Your kid is misbehaving? Blame the cellphone
A study reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that kids with behavioral issues may have become that way thanks to regular cellphone usage by the kids' mothers while they were pregnant. 28,000 7 year old children and their moms took part in the Danish study. Children whose mothers used the handsets and used the phones themselves, were 50% more likely to have behavior problems. That figure dropped to 40% if the mother only used the cellphone.
The mothers said that 3% of the children had borderline issues with behavior while 3% showed abnormal behavior such as having emotional tantrums and problems obeying their mother. The cellphone usage did not lead to an increase in physical problems like epilepsy or slow development of the children.
The study tried to find alternate reasons for the kid's behavior and Leeka Kheifets, an epidemiologist at UCLA who led the study, said she looked at things like social status among mothers, breastfeeding and even the inattention of the mother. Instead, it all came back to the mom's cellphone usage while pregnant being the common factor.
Not every expert agreed with the findings. David Spiegelhalter, a professor of Biostatistics at Britain's University of Cambridge, said,"I am skeptical of these results, even though they will get a lot of publicity." With approximately 5 billion handsets being used around the globe, The World Health Organization, the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health have found no evidence that health can be damaged by the usage of cellphones.
source: Reuters
The study tried to find alternate reasons for the kid's behavior and Leeka Kheifets, an epidemiologist at UCLA who led the study, said she looked at things like social status among mothers, breastfeeding and even the inattention of the mother. Instead, it all came back to the mom's cellphone usage while pregnant being the common factor.
source: Reuters
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