by Stacey

Children who worry about how their parents get along with each other are more likely than other children to have trouble paying attention in school. According to this article on Science Daily a new study published in the Sept/October issue of the journal Child Development looked at a group of 216 predominantly white 6-year olds, their parents, and their teachers over a three year period.

Children were evaluated to determine their negative thoughts and worries about how their parents got along, based on how they completed unfinished stories about conflicts between parents. Teachers reported on children’s ability to get along with their classmates and take part in class activities, and on their behavior as a measure of how they had adjusted to school. Specifically, they were asked whether the children were cooperative with peers, followed teachers’ directions, used classroom materials responsibly, and usually acted appropriately. Children’s attention problems were assessed through reports by parents and computerized measures of how they were able to focus and sustain attention.

Children who had concerns about how their parents got along had more attention problems a year after the concern was first identified, according to the study. These attention problems, in turn, were associated with reports by teachers that the children had problems adjusting to school in the same year and one year later. Attention difficulties accounted for an average of 34% of the relationship between children’s worries about their parents and school problems. The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Another study (described here) by researchers at Yale University Medical School found that mothers who give birth vaginally respond more strongly the sound of their newborn’s cries than mothers who give birth by c-section. The study was published in the October issue of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

The researchers, led by Yale Child Study Center Assistant Professor James Swain, M.D., recruited two groups of parents from postpartum wards. One group of 12 mothers had cesarean sections and the other delivered naturally (vaginally). All women were interviewed and given brain scans two to three weeks after giving birth. During the brain scans, parents listened to recordings of their own baby’s cry during the discomfort of a diaper change. The researchers then conducted interviews to assess the mothers’ mood as well as their thoughts and parenting.

The team found that compared to mothers who delivered by cesarean section, those who delivered vaginally had greater activity in certain brain regions in response to their own baby’s cry as measured by fMRI. These brain areas included cortical regions that regulate emotions and empathy, as well as deeper brain structures that contribute to motivation, and habitual thoughts and behaviors. The responses to their own baby’s cry in some of these regions varied according to mood and anxiety. The researchers attributed the differences to hormones in the brain following childbirth.

And lastly, this article describes a study published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a professional journal of the American Psychological Association, which found that mothers’ beliefs about alcohol use and teens can influence the choices that kids make about alcohol in adolescence.

“When mothers overestimated their teens’ future use of alcohol, the teens developed the self-view that they were likely to drink alcohol in the future, which ultimately led them to drink more,” said Stephanie Madon, an ISU associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study.

The researchers, from Iowa State University, analyzed data obtained from a series of interviews with nearly 800 Iowa mothers and their children over three to five years. The study found strong evidence that a mother’s beliefs regarding her child’s likelihood of using alcohol altered her child’s self-view in either a positive or negative direction. The child then validated that new self-view by acting consistently with it later on.

by Stacey

This is scary: Over half of American college students have considered suicide at least once. According to this article on MSNBC.com, a new survey of 26,000 college students at 70 schools around the country revealed that suicidal thoughts may be as common as depression, substance abuse, or eating disorders.

The survey, results of which were presented Sunday at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Boston, adds to the growing body of evidence that the prevalence of suicidal thoughts is far more widespread among America’s college students than it is among the population in general. By contrast, only 15.3 percent of Americans overall have had such thoughts, the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health Survey Initiative reported in February.

The survey is part of an ongoing study on student suicidal behaviors being conducted by  David Drum, a professor of education psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, the article says. The survey defined considering suicide as having at least one episode of suicidal thinking at some point. Slightly more than half of students said they fit that category, which is known as suicide ideation. When researchers asked about more serious episodes, 15 percent said they had “seriously considered” attempting suicide. More than 5 percent of students said they had actually attempted suicide, which is the second-leading cause of death for college students, compared to its ranking of ninth among the U.S. population at large, according to the National Alliance on Mental Health.

“Relief from emotional or physical pain” was the top reason students cited for suicidal thinking, followed by problems with romantic relationships, the article says. A generalized desire to end their lives was next, followed by problems with school or academics.

The study extrapolated that at an average college with 18,000 undergraduate students, 1,080 of them would seriously contemplate taking their lives in any year, numbers that pose troubling issues for college administrators.

The survey identified growing levels of distress among college students and diminishing resources to handle the consequences. They found that half of students who had had suicidal thoughts never sought counseling or treatment.

Drum and other researchers said colleges needed a new model, shifting the emphasis from narrowly focused treatments involving suicidal students and a small number of mental health professionals, to one that involved the entire campus in addressing student stresses.

