Billion Children Affected by War, Famine, Disease
Kids Almanac - December 19, 2004

In its annual State of the World's Children report, UNICEF says half of the world's population of children suffer from poverty, violence or AIDS.
Acording to the United Nations Children's Fund report, more than one-billion children worldwide are suffering from severe hardships that are denying them a healthy and secure upbringing.
UNICEF says the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child is routinely violated, and blames governments for their failure to prevent human-rights abuses and carry out economic reforms.
UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy says while progress has been made in some areas, overall, countries around the world have failed their children. “I have seen many things in my 10 years at UNICEF,” says Ms. Bellamy, “Many great achievements for children but frankly, I have seen many more opportunities missed and deliberate acts of greed and knowing shortsightedness… The state of the world's children is not what it should be or not what it could be and not what it ought to be, not what we have promised it would be.”
Carol Bellamy blames the governments, and urges citizens to become more active in demanding greater accountability from their representatives. “Childhood is under threat not for mysterious reasons that strain our imaginations, but because of deliberate choices made by governments and others in power,” Ms. Bellamy says, “Poverty does not persist because of nothing. War does not emerge from nowhere. HIV/AIDS does not spread by choice of its own. These are our choices. How we allocate our resources, how we assess the impact of our decisions, how we consider children in our choices, these are the moments that matter.”
Although the UNICEF report paints a bleak picture, Carol Bellamy says she is confident that improvements can be made if governments act to change their priorities and reassign their resources. “Although they may seem intractable, poverty, conflict and AIDS can be curtailed,” she says, “They can be slowed. They can be bent to our will. Once we decide in favor of protecting childhood, we can accomplish nearly anything.”
UNICEF urges government to meet their commitments under the U.N. Millenium Development Goals of reducing child mortality by two-thirds by 2015.

Researchers have hit on what may be an inexpensive way to prevent death from infections in children with HIV until anti-retroviral drugs become affordable in the developing world. In an article published in the Lancet, investigators report how they slashed the death rate of children infected with AIDS by nearly half using a common, cheap antibiotic drug.
The 20-month study involved more than five-hundred HIV-infected children between the ages of one and 14 in Zambia. In an effort to prevent life-threatening infections in immune-compromised children, investigators gave daily doses of the inexpensive and widely available drug, co-trimoxazole, to half the children. The rest received a placebo or sugar pill.
When the initial results showed that the antibiotic reduced the death rate by 42 percent, the study was stopped and all the children were put on co-trimoxazole therapy.
Co-infections in people with AIDS , such as tuberculosis, are a main cause of death. The benefit of co-trimoxazole taken preventatively is that it keeps such infections in check, even though bacteria have become resistant to the drug. The study author is Diana Gibb of England's Medical Research Council. “We're not talking about this drug actually having a direct affect on the HIV itself,” she says, “It's having an effect on what we think is the bacterial infections there, despite in the test tube, if you like, where there's evidence of resistance.”
Dr. Gibb notes that co-trimoxazole stacks up well against anti-retroviral drugs, in reducing the death rate from HIV. Until anti-AIDS drugs become widely available in poor countries, Dr. Gibb says, the antibiotic can be very useful. “It's not in that sort of order, but it's still a very good start, she says, “And it's a good reason for testing children, getting them into follow-up, giving them nutritional help and co-trimoxazole which is cheap.”
Dr. Gibb believes that co-trimoxazole should be given to all HIV-infected individuals, no matter how old they are or how sick, to prevent life-threatening infections.

