seat, and buckle the harness straps, which should be adjusted just as they were when the child was wearing the coat.

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If you can pinch the webbing between your thumb and forefinger now, then the coat is too bulky to be worn under the harness.

If you find that the coat can’t be safely worn under the harness, here are a couple of things you can do:

For smaller children, put a blanket over them to keep them warm.

Only use aftermarket covers, essentially fitted blankets, designed to give additional warmth that are approved by the car-seat manufacturer for your specific car seat. Such covers have been tested with the seat and won’t compromise your child’s safety.

For a bigger child, after securing him or her in the car seat, turn the coat around and put it on backward (with arms through the armholes), so the back of the coat serves as a blanket resting on top of the harness.

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Fall STEM: Sink or Float Activity

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This is such a fun fall activity for children to use their brains! You can even add a sensory aspect depending on the sink/float items you choose.

Fall items you can use:

 

To start off the science experiment, have kids think about which items on the tray will float and which items will sink. If you’re doing this activity with multiple children, make a list of who thinks what items will float/sink so you can compare later.

Have children start experimenting! Some might be surprised about their predictions. Ask them why they thought an item would sink/float and help them find the reason why it actually floats/sinks.

 

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Fall STEM: Creating Structures with Pumpkin Candy

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How to Build Structures with Candy Pumpkins for a Halloween STEM Challenge

 

This is a very easy activity with limitless possibilities! It relies on creativity, imagination, and a little STEM thrown in! As they build, they’ll count and measure, using tons of math without even realizing it. There is so much trial and error involved it’s great for scientific thinking!

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Materials Needed:

  • Toothpicks
  • Gummy Pumpkin Candy
  • Imagination

Let the children make their own buildings and structures or ask them to build specific shapes using a certain number of pumpkins and toothpicks!

Trust Us…Baby Shark is Helping your Child Learn!

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In a world of apps, eBooks and streaming, it is hard to believe that something as simple as a few verses of “Baby Shark” could make much of a difference on your child’s brain. Although it may be driving some people crazy, it’s actually helping children learn! Research has shown, that simple songs and nursery rhymes can help your child learn language and literacy skills. Here’s how:

Repetition is Key!

Children benefit from repetition and review of concepts, and the right kind of children’s songs have the repetition necessary to really make developing language concepts stick. Through interactive finger play songs and chants, children can learn new words to grow their vocabulary and basic concepts, such as loud/quiet, up/down, in/out, as well as number concepts. They can also develop cognitive skills, such as memory, sequencing and attention by singing songs and chants that have many verses such as “The Ants Go Marching” and “Going on a Bear Hunt.”

Try these songs with little ones to encourage memory, sequencing, attention and language skills:

“Do You Know the Muffin Man?”

“Bringing Home a Baby Bumble Bee”

“Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich”

“Five Little Ducks”

“Round and Round the Garden”

“John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt”

 

Get them Moving!

Children learn best when they see it, hear it, say it and move it. Songs with movements and gestures are the perfect match for this learning style.

These songs all have hand and body movements to match the words!

“Baby Shark”

“Hurry Hurry, Drive the Fire Truck”

“Five Little Ducks”

“Icky Sticky Bubble Gum”

“Open Shut Them”

“Where is Thumbkin?”

It’s Rhyme Time!

Rhyming is an essential reading readiness skill. Songs and chants that rhyme help your children learn to play with and to explore the sounds of language. Even before they know the alphabet, rhyming can teach them the pre-literacy skills they will need to sound out words and to identify sound patterns in words. Research has shown that children who are taught nursery rhymes at an early age have better reading skills than those who were not exposed to them.

See if the children you care for can remember these rhymes!

“Down By the Bay”

“Willoughby Wallaby Woo”

“The Name Game Song”

“I Like to Eat Apples and Bananas”

“This Old Man”

“Hickory Dickory Dock”

Chants, nursery rhymes and simple songs with repetitive tunes and verses have been shown to help children to learn language, reading and important cognitive skills. From bedtime to bath time, and even while waiting in line at the store, integrating songs into your daily routine will help your child to develop a strong foundation upon which language and literacy skills can grow. So when you are singing your hundredth rendition of “Baby Shark,” remember the impact you are making in the brain of your child, because one day the sound of your child’s first word or listening to a story she has learned to read, will be music to your ears.

 

 

 

 

 

The Dangers of Baby Bottle Propping

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Bottle propping is a dangerous practice that goes back years. But it is now receiving increased attention as society tries to sell a “solution” for everything.

Feeding a baby with a bottle resting upright against something allows the milk to flow without the need for parental hands. And over the last few years, numerous devices that essentially make feeding a baby a hands free activity have flooded the market. Promoted as enabling parents to get a break from the proposed monotony of caring for a baby, they sell a solution that could be deadly.

Tragically, bottle propping can be fatal. Young babies may not have the head control or strength to move away from the flow of the milk that is being aided by gravity. Quite simply they can choke to death as they cannot escape from the milk, or inhale it as the bottle becomes displaced.

There is also the very real risk that babies simply end up consuming too much milk if it keeps flowing. Research has shown how babies take more milk from a bottle than they do when they breastfeed (one reason why bottle fed babies can be at a higher risk of being overweight) and this increases if they are encouraged to take more – as a propped bottle would “encourage” them to do.

Yes, an older baby might be able to move their head away, but at what stage? When they’ve had enough? Or when they really can’t stand any more? Small extra amounts of milk every day matter. Those few extra calories can turn into extra grams and pounds over the months. And encouraging a baby to keep feeding when they are full can also interfere with their ability to control their appetite later on.

Then there is the inescapable fact that having a bottle propped into your mouth when you can’t remove it can’t be the nicest feeding experience. Feeding is about so much more than nutrition. Holding a baby warm and close while being fed is a big part of them feeling secure and loved. It’s no coincidence that the sight range of newborn babies is pretty much perfect to reach their parents eyes at the angle that they would be held for a feed. Skin to skin contact is ideal when possible during feeds, but just the fact that the baby is being fed by a human being increases oxytocin, helping calm them and create general all round lovely feelings.

And no, you don’t need to stare endlessly into a baby’s eyes at every feed, but there is a vast gulf between that and not even holding a baby.

Hungry but happy. MJTH/Shutterstock