This article doesn’t address the question of why there is growing distress among college students. I’m kind of shocked by these numbers.

Do any of you have kids this age? If so, do you see anything among your children or their friends that might explain this?

Cross-posted at MotherTalkers

by Stacey

Teenagers who want to scoop ice cream or sell clothing from their favorite store this summer may have a harder time than usual landing a job. This article in the NY Times says that little more than one-third of the 16- to 19-year-olds in the United States are likely to be employed this summer, the smallest share since the government began tracking teenage work in 1948, according to a research paper published by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

As the forces of economic downturn ripple widely across the United States, the job market of 2008 is shaping up as the weakest in more than half a century for teenagers looking for summer work, according to labor economists, government data and companies that hire young people. This deterioration is jeopardizing what many experts consider a crucial beginning stage of working life, one that gives young people experience and confidence along with pocket money.

The article says that retailers, a major source of summer jobs, are grappling with a loss of American spending power, causing some to pull back in hiring. Restaurants, also big employers of teenagers, are adding jobs at a slower pace than in previous summers, said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president for research at the National Restaurant Association in Washington.

“When you go into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest,” said Andrew Sum, an economist at the Center for Labor Market Studies who led the study on the summer job market. “Kids always go to the back of the hiring queue. Now, they find themselves with a lot of other people in line ahead of them.”

Teenage employment has dropped steadily since the late 1970s when nearly half of all 16- to 19-year olds had summer jobs, the article says.

Some economists contend this is a good sign, reflecting a rising percentage of teenagers completing high school and going on to college, with some enrolling in summer academic programs, leaving less time for work. In addition, more affluent high school teens may use the summer months to gain experience worthy of bragging rights on college applications.

But others contend that plenty of teenagers want to work but face increasing difficulties landing jobs. From early 2001 to the middle of 2007, the number of Americans employed outside the military grew more than 8.3 million, according to the Labor Department, yet employment among teenagers fell more than 1.2 million.

Obviously my kids are too young to work, but I am remembering summer jobs that I had during the end of high school and throughout college. Those were fun times and I learned a lot being in the “real” world. It would be a shame for kids to miss out on those early work experiences.

What do you think? Did you work as a teenager? How valuable of an experience was it for you?

Cross-posted at MotherTalkers

by Stacey

New software programs enable parents to learn of everything from their child’s daily class attendance and homework completion to test scores and overall grades throughout the semester, according to this article in the NY Times.

Boy am I glad I’m not a kid anymore. What a nightmare. Sorry if you’re one of those parents who likes to use these programs, but this seems like an invasion of privacy to me.

The article profiles Nicole Dobbins, a mother of three from Alpharetta, Ga. who regularly logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her children. By the time she sees them after school she already knows what happened because she’s been spying on them all day.

When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment. “He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.

Apparently there are a bunch of these tracking programs out there with names like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool. They are being used by thousands of schools, kindergarten through 12th grade, the article says.

Kindergarten? Huh?

But schools do seem to like them. More and more are using them to help teachers communicate with busy parents. Studies have shown that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance and educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents, the article says.

But there has to be a downside.

At an age when teenagers increasingly want to manage their own lives, many parents use these programs to tighten the grip. College admission is so devastatingly competitive, parents say, they feel compelled to check online grades frequently. Parents hope to transform even modest dips before a child’s record is irrevocably scarred. “I tell my son, ‘What you do as a freshman will matter to you as a senior,’ ” Mrs. Dobbins said. “ ‘It will haunt you or applaud you.’ ”

This is fear-based parenting. Is that what we want? To be so terrified of college admissions that we harangue and spy on our kids for four years in a desperate attempt to keep them from fucking up? I don’t want to do this.

Kathleen DeBuys, a mother of four in Roswell, Ga., used to check her e-mail first thing in the morning: the ParentConnect alerts would fly in by 6 a.m. The subject line might read, “Claire has received a failing grade. …”

“And I’d freak out,” said Mrs. DeBuys, speaking of her oldest child, then a high school freshman. “I’d be waking her up, shouting: ‘Claire! What did you fail? What is wrong with you?’ She’d pull the pillow over her head and say, ‘Leave me alone!’ ”

Claire was in the gifted-and-talented program at her school and usually the notices were mistakes due to her missing class either because she had been sick or because she was off being gifted and talented along with the other Harvard-bound kids in her class.