Pollution Endangers Children’s Health
Kids Almanac - 10/28/04

Teenagers raised in heavily polluted environments can grow up with reduced lung capacity. That's the finding of a new study that followed school children in Los Angeles, California, one of America's most polluted cities.
Among those at greatest risk are children with asthma, the most common chronic childhood disease in the United States. But the long-term effects of breathing pollution could impact a much wider group of young people, despite some well-meaning efforts to clear the air.
A low electronic tone alerts students at Carrick High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that it's time to change classes. For the next five minutes the entire student body or some 14-hundred teenagers is on the move through a maze of hallways that extends for over a city block.
Some may race to the gym, swim center or music studios, which were part of a major renovation a few years ago. As they hurry to class, most students are unaware of the upgrades that make Carrick a healthier place to study. Linda Mihalic, who managed the renovation project, says some newly installed devices make the air better to breathe. “The main thing is that there is more circulation,” she says, “Indoor air quality is a big issue with buildings and schools and that (means) circulating the air that people breath. There is a goal that we have to try to provide 30 percent outside air into the classrooms, and it is has made a measurable difference.”
According to Linda Mihalic, 5-centimeter pleated filters are part of the solution. “The pleated design allows for more air to get through and for more surface media for particulate (matter) to get trapped in the filter,” she says, “So, that is definitely is something that we spend a little bit more money on here, but it improves the air quality and also improves the efficiency of the unit.”
But James Gauderman, associate professor of preventative medicine at the University of Southern California, says the pleated filter won't stop the smallest and potentially most dangerous - outdoor particles, which can pass through the filter as easily as a gas.
Mr. Gauderman is lead author of a study on the effects of outdoor air pollution on children's respiratory health. The study - which monitored children from ages 10 to 18 - found reduced lung capacity as the young people grew older. “By the time they reach age 18 they were five times more likely to have clinically low function at that time compared to children who were breathing cleaner air,” Mr. Gauderman says.
The 18-year olds had twenty percent less lung function compared with what was expected for their age. Long-term exposure to dirty air would put young people at greater risk for cardiac and respiratory problems later in adult life. James Gauderman says the research showed the same health problems in a wide cross section of people. “We found equally large effects in non-asthmatic children,” he says, “We saw the effects in non-smokers, and we saw similar effects in both boys and girls. So, it really indicates that for some of these more chronic effects like the development of lung function, the whole population is potentially at risk, not just susceptible groups.”
While the study focused on twelve areas in South California, the results could apply to any urban environment, according to James Gauderman. “The pollutants that we found most closely associated with these deficits were nitrogen dioxide and fine particles and these are pollutants that would be present in any urban environment,” he says, “They are the byproducts of fossil fuels, mostly around here from vehicle emissions as the big source, but any time you have industrial pollution, trucks, cars (and other vehicles) you are going to have elevated levels of these pollutants.”
James Gauderman says despite overall improvements in air quality over the last several decades, air pollution still has potentially serious health effects, especially for young people. He says tougher clean air policies can serve as preventive medicine.
The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Health Experts Recommend Ways to Reverse US Youth Obesity Epidemic
Kids Almanac - September 30, 2004

A panel of U.S. public health experts says the country's epidemic of childhood obesity threatens to set back the medical advances that have decreased child mortality and extended life spans in the past century. The panel recommends that every sector of the nation work to reverse the rapid rise in youth obesity as ambitiously as anti-smoking efforts.
The expert recommendations come in response to a request from Congress, which is seeking ways to reverse the overweight epidemic lest it become an unrelenting health burden to the country. Since the 1970s, the prevalence of obesity has more than doubled among U.S. pre-school children and teenagers and more than tripled for youth aged 6 to 11.
Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, vice president for health affairs at Emory University in Atlanta, is chairman of the expert panel appointed to study the problem by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. “These trends mirror a profound increase in obesity among adult Americans as well as a concurrent rise internationally in both developed and developing countries,” says Dr. Koplan.
Summarizing the panel's new report, Dr. Koplan says reversing the obesity epidemic will require a multifaceted approach by schools, families, communities, the food and entertainment industries, and governments at all levels. “This report is calling for fundamental changes in our society,” he says, “This is a collective responsibility and we as a nation need to move toward a healthier environment in which our children and youth can grow up.”
The panel calls on schools to improve the nutrition of the food they serve and require at least 30 minutes of student physical activity a day. The report says parents should encourage physical activity by reducing their children's' television and computer time, and communities should provide more recreational facilities.
It says the food and entertainment industries, which spend more than 10 billion dollars a year marketing high calorie foods to children, should adopt voluntary advertising guidelines limiting this exposure. It asks Congress to give the government authority to require compliance with such marketing guidelines.
The experts estimate the current annual U.S. health care costs of adult obesity are between 100 and 130 billion dollars because of the heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases to which it contributes. One panel member, Dr. Thomas Robinson of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, says these costs could soar if today's obese children become fat adults. “Many of us are extremely scared about what is going to happen in the future to children's health because of this,” he says, “We're looking at the adult chronic diseases start to enter into the teen years and into childhood. As pediatricians and family health care physicians and other child health care providers, we're really not, in many ways, equipped to try and address this morbidity in the population as a whole.”
The panel chairman, Dr. Koplan, says the cost of implementing its recommendations would be small compared to the immensity of the health costs if they are not put into effect.

