"A person's a person no matter how small"-Dr. Seuss

I have decided to share a personal story as a parent about relying on research and a medical professional’s knowledge in research to make a life changing decision for my son.   My son was born 28 weeks premature and was on a high-frequency air ventilator for about two months after birth.   A major side effect from using the high-pressured ventilators is eye damage, to muscles and retinas specifically.   Soon as the doctors had to make the decision to put my son on the ventilator I had to sign a waiver acknowledging this could happen.   At that moment, vision or breathing was the question at hand…I chose breathing.   My son was visited by an ophthalmologist regularly while he was in the NICU to observe his retina development.   Luckily, we were sent home after three months and he had no retina damage.   We had a follow-up appointment a year from then to reassess his eye development.           ...

            For our research assimilation project, I had decided I was especially interested in the topic of stress in children, families, and EC professionals.   I narrowed stress into three subtopics: acute stress, episodic stress, and chronic/toxic stress.   Each of these subtopics interested me for different reasons.   I find acute stress interesting because we are beginning to see a trend of children not being allowed to experience stress, not even if it is mild acute levels.   Episodic stress is interesting because of the windows of development it can impact or not impact, depending on the context and the development of the individual.   And finally, chronic/toxic stress was interesting because of the research that is beginning to emerge about the lasting effects of such detrimental levels of stress that is influencing the children and adults we are serving.       ...