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Welcome to Riverside Blog a place for you to have your say and for us to introduce you to a wide range of topics related to childcare covering newborn, toddlers pre-schoolers right thru to teens.  We want you to tell us what you would like to hear about and we would love you to submit articles. We want to share with you and hear about your aspirations, inspirations and ideas. Riverside see this as a creative and informative place for you to visit.

Riverside Childcare and Riverside Nannies are gearing up for a summer of speed, power both physical and by virtue of will and creativity. The world is coming to London and maybe you are too! If you need help with childcare either daytime or evening let us know we have a team ready to help support your childcare needs.

Best regards

The Riverside Team

Chicken Pox Parties – Good or Bad Idea

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This is a topic which comes up every few years in the press with a certain amount of debate. Chicken pox is a mild infectious disease most common in children under the age of ten and causes a red rash of itchy spots that form blisters, which then crust over and form scabs which then drop off. As I am writing this I immediately want to say yuk!

It is caused by a virus and is spread through coughs and sneezes from the infected person. The formulae for a chicken pox party is that healthy children are invited to spend time in close proximity to the child who already has the virus, in the hope that they will catch it at a planned time to avoid them getting it on holiday, or at a bad time for the family… clever you may think!!! There is an added advantage that if you catch chicken pox as a child you are much less likely to catch it as an adult when complications are more common.

If the idea appeals you are looking towards inviting round a group of well, lively children to play with your child who may be feeling pretty miserable and may well have a fever which makes them feel even worse, not to mention the itching which anyone who has been bitten by a mosquito can relate to. Ummm now it feels convenient for the family but not so good for the patient….

The party needs to be arranged at short-notice as children are only infectious until the last blister has burst and crusted over, think around five to six days.

Natch any adults in attendance will also be at risk, and yes although rare, chicken pox can be caught again. According to NHS Direct 13% of people say they have had chicken pox more than once, probably they did not develop antibodies the first time round. So now we are entertaining a scenario where there could be a two generation outbreak.

Does the host bear any further responsibility towards the ‘guests’? Chicken pox needs to be avoided in pregnancy as it can cause complications both for the mother and in rare cases a significant harm to the unborn baby. Others at risk are babies under one month, so the host has to factor in the siblings of those invited, and anyone with a compromised immune system.

A final consideration, your child is unwell so their immune system is already working very hard, you bring in a group of other children who may be at the start of developing other diseases therefore putting your child at risk…..

Who doesn’t love a party but for this one we have to say

Thanks but no Thanks

Jill Wheatcroft

Jill Wheatcroft MSc, RSCN, BSc Community Children’s Nursing is a Lecturer in Children’s Nursing. She has gained extensive experience in Paediatrics both in hospital ward and community settings. She has a specialism in the teaching of Child Protection, Safeguarding and Paediatric First Aid and is the Programme Co-ordinator for Riverside Nannies and Riverside Training Company

David Cameron’s Quick Fix

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This week in the UK there have been two news items that have stood out for me and they have profound links. A local Pakistani businessman in the inner city area of Carlisle Cumbria and a separate group in Rochdale Lancashire trawled the streets seeking sex with underage girls in exchange for money and drugs. They have all been caught, one awaits sentence and the Rochdale group are now behind bars. Embedded in this story is a tragic tale of teens and pre-teens hounded and groomed persistently by these men whose campaign lasted many years, who had no respect for them, and relentlessly pursued their prey.It appears the police were entirely unbothered and ignored repeated requests from the girls to help them. Eventually they did and I suspect over the next few weeks we will learn more about why they did not lend sufficient support to stop the abuse until now. There is no doubt that the girls were tragically vulnerable and we know they spent their money gained from their sexual encounters on drugs and sweets.

The second news item is the introduction of a pilot scheme by David Cameron called Can Parent Scheme, which involves giving parents a voucher which enables them to access a DVD, alongside a series of short videos available on the web teaching very basic parenting skills. The rational behind this is that too many parents don’t know how to bring up their own children and can be taught in a sort of cheap fix way care of a DVD. One should note that many Sure Start Centre programmes have been the subject of severe cuts – hands on programmes teaching real skills over a period of time.

