When to promote healthy risk-taking

Last update: November 8, 2009 - 12:48 AM

In the fallout of the "balloon boy" incident, "Raising Children Who Soar" (Teachers College Press, $22) is extra relevant as a guide to healthy risk-taking. Susan Davis and Nancy Eppler-Wolff, who are psychologists and mothers, suggest that parents can encourage their children to take the healthy risks necessary to succeed, such as going to sleep-away camp, making a presentation in school or trying out for a sports team. The authors focus mostly on getting nervous parents to remember that risk is not necessarily synonymous with danger, although there are sections on parents who push their kids too hard, risk-wise. Maybe, for example, parents who encourage their 6-year-old son to pretend to fly inside a helium balloon in order to get on reality television?

WASHINGTON POST

Stock medicine cabinet

Hospital workers fight an uphill battle to keep themselves free of colds and flu. And so they are just the ones to turn to for advice on staying healthy, such as stocking your medicine cabinet. Our experts gravitate toward Vicks VapoRub, Tylenol, DayQuil, NyQuil, Mucinex (or the generic versions of these) and herbal remedies. Laura Anderko, a nurse and associate professor at Georgetown University School of Nursing and Health Studies, learned that it's helpful to gargle with a little baking soda and warm water to alleviate swelling from a sore throat.

Even if your medicine cabinet is brimming with drugs, make sure you take only what your symptoms call for, Anderko says. Sometimes it's OK to lay off the meds. The common cold doesn't last long, says Martin Brown, medical director of Inova Alexandria (Va.) Hospital's emergency room, so "it's hard to tell when you're just getting better [on your own] or the medications are working."

WASHINGTON POST

Fear of vomiting

Even for those of us who don't have an irrational fear of vomiting or of witnessing others as they lose their lunch, such a scene is pretty wrenching and might make us feel like hurling. But for an emetophobe (emesis = vomiting, phobe = fear), just the thought of watching a kid or anyone else vomit is terrifying to the core.

Emetophobia has been little studied, so we don't know much about what causes it or how to fix it. Emetophobes might avoid going out much for fear they'll puke in public or see someone else do so. They might become picky eaters, avoiding anything they think might make them sick. And, according to Washington psychotherapist Jerilyn Ross, some women even put off getting pregnant because they so dread the idea of morning sickness -- and worry that they might not be able to care for their children if it involved overseeing upchucking. Ross says that when the fear of vomiting is so severe it makes a person rearrange activities, it is a phobia.

WASHINGTON POST

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