It's back-to-school time, when everything is shiny and fresh: New clothes, new notebooks, new backpacks, new teachers and, for many, new schools. The scrubbed-clean classrooms and empty desks are filled with promise.

To realize all that potential, though, schools need a little help from parents. For children to have their best chance at success, parents must make sure their kids' teachers and school administrators have all the information they need to give each student the best instruction possible.

"We have a partnership with parents and that partnership is to make sure that their children can be as successful in school as possible," Barbara Chester, president of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, tells ParentDish. "We need, as principals and teachers, the most accurate information we can get so we can best work together with the parents for their child's success."

Girls can be in such a hurry grow up fast -- they want to wear makeup, carry purses and get waxed. Wait ... waxed?

Yep, teen and tweendom comes with more and more of the trappings of womanhood these days, and salon owners say they now see girls as young as 8 coming in to get unwanted body hair removed.

The youngest waxers tend to want to get rid of the dark fuzz on their upper lips or shape up unibrows, and are often the children of clients, Diane Fisher, owner of Eclips Kids Salon in Ashburn, Va., tells ParentDish.

"Where we live, there's a lot of Middle Easterners," she says. "Lots of the girls have dark hair for their age. They're self-conscious."

Wanda Stawczyk, owner of Wanda's European Skin Care Center in New York, says girls who start waxing young, even before they have dark hair, will always have lighter, thinner hair.

"It's a very big result," she tells ParentDish. "The hair is diminished almost 100 percent."

Remember when you shouted to your teenager that he'd better turn his music down or he'd go deaf? Turns out, you were right.

Hearing loss among adolescents in the United States is up at a rate of nearly a third, and about one in five kids ages 12 to 19 are suffering from it -- roughly 6.5 million, according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And boys' hearing is deteriorating at a higher rate than that of girls, the article says.

The kind of hearing loss the kids are suffering could affect their ability to hear in a classroom setting, Josef Shargorodsky, a resident at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and the paper's lead author, tells ParentDish.

"Most of the kids experienced slight hearing loss, and chances are they won't realize it," he says. "(But) with low intensity -- even slight -- hearing loss, they might not be able to hear what they need to hear at school."

Shargorodsky and colleagues in Boston examined data from two national surveys of teens ranging from 12 to 19 years old. The first database contained information gathered from nearly 3,000 teens between 1988 and 1994, and the second had information on nearly 2,000 teens gathered between 2005 and 2006.

Without the cape, Superman was just mild-mannered, clumsy Clark Kent, who could never quite get the girl. By day, Spider-Man was the shy and dorky Peter Parker. And even the rich and charming Bruce Wayne -- Batman's alter ego -- had his limitations when he wasn't wearing that special suit.

But today's superheroes have no such vulnerabilities, making them poor role models for boys, psychologists now say.

Yesterday's superheroes talked about serving the public good, where today's -- as typified by Iron Man -- participate in nonstop violence, says Sharon Lamb, a University of Massachusetts distinguished professor.

Yesterday's heroes, she says, were brainy and wry in their daytime lives -- real people with problems and vulnerabilities. Today's are aggressive and sarcastic. Yesterday's were worthy role models, while today's exploit women and flash bling.

And it's not just the men in costume who kids are looking up to.

"Superheroes come in all forms," ranging from business scions such as Donald Trump to rap stars, Lamb tells ParentDish.

Walking to school in the morning can help children respond better to stress during the day, a new study shows.

Forty children between the ages of 10 and 14 made a morning visit to the Behavioral Medicine Research Laboratory at the University at Buffalo. Half of them sat in a comfortable chair and watched a 10-minutes slide show of pictures of a suburban neighborhood-simulation of a bus ride and the other half walked a mile on a treadmill wearing a book bag and looking at similar suburban images-simulation of a walk to school.

The children were then allowed to rest for 20 minutes before taking a test that required them to identify color names printed in the wrong color, such as the word "green" printed in blue ink.

Children who were put through the simulated walk to school in the morning had smaller elevations in their blood pressure, heart rates and perceived stress when given a short exam later in the day than children who had been given the simulated ride.

Study shows there's no need to wait Credit: Getty Images

Having a miscarriage can be emotionally devastating -- perhaps even more so for women who don't already have children -- and many doctors recommend taking a break before trying to conceive again.

However, a new study published in the British Medical Journal suggests getting pregnant again quickly -- within six months of an initial miscarriage -- may improve a woman's odds of having a healthy pregnancy.

About 20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage before 24 weeks, and women who have one miscarriage are at an increased risk not only of miscarrying again, but also of having complications in a subsequent pregnancy.

But doctors and medical organizations differ on how long a woman should wait before conceiving again. The World Health Organization recommends waiting at least six months, and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists simply recommends allowing enough time for physical and emotional healing.

Don't want your kids to be overweight? Then watch what you put in your mouth during pregnancy.

A new study shows that women who gain too much weight while they're pregnant are likely to have heavier babies as a result. We already know the fatter a baby is at birth, the more likely it is to suffer from obesity, cancer and asthma later in life.

Researchers from Children's Hospital Boston looked at mothers who had multiple pregnancies and concluded that it was the mother's weight gain, as opposed to genetic factors, that predicts birth weight. The study, published in The Lancet, stresses the importance of weight management even before a child is born.

"It's appropriate for a baby to be born with some fat, but a baby born too fat indicates that the fetus developed in an abnormal environment during the most critical nine months of life," the article's co-author, David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Children's Hospital Boston, says in a statement.

She may be bossy or annoying and she might steal your clothes, but having a sister, whether older or younger, helps kids ward off the blues.

A recent study on the impact of siblings showed that kids between the ages of 10 and 14 were less likely to feel unloved, guilty, lonely, self-conscious or fearful if they have a sister. That was true regardless of how far apart the kids were in age.

"Even after you account for parents' influence, siblings do matter in unique ways," the study's lead author, Laura Padilla-Walker, a professor at Brigham Young University School of Family Life, says in a statement. "They give kids something that parents don't."

It's not just sisters who count. Having a loving sibling of either gender promoted good deeds and charitable attitudes such as helping a neighbor or watching out for other kids at school -- twice as strongly as having a loving parent did.

The joys of parenting: You bring your perfect little bundle of joy home from the hospital ... and she cries all night. In preschool, she refuses to wear anything but a neon pink tutu. A few short years later she's got her room wallpapered with Justin Bieber posters.

Relax, you tell yourself. It's just a phase.

And then, come the piercings. First the ears. Next? The belly button. And then, oh, dear, the tongue. And that, a new study shows, is more than just a passing stage. That can have a serious impact on a life.

Yours.

That little stud in your daughter's tongue might well cost you thousands of smackeroos in orthodontist bills.

Your teenager seems moody and depressed? Showing all the signs of addiction? Before you go ordering that tox screen, you might want to consider another culprit: the Internet.

Teens whose Internet use is uncontrolled or unreasonable -- deemed "pathological" -- are more likely to become depressed than those whose use is more moderate, a new study indicates.

Pathological use of the Internet has long been associated with the behaviors and symptoms of addiction, including relationship problems, ill health and aggression, the study, to be published in an upcoming issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, says.

Researchers from Australia and China looked at more than 1,000 teens in China who had an average age of 15. The kids were screened for depression and completed a questionnaire to help the researchers identify pathological Internet use and identify typical addiction behaviors and feelings, such as nervousness when off-line that disappears once back online.