Why do I link the two stories? Because I believe that David Cameron is trying to reach girls like the ones subjected to abuse at the hands of the businessmen – undoubtedly some fell pregnant and have become the mothers DC wants to teach. Actually lets include the mothers of these girls who may well also come from deprived families and have simply struggled to support their daughters due to a lack of knowledge and education combined with real poverty. The state failure is multi-generational.

Removing funding from real programmes, staffed by professional trained individuals, who can spot in a moment if a family needs more help and can act immediately in a way best tailored to the parent’s individual need is madness. To then replace it with a video and dare to celebrate that as an improved service is tragic. If we learn nothing from what happened to these girls let us at least learn that they need contact, direct contact and that the families DC craves to reach are the least likely group to settle down in front of a computer screen and learn how to entirely change their lifestyle, environment and family dynamic.

Why Breastfeeding really is the Best

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The World Health Organisation has put together a really neat little section on breastfeeding. Follow the link to 10 reasons why breast is best. I think its one of those guides that can just give you that little pick-me-up when it seems you are never going to get the hang of it.

My view has always been if you can get through the first few weeks then it turns into a massively easier option. Who needs to schlep bottles and formulae around you are a mobile milk cart with endless supply.

http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/breastfeeding/en/index.html

How the Cord Blood Registry is Helping save Lives

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When I first encountered the term Cord Blood Registry to be honest I actually didn’t know what it was or how profoundly it could impact on the lives of other and be potentially life-saving. Kathy Engle, Director of the Cord Blood Registry in Califonia kindly agreed to tell us about how the cord blood bank and regenerative medicine

 

 

 

 

 

What is the Cord Blood Registry?


CBR is the most experienced cord blood bank in the world. CBR has saved
cord blood stem cells for more than 400,000 newborns and has helped many
families use their stem cells for lifesaving transplants and other
therapies.

What is Cord blood banking?

A one-time opportunity to save a baby’s cord blood stem cells for potential medical uses. Having cord blood saved can be lifesaving or life-changing for a baby or other family members and ensures that these cells are immediately available if ever needed.

How is the cord blood collected?

By a painless procedure that usually takes less than five minutes and happens immediately after birth. After the umbilical cord has been cut, the remaining blood in the cord is collected. The cord blood is then shipped to the laboratory, processed, and frozen in cryogenic storage tanks for long-term preservation.

What are the benefits of storing a babies cord blood stem cells?

Cord blood is the blood that remains in your newborn’s umbilical cord
after birth. Cord blood is an invaluable source of a pristine type of
stem cell that can be used in a variety of medical treatments.

What are Stem cells and why do they continue to be of increasing interest to medical scientists?

They are the body’s “master cells” because they are the building
blocks of organ tissues, blood, and the immune system. Stem cells from
bone marrow were first used to regenerate blood and immune cells for
patients who had received chemotherapy for cancer. In the late 1980s,
doctors started using cord blood stem cells to treat diseases that had
previously been treated with bone marrow transplantation.

Today, cord blood stem cells are successfully being used to save lives.
They also are being researched in an exciting new area of medicine
called regenerative medicine, where scientists are studying the use of
cord blood stem cells in experimental treatments for conditions like
brain injury and acquired hearing loss.

Can the stem cells benefit people outside the immediate family?

Expectant parents have three options for cord blood after birth:
* They can choose a family bank to save the stem cells
for a fee with the bank for exclusive use by your family (ownership
rights are retained by the family);
* They can donate the cord blood to a public bank for potential
use by a patient who needs a transplant (As extra clarification:  when
you donate for public use, if the sample is eligible and stored, the
cord blood may be available to any patient who needs a transplant,
donors give up their ownership rights);
* Or the cord blood can be discarded as medical waste.

In the last 20 years, cord blood stem cells have been used in more than
25,000 transplants worldwide, so they have successfully benefitted
people inside and outside a family.

How many years has CBR been operating and in how many countries?

CBR stored its first cord blood unit nearly twenty years ago.  Since
that time, the company has grown to be the largest family bank in the
world and provided the most number of units for treatment than any other
family bank.  CBR is proud to serve clients in more than 80 countries
around the world.

