Faculty Bibliography

Klass reviews 'What A Blessing She Had Chloroform: The Medical and Social Response to the Pain of Childbirth from 1800 to the Present' by Donald Caton

Klass explains why she feels that, post-potty training, there is little a parent should know about their child's bathroom habits. She notes that just as parents' attitudes about their children's bodily privacy vary, kids' thoughts on the subject vary as well

Klass, a pediatrician, discusses children's weight. Parents who hover over their children, worried that they're getting fat, reinforce the message that one can never be thin enough, a message that can lead to eating disorders and misery

ON a Saturday morning here, there is only one possible place to be, at least for parents with children under 10. Dr. Edward M. Hallowell is at a soccer game. His son Jack, 7, is playing for the Maroon team; his wife, Sue Hallowell, is team manager. And because this is Cambridge, ground zero for self-conscious parenting, every soccer team has been taught to chant, ''One, two, three, four -- We don't care about the score!'' Dr. Hallowell, 49, a child and adult psychiatrist, is the author of ''Connect,'' a book that argues the necessity of human connectedness in the interest of health and happiness. So how does he square connecting and competing? Even 8-and-under soccer, he would argue, is more than little boys in shorts and shin guards running themselves breathless on a bright fall morning; it, too, is a form of connection. Exactly, Dr. Hallowell said. Dr. Hallowell, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Medical School and an expert on attention deficit disorder, has turned his focus on the squishy area of feelings and found that feeling good is good for you

MY daughter will tell you, if you ask, that she is named after Jo March, the strong-willed heroine of Louisa May Alcott's ''Little Women.'' She will say it with a tinge of apologizing for a parent's folly, and if I am nearby I will often interject some lighthearted comment about other famous Josephines -- Baker or Beauharnais, for example. But the truth is, she was named after Jo March and she knows it. Almost every year on her birthday, we somehow end up at Orchard House, the wooden house in Concord, Mass., where Alcott lived with her parents and her sisters, and where she wrote ''Little Women'' more than a century ago. At Orchard House, in 1858, the peripatetic Alcott family settled down. They had already been through the adventure of the failed Utopian community at Fruitlands in Harvard, Mass. (another entertaining day trip), had lived in many houses and boardinghouses and had stayed with generous friends. In Concord, not far from such good friends and neighbors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, they found a little brown house that fit them well. And I pay my respects to Emerson and to Hawthorne and to all the other luminaries of 19th-century letters who have passed through Concord, and to the great thinkers of transcendentalism. But internally, like every serious Orchard House pilgrim, I also suppress a quiet smile, knowing it is ''Little Women'' that attracts busloads of women, all of whom feel they are on close personal terms with characters described in an 1868 children's book. In our minds, most of us have long inhabited Orchard House, identifying with one sister or another (you don't have to ask whom I identify with; I named my daughter to show my devotion). We know these people, or we think we do; we've been at the table for their meals, sat up nights crying over their tragedies, helped with the scrimping and saving to get by

The use of antibiotics to treat children with colds caused by a virus is discussed. Worried parents need convincing that antibiotics will not cure a cold

I know what my patients want--or at least what their parents want. I know what they want to take away with them, after I have performed my slightly mystical, ritualized functions--listened to the chest, looked in the ears, pressed on the belly. They want me to give them a spell, a charm, a nostrum to take home and make their children better. Isn't that what you expect from your friendly neighborhood witch, from your shaman, from your doctor? Sometimes parents tell me I'm on the wrong track. 'It will be an ear infection by tomorrow, it always is.' Or even, 'His other doctor always gives him penicillin when he has a cold.' Others just look disgruntled. And sometimes I try to get away with giving out samples of over-the-counter medicines, the various decongestants, cough medicines and antihistamines that the drug companies supply--here, I say, maybe this will help. And sometimes it does: The parent goes out of the door happy, holding a special magic mixture. I call it 'magic' not because it has no medical effect--it may or may not. The magic comes when it is handed over, recommended, by an expert. So much for pediatrics, where our great prescribing dilemma most of the time is about antibiotics. Patients want them, and we doctors try to hold the line and not give them out unnecessarily. Not for colds, not for runny noses, not for viruses, not for teething. There are sound medical reasons for our reticence; we know that antibiotics do not work against viruses, and that the overprescription of antibiotics is contributing to the emergence of bacteria that are resistant to many common drugs. So why do I sometimes feel guilty face to face with a mother who can't believe I'm holding out on her sick child? Why do I hope to see that bright red eardrum, that possible bacterial infection, that excuse to reach for the prescription pad? I want to help, and I also want to be seen as helpful. Often it's hard to find the right balance

As a parent, I have noticed that certain conversations go with different stages of children's lives. When they're babies, we exclaim over the vagaries of temperament, over how children are different right from the beginning. In fact, as a pediatrician, I find myself asking at the two-month or the four-month visit, `What kind of a baby is he?' No parent ever has trouble coming up with an answer. Then there is the larger debate about child rearing that our culture engages in at fairly regular intervals. Perhaps it is unfair to call it a debate; perhaps it is more an epiphenomenon of marketing, book and magazine hype, and that peculiar combination of breast beating and navel gazing that marks our rather childish preoccupation with our jobs as parents and adults. We always seem to be ready to engage in yet another round of astonished debate about children and parents, and cause and effect. Yet when most adults look at their own lives, they place heavy emphasis on the combination of two factors that seem largely forgotten in this conversation: choice and chance. We do not tell our life stories as examples of determinism of any kind. What is the last memoir you read whose author sees himself as a hapless actor playing out the lines and stage directions encoded in his DNA? Or as a blank slate on which his parents drew the road map?

Klass, a pediatrician and a mother, discusses how pediatricians may 'evaluate' what kind of parents their patients have from both sides of the issue. Klass says she has found that most of the time pediatricians aren't dealing with bad parents but less-than-shining moments in a long and difficult endeavor