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Growing Up Green: Baby and Child Care: Volume 2 in the Bestselling Green This! Series, by Deirdre Imus
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The essential, parent-friendly guide to raising a healthy child in our increasingly toxic environment.
The second volume in the New York Times bestselling Green This! series, Growing Up Green: Baby and Child Care is a complete guide to raising healthy kids. Environmental activist and children's advocate Deirdre Imus addresses specific issues faced by children in every age group -- from infants to adolescents and beyond. With a focus on preventing rather than treating childhood illnesses, Deirdre concentrates on educating and empowering parents with information such as:
How to make sure your child is vaccinated safely
Which plastic bottles and toys are least toxic
How to lobby for safer school environments and support children's environmental health studies
Advice from leading "green" pediatricians and nationally recognized doctors such as Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.
Chock-full of research and advice, Growing Up Green makes it easy for you to introduce your child to the "living green" way of life.
- Sales Rank: #2055336 in Books
- Brand: Baker and Taylor
- Published on: 2008-04-15
- Released on: 2008-04-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .80" w x 6.00" l, .80 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
- Great product!
About the Author
Deirdre Imus is the founder and president of the Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology(R), part of Hackensack University Medical Center (HUMC) in New Jersey. She is also a cofounder and codirector of the Imus Cattle Ranch for Kids with Cancer, and the author of the bestselling book The Imus Ranch: Cooking for Kids and Cowboys.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
A Letter to Parents
Half a century ago, most parents had a pretty good sense of their responsibilities toward their children: to provide them with food, clothing, shelter, an education, and, of course, love. Like parents throughout history, they did whatever was in their power to keep their children safe, to protect them from harm.
But what does it mean today, to "keep our children safe"? In recent years, the job of raising -- and protecting -- our children seems to have become a lot more complicated. Our lifestyles have undergone radical changes over the past few decades, and so has the environment we live in.
As a culture, we seem to be in constant motion. We work more, and sleep less, than ever before. Instead of making time for a good old-fashioned sit-down dinner at home, we opt for the drive-in window of the nearest fast-food restaurant. We live off processed foods loaded with sugars, synthetic additives, and trans fats. We skip our morning walk and instead spend hours of every day locked inside our cars or plugged into various electronic devices.
And perhaps most significantly, harmful toxins have become more and more present in our environment. Every week, more chemicals are introduced into our environment, often without first being tested for safety on humans, much less safety on children. These toxins pervade every aspect of our lives: the air we breathe, the water we drink, even the clothes we wear. We spray our lawns with pesticides, and eat fish contaminated with mercury, and drink milk pumped up with hormones. We sleep on mattresses treated with bioaccumulative flame retardants and scrub our kitchens -- and our faces -- with irritating chemicals. We're inundating ourselves with toxins twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and most of the time we don't even know it!
So what, you might be asking, does any of this have to do with raising a child?
The answer is absolutely everything. Over the past thirty years, these changes in our lifestyle, diet, and environment have taken a dramatic -- and tragic -- toll on our children's health. We're seeing epidemic levels of diabetes and obesity. Pediatric cancers have risen steadily at a rate of 1 percent annually over the last twenty years. A poor diet and lack of exercise have contributed to an epidemic of childhood obesity, with one in six children in the United States between the ages of six and nineteen considered overweight. Asthma rates have increased tenfold over the last decade. Approximately one out of every six U.S. children has a developmental disability, including speech and language disorders, learning disabilities, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Approximately 1 in 150 American children has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).One out of every eight babies is born premature in this country, and the rate of premature births increased nearly 31 percent between 1981 and 2003. Rheumatoid arthritis has become the third-most-common childhood disease -- among infants. Childhood allergies are at record levels.
If you're like me, you probably feel pretty horrified upon confronting these sobering facts for the first time. But I don't want this information to frighten or paralyze you. On the contrary: It should empower you to start asking some critical questions about what's causing this extraordinary increase in diseases over the last twenty-five years and what you as a parent can do to reverse these trends.
The World Health Organization estimates that we could prevent more than 80 percent of all chronic illnesses by improving our lifestyles in simple ways, like working to reduce our exposure to environmental pollutants and eating a healthier diet. Eighty percent! So why aren't we doing more to protect our children?