So where’s the trust? The kid is in the g&t program? Why doesn’t it occur to the mom to ask her daughter about it instead of flying around the house like a lunatic at six o’clock in the morning? “It was horrible,” Mrs. DeBuys admits.

Part of the problem is that these kinds of programs are addictive. You want to know whether your surly sixteen year old handed in his English paper? You don’t have to try to pull it out of his reluctant mouth, you can just check your email and find out.

I kind of think that parents use the excuse of competitive college admissions to keep tabs on their kids because it sucks that teenagers shut us out. But isn’t that just the way it goes? Aren’t teenagers supposed to separate? What do you think of these programs?

by Stacey

If toxic paint wasn’t enough of a reason to boycott toys made in China, an article in today’s NY Times says that hundreds and maybe thousands of children in China have been sold to work as slave laborers in booming coastal factory cities.

Authorities in southern Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong, said they had already rescued more than 100 children from factories in Dongguan, a huge manufacturing city known for producing and exporting toys, textiles and electronics. The children, mostly 13 to 15 years old, were often tricked or kidnapped by employment agencies working in an impoverished part of western Sichuan Province, and then sent to factory towns in Guangdong, where they were often forced to work as much as 300 hours a month for little money, according to government officials and accounts from the state-owned media.

The new child labor case “is quite typical,” said Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics and social policy at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “China’s economy is developing at a fascinating speed, but often at the expense of laws, human rights and environmental protection.” Professor Hu also said that sometimes the children were sold by their parents who didn’t know of the working conditions.

The child labor scandal was uncovered by Southern Metropolis Daily, a crusading newspaper based in Guangzhou, in southern China, less than a year after the authorities said they had rescued hundreds of people, including children, from working as “slave laborers” in brick kilns in the north and central part of the country. Many of the workers in that case also said they had been kidnapped.

Young people can legally go to work in factories when they turn 16, the article says. In a series of articles this week, the Southern Metropolis Daily said recruiters and labor agencies working in Liangshan often transported children south and then “sold” them to factories at virtual auctions in Guangdong Province, one of China’s biggest manufacturing centers and home to a huge population of migrant workers. At some coastal factories, children were even lined up and selected based on their body type, the journalists wrote.

The newspaper also alleged that when the children were paid, they received about three renminbi per hour, or about 43 cents, far below the local minimum wage, about 64 cents an hour. By law, overtime pay is much higher.

The Chinese paper said that some children had been threatened with death if they tried to escape from labor recruiters. The newspaper did not identify the coastal factories where the children worked, but the report said that one was a toy factory in Dongguan.

Okay, what the hell? This is horrible. I don’t even know what to say. Anyone?

by Stacey

The informal style of writing that teens use in emails, text messages and on social networking sites is starting to show up in their academic work, according to this article in the NY Times.

Nearly two-thirds of 700 students surveyed said their e-communication style sometimes bled into school assignments, according to the study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the College Board’s National Commission on Writing.

About half said they sometimes omitted proper punctuation and capitalization in schoolwork. A quarter said they had used emoticons like smiley faces. About a third said they had used text shortcuts like “LOL” for “laugh out loud.”

Richard Sterling, emeritus executive director of the National Writing Project, which aims to improve the teaching of writing, told the Times he thinks this is nothing to worry about. He said teachers can use it as an opportunity to explain that while such usages are acceptable in some contexts, they do not belong in schoolwork.

Most teenagers do not think of their e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings as “real writing,” the study found.

Even though I can’t decipher it, I think the way they communicate is creative. I do agree though, that smiley faces, LOL’s, and a lack of punctuation have no place in serious school work. What do you think?

by Stacey

A few weeks ago I wrote about talking to my four-year old son Sage about sex. According to this recent article in the Washington Post, parents should plan on having “the talk” early and often.

Today, experts urge parents to welcome questions on sexuality by the time their kids can ask why the sky is blue. Recent research has shown that regular discussions of sexuality may improve parent-child relationships and even delay the onset of sexual activity by children. For some parents, that latter effect is taking on new importance in light of a recent study showing that at least one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease.

“You could do a real disservice with this assumption that you wait until the child asks,” says Baltimore-based sex educator Deborah Roffman, the author of Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent’s Guide to Talking Sense About Sex. “The truth is that we’ve left our children in a vacuum around these topics, and popular culture has just waltzed into this vacuum.”

How do you give your kids the tools they need to safeguard their physical and emotional health? And how much should you tell kids to reassure them about their own sexuality but not encourage risk-taking?

