Re: For parents, a flat head on their baby stirs guilt,

[Guest guest]

could someone please post the link that was attatched to this..i got the daily digest but it didn't have the link and it sounds like something i would wanna read..thanx..

brenda

mom of tucker

[Guest guest]

:

I just copied & pasted it from the link below: It said the article

would be gone shortly, so I wanted to make sure we at least have it

in our archive becuz it really is a great article.

Debbie abby's mom DOCgrad

MI

>For parents, a flat head on their baby stirs guilt, anxiety

By Rajkumar

Mercury News

The babies around the table came in all varieties, from the

determined toddler zeroing in on the car keys to the plump beauty

lounging in her mother's arms to my own little man trying to eat the

handout.

But they all had one thing in common: a flat head.

My baby suffers from what the doctors call positional plagiocephaly --

also known as flat-headedness. And so, it turns out, do a lot of

other babies these days.

That's because a lot of parents did what we did. Worried about Sudden

Infant Death Syndrome, we put our baby to sleep on his back instead

of face down. But the pressure pushed in his soft skull and left the

back of his head flat as a diaper mat.

While nationwide figures are hard to come by, dismayed parents are

apparently flooding the offices of pediatricians, flat-headed babies

in tow. Some research suggests that about one in five babies is now a

victim of plagiocephaly, which ranges from mild to severe. More than

2,400 messages about flat heads were posted on a chat site in

May alone.

An entire industry has grown up around rounding the head: baby

helmets. Several companies manufacture these helmets to reshape a

baby's head, at a cost of up to several thousand dollars each.

``There certainly is a mega-trend here,'' says Dr. Maddox,

chief of pediatrics for Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara. ``It's

really on the upswing.''

With us, it was Raj's caretaker who first noticed the flatness. We

told our doctor, who sent us to another doctor. And so it was that

Raj and I found ourselves in March at Kaiser Oakland's first class

for babies with flat heads.

It was the first minor crisis of my parenthood. I was mortified. Here

we had patted ourselves on the back for being the kind of parents who

didn't obsess about every little wrinkle in the baby literature or on

our child's skin. And along the way we had managed to flatten his

head and not even notice.

As I learned more, my shamefaced laughter turned to mild alarm.

Plagiocephaly -- unlike craniosynostosis, a more severe head shape

disorder that often requires surgery -- is caused by external

pressure. Sometimes a slight flatness will go away as the baby grows

older. But in the most extreme cases, the movement of the bones can

push the forehead out and jar the balance of the features.

Parents can protect a newborn's head by switching sleep positions

between the back and sides. Playtime on the stomach during the day is

good, although babies should not be put to sleep on their stomachs.

And neck exercise -- what Maddox calls ``the poor man's helmet'' --

helps babies turn their heads more easily to both sides.

But at almost 7 months, Raj was no longer a newborn. And the longer

we waited, the harder it would be to fix.

For a few anxious weeks I was eaten up with guilt. Everywhere I went,

I noticed the shapes of heads and wondered what secrets lurked

beneath hair. Every time I looked at Raj, I saw his head reproaching

me -- soft, adorable, and undeniably flat.

I scrutinized each feature, on the lookout for unevenness. I

inspected his head from all angles and worried about his brow. I

imagined future school buddies calling him flathead or pancake boy,

and thought of all the buzz cuts and Mohawks he wouldn't be able to

get.

I even considered a helmet. But I hated the thought of my son

strapped into a helmet 23 hours a day, and in any case the doctors

said it wasn't likely to work for him.

So I vowed that at the very least, I would change the way he slept.

And that vow launched the first of what will no doubt be many battles

with our son.

We started by flipping him on his side to sleep. Several kicks and

punches later, we realized that wouldn't work.

Then we waited until he fell asleep, sneaked into his room and

``tipped'' him. Every time he tipped himself right back, usually

within minutes.

We packed rolled towels to keep him in place, but he squirmed out

from under them. We wedged him in tighter, but he screamed bloody

murder. No matter what we did, every morning we found him, sleeping

soundly, flat on his back.

Finally Raj's caretaker, Aracelly, stepped in to rescue him from our

parental incompetence. `Don't worry,'' she told him, in firm and

rapid Spanish. ``Aracelly will fix your head.''

That evening, she called her elderly mother in Colombia for advice.

And the next day, we came home to find Aracelly beaming and Raj with

a pillow full of dried lentils.

It's hardly a remedy from the doctor's kit -- in fact, they

discourage pillows for newborns -- but it seems to work for my son,

now 9 months old. I don't know if it's the magic of the lentil pillow

or my own wishful thinking, but these days Raj's head is looking a

tiny bit rounder. And I'm feeling a tiny bit more reassured that

he'll come out just fine, even if his head never meets the cruel

perfect-sphere standards of the Gerber baby.

And I have to admit that as I watch him sleep, back down on his

lentil pillow, it's still the sweetest little head in the world to me.

For more information and links to a support group, go to

www.plagiocephaly.org.

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> could someone please post the link that was attatched to this..i

got the daily digest but it didn't have the link and it sounds like

something i would wanna read..thanx..

> brenda

> mom of tucker