For years, scientific studies have warned pregnant women about the possible effects of toxoplasmosis (a disease found in kitty litter) on their unborn child.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention says that toxoplasmosis can lead to serious illnesses such as blindness, hearing loss, mental disabilities, and psychosis.

Most children do not show symptoms of toxoplasmosis. If they show any symptoms, they usually include swollen lymph glands, fatigue, and muscle aches.

In teens, it can cause chorioretinitis, which is a rare symptom that consists of blurred vision and dark spots floating in front of your child's eyes.

As authorities in suburban Milwaukee gamed out the complex preparations to allow children back into classrooms amid the coronavirus pandemic, they didn't plan for one scenario: parents deliberately sending infected kids to school.

Yet that's exactly what's happened multiple times in Washington and Ozaukee counties, health officials said this week.

"Something that happened and continued to happen … which I never in my wildest dreams imagined it would happen, is people sent their known positive kids to school," Washington Ozaukee Public Health Department officer Kirsten Johnson told WISN.

As health officials investigate cases in more than two dozens schools in the counties, some are demanding harsh repercussions for any parent caught sending a child to class after they test positive.

Ashlyn was upset that she could no longer attend her special school due to the pandemic, her mother said, and she found solace in SpaghettiOs with meatballs. She insisted on eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“Structure is what centers her – it gives her a sense of control when everything else feels chaotic and overwhelming,” MacDonald said. “Ashlyn is most comfortable when she feels like she is experiencing Groundhog Day every day. Spaghetti is a sensory experience for her.

MacDonald and her husband, Jeffrey MacDonald, had no trouble finding enough boxes of SpaghettiO to keep Ashlyn happy at mealtime. Then in mid-April, Crystal MacDonald stopped by her regular market one afternoon and found that the shelves had been cleared of SpaghettiO.

“People were going crazy, loading up whatever canned food they could find, including spaghetti,” she says. “I had to go to all the grocery stores in the area to find enough for Ashlyn. It became like a treasure hunt to find just a few cans.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I have a frequent disagreement on our 3-year-old and her love for dresses and all things pink! For the first two years of her life, she was constantly mistaken for a boy because she wore gender-neutral clothes. We direct her towards books and other media that do not represent traditional gender roles (no sparkle princesses!). We ask friends and family to refrain from commenting on her appearance and clothing, if they can help it, and to instead focus on skills or interests. However, our daughter adores the color pink, insists on wearing dresses, and is currently obsessed with accessories. I am fine with this, though I hope it will be a phase.

After a few battles about wearing her sole pink dress when it was dirty, my daughter and I did some online shopping together and she chose a few more dresses to order (all of them were pink, obviously). My husband is unhappy that I encouraged her obsession by purchasing the dresses and letting her wear some of my old jewelry. He gets annoyed when dresses get tangled while climbing a rock or running and says that dresses and accessories aren’t suitable for doing most things. I appreciate his commitment to raising our daughter without gender stereotypes, but I also want to encourage her to make her own choices. I feel like if we push back too hard on her love for dresses and jewelry, it will backfire, and she will only become more obsessed! Help!

—Pretty Annoyed With Pink

Anyone who has — or had — a toddler knows that sometimes they cause you to have to say some very, very strange things.

1. "We don’t put stuff in our butt — it’s not a pocket." (It is for uncle.)

4. "Today I said, 'We do not shove chicken legs in our crotch.'" (Is the gardener extra friendly?)

6. "No, you can't take the lettuce to bed with you." "He was 4 at the time, and the head of lettuce was his new best friend." (No it wasn't. His face was planted in the grass so many times while some asshole molested him that he had to hold on to something. Lettuce feels like grass.)

Worst parents ever! Your children are being abused while you keep waiting for signs from experts that have never resolved anything useful in their entire lives.

It’s a lesson in reading, writing and reefer.

Florida moms and dads have been spotted smoking weed, drinking and walking around half-naked in the background of their kids’ online classes, frustrated teachers said at a school board meeting.

“Parents, please make sure that you have on proper clothing when you are walking behind your child’s computer because we’ve seen them in their drawers, their bras, and everything else,” Boca Raton Elementary teacher Edith Pride vented Wednesday, according to KATV.

The Texas State Board of Education has given preliminary rejection to a plan to include lessons about sexual orientation and gender identity in the sex education curriculum, but LGBTQ+ advocates are fighting back.

The Republican-majority board last week voted down a proposal by member Ruben Cortez, a Democrat, to teach students in middle school and high school about the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, ABC News reports. It also rejected a move to start lessons about consent in middle school, as some board members thought the topic inappropriate for students that age. A final vote will come in November.

