Kids | featured news

A Delaware doctor and his wife were arrested this week after their daughter told authorities that she was punished by "waterboarding," police said. The 11-year-old girl told police that her father, pediatrician Melvin Morse, would hold her face under a running faucet causing the water to shoot up her nose, the Delaware State Police said. The punishments happened at least four times over a two-year period and the girl's mother, Pauline Morse, witnessed some of them and did nothing, police said.

Changing the type of DVDs, videos and TV shows that preschoolers watch during the day may help them sleep better at night. A program that encouraged parents of kids ages 3 to 5 to replace age-inappropriate media content with more suitable programming found "long-lasting, significant reductions in sleep problems," says Michelle Garrison of Seattle Children's Research Institute, lead author of the study in Monday's Pediatrics.

Los Angeles Times review of Boy Scout documents shows that a blacklist meant to protect boys from sexual predators too often failed in its mission. For nearly a century, the Boy Scouts of America has relied on a confidential blacklist known as the "perversion files" as a crucial line of defense against sexual predators.

J.K. Rowling's next book is for adults, but she will be on hand this fall to help promote a new club for kids, the Harry Potter Reading Club.

It's a question often asked: Is chivalry dead? According to a recent study by two Swedish economists, that brand of gallantry is not only dead, it was buried at sea long ago... With a few exceptions, like the Titanic, female passengers and kids were less likely to survive than the captain and crew.

Special seats and other devices designed to help prevent parents from accidentally leaving babies and toddlers behind in cars don’t work, a team of experts said on Monday. They said parents shouldn’t rely on them to keep children safe.

A boy was in critical condition after a tree fell on him in a Bay Area campground. The 12-year-old was camping with family at campground in San Mateo County when a 40-foot tree fell on the tent in which he and another boy were sleeping.

Police say a boy who was rushed to the hospital Tuesday after a sand tunnel collapsed over him at a beach in Long Branch, N.J., has died.

The news that two parents in separate central Indiana incidents left their young child in a sweltering vehicle during a record heat wave has stirred outrage, but national child car-safety advocates say that, in reality, it happens more often than people realize and it happens to all kinds of parents.

Babies who spend their first year in homes with dogs have fewer colds and ear infections and need fewer antibiotics than babies in pet-free homes, a new study from Finland shows. Babies who live with cats also seem to have a health advantage, but it's not as big.