For a number of reasons, children are more adversely affected by exposure to environmental toxins than adults. Pound for pound of body weight, they breathe and eat more than we do. Their still-developing immune systems might mistakenly treat the toxins as naturally occurring enzymes or hormones. And because children are growing and developing so fast, dangerous cell mutations can multiply at a faster rate. Children are also less capable of detoxifying and excreting chemicals than adults. Their blood-brain barrier is still porous and allows more chemicals to reach their brains.
The environmental toxins most harmful to children include:
- Mercury (in vaccines, fish, dental amalgams, coal-burning
- emissions, incinerators, landfills)
- Toxic cleaning products
- PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls)
- Lead
- Air pollutants such as dioxins, volatile organic compounds
- (VOCs), asbestos
- Environmental and/or tobacco smoke
- Pesticides sprayed in the home and on the lawn
- Pesticides used in lice shampoos
- Pesticides in food and water
- Drinking water contaminants
- Industrial emissions
Many children, particularly those in lower-income urban areas, face a number of these environmental insults on a regular basis, even daily. All I can say is no wonder their health is suffering. Their bodies are overloaded with toxins and deficient in the nutrients they need to develop properly. How could our kids not be chronically ill?
As parents, and as a society, we need to become more vigilant about shielding our children from these environmental insults. We're already way past the tipping point. We can -- we must -- band together to reverse these frightening trends in our children's health.
With that goal in mind, I've written this book for you -- all the concerned parents (and future parents) out there who are ready to take charge of their children's health once and for all. Greening Your Baby is a chronological, stage-by-stage guide that will take you from the moment you first entertain the possibility of having a child all the way through the moment when you send that child off into the "real world," whether that means college or the workplace. Whatever your level of parenting experience, if you have one kid or nine, you can use the information in these pages to secure a better future for your children.
With the necessary tools, you can protect your children from environmental toxins. Throughout this book, I'll be examining how all sorts of different lifestyle choices -- about nutrition, physical fitness, even vaccinations -- may affect the development of your child. I've spoken to more than twenty of the most respected children's health experts in the country about the dangers toxins pose and the actions we can take to reduce kids' exposure to them.
Though I was interested in these issues long before I became a mother, the birth of my son, Wyatt, deepened my determination to clean up our toxic environment. I wanted to give my son the best possible start in life, and I knew that doing so meant reducing his exposure to toxins. How could I help Wyatt and millions of kids like him?
In 1998 -- the same year that I gave birth to Wyatt -- my husband and I realized a longtime dream when we founded the Imus Ranch in Ribera, New Mexico. That summer, and every summer since, we invited children suffering from cancer and various life-threatening blood disorders, such as sickle cell, and children who have lost a brother or sister to sudden infant death syndrome, to experience life on our authentic 1880s-style working cattle ranch.
My experiences over the last decade at the ranch have strengthened my desire to leave our children, and their children, a cleaner world to inherit. We've now had more than seven hundred kids at the ranch, and I've learned a great deal from every single one of them. I like to think that this book reflects many of the lessons I've taken from my summers in New Mexico -- and from every day of the year as a mother.
To me, it all boils down to knowing the right questions to ask and the choices that are available to you. Awareness is the essential tool here. Only when we truly educate ourselves about the widespread threats to our children's health can we take steps to avoid and ultimately eliminate those threats. With that goal in mind, in 2001, I founded the Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology at the Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, New Jersey, to raise people's awareness of the environmental factors that contribute to childhood cancer and other serious childhood diseases. In our campaign to reduce kids' exposure to environmental toxins, we place a big emphasis on the dangers of cleaning chemicals and pesticides in schools and homes. We believe that if more parents spoke out about the irreparable harm these substances were doing to our children, people would no longer use them.
The time has come to raise our voices and demand some changes. If we continue bringing up our children in this toxic soup, their health problems will only worsen, and then what will we be left with as a society?
Throughout this book, I've tried to make my suggestions as accessible, realistic, and affordable as possible, since I'm the first to acknowledge that most parents have too much on their plates for any complicated life-turnaround scheme. Even if, like so many families today, you and your partner both have full-time jobs, I promise you that you can make these changes, without any trouble at all. I've always believed that the most significant transformations are the ones that occur slowly, sometimes without our even noticing.