Cord blood stem cells have been successfully used in transplant medicine
for more than 20 years. Cord blood has been used to treat many
life-threatening diseases including leukemia, other cancers, blood
disorders, metabolic disorders, and immune diseases.

Cord blood also is being used in regenerative medicine research, where
stem cells are being evaluated for their ability to induce healing and
regenerate cells to repair tissues. Clinical trials are evaluating a
child’s own cord blood stem cell infusions as experimental therapies to
treat cerebral palsy, brain injury, juvenile diabetes, and acquired
hearing loss.
How can a potential donor find out if there is a cord blood bank
located nearby?

There is a resource online that parents can use to see if there is a
public cord blood bank near them called the Parents Guide to Cord Blood
which can be found at www.parentsguidecordblood.org.

Does one need the agreement of the hospital/midwifery team in order to make the donation?

With public donation, dependent on the individual country you may be able to donate your baby’s cord blood for use by an anonymous patient in need. For example in 2009 in the United States, the National Marrow Donor Programme facilitated more than 4,800 marrow and cord blood transplants for patients who did not have matching donors in the family.
Arrangements do need to be made in advance with the hospital, and
parents would need to check to see if the hospital they are delivering
at is able to take donations.  For more information about donation,
visit BeTheMatch.org.

Has there been any resistance to the project?

Education around the benefits of cord blood stem cells is a very slow
process.  Unfortunately, 95% of the time these precious resources are
discarded as medical waste.   We encourage expectant parents to learn
their options with regard to newborn stem cell banking and to ask their
doctors about CBR.  There are also online educations modules which can
help start that process like www.cordbankingbasics.com.

Are all donations accepted and used ?

If a family is eligible to donate, the samples do not always make it
into storage to be available for transplant.  According to some of the
public banking web sites, as many as 71% of the donations sent in may be
rejected based on family medical history, maternal medical history,
collection volume, or examination of the maternal blood sample.

How can a family living outside the US get their stem cells to a bank?

As  long as their own laws permit the collection and storage of cord blood for
family use, they can choose CBR as their bank.  There are international
banks, and the Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation lists those
businesses.  That site also does stress that proximity is not
necessarily the best filter to choose a cord blood bank for your family.
Instead, there are a list of factors that parents should consider like
the experience of the bank, whether or not they have successfully
released samples for treatment, financial stability, quality measures on
the collection, processing and storage etc.
Can you share with us an example of how the use of stored cells has
helped someone?

CBR has many examples of client families who have used the cord blood
stem cells stored with us, as successful treatments for their children.
One of our longstanding programs, the Newborn Possibilities Program,
allows families to bank and store newborn stem cells for 5 years for
free, if they have a child diagnosed with a medical condition treatable
with stem cells.  One such family, the Mulumba family, benefitted from
this exact program.  Daughter Carol, was gravely ill with sickle cell
anemia.  Traditional treatments were not working and she was in constant
pain.  When Carol’s mom, Lucky, became pregnant with a second child, her
doctor told her about CBR and cord blood banking.  Carol received a
combination of her brother’s cord blood stem cells and bone marrow stem
cells and has now been sickle cell free for three years.

Tell us more about current research using stem cells.

On the research side, we are really talking about two paths – think of them as development of two different kinds of drugs.  One path is fed by the public banking system and further refines transplant medicine.  Using stem cells to help in a last resort type of scenario to treat people where chemo and other lines of defense have failed.  And the other research path is for regenerative
medicine, looking at the possibility of using stem cells to help trigger
the body to initiate repair on its own.  At this point, participating in
this kind of research requires the use of ones own stem cells because
that is known to be safe.  Today, family banking is helping to advance
this kind of regenerative medicine research because there is a pool of
families who have chosen to save a source of their own family’s stem
cells.  Diseases being looked at here are totally different from
transplant medicine and in many cases represent illnesses and diseases
for which there are currently no medical therapies like cerebral palsy,
brain injury, hearing loss or type one diabetes.

For more information about the Cord Blood Registry visit  www.cordblood.com

Laura Johnson – why should her Father’s bank balance make a difference to how we view her role in the riots last summer?

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Laura Johnson, name not that familiar? Instead think millionaire’s daughter and sometime drive-by chauffeur involved in last summers riots which blighted a few days, in the process altering the view many foreigners had of Brits. A view that previously saw the English as a bit Downton Abbey and a bit Lily Allen.