Steve Martino is a behavioral scientist with the Rand Corp. in Pittsburgh, he was the lead author of a study in the February issue of Pediatrics showing that the more frequently parents talked to their adolescents about sex, the closer the teens felt to their parents and the less likely they were to engage in risky behavior, the article says.

Researchers who surveyed 312 teens and their parents in Southern California four times over a year found that parents who took a one-shot “checklist” approach to talking about sex had less influence than those who introduced new topics gradually, returning to them over time. “Parents might think that they can talk about a particular topic once and be done with that topic,” Martino said, “but as your child ages and develops and has new experiences, the topics take on new meaning.”

Often, by the time children are teens, they want to talk to parents not so much about how sex works but about how to negotiate relationships, how to listen, how to say no. That’s what came out of a recent teen focus group at Children’s Hospital about the spread of AIDS, says Maureen Lyon, a clinical psychologist at Children’s National Medical Center.

Don’t worry. Talking won’t put ideas into children’s heads, says Michelle S. Barratt, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Adolescence. “There’s this myth that if you talk about something it will be on your child’s mind when it wasn’t before. Most young children could care less,” she said.

Parents can use talk about sex to instill their values, ethics and family beliefs, she said, as well as help children understand their own bodies. In talking about sex, experts say it’s important that parents cover a range of topics, including emotions and acts of physical intimacy, such as oral sex and anal intercourse.

By ignoring the emotional aspects of sexual behavior, parents put their children at risk, says sex educator Roffman, though many parents think they’ve done their duty once they’ve explained the mechanics of intercourse. “That sets [kids] on the road of thinking about sex in purely mechanical and depersonalized ways,” she said.

Choosing not to talk about sex with children also backfires, she said. By third grade, many children from families where such talk isn’t encouraged have concluded that their parents aren’t the ones to ask about sex, so they ask on the playground.

I haven’t broached the subject with Sage since that first time when he claimed it was “quite a story” I had told him about how babies are made. I know there’s a lot left to cover, but for now I’m glad he knows the basics. This article is a good reminder that the basics are only the beginning.

Photo courtesy of the Kids for Obama Web site.

by Stacey

Kids who support Barack Obama for President are influencing their parents to vote for him. According to this article in the NY Times, children as young as seven years old feel passionate about the candidate.

As the race for the Democratic presidential nomination continues, youthful volunteers for each candidate have been campaigning with bright-eyed brio, not only door-to-door but also at home. But the young supporters of Mr. Obama, who has captured a majority of under-30 primary voters, seem to be leading in the pestering sweepstakes. They send their parents the latest Obama YouTube videos, blog exhortations and “Tell Your Mama/Vote for Obama!” bumper stickers.

Some parents have been swayed by their children’s passion and interest in presidential politics, the article says. “For some waffling primary voters, the relentless push by their children was good enough reason to capitulate. Eager to encourage their offspring’s latest enthusiasm, they have been willing to toss up their hands and vote for Mr. Obama, if only to impress their children.”

My mom’s cool, she voted for Obama. Wow.

It isn’t an accident, though that kids like Obama. The article says that from the beginning, Obama has courted young voters by effectively using the Internet and campus networks. Those efforts are paying off, the article says: in all Democratic primaries to date (excluding Florida and Michigan), about 6 in 10 voters under age 30 have supported him, according to exit polls.

For many parents, this campaign season also feels like a fond flashback: in their children’s unvarnished idealism, many see a resurrection of their own youthful political passions. “It’s something you can brag to your friends about,” said Professor Kindlon, who writes about child-rearing and adolescents. “ ‘My kid is involved in politics.’”

Hillary Clinton also enjoys passionate support among certain college-age students, the article says. But Obama has tapped an even younger crowd. The Web site Kids for Obama is geared towards supporters who are twelve and under. And at the Web site, YrMomma4Obama, youngsters are encouraged to push their parents to vote for the candidate.

Pretty cool stuff. What do you think? Are your kids Obamamaniacs?

by Stacey

Last week I wrote on the importance of eating dinner with kids, especially young children. Here’s more on family meals, this time from the teen perspective. A new study in the March issue of the journal Pediatrics found teens who eat breakfast consistently are less likely to be overweight than those who skip the morning meal.

According to this NY Times article, the researchers examined the eating and exercise habits of 1,007 boys and 1,215 girls, with an average age of 15 at the start of the five-year study — a racially and economically diverse sample from public schools in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

The authors found a direct relationship between eating breakfast and body mass index; the more often an adolescent had breakfast, the lower the B.M.I. And whether they looked at the data at a given point or analyzed changes over time, that relationship persisted.

