When babies attack: Labor pain is just the start

Jacqueline Stenson MSNBC contributor

While other moms were enjoying being pampered on Mother’s Day, Hilary Wheeler Miller was nursing a broken nose that she suffered after being headbutted by her 3-year-old son.

“He stood up really fast and just plowed into my nose,” says the 40-year-old mom from Littleton, Colo.

As a result of the accident, Miller’s nose is now broken in two places and she’ll need surgery later this month to straighten it.

After an emergency C-section for her son’s delivery, Miller thought the worst of baby-induced pain was behind her. But childbirth was just the start.

Miller also got a fat, black-and-blue lip when Nicholas bit her as an infant. During a later roller-skating outing, he pulled her down and she shattered her right wrist, requiring a cast for two months. Miller also has been sickened with various illnesses that her son picked up at daycare, including strep throat, three rounds of pink eye, and a severe case of bronchitis that took months to treat.

“Never once did I imagine having a child would be hazardous to my health,” she says. Today, though, there’s an “ongoing saga of danger surrounding my life now that I have a child.”

Advice books, magazines and Web sites for new parents talk at great length about the aches and pains of pregnancy and childbirth, and the subsequent sleep deprivation and exhaustion. But beyond that, parents are more likely to learn the hard way about various other owies that babies and young children can innocently inflict.

Teeny-tiny terrors
Parents who’ve been knocked around a few times by tiny tots quickly find themselves strategizing about how to deflect flailing arms and legs, flying toys and utensils, razor-sharp fingernails and fists that tighten around strands of hair like a Vise-Grip — and then pull! They search for ways to ease the pain of strained backs from endless hours of carrying around youngsters (often only on one hip, which makes matters worse) and strained necks from gazing at baby while feeding (which is widely recommended for promoting parent-infant bonding).

Courtesy of Hilary Wheeler Miller Hilary Wheeler Miller nurses her broken wrist while she watches her son, Nicholas, play in the sandbox. Nicholas broke his mom's wrist when he pulled her down during a roller-skating outing.

And when moms and dads drop their guard and take a finger to the eye, a blow to the head or a kick to the groin, they see stars — and not little twinkling ones.

Kris Cambra was in so much pain in April when her 2-year-old son, Truman, poked her in the eye, that she went to the emergency room.

“Think of having a paper cut on your eye,” says Cambra, 34, of New Bedford, Mass., who was diagnosed with a corneal abrasion.

“The doctor used an ultraviolet light to look at my eye and then she said, ‘Yep, you have a scratch on your cornea and it's shaped just like a fingernail,’" she says.

Thankfully, Cambra doesn’t have any lasting eye damage. But the experience has heightened her awareness of the need to stay on guard with her son, who she says is more physical and prone to tantrums and flailing than her daughter, 7, ever was. “You think, you outweigh them, you’re much bigger than them, so what can they really do to you?” A lot, actually.

Judy Ward, a pediatric nurse at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, says she’s heard about a range of child-induced injuries from parents who’ve called into the hospital’s Answer Line with questions about child health and behavior over the last 12 years that she’s fielded calls.

Her first bit of advice: “They probably didn’t mean it when they headbutted you.”

It may not always appear to make sense at the time, she says, but there are valid reasons why young children do seemingly inexplicable things, like beating up on their poor parents.

“They are, from practically the moment they are born, exploring their world,” says Ward. “Sticking their finger in your eye is no different than sticking it in an electrical socket.”

Tantrums can leave collateral damage
“Pre-verbal” children who don’t have the language skills to communicate their feelings and desires can be difficult because they get frustrated and then act out physically, Ward explains. “Biting, headbutting, tantrums, all of these things are because, ‘I want to go out and play and now you’re putting me in my car seat and I don’t want to go,’” she says. Sometimes kids want more attention or need a change of scenery.

Sometimes they absolutely must have an age-inappropriate pair of Pocahontas earrings. Just ask Sherry Gavanditti, who remembers every dark detail of an outing with her daughter Emily 14 years ago.

Courtesy of Sherry Gavanditti Sherry Gavanditti, right, still teases her daughter, Emily, about the tantrum over Pocahontas earrings that almost landed the mom in a plastic surgeon's office.

“My 2-year-old was fascinated with Pocahontas and decided quickly and loudly while on a shopping trip to a local Wal-Mart that she just had to have a pair of long dangly Pocahontas earrings,” says Gavanditti, 46, of Cleveland. “She was always a very sweet baby and is a wonderful young girl now, but at that time, when I removed those earrings from her tight little grasp, she screamed bloody murder with a spine-curdling ending and ripped the flesh off my right cheek with her tiny little nails like she was dangling from a 10-story building.”

The tantrum continued as Gavanditti left the store (without the earrings). In the parking lot, her daughter “spread out like a 10-foot spider to block entrance to the car and to keep from being placed into her car seat.” She screamed all the way home.

“I came home from Wal-Mart with a bloody face, a black eye and scratches all over my upper arms and chest,” Gavanditti says. “To this day, I tease my daughter about her one and only temper tantrum that almost cost me a trip to the plastic surgeon.”

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