ARTICLES RELATED TO:
0-12 months: Infant

As a parent, it’s natural to have concerns about your child’s development, and conditions like lip and tongue ties can be confusing, especially with the images they evoke of a tongue-tied baby. Anywhere from 1% to 11% of newborns have signs of tongue tie, or ankyloglossia (ang-kuh-low-GLOSS-ee-uh), according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Lip and tongue ties aren’t cause for a lot of worry on their own, but they can affect feeding, speech, and oral health, or even be indicators of related conditions. Here are some other common questions about lip and tongue ties, including how to recognize the signs, their potential impact, and what to consider when making treatment decisions. What Are Lip and Tongue Ties?  Which Parts of the Mouth Are Affected? How Do I Know If It’s a Lip or Tongue Tie? Identifying lip and tongue ties can be challenging. Tied tongue in newborns is often […]

Much of a baby’s early life is spent sleeping. In fact, many newborns snooze 16 to 17 hours a day! It’s important that sleeping hours be just as safe as those spent awake. Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is a leading cause of death in infants 1 month to 1-year-old. Most of these SIDS deaths occur in the first six months of life. Here are the top tips to keep in mind to ensure that your baby’s sleep environment is as safe as possible. 1. Keep your baby in your bedroom – but not your bed. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends room-sharing (as in bedroom-sharing). This is when an infant sleeps in the same bedroom as their parents (but not the same bed) for at least their first six months. The reason sharing a bed (also called “bed-sharing”) is not recommended is that parents can accidentally roll onto […]

Eat, poop, sleep, and repeat. As routine as these things may seem, we all know the struggles associated with parenting infants. Our job, as your friendly neighborhood dietitians, is to help guide you through that first part – feeding your infant. We are going to discuss, in a rather general sense, two primary feeding methods. To make a sometimes confusing topic a bit more relatable, I like to compare infant feeding to macaroni and cheese. You have your homemade mac-n-cheese and your pre-made mac-n-cheese. Both are delicious, and typically contain the same calories and nutrients, it’s just a matter of the resources available to you. Breastfeeding First, let’s talk about breastfeeding. Just like your homemade mac-n-cheese, breast milk is designed to specifically meet your family’s needs. Breast milk is unique to each woman as well each environment. That means, if you breastfeed (or pump) in day care, the milk will […]

With ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes, a newborn infant seems perfectly made. But the one thing a baby is not born with is enough vitamin K. For this reason, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) since 1961 has strongly recommended that all newborns receive a dose of vitamin K at birth. This has been the standard of care for infants since that time. However in the last few years, there has been a small, but alarming trend of parents who are opting to defer the injection at birth. Why Vitamin K? Vitamin K is a crucial vitamin that helps the body activate clotting factors, which can prevent bleeding. It does not pass in sufficient quantity to an infant during pregnancy, so every baby is born deficient. Most of the vitamin K we make in our bodies comes from the food we eat and from healthy bacteria in our […]

Vitamin D helps to ensure that our bodies absorb and retain calcium and phosphorous, which are both needed for building strong bones. The need for vitamin D begins even before a baby is born; insufficient intake can put an infant’s bone development at risk. Why is Vitamin D so Essential? Severe vitamin D deficiency can lead to nutritional rickets, which can cause softened and weakened bones. This disease is most often seen in children younger than 2 years of age. Because recent studies have shown that most infants in the United States have not been consuming enough vitamin D, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) now recommends that all infants have a minimum intake of 400 International Units (IU) of vitamin D per day beginning soon after birth. How Does the Body Get Vitamin D? Vitamin D can be obtained in two ways: first, from the foods we eat; and […]

It seems like everyone has a story that involves a child, a small object, and an orifice: a bean in a nostril, a pebble in an ear—maybe even a swallowed Barbie shoe or penny. It’s no wonder these instances are so common. Kids are naturally curious, and their worlds contain so many things that fit just so in the body parts they’re learning to explore. So what do you do when your child becomes one of these stories? It all depends on two things: what’s the object, and which opening is it stuck in? First things first: If you know or suspect that your child has swallowed a button battery, get to the emergency department immediately. Swallowed batteries can cause esophageal perforation (a hole in the tube that carries food from the mouth to the stomach), and other life-threatening injuries—sometimes within hours. It’s also time to head to the ER […]