Exhibit Looks at Lives of Ancient Greek Children
Kids Almanac - September 15, 2004

Sports, schoolwork, play, and other activities of childhood were as important in the ancient world as they are today. An exhibit called "Coming of Age in Ancient Greece" at the J. Paul Getty Museum looks the world of children more than 2,000 years ago.
Dolls with movable arms and legs, a miniature horse on wheels, a rattle and spinning top are toys that any modern child would be happy to play with. But they are ancient artifacts, among 160 in the exhibit at the Getty Museum.
Janet Grossman is the museum's associate curator of antiquities. “The show really traces the life of ancient children from birth on through the time at which they had reached adulthood,” he says.
For girls, adulthood came at about 15, when they might marry. For boys, it arrived at 18, when compulsory military training began.
Until then, children lived in a world of parents and grandparents, siblings and friends. Later, tutors would teach them the alphabet. A volunteer docent explains to a modern child how a Greek student used a stylus to inscribe letters on a wax tablet.
This story of childhood in ancient Greece is told through terracotta figures, illustrations on pottery, and carvings and inscriptions on object like gravestones. They come from across the classical world, from the Greek settlements on the coast of modern Turkey to the Greek colonies of southern Italy.
While much in the exhibition is familiar, some things are not. The curator says elaborate rituals were intended to safeguard the health of children, or commemorate those who had died. “It's been estimated that one in three children did not reach maturity, and so there were a lot of rituals having to do with magic and the protection of children,” says Ms. Grossman.
This exhibition began at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and made stops in New York and Cincinnati before coming to California.
It has been expanded on the West Coast to include objects from the Getty Museum's antiquities collections. A so-called "Family Zone" was added, featuring reproductions of ancient games, and musical instruments like the lyre.
Viviane Meerbergen designed this part of the exhibit, which also has reproductions of draped period clothing, which children and their parents can try on. And there is a game that children can play called "knucklebones." “That's a game that's similar to our jacks or dice today,” she says, “And knucklebones are actually bones from sheep that kids used to play these games.”
Each side of the bones has a numerical value and the children keep score as they throw the bones on the ground to determine the winner.
Museum curator Janet Grossman says the exhibit offers a snapshot of the lives of ancient children, and is aimed at modern children and their parents.
The exhibit "Coming of Age in Ancient Greece" can be seen at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles through December 5th.

Education for Gifted Children
Kids Almanac - August 18, 2004

In the United States, decisions about public education often leave parents of the brightest students, their educators and the students themselves dissatisfied.These students rank in the 97th percentile or higher in verbal ability or math or both. They learn differently and think differently from students with lesser abilities.
One way to supplement their education is through summer programs such as those offered by the Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth.
These students are completing a college level engineering course in just three weeks.
They build bridges out of strands of uncooked spaghetti after first doing complicated mathematical calculations to figure out how to build the strongest bridge. Instructor Jack Bartholomew says the course helps these students make career decisions. “It allows them to think and breathe as an engineer would and try out the field and see if it is something they want to pursue,” he says.
The program is designed to challenge these students intellectually, but director Liz Albert says it does more than that. She refers to The Center for Talented Youth as CTY. “What the students tell us over and over again is that in a CTY summer program, they find the first place where they don't feel different, where they don't feel they have to hide who they are, and they can be who they are both in the classroom and out of the classroom, and that is a relief for them,” she says.
And while the students talk about how much fun they have and the friends they make, they also talk about the courses they are taking. "Last year I took philosophy of the mind and this year I'm back for cognitive psychology,” one student says, “and I had such a great time and I really wanted to come back.” “I am interested in engineering,” another student says, “And this course has really opened up the horizons for me, has shown me what it's really like, and all hard decisions you have to make the factors that go into your decisions like how you build your design and where you build stuff. It's really complicated. It really sparked my interest more than it already was.”
Nearly 10-thousand children from the US and abroad attended this summer's programs
either at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, or at one of its other sites.
Some other American universities offer similar programs because most public schools fail to meet the needs of exceptionally gifted students, according to Charlene Harr, President of the Education Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “We should recognize the talents of intellectually superior children just as we recognize the superior talents of athletes who are competing at the Olympics, but we don't do that,” she says.
Some people think the greatest effort should be made to educate the majority of children, whose abilities do not match those of the gifted students. They think gifted students should not receive special help, which is wrong, according to Charlene Haar. “We haven't been giving them the challenges that they need to excel intellectually,” she says, “And, after all, these are our future leaders. These are our future entrepreneurs. These are our future intellectual geniuses. These are the people who are making decisions that will be affecting the world and certainly American society in the future.”
Because many of these classes depend on computer research, during the school year, some of the students can take advantage of distance learning.
Johns Hopkins and other colleges and universities offer distance learning programs to exceptional students.
Charles Beckman with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth has seen a dramatic increase in enrollments as personal computers become more widely used throughout the world. “Our enrollments have zoomed from several hundred six or seven years ago, to five thousand within the past year,” says Mr. Beckman, “There's no live instructor in front of the kids, but the kids are connected with a very qualified tutor through the internet and they correspond very frequently on different topics.”
He says there is almost no limit to the number of gifted students who can benefit from distance learning programs. The main obstacle is funding so all gifted students can receive the education that best addresses their abilities.

