"After telling New York City's public schools that they could not keep their parent-paid teaching aides, the Bloomberg administration said Thursday that it was working to return those aides to classrooms this fall.

Inundated by complaints from parents, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has proposed an arrangement that would allow teaching assistants who have been independently hired by schools with parent donations to continue working as employees of the Department of Education. Their salaries would be included in official school budgets, though still financed with the help of parent donations.

Under Mr. Klein's proposal, essentially a technical change, the assistants would now be employed under the title of "substitute aide," an existing departmental position that pays $12.30 an hour, with no benefits. The city’s current hiring freeze would not apply to them, as the positions would still be paid for with donations."

"Teaching new mothers how to breast-feed could save 1.3 million children's lives every year, but many women get no help and give up trying, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

Fewer than 40 percent of mothers worldwide breast-feed their infants exclusively in the first six months, as recommended by the WHO. Many abandon it because they don't know how to get their baby to latch on properly or suffer pain and discomfort.

"When it comes to doing it practically, they don't have the practical support," WHO expert Constanza Vallenas told a news briefing in Geneva, where the United Nations agency is based.

This is a problem in both rich and poor countries, she said, calling for more assistance in hospitals, health clinics and communities for new mothers who need information and help."

"Should old women have babies?

Until recently, this wasn't an issue. Nature exhausted your egg supply, and that was it. But technology has surmounted that problem. Now you can get in vitro fertilization, donor eggs, and womb-rejuvenating hormones. You can freeze your eggs or embryos. You can even freeze your ovarian tissue, reimplant it later, and resume ovulating.

Everywhere you look, moms are older. Over the last three decades, the U.S. birth rate among women aged 35 or older has increased by 140 percent. These women now produce one of every seven American children. In Europe, women over 35 have increased their share of pregnancies from 5 percent to 20 percent. More than 100,000 American women aged 40 or older have babies each year. In the last 15 years, at least a dozen women aged 60 or older have done it. The oldest age at which a woman has given birth is now 70.

Is middle-aged motherhood getting out of control?"

Discuss on Urban Baby: How old is too old to have babies?

Do You Know a High-Achieving Student Kept From College Because of Money? -- The Washington Post

Is Structured Learning Necessary During Summer Break? -- Parent Dish

When Terrible Things Happen to Children -- Motherlode

Isn't It the Parents' Job to Keep Track of Their Children? -- Lil Sugar

The Whining Road To Straighter Teeth -- The New York Times

"Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over conventionally produced food, according to a major study published on Wednesday.

Its conclusions were challenged by organic food campaigners.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers paid higher prices for organic food in part because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.

A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference."

"Like a seesaw on the school playground, falling state budgets are pushing class sizes higher.

The recession is forcing districts to lay off teachers even as the economic stimulus pumps billions of dollars into schools. As a result, classrooms across the country will be more crowded when school starts in the fall.

Patti Hathorn, a fifth-grade teacher in rural Pinson, Ala., is expecting 29 or 30 students, making it the biggest class she's taught. Many of her students at Kermit Johnson Elementary are learning English or are in special education.

"You may have a child that needs you, that needs that adult figure, to spend the extra five minutes with them. If you have five or six extra kids, that five minutes is gone," Hathorn said.

It's the same story in small communities such as Pinson and Wapakoneta, Ohio, and urban areas including Los Angeles and Broward County, Fla. In many places, classes will have well over 30 kids."

"I grew up with no money and a very part-time father. I spent my earliest years in housing projects, and then had to live with babysitters and my aunt until first grade so my mother could work. My older brother got to live at home, but he had to sleep alone in our apartment at night while my mother worked the graveyard shift. Later, we were latchkey kids, like millions of others, until early evening.

We had no car, no fancy toys and no private lessons and, thanks to my various tomboy accidents, frequent hour-long bus rides to the bloodstained floors of the public hospital's emergency room.

End sob story.

Here's the question: Now that I've climbed out of that life and married someone who was never in it, how can we teach our children gratitude?"

Discuss on Urban Baby: How do you teach your kids gratitude?

"Children who were exposed to anesthesia when their mothers underwent Caesarean section deliveries were no more likely to develop learning disabilities than those whose mothers delivered vaginally, a new study reports.

"This is reassuring," said Dr. Juraj Sprung, a professor of anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and first author of the study. A recently published paper by the same research group had found an increased risk of learning disabilities among children who were exposed repeatedly to anesthesia before the age of 4, raising concerns that anesthesia may have adverse effects on newborns as well.

"It appears that exposure to a single anesthetic, even during labor and delivery, does not cause any adverse effect on brain development," Dr. Sprung said of the current findings, which appeared in the journal Anesthesiology."

"World health officials are carefully watching the H1N1/09 swine flu virus as it makes it way through the Southern Hemisphere, which is currently in the thick of its flu season. They are particularly interested in seeing how severely the virus affects infected people in parts of Africa, South America and Australia, since their illnesses could be a good predictor of how aggressive the virus will be when flu season returns to the rest of the world in the fall.

So far, the H1N1/09 flu appears to be mild overall and treatable with existing antiviral therapies. But, given that the virus continues to cause some serious cases of illness and death, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) isn't taking any chances. On Wednesday the agency called an urgent meeting of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which decides who gets vaccinated against which disease, and when. The committee was asked to generate guidelines for H1N1/09 vaccination, if and when the agency determines that such immunizations become necessary, in addition to those for seasonal flu.

The 15-member panel of doctors, scientists, vaccine experts, public health officials and a public citizen representative came up with five core populations whom they believe should receive the first wave of H1N1/09 immunization. These include pregnant women, people living in households with babies under six months old (since infants cannot be immunized, they must be protected by preventing illness in those around them), emergency medical personnel who are likely to be in contact with infected patients, young people between six months and 24 years old, and non-elderly individuals who have underlying conditions that put them at higher risk of flu complications, such as asthma, respiratory illness and compromised immune systems."

"Afterward, they comforted each other with the blasphemy: "It was God's will."

It was the first pregnancy for Shazia Allahdita, 19. I was in the operating room at a public hospital here in Karachi as surgeons performed a Caesarean section on her to try to save her life.

As she lay unconscious under the anesthesia, doctors plucked a baby boy from her uterus and then labored to revive the child. "He has a heartbeat, but he's not crying," Dr. Aijaz Ahmed explained tersely as he gave the boy oxygen. "He's not responding. I think he's getting weaker."

These dramas play out constantly in poor countries. One woman dies a minute from complications of pregnancy or childbirth somewhere in the world, and 20 times as many suffer childbirth injuries."