That's Fit

I've never been pregnant, yet drinking during pregnancy is an issue that I'm very familiar with. My son's biological mother drank while she was pregnant with him. As a result, my son has Fetal Alcohol Effect. While he doesn't have the craniofacial features that are typical of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, he has many of the behavioral and cognitive impairments associated with the spectrum disorder. For example, though he is 11-years-old, my son's ability to comprehend cause and effect is about the level of a 2-year-old's.

So suffice it to say that I'm glad to see this study stating that even a few glasses of wine in early pregnancy can cause some fetal cell death. The researchers studied the effects of alcohol on fetal development in mice. Evidence shows that a few glasses of wine over an hour can have lasting effects on fetal development.

If you're pregnant, or there's any chance you might be pregnant, don't drink. It's just not worth it. One fun night might turn into permanent impairment that your child has to manage and live with for their rest of his or her life.

A group of Canadian audiologists and speech pathologists are concerned that noisy classrooms are making it tougher for kids to properly hear lessons and therefore learn material. A study comissioned by the Canadian Language and Literacy Reseach Network showed that first grade students tend to miss at least 1 of every 6 words spoken by their teachers because of the amount of ambient noise, including other classes and audio equipment, in classrooms.

As this article points out, while adults have the language skills to determine words that they've missed in sentences, children aren't able to put the pieces of a sentence together and end up experiencing a number of detrimental effects including poor understanding, reading problems and decreased attention. Apparently the problem is worse in Canada than in the United States, where there is a national standard that keeps classrooms less noisy.

Are you worried about the amount of noise in your child's classroom?