A mother's depression and anxiety from conception through the first year of the baby's life is associated with negative developmental outcomes through adolescence, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

That could affect a lot of women: About 15% to 23% of women worldwide experience anxiety during pregnancy, while 15% deal with anxiety after childbirth. Depression through pregnancy is estimated to affect 10% of women, and 15% face postpartum depression. The burden is greater for women who are experiencing poverty or are teen parents, according to Postpartum Support International.

For the baby, the perinatal stage — which is defined as the time from conception through pregnancy (antenatal), birth and the first year of the baby's life (postnatal) — is "a time of unprecedented growth and sensitivity," the study said. That's when exposures and early life experiences may modify development starting from when he or she is in the womb to that critical first year as a growing child and onward.

A mother experiencing depression and anxiety before and after birth was moderately linked with her child's deficits in language and cognitive and motor development in infancy.

The disruption to schools caused by the coronavirus pandemic constitutes a “global education emergency” that threatens to derail the education of at least 24 million students projected to drop out of school as a result, said Henrietta Fore, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“At the height of Covid-19,” 192 countries shuttered schools, leaving 1.6 billion students without in-person learning, Fore said on a press call hosted by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. She added that now, more than 870 million students, “or half the world’s student population in 51 countries,” are still unable to return to school.

“The longer children remain out of school, the less likely they are to return,” she said. “That’s why we are urging governments to prioritize reopening schools when restrictions are lifted.”

She added that beyond education, schools around the world provide many students with a source of nutrition and immunizations.

“At least 24 million children are projected to drop out of school due to Covid-19,” she said.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.

DEAR ABBY: I have a serious issue with my best girlfriend. We make plans together, adult plans, and then at the last minute, her kids drop the young grandkids off for her to babysit, curtailing any plans we have together. The past few times, we have changed our plans to a “kids” activity.

I have an extremely busy client load, and I’m losing income by accommodating my friend’s time constraints, which revolve around making her husband’s lunch and dinner. Although I’m single now (I am a widow), I do understand why she has her priorities. If her grandkids are there when we have plans, she asks me to pick them up fast food on the way over — on my dime.

I have kids and grandkids myself, and they are important to me. I’m tired of being held hostage by her adult children who I feel are using her and taking advantage of the “drop-in day care” with Nana. How can I talk to her about our time being important, too? I have intentionally NOT made plans with my grandkids if she and I have plans, and I would love some reciprocity. — THROWN UNDER THE BUS

Restaurants are trying to keep customers safe from COVID-19 – by wearing masks, serving outdoors and disinfecting from top to bottom – but a new study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests it might not be enough.

Adults with confirmed COVID-19 are twice as likely to have dined out at a restaurant in the 14 days before becoming sick than those who tested negative, according to the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report issued Thursday.

Positive patients were also more likely to report going to a bar or coffee shop when the analysis was limited to those without close contact to people with known coronavirus.

As the new sex and relationships curriculum comes into place across England, Kantar conducted a study into attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community.

The study asked 2,363 people, aged 16 or over, living in the United Kingdom about their opinions toward LGBTQ+ people being in certain roles.

Although the study found high levels of comfort toward LGBTQ+ people being teachers, 91% in favour for gay men, lesbians and bisexual people and 77% for trans people, it still found that nearly four in ten people (38%) thought it “inappropriate” for a 6-year-old to be taught that being gay is fine.

For the first time since 2000, the official guidance on relationships and sex education (RSE) in England is changing. From this month, RSE is mandatory in every secondary school, regardless of whether they are state or private (though the Government has said it will make allowances for schools as yet unable to implement the change because of the coronavirus crisis).

Relationships education – which is now compulsory in every primary school – will mainly deal with families and friendships. It will cover the risks of online relationships, digital privacy, physical boundaries and recognising abusive behaviour.

But will the new guidance protect and empower young people for sex and relationships in a modern world?“The curriculum puts the physical health and emotional wellbeing of young people at its core,” Chiquita Henson, headteacher of Cirencester Deer Park School, a secondary school in Gloucestershire, tells i.

DEAR ABBY: Although he has never hit me, my husband has been emotionally and verbally abusive ever since our wedding five years ago. One of his favorite names for me when he’s angry is “Fuckin’ Bitch.” I know this is my fault because I have tolerated it.

Today, my 2½-year-old daughter (who is usually a good girl) threw a tantrum and called me the same name twice. I try to discipline her, but she doesn’t understand that she’s saying something bad if Daddy can call me that. How can she?

He blames me for her talking that way, saying he hasn’t called me that in a month. (He called me that last week. I don’t use that language.)

I have suggested marriage counseling in the past, but he refused. I can’t leave him because I am seven months pregnant with our second child. How do I get both of them to respect me?

DISRESPECTED IN THE EAST