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AIKEN-AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
JANUARY 22, 2016
Kid’s Stuff NOTES FROM A PEDIATRIC INTERN by Caroline Colden, M.D.
Let’s talk about reading When children come to see me for their well-child checks in my clinic, I try to talk with parents about reading books to and with children. At MCG, we try to even have books ready to give to the kids at their appointment to take home and keep. It’s funny to me, because even the really little kids who don’t really know what books are yet get excited when you give them a book. Maybe they just like presents, but almost all of the kids will immediately start to open the book (sometimes upside down) and look through the pages. Even if they cannot understand the words, the colors and pictures are still very stimulating to the children and their imaginations. Children are never too young to start having reading time. Even newborn babies can benefit from the activity. Studies have shown that just speaking and talking to a baby helps to stimulate language development and brain activity, and reading books is a perfect way to do this. As children get older, they will start learning new words and be able to put words, eventually sentences together. Reading can facilitate this process wonderfully, as it provides new vocabulary words to the child to store away in their arsenal of words, and it helps them to establish a baseline of good grammar. Some kids will love (even demand), to hear the same story again Please see READING page 4
got guns? Of course you do. This is America. It’s your Second Amendment right to bear arms. Living as we do in a nation said to have a “gun culture,” gun owners have the duty and obligation to keep their firearms safely secured and always properly used. This obligation is especially important when a gun owner is a parent or grandparent or an aunt or an uncle — in short, anyone whose home contains both guns and young people, even if only occasionally. You don’t have to think back too far to recall local news stories involving children and guns, often with tragic consequences. Just one example: a third-grader at W.S. Hornsby Elemetary School was shot and wounded last August when a gun brought to school by a fellow third-grader accidentally went off as the student played with the gun inside his desk. Fortunately, the bullet — from a .38 semi-automatic handgun — only grazed the other student, but it could have been far worse. The person charged in the incident? The gun owner, the boyfriend of the shooter’s
grandmother, who kept the loaded gun on the top shelf of a curio cabinet in the family’s kitchen. This headline-for-a-day story could be compared to the tip of an iceberg. The big picture: this is a huge issue, and coming to appreciate it should move gun owners to be safer and more responsible.
of Sidney’s Department Store and the CSRA’s unofficial firearms expert, for his words of wisdom on gun safety.
How We Compare Please see GOT GUNS? back cover Public health researchers recently completed an analysis of World Health Organization data from 2010 comparing gun deaths in 23 high-income countries. Where the U.S. stands among its international peers is, in the words of the researchers, “eye-popping.” The statistics involving guns and youth were particularly sad: of all the children (aged 0 to 14) who were killed by guns in all 23 countries studied, 91 percent lived in the U.S. + Among 15 to 24-year-olds, the gun homicide rate in the U.S. is 49 times higher than in the 22 other high-income countries. And that represents a drop from the last time the same figures were analyzed, in 2003! © What’s the solution? We asked Steven Fishman, owner SEE PAGE 3
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