Blog Posts by Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine

Letting your toddler slide down alone may be safer that riding down with her in your lap.When your toddler is clamoring to ride down the big-kid slide at the playground, most parents assume that the safest thing to do is put her on your lap and ride down with her. But orthopedists say that doing so puts small children at risk for broken legs -- and it happens far more frequently than you'd think.

Parents may not notice when their child's shoe catches on the side of the slide for a second or two, but that, combined with the speed at which the parent and child are zipping down the slide, can create enough friction to break the child's shin bone (tibia). Instead, what parents do notice is that at the bottom of the slide, instead of laughing with joy, the child is whimpering or screaming in pain.

Related: The biggest sports health hazards kids face

"My wife was just trying to keep Hannah extra safe and make sure she didn’t fall,” Jed Dickman told the New York Times. His 18-month-old daughter's sneaker snagged on the slide, and by the time his wife freed it the child's tibia

After sending his son to school wearing a wire, Stuart Chaifetz found out that his son, Akian, was being bullied …When his 10-year-old son, Akian, started getting into trouble at school, Stuart Chaifetz was stunned. The notes from Horace Mann Elementary School in Cherry Hill, N.J., said that Akian, who has autism, was having violent outbursts and hitting his teacher and his aide -- behavior that the boy had never exhibited before.

"I could not understand why this was happening," Chaifetz, a 44-year-old animal rights activist in New Jersey, wrote on his website. "I had never witnessed Akian hit anyone, nor could I dream of him lashing out as had been described to me."

Related: Bullying, child abuse hastens aging in kids

In October 2011, he met with Akian's teachers and school therapists. A behaviorist was called in, but during several classroom visits he didn't see Akian become violent. "He tried to create a scenario that would push Akian so far that he would lash out," Chaifetz explained. "And Akian did not."

"If Akian was pushed and didn't do anything, what was setting him off?" his dad

Is drinking alcohol-based hand sanitizer the new teen trend?Six teenagers have ended up in San Fernando Valley emergency rooms recently with symptoms of alcohol poisoning. But the illicit alcohol didn't come from their parents' liquor cabinets or from illegally purchased beers. These teens got drunk -- and dangerously ill -- drinking hand sanitizer.
Related: 6 Risky Games Your Kids May Be Playing

They're not drinking the gel straight from the dispenser. Some of the teens reportedly used salt to isolate the ethyl alcohol in the disinfectant, turning the gel into a shot of something like liquor; others go online to find distillation instructions. Since most hand sanitizers are 62 percent to 65 percent ethyl alcohol, the drink distilled from it can be as high as 120 proof. (In contrast, a standard shot of vodka is about 40 percent alcohol, or 80 proof.)

"All it takes is just a few swallows and you have a drunk teenager," Cyrus Rangan, director of the toxicology bureau for the county public health department and a medical toxicology consultant for

Meredith Goldstein, author of As an advice columnist and entertainment reporter at The Boston Globe, Meredith Goldstein, 34, has heard plenty of horror stories about the hazards of being single in general (and at weddings in particular). But her debut novel, "The Singles," isn't based on other people's problems.

"A lot of people have asked whether this book is inspired by my advice column, Love Letters. My simple answer is: No," she told Yahoo! Shine in an interview. "This book is inspired by how I behave when I'm not being an advice columnist - when I'm someone who needs advice. I had to shelve my sanity and levelheadedness in order to write this book. And it was wonderful. "

The book is set at the posh Maryland wedding of Beth "Bee" Evans and Matt Fee. Bee, who always hated going to weddings solo, has asked each guest to bring a date, but five of them -- Hannah, Vicki, Rob, Joe, and Nancy -- insist on attending alone. They are characters with which most readers can identify, no matter what their marital status

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice answers questions from reporters at Mississippi College in Clinton, …We may be ready for a woman to be Vice President on television -- witness HBO's new political comedy, "Veep,"which debuted last night -- but in real life, conservative pundits say that the chances of Mitt Romney picking a female running mate are slim to none.

Last week, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was the popular pick for Vice President, according to a CNN/ORC International survey. Twenty-six percent of Republicans and conservative-leaning independents said that they'd choose Rice, who also served as President George W. Bush's national security adviser, and 36 percent of Republicans who aren't in the Tea Party said she was their top choice, beating out former GOP hopeful Rick Santorum, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie by wide margins.

"Name recognition is the key," CNN polling director Keating Holland said. "Rice and Santorum are best known and they top the overall wish list."

But some say that the country's experience with former

By Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine

Wedding photographer Jason Lee started his blog, kristinandkayla.com, nearly six years ago, posting pictures of his daughters for his family, particularly his mom, to see. "I started this project back in November of 2006, to document the lives of my children for my mom, who was diagnosed with Non Hodgkin's Lymphoma," Lee told Yahoo! Shine. "With the kids being sick all the time, it wasn't a great idea to have them around her too often."

But what started out as candid shots on a family photo blog turned into some crazily creative portraits. Take a look!

Tommy Mallon recovering in the hospital after a head-on collision during a high school lacrosse game broke his …Tommy Mallon, a senior at Santa Fe Christian school in San Diego, was two minutes away from the end of the last varsity lacrosse game of the season when it happened.

"I was running for a ground ball and collided with an opposing athlete," he told Yahoo! Shine. "And I went down."

[Related: The biggest sport health hazards kids face]

"It was shocking, first of all, because the collision between Tommy and the other player did not look serious at all," his mother, Beth Mallon, told Yahoo! Shine. "It didn't look like a bad hit. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary."

Tommy said he was fine and wanted to get back to the game, but the school's athletic trainer, Riki Kirchhoff, made him stay on the ground. While trying to figure out if he had a concussion, she saw signs of possible nerve damage, and insisted that the school call an ambulance.

He insisted he was fine. Kirchhoff was sure he was not. And she was right.

The force of the hit had caused Tommy's head to rotate on the top of his

U.S. nuns are being taken to task by the Vatican for having The Vatican this week reprimanded the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the group to which most nuns in the United States belong, for promoting "certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith," publicly disagreeing with church Bishops, and spending too much time focusing on poverty and social injustice instead of promoting a "Biblical view of family life and human sexuality," according to a Reuters report.

In an eight-page investigative report issued by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Holy See cited "serious doctrinal problems which affect many in consecrated life" and worried that the nuns' "commentaries on 'patriarchy' … undermine the revealed doctrines of the Holy Trinity."

Sister Simone Campbell -- whose organization, NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby that works with the LCWR, was named in the Vatican's report -- told NPR: "The leadership doesn't know how to deal with strong women."

"I wish I knew what was