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Parents Do Too Little to Protect Kids from Sun Damage

May 2, 2000 -- Picnics, baseball games, pools, and beaches -- parents and kids are gearing up to head out for fun in the sun. But too many parents still aren't adequately protecting either themselves or their children from the sun's harmful rays.

A new study shows that although parents are aware that sun exposure is dangerous, kids wearing sunscreen spend much more time in the sun than kids who don't, even though sunscreen provides only partial protection. What's more, many parents still emphasize the importance of that tanned look.

"We have seen progress in attitudes," says researcher June K. Robinson, MD, a Chicago dermatologist who has been studying skin- cancer protection for more than a decade. "People are using sunscreen. It's different from a decade ago, when adults were not using sunscreens at all. They just need to get better at it."

Robinson is a professor of medicine (dermatology and pathology) at Loyola University's Cardinal Bernardin Cancer Center in Chicago. Her study appears in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

Parents must also be aware that kids pick up on their habits and attitudes, she says. "Men, more so than women, still believe that a tan looks good and that older children who are tan look good," she says. "So we have to work on our male friends."

It's an important issue. Even one or two blistering sunburns can significantly increase a child's risk for developing skin cancer later in life, according to the American Academy of Dermatology, which funded Robinson's study. Dark- as well as light-skinned children are at risk.

To gain insight into parents' attitudes and the sun protection methods they use, Robinson conducted a telephone survey of 503 households in the Chicago area. Questions were asked about sun exposure during the previous week or weekend.

"We found that that parents were using sunscreen with an SPF 15 rating or greater as a sole means of protection for their children. Yet 13% of those children -- and 9% of parents -- were still getting sunburned on any given weekend," Robinson says.

Parents were most likely to rely on sunscreen as the primary method for protecting their children from the sun, as opposed to keeping them in the shade or dressing them in protective clothing. Women, fair-skinned children, and children who had a family history of skin cancer were more likely to use sunscreen. As they got older, kids still used sunscreen, but they stayed in the shade less than the younger kids.

Parents only used sunscreen on children when the weather was sunny. They also applied sunscreen to their children more frequently than they did to themselves. Very often, they didn't apply enough sunscreen. And parents relied on sunscreen too much, allowing their children (with sunscreen) to spend an average of nearly 22% more time in the sun on a weekend than kids who were not using sunscreen.