Laura has stopped being a faceless individual with a silver spoon shoved firmly in her gob and instead, care of her family’s Solicitor, should be viewed as a troubled youngster, vulnerable, easily led in need of huge dollops of understanding. Aren’t we the lucky ones having the opportunity to learn about her, surely we must adjust our views. But is that fair – Laura has means at her disposal that many others do not. She can’t be the only rioter who has a personality disorder. I’m sure many will be able to easily show they come from broken homes, suffered as a result of an absent father, got into a scrap as a youngster and didn’t have a strong guiding hand to bring them back in line. They will remain faceless and we will turn away from them.

So what do we do with Laura, convicted awaiting sentencing? This summer the greatest show on earth arrives in our town, Police and Emergency Services will be stretched to the limit. Last summer the rioters figured out that they were one step ahead of the police who simply could not carry out their duties on more than a few fronts at a time. Do we let Laura off with a soft sentence or do we say No Way? Do we believe a  strong message has to be sent out that last summers situation will not be tolerated and the price a rioter will pay in court will be too high to be ignored?

It’s easy to come to that conclusion however I’m profoundly troubled when it comes to Laura. Clearly she needs help and will suffer in prison and actually end up even more of a burden on society and a bigger worry to her parents – entirely innocent in this mess.

We can’t ‘un-know’ however we must make sure our court system picks up the other Lauras who cannot hire someone to  articulate they problems on their behalf

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Flat Head Syndrome

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Do you have a view about the value of Helmets. There’s a lot of chatter about it at the moment in the UK. If anyone has had personal experience of this syndrome and how you managed the situation we would really like to hear from you. Natch this can be done either including your name or annoymously

Narcissists do better in job interviews, study finds

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I just caught this interesting piece in the Huffington post and had to share. Naturally anything which relates to interviews and applicants would catch my eye. We have seen over the years that clearly some people exude confidence at interview sharing heaps about their skills, lets be honest they are so much easier to interview in comparison with those who whilst being genuinely the real deal are so self effacing that one has to work hard to encourage them to share why they are really the best candidate for a post. Anyway read on and see if you agree. As always love to hear your views.

Who likes a narcissist?

Well, according to a new study, job interviewers do.

Researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that narcissists make a better impression in job interviewslikely because they are just so darn good at promoting themselves.

“This is one setting where it’s OK to say nice things about yourself and there are no ramifications. In fact, it’s expected,” study researcher Peter Harms, an assistant professor of management at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said in a statement. “Simply put, those who are comfortable doing this tend to do much better than those who aren’t.”

The study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, included two parts. In the first part, 72 people were filmed as they participated in a fake job interview. The researchers found that the narcissistic people in the study promoted themselves more in the job interview than the non-narcissistic people.

When the job interviewer challenged the study participants, the non-narcissistic people backed down a little bit. But the narcissistic people actually became even moreself-promotional, “as if they say ‘Oh, you’re going to challenge me? Then I’m not just great, I’m fantastic,’” study researcher Harms explained in the statement.

In the second part of the study, 222 study participants were asked to rate filmed job interviews. Everyone who was in the videos had about the same kind of job skills, but some people in the videos were more narcissistic than others.

The researchers found that the study participants rated the narcissists higher than the non-narcissists, as the narcissists tended to do things like talk a lot and speak quickly, as well as smile at other people.

Researchers said that they are not trying to imply that narcissists are worse workers than non-narcissists, but that “they can be very disruptive and destructive when dealing with other people on a regular basis,” Harms said. “If everything else is equal, it probably is best to avoid hiring them.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, people with narcissistic personality disorder tend to over-sell their achievements or skills, take advantage of others in order to further themselves, don’t respond well to criticism or shame, and often disregard others’ feelings.

Past research has suggested that people who possess characteristics of narcissism tend to have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which could increase their risk of health problems.

“It gives a biological correlation to a psychiatric phenomenon,” Dr. Patrick Kelly of Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved in the study, previously told HuffPost. “It helps to say, ‘there is a mind body connection.’ There are real physical ramifications to your mental state, particularly if you have something like a personality disorder, which can be treated.”