As you read, I'd like you to revisit the question I introduced at the very beginning: What does it mean, these days, to keep your children safe, to protect them from harm? I'm talking about more than just buckling your seatbelt or locking the back door at bedtime. I'm talking about protecting your children's health over the long term.
Yes, the rules of the game have changed over the last few decades. But if there's one thing that parenthood teaches, it's adaptability. And there's no time like the present to put that skill to good use. We must adapt our lifestyles and ...
Most helpful customer reviews
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
This book lost it's credibility when the author questioned breastfeeding's benefits.
By Giordano903
I really wanted to like this book. I try my best to raise my chilren "green". To me breastfeeding and being green go hand in hand. Breastmilk is by far superior to infant formulas. To even think that the toxins that are found in breastmilk outweigh the benefits of breastfeeding for both mother and child are laughable. Breastfeeding rates here in the U.S. are already low, I am sad to think that new mothers who read this book might be influenced by it's information and advertisements of organic infant formulas.
38 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
No Prioritization, No Encouragement to Go Against the Tide, Overwhelming
By ChristineMM
I really wanted to love this book and had hoped to give it a 5 star rating. In this review I will fully explain the reason for rating this book with 3 stars. I think I have given it a fair judgment. Note I have implemented many of these suggestions in our family's life in the years past and am supportive of families making healthier choices as well as making choices that are better for our environment.
The best thing about Growing Up Green! Is that Deirdre Imus has taken every single green living issue pertaining to children and health and summarized it in one place. Buying and reading this book can save you lots of time and money. As a comparison, I have been reading about health, wellness, and green living and parenting for twenty years and have spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on books and magazines and hundreds of hours combing through lots of information to extract out the latest recommendation on a topic. If you have not yet invested that kind of time, this book is a time saver for you (and a bargain).
The book is easy to read. You can breeze through it quickly. One of my problems was that I was so horrified by two subjects that twice I had to shelve the book for a few weeks to save my sanity (more on that later).
The book's strong point of being all encompassing and cutting to the chase is also its weakness. Imus covers each topic shallowly, sometimes too thinly. Although she does provide websites to go read for more information on nearly every topic, sometimes there just is not enough information to explain a topic. Other topics deserve reading an entire book (or two) on the topic. Specifically troublesome was that some topics that I know from other sources are conflicted or are being credited as junk science is never mentioned in the book. Things come across as fact without saying that some of these topics are questionable, with conflicting studies published on both sides of the position, so I (the informed reader) don't truly know what to believe (others ignorant on some topics may take everything as gospel).
Several times, Imus says that we should just choose the course of action assuming the worst is true, and avoid that thing lest we possibly harm our children's health. That would not be so hard if it involved one or a few choices in our lives but when you put all the recommendations together, to really do all the things in this book just may drive a person crazy (seriously) or at the least, would leave them worried and possibly angry at the world too.
Another major issue is there is no prioritization of the recommendations. Eating your fruits and veggies versus eating organic versus going totally vegan versus using all green school supplies and children wearing only organic cotton and renovating your home to replace everything with green materials is all weighted the same. The fact is that even if we have a desire, putting every single one of these recommendations into place is not possible, especially when a family's budget is limited. It is not feasible for most families to renovate their homes just to make them greener. Even with our best intentions the fact of the matter is that some of the lifestyle changes that are not prohibited by our budget are hard to be consistent with over the long-term as they require constant effort to go against the tide which can be emotionally draining and exhausting. I speak from experience when I say that swimming upstream is difficult in the long term.
Additionally we hear over and over how the author was able to implement these changes with her only child. Perhaps if she had two or more children she might see that sometimes a parent's best intention is altered by the different wills, personalities, and taste buds of different children even born into the same family and raised with the same parenting style and diet as the other children in the family. Additionally parents with more than one child have less energy and patience to juggle all these recommendations with different aged children. This book does fall prey to the mother of an only child typical thing "I did it with my one child so you all should have the same success with all of your own children if you would just try".
The author gives no sympathy to the reader by way of acknowledging that making all of these changes might be difficult, by the way.
Take it from me, a mother who has over the years implemented and practiced some alternative parenting methods and choices, managing an alternative parenting lifestyle is challenging. We face challenges at the grocery store when shopping, when at friend's and relative's homes, when at children's birthday parties, and when at the doctor's office. The lack of guidance with some kind of a priority scale and the lack of encouragement for readers to use critical thinking and their personal discernment about which battles to fight and which to surrender is an issue. Reading all of these recommendations for green parenting will leave some readers overwhelmed. Some readers will be left confused and may give up, while some may even end up neurotic and angry or exhausted as they try to do everything recommended (and worry of damaging their children if they fail or choose to not follow a recommendation).
