The popular prescription shampoo, Lindane, which is used to treat lice, was slapped by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for failing to warn consumers about its potential toxicity.

In a little-noticed December letter, the FDA cites concern over some of the information drugmaker Morton Grove Pharmaceuticals provided on websites and in mailed materials, including a statement by the company that treating head lice effectively requires two applications, several days apart. That is "extremely alarming given that retreatment with Lindane Shampoo can lead to increased exposure and possibly death," the FDA says.

California has already banned Lindane, and three other states, including New York and Michigan, are considering similar bans. (The manufacturer, meanwhile, insists that they didn't do anything wrong.)
Lindane was supposed to be a powerful last resort. Many of the other treatments on the market have been losing their effectiveness, and the lice epidemic seems to be raging unabated.
I know people whose kids have been infected two, three, even four times.
Why lice seems to becoming more common is a question I will address shortly. Stumble It!

When I saw the headline, "To Catch a Baby Broker," I felt that familiar knot in my stomach, the one I get whenever I am about to watch or read news about international adoption.
NBC's Dateline aired an investigation into corruption in Guatemala adoptions. I missed the show, but read the transcript on MSNBC.com. (Or watch snippets here.)
This is how Dateline billed their story:

Some children offered for international adoption are exploited, even kidnapped--forcing families into a desperate battle to save them.

Well, the producers document that sleazy operators are still doing business, and that international adoption in Guatemala is rife with corruption that leads to heartbreaking scenarios, including kidnappings.
It is precisely these stories that led Guatemala to shut down its international adoption program as of January 1.
Let's hope that the reforms being instituted will result in ethical adoptions--not simply no adoptions. I worry that in all this negative publicity, governments and experts lose track of the many kids who will benefit and have already benefitted from international adoption. And then what we end up with is Romania, where international adoptions have been banned since June 2001 while it supposedly was cleaning up its system.

Labels: international adoption

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So much has been written about the film, Juno, and how it treats abortion and teen pregnancy. (Another op-ed by Ellen Goodman here.)

But last night I saw the movie with my husband, and as a parent of two kids, one of whom we adopted as an infant, what struck me most was the film's depiction of adoptive parents. For those of you living under a rock, the movie is about a 16-year-old girl who suddenly finds herself pregnant, decides not to have an abortion, and finds an infertile couple who wants to adopt.

In so many movies, couples who enter into a domestic adoption are depicted as snobby and soulless yuppies, who treat the birth mother as little more than vehicles for satisfying their desires. And often this is true in the media too. (Take a look at New York Times story about Guatemala adoptions here and my blog posting about that story.)

While the birth mom in Juno seems to be always carrying shopping bags and lives in one of those ugly suburban McMansions, her yearning to be a mother also is shown as genuine and touching. She doesn't just want the baby as another acquisition; she truly loves children and literally kneels at Juno's belly, hoping to connect with the baby inside.

Now I did find the message of this movie problematic: Abortion is dismissed as an option (the girl dismisses abortion as a choice after finding out her two month old fetus has "finger nails.") Juno seemingly suffers no grief or lasting trauma as a result of entering into an adoption, which conflicts with much of what we know about birth mothers. Plus the movie shows her entering into a closed adoption and reinforces the stereotype that desperately infertile couples are the only ones entering adoptions.

We weren't desperately infertile. Increasingly, people are choosing adoption.

However...it was refreshing to see a movie that doesn't depict adoptive parents as rapacious yuppies, but people who genuinely love children and want to parent.

Labels: adoption

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A new study debunks the claim that mothers are "opting out" of the workforce. Heather Boushey, Ph.D., a leading feminist economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research, studied data from the Current Population Survey's Annual Social and Economic Survey (ASEC) to examine whether children have caused women to exit employment.
Her conclusion: There is no statistical evidence that women are dropping out because of children.

The child effect was -21.8 percentage points in 1979 and has fallen consistently over the last two decades to -12.7 percentage points in 2005...Recent declines in women's employment may be more an effect of the weak labor market for all women, mothers and non-mothers, rather than an increase in mothers voluntarily choosing to exit employment.

Ever since Lisa Belkin's story about the "opt out revolution" was published in The New York Times in 2003, there has been a raging debate about whether educated mothers are, in fact, dropping out. I've heard any number of arguments from feminist scholars. Some don't dispute that educated mothers are dropping out but suggest that they are forced out--by an inhospitable workplace. Others argue that the only a small sliver of elite women actually can have this "choice"--the vast majority don't have the option to opt out and aren't doing so. Still others don't question that this is a trend but suggest that women who opt out are putting themselves in economic jeopardy or just betraying the feminist revolution.

I sincerely doubt that this study is going to put an end to the debate. Boushey has been giving interviews about her research for nearly two years (see this 2005 story that was buried in the New York Times. Why the Times buried it, after trumpeting the trend to begin with, is another story.) But one question I have:

Does this research take into account the fact that many mothers downshift--go to part-time or less time-consuming jobs--after having kids? (I'm always surprised by the number of mothers I meet in my suburban town who work "one or two days" a week, or only five hours a day.) I understand why mothers take these jobs, but typically, they don't pay well and put women on permanent slow tracks, which perpetuates all kinds of inequality. (Really, these mommy track jobs aren't all that different from my mothers' peers who worked as travel agents or realtors in the 1970s.

Labels: mothers, opting out

Stumble It!

When the number of international adoptions began to skyrocket 15 years ago, many couples who adopted went into the process naively. They saw the pictures of the abused, neglected children warehoused in Romanian orphanages; they may have heard the reports of the high rate of fetal alcohol syndrome in Russia.

But there was this sense that love could cure all.

Bonnie Miller Rubin reports for the Chicago Tribune about the dark outcome for many of these families. In a heartbreaking story, she writes about a ranch in the middle of rural Montana, which houses and attempts to heal internationally adopted, deeply troubled and often violent teens. One has molested a sibling. Another tried to kill a family pet.

This is the final stop. Most already have logged countless hours in psychiatric units, wilderness programs and residential treatment centers, searching for answers to their disturbing behaviors. The goal is that through intense intervention and structure, their conduct will improve sufficiently so they can go home.

Sadly, though, Rubin says a "handful" will be sent to live with new families, the victims of what is known as "adoption disruption," the term for when adoptive parents attempt to undo the adoption.

Whenever I've read stories about adoption disruption, usually there is a harsh judging tone--sometimes even an explicit condemnation of parents. But Rubin, adoptive mom who wrote a beautiful essay for my anthology, A Love Like No Other, writes about these parents--and children--with compassion and a recognition of the tragedy involved. She points out that this is an outcome that no one wanted. Stumble It!

Back to school after the Christmas holidays almost always brings home one unwelcome report from my kids: The list of gifts their friends got for Christmas.

My oldest is in middle school, so at this point, I feel I've become a pro at deflecting.

The responses I've perfected:

the shoulder shrug,

"oh well,"

"put it on your birthday list,"

or--when all else fails--an eye roll.

Still, I found myself momentarily speechless yesterday when my SIX-year-old came home with the report that four of her first grade buddies all received brand new ipods. According to my daughter, some of these ipods play video so these are not the $69 ipods--more in the $150-200 range.

My sixth grader didn't ask for an ipod until she was 10, but most of her friends didn't have any then. Now, I know that tech toys are being marketed to younger and younger kids and adult tech toys have been coveted by teens and tweens for a while, but does this mean that the kindergarten set will be begging for them too? Stumble It!