International Children's Digital Library
Kids Almanac - June 17, 2004

Looking for a good children's book? Internet users can find hundreds of them. These books are from around the world. And they are free of charge. The project is called the International Children's Digital Library. The goal is to offer electronic versions of more than ten-thousand children's books in at least one-hundred languages.
Project developers have been working with children to design easy ways to search the collection and read the books. An image of each page appears on the computer. Users can also print copies on paper.
Officials say the project has been designed for two main groups of users. The first is children between the ages of three and thirteen, along with their teachers and parents. The second group is researchers in the area of children's literature.
The books chosen for the collection are meant to help children understand the world in which they live. Literature is one way to teach young people about new ideas. The idea behind the collection is that an interesting story not only helps children understand who they are. It may also influence their desire to explore the world.
Project organizers say they have chosen books that show the similarities and differences in ways of life around the world. The aim is to create a greater understanding of other people's cultures and beliefs. The International Children's Digital Library is also an attempt to use technology to strengthen libraries around the world.
The digital library is a project of the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is building an electronic library of Internet sites and other digital collections as a cultural record.
The children's library project is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Library of Congress and other organizations are also involved. The first materials appeared in two-thousand-two.
The goal is to have all ten-thousand books online in 2007. So far, the collection contains more than five hundred books.
The address of the International Children's Digital Library: www.icdlbooks.org.