The study found that breakfast eaters consumed greater amounts of carbohydrates and fiber, got fewer calories from fat and exercised more. Consumption of fiber-rich foods may improve glucose and insulin levels, making people feel satisfied and less likely to eat more later in the day, the article says.

The teens reported to researchers on their eating habits, including answering questions to determine the behavioral and social forces that might affect eating. For example, they asked whether the teenagers were concerned about their weight, whether they skipped meals to lose weight, whether they had ever been teased about their weight and how often they had dieted during the last year. They were also asked how much exercise they were getting.

About half the teenagers ate breakfast intermittently, but girls were more likely to skip breakfast consistently and boys more likely to eat it every day. Girls who consistently ate breakfast had an overall diet higher in cholesterol, fiber and total calories than those who skipped the meal; the boys who were consistent consumed more calories, more carbohydrates and fiber, and less saturated fat than their breakfast-skipping peers.

Seems like this might be useful information to discuss with a teenager.

The authors acknowledge that the study depends on self-reports of weight and eating habits, which are not always reliable, and that even though they controlled for many variables, the study was observational, showing only an association between breakfast eating habits and body mass, not a causal relationship.

Still, Mark A. Pereira, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, said that eating a healthy breakfast would “promote healthy eating throughout the day and might help to prevent situations where you’re grabbing fast food or vending machine food.”

Dr. Pereira added that parents could begin to set a good example by sitting down to breakfast themselves. “The whole family structure is involved here,” he said.

We often have fun family breakfasts on the weekends. During the week, it is a bit more haphazard. The kids always eat together and we sometimes sit and eat with them and sometimes spend the time getting lunches ready. Right now, the breakfast ritual is a given for them, but I could see how it could fall away in high school. Good to know it matters.

Cross-posted at MotherTalkers

by Stacey

About a week ago I went to hear a lecture on talking to kids about sex by Amy Lang, a parent educator in Seattle. I really was just tagging along with a friend and hadn’t given much thought to the topic since my kids are only four and one-year old.

Well, I got an earful. Here’s some of what she said:

We’re told we should wait until they ask us. That’s not true. It’s not their job to know when they’re ready. We need to be the ones to initiate the conversation. It’s really important to have early, regular, consistent conversations with your kids about sex throughout childhood and adolescence.

How early? Earlier than you might think.

By age five they should know. Up to age five, they’re a blank slate. They come to the conversation with curiosity. It’s really easy to talk to them about it. It’s science, it’s biology.

After that, she says they go to school and hear about it from other kids who may or may not have their facts straight.

You tell them that sex is for older people. Sex is for when you are in love. You get to give them facts and information and a big dose of your family values. Hopefully you’re in their head by the time they start dealing with this.

I sat there thinking about my older son Sage who still talks to his imaginary friends and wonders aloud if he can go surfing soon without realizing he needs to learn how to swim first. And then I thought about how she said this is a matter of health and safety. She said kids who know about their private body parts and understand that sex is something that grown-ups do, may be able to protect themselves better if they are ever faced with a creepy adult. That was reason enough for me.

So I took her advice and bought a book to get the conversation going. The book I got is called “What’s the Big Secret? Talking About Sex with Girls and Boys.” I decided to read it to him this weekend.

The first time we sat down with the book was Saturday afternoon. It starts out talking about the differences between boys and girls.

Actually, the only sure way to tell boys and girls apart is by their bodies. If you’re a boy, you have a penis, scrotum, and testicles.

If you’re a girl, you have a vulva, clitoris, and vagina.

These male and female body parts that show on the outside are called your genitals. Boys genitals are easier to see than girls’, but both are equally important.

Hurray! He was riveted.

Then we moved on to issues of privacy and touching and I noticed that his breathing was getting steady and his body wasn’t wiggling as much. By the time we got to intercourse, he had fallen asleep.

Later that night he wanted me to read the book to him again. He managed to stay awake this time and mostly seemed interested in the explanation of genitals, but he was starting to catch on that there was more to this conversation. It seemed as though it had never occurred to him before to wonder where babies come from. He was intrigued.

The next morning he asked me to read the book to him again and we spent more time on the part about how babies are made. Later on when we were in the kitchen getting breakfast ready, he asked me, “But how does it make the baby?” I knew what he meant. He didn’t understand how all of it translated into an actual person. And honestly, neither do I.

I agreed with him that it’s mysterious and then tried to explain it once more. I talked about how the daddy and mommy love each other and some of the mechanics involved, including the part about the sