hazards of sippy cups

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Because of quit a few discussions about problems children transferring from bottle to sippy cups, I was interested in who invented them. I came across an article about the hazards of them. Here is what I found. Some speech pathologists say They're are being used when they ought to be swilling and gulping. The consequence: a lazy tongue that produces sloppy "th" and "st" sounds, at least temporarily. Nursery-school teachers have noticed that articulation for young children has totally disappeared Gail Smith, director of the Gingham Giraffe Preschool in Chatham, N.J. directly attribute it to the use of sippy cups. she took one home and drank from it herself for a weekend. She became concerned that sucking a sippy cup was a lot like sucking a thumb. "You do tend to leave your tongue under the cup," she says. Second, some pediatric dentists say they are beginning to see more cavities among children who use sippy cups as if they were baby bottles -- sucking milk, juice and other sugary drinks for hours at time, sometimes even while they sleep. Some speech pathologists worry about overindulgence. When children drink from a bottle or breast, they perform something speech therapists refer to as a suckle-swallow. The tongue lays flat and moves mostly in a back-and-forth pattern. Drinking from a regular cup, however, requires a more complicated swallow. The cheeks and lips suck the liquid onto the tongue, then the tongue squeezes, lifts and propels the water down the throat. That action helps build the muscles required for proper speech -- at least according to one school of experts.But with a sippy cup, according to its critics, the tongue doesn't get enough action. "It's wreaking havoc on that tongue position," says Charlotte A. Boshart, a speech pathologist in Temecula, Calif. "It's just like sucking your thumb all the way up until you're five or six years old," says Sara Rosenfeld-Johnson, a speech pathologist in Tucson, Ariz has become one of the most outspoken critics of the sippy cup. But most children who develop speech difficulties after drinking from sippy cups are easily cured. But for children with Down Syndrome or other illnesses that weaken the facial muscles, these problems can be longer lasting. In those cases, she prescribes a series of exercises in which children gradually switch from sippy cups to straws to regular cups. Dentists are engaged in their own discussions on the subject. The Academy of General Dentistry say "that the long-term and regular use of sippy cups puts children's growing teeth at increased risk for decay." And it warns parents not to put sugary drinks in the cups. Ms. Adams, the television news reporter in Louisville collected sippy cups from various parents homes as well as from her own car and had them tested in a lab. Her report, aired recently on WHAS, revealed that the cups were teeming with germs.