History of Children's Television
Kids Almanac - May 24, 2004

Television became popular after World War Two in the nineteen-forties. Successful radio programs became early television shows. "Howdy Doody" was one of the first shows for children. The television show began on N.B.C., the National Broadcasting Company, in nineteen-forty-seven. Soon, it expanded to five days a week.
Howdy Doody looked like an average American boy. Only he was made of wood and controlled with strings from above. He had red hair, although he appeared in black-and-white, like everything else in early television. And he had a permanent smile.
An actor named Bob Smith, known as Buffalo Bob Smith, started the show each time with the same words.
In the early days, local television stations all over the country produced programs for children. Local actors, artists and musicians performed live. Often they played movies or animated cartoons like "Bugs Bunny" or "Popeye the Sailor."
But Popeye the Sailor and Bugs Bunny were movie stars, really. In time, cartoons made especially for television replaced them.
Hanna-Barbera Studios created cartoons like "Huckleberry Hound" and "Yogi Bear."
Shows like "Yogi Bear" were syndicated. That means local stations paid for the rights to broadcast the program in different cities.
Tim Hollis is an expert on the history of children's television. He says that by the nineteen sixties, many shows were franchised. A local station would pay to use the idea for a show, but then produce it with local actors.
Two popular franchised shows during the nineteen-sixties were "Romper Room" and "Bozo the Clown." Tim Hollis estimates that at one time, the United States had more than two-hundred local Bozo the Clowns.
Television presented a new way for businesses to market to children through advertising. However, in the nineteen-sixties, many parents grew concerned. They thought their children were seeing too many commercials for products.
As a result, the Federal Communications Commission limited the amount of commercial time in children's programs. The government also barred local children's actors from reading commercials. This was meant as another way to reduce the influence on children. But these actions also reduced the amount of money that stations earned.
By the early nineteen-seventies, most local television stations stopped producing their own shows for children. Many replaced them with syndicated programs like "I Love Lucy" and "Gilligan's Island."
In addition to syndicated programs, local stations used national network shows to fill their broadcast day.
C.B.S., the Columbia Broadcasting System, launched a children's show in nineteen-fifty-five. Each day, the star wore a red coat with pockets on the sides. The pockets were big -- big enough maybe even for a mother kangaroo to carry her baby. So an actor named Bob Keeshan became known as Captain Kangaroo.
C.B.S. aired "Captain Kangaroo" for twenty-nine years. In nineteen-eighty-four, the show moved to public television. There, it appeared for six more years.
Another popular children's show on the public broadcasting system is "Sesame Street." This show began in nineteen-sixty-nine. Today, different versions of "Sesame Street" can been seen in more than one-hundred-twenty countries.
Public television also brought young children an educational show called "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."
It always started the same way. "Mister Rogers" -- Fred Rogers in real life -- walked through the front door into his television house, put on a sweater and changed his shoes.
Fred Rogers began the show in nineteen-sixty-eight. "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" aired for more than thirty years.
Today, the shows on educational television for young children include imports like "Teletubbies" from Britain. In general, though, the programs on American television aimed at children are mainly for entertainment.
Cable television became popular in the United States in the nineteen-eighties. There are children's programs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
One of the most popular cartoons on cable is about a square yellow sea sponge. He lives deep in the Pacific Ocean, in a city called Bikini Bottom. His name is SpongeBob SquarePants.
A former marine-biology teacher named Steven Hillenburg created "SpongeBob SquarePants" in nineteen-ninety-six. The show began on the Nickelodeon cable channel three years later.
Children consider SpongeBob an honest person -- I mean, creature -- who always sees the brighter, happier side of life. The show is also aimed at adults, a lot of whom do find it funny.
These days, there are hundreds of channels of broadcast, cable and satellite television to choose from. Plus there are countless videos and video games. Children can see all sorts of things, and their parents do not always supervise.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry says children in the United States watch TV an average of three to four hours a day. The American Academy of Pediatrics says children under the age of two should not watch any television at all. And it says older children should watch no more than one to two hours a day.
Many scientists believe that too much television can cause attention problems for children later in life. Studies have also linked a lot of television with children becoming too fat and too aggressive.
There are also concerns about the limited number of female heroes on television for girls to identify with. And critics say children's television is too often simply a method to sell things to young consumers.
Product marketing tied to shows is a major business. SpongeBob SquarePants, for example, appears not just on television. He is also on clothes, bedding, books, school supplies and toys.
Experts urge parents to watch shows with their children and discuss them. Some of what they see might make them wish for the days of that puppet with a big smile on his face.

Ideas for Teaching Young Children About Science
Kids Almanac - January 29, 2004

Experts say students are never too young to think creatively about science. Educator Karen Meador says early education can help children become creative science students later in life. Mizz Meador offers some suggestions for activities. She recently shared her ideas with Gifted Child Today Magazine.
For example, she describes how students between the ages of about four and eight can explore the movement of liquid on wax paper. The wax keeps the water from disappearing into the paper.
In addition to the wax paper, students need small tubes called eye droppers for the experiment. The students also need water containing red, yellow and blue food coloring. Using the eye droppers, they place the colored water onto the wax paper. Then they blow softly into the water. Or they can blow through a straw, a thin hollow tube, to move the water drops.
The students observe the tension on the surface. They see how it affects the way the water moves and shapes itself. Even when students blow the drops of water across the paper, the liquid keeps its round shape. Mizz Meador says the children like to see how the colors mix when one colored drop slides into another.
The shape and movement of the water is similar to that of mercury. But mercury is dangerous to handle.Mizz Meador also says children can study how water acts on aluminum foil. They can find out if the water will act the same on a metal surface as it did on wax paper. Before doing the new experiment, they can write their ideas about what they think will happen. Or they can record their ideas on tape. Mizz Meador says this activity prepares them for more difficult experiments.
The children again move the colored water around by blowing directly onto it or through or a straw. But this time they move it on the foil. Then they test their theories about how the water would act against what really took place. Similar experiments can be carried out with other kinds of paper or glass.
Karen Meador is writer of the book "Creative Thinking and Problem Solving for Young Learners," published by Teacher Ideas Press.