I found the book scary in some parts. The most disturbing to me was the one thing that I'd not heard about before. The author says that chemicals and drugs used in the infertility treatment process may damage the very children that are conceived from such procedures. We were not led on where to go for more information or told what studies or reports discuss this. If this really is true our country is in real trouble and we all would have serious reasons to be skeptical of American medical doctors.
The next issue that caused me worry and family strife was the use of plastics in food wraps, food storage containers and water bottles. One of the issues is Bisphenol A. I was so worried about what I read that I went and did more research and found the topic to be debated and studies conflicted each other. The author may be happy to know I've thrown out most of the plastic we own in a fit of fear and anger after reading that section of her book. I'm now worried about hormone disruption in my sons and wonder if they will be infertile in adulthood. My husband thinks I'm crazy and we're actually having disagreements over this topic. This is one topic in the book that is not covered as deeply as I felt it deserved. For example if a study showed that the plastic with food in it should not be heated then why can't we still use it to hold cold food? We are told instead to just avoid the use of it entirely and buy glass food storage containers.
Although the book has a chapter on how to become an activist in the community, it is lacking something else more important. The book really needed a chapter about how concerned mothers can convince their husbands to go along with these changes (especially since some are not easy to implement and others are very costly and some may be too costly for the family budget). In fact the topic of the budget is never discussed, since it is not an issue for the author I guess she thinks it is not an issue for mainstream Americans? Additionally dealing with other relatives on our alternative choices is something that we need support with. That topic is completely absent. If you do all the things in this book it will be you against the world, or perhaps only with the support of other green living parents that you meet in online discussion groups.
The author quotes about a dozen medical doctors who are famous in their fields or have published books on the topics. Their biographies are at the end of the book. To be more of a thinking person readers should really go on to read those books too. I have read some of them and they educate and enlighten the reader more than this book can in its short length and broad scope.
The book really needs an index so we can quickly reference the topics, especially to look back on a topic we know we read on the first go-through. I can't believe there is no index!
The book also had some typos, spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes. One duplication error was in a chemical reference chart. I'm surprised the editor and this major book publisher let those get through.
The topics in the book span from pre-conception through raising teenagers. Some of the larger topics touched upon which deserve more reading and self-education are Autism and the vaccination debate. One or more whole books on those topics really should be read. A few other topics are thrown in like saying we should use public transportation. My husband said he heard Don Imus on the radio the day after Deirdre did a book signing at her own town's library in which he admitted he sat in the limo with the engine idling while she did her talk, and he was chastised by a citizen for doing so. Could they not have driven themselves from their own home to the public library in their same town or used public transportation?
To summarize if you want to be told what to do and to not think much about all the background information or to even question if these statement are correct you'll love the book and would think it is 5 star book. If you want all the topics in one book for fast reading you'd love it too (5). If you worry that the book over-generalizes or possibly conceals that the topic is actually based on junk science, it is a 3 or a 2. If you are well read on these topics already then the book won't be of much use to you and it would be a 3 or a 2. If you like to gather your own information and think on your own you may think this is a 3 or a 2.
I have implemented many of the suggestions in this book before it was published. If you don't know this stuff already perhaps this is a good starting point for a quick read summary of all the recommendations.
I wish all parents well and hope that everyone's children are healthy now and in the future. I hope you are able to be happy on your parenting journey too--don't let worries ruin it.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Not the best choice
By green mama
This book does provide some useful links and ideas but it is mostly a testament of what worked for the author personally and for her one and only child. The book is preachy and light on facts, heavy on opinions. I was horrified by her remarks that state breastfeeding may not be the best choice due to toxins in breastmilk. She does her readers a real disservice by presenting this idea and giving links to organic formula. According to La Leche League International, a reputable authority on breastfeeding, human milk is still the best choice. Also there was not much information on cloth diapering -- the author glossed over the idea saying she could not keep up with the laundry rather than giving resources or facts about a great green idea. I am glad I got this at the library and saved my cash for better resources.
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