April 28, 2023 — Friday
A while back, someone who I did not know at all — her name is Devon — approached me and asked if I would do an interview “for her video conference series on toddlerhood.” I said “Sure — of course!” I am up for doing ALL the interviews — because each interviewer asks different questions about Lead exposure and consumer goods safety, and each interview helps reach more parents with information on protecting their children and preventing childhood Lead-exposure. So a few months ago we did the interview, Devon asked lots of great questions (and I tried not to ramble too much)! The interesting thing about Devon was that she was a new mama. She had created a business helping mothers navigate toddlerhood (based on lessons and practices learned through her education and work experience with young children), but had only recently become a mom herself!
In our interview, I talked about how I encourage parents to test their babies for Lead BEFORE they start really crawling, and then again AFTER they become very mobile. This works out to about 6-8 months old for the first test (normally a finger-stick or heel-stick test is done for children that age), and then 12 to 16 months old for the second test. By testing babies at these ages (instead of the Federal recommendation nonsense of “12 months, and 2 years”) you can catch Lead-exposure very early — potentially even BEFORE it has seriously impacted your child — because this is when the baby has just started to self-mobilize on the floor, which is the primary source of exposure to the most common Lead hazard for children (the micro-particulate — invisible — Lead dust from various sources present in many, many homes and especially any home built before 1980).
If at 6 to 7 or 8 months old your baby tests negative, then you probably don’t have any — easily accessible, active-hazard — Lead-dust source in your home or elsewhere in your child’s life, but you should still follow up and check again around one year old (or so).
HOWEVER, if at six months your kiddo tests positive, then you know you have some source of Lead dust in your child’s environment and you should do a follow-up venous draw test to confirm if any of that Lead is actually circulating in their system — or if it was just surface-contamination of your baby’s skin from Lead in dust that was on the floor (but that is luckily not-yet ingested and circulating in their blood).
Isn’t this a “false positive” then?
Some would erroneously interpret this as a “false positive” from the heel-stick — but it is NOT a false positive; it is positive confirmation that there is Lead dust somewhere in your child’s environment. If you find Lead that early (BEFORE a baby is really getting around much on their own) with a heel-stick in that way — but the exposure is not confirmed by a venous draw test — you have really dodged a bullet. You have been given the opportunity to know that you need to get your home (or your child’s daycare or playground) tested for Lead — you have been given the opportunity to do that testing, and make decisions for next steps (identifying the source? Renovations? Moving out?) BEFORE your child tests positive for Lead circulating in their blood!*
*Of course it’s always best to get a Lead-hazard assessment of your home done BEFORE you move in, but most young parents are not told this by their realtors and have no idea that hazard assessments are even something one should do.
So anyway, this was part of the conversation Devon and I had in our interview. Devon’s baby was 6 months old, and Devon decided to get her baby tested after we spoke (even though her doctor discouraged it — because the baby was “not yet one year old”) … and Devon’s baby tested positive for Lead with a heel-stick test.
This was so unexpected for her that I think it upended her world a bit, and she followed up with me in a Zoom call to figure out a course of action (which included following up with a venous draw for her kiddo as noted above). Luckily, her kiddo’s venous draw came back negative (for that particular lab’s low threshold of detection for the BLL test in her case, negative was “= less than 0.5 µg/dL” — which is as close to a “true negative” as many labs get!), so she feels confident she learned about the concern before any significant ingested or inhaled exposure, given her baby had only just started to be ambulatory at the time.
In our Zoom chat, and through a bunch of follow-up back-and-forth together (with some independent testing — including soil testing, thrown in for good measure) over several weeks, we determined the likely culprits for her child’s Lead-exposure and she was able to take a quick course of action that eliminated any potential future exposure for him from the sources we identified.
So, this was truly the best possible outcome!
I am so thankful that the conversation in our interview for her conference inspired her to get her baby tested. I am also so thankful that the heel-stick test was indicative of Lead in his environment, but it was not yet Lead that had made its way into his bloodstream!
I am writing today because Devon’s online parenting conference (that she interviewed me for) is next week — from May 3 to May 7. Check out the image below, which has details.
If you sign up for her conference now, it is FREE for the first five days (to listen to as many of the pre-recorded sessions as you can fit into your schedule!), and you can hear our interview (if you decide you want to have continued access to the conference beyond the free period, there is a way to pay for that, too. I haven’t been a mother of toddlers for more than a decade, so I am not intimately familiar with the content of the conference — beyond my interview with Devon — but I have seen that Devon is very careful, thoughtful, smart, intentional, thorough, and measured in her process and choices in her own parenting journey, so I expect her conference will likely reflect those qualities and will be of great value for those who choose to attend (parents of toddlers looking for support through this challenging parenting period). 🙂
Given all she has been through, following the discovery of some active Lead hazards in her child’s environment, I do want to support her in helping get the word out about this issue. If her conference sounds interesting to you, check out the free trial period — including our interview! Let me know what you think in the comments here on this post, and if you have any follow-up questions from hearing our chat! Here’s her link: https://www.transformingtoddlerhood.com/conference/.
I would also invite parents of toddlers to follow her on Instagram — (here’s that link) and stand by for a future Instagram Live Q&A follow-up chat with Tamara and Devon (I’ll let folks know as soon as we schedule that)! FYI: I don’t have any financial interest of any sort here — I just love supporting other moms working toward educating and informing parents about making safer, healthier choices for their children.
Tamara Rubin
Owner
Lead Safe Mama, LLC
Hi! Can you let us the sources of lead that you identified?
Thank you!
For her privacy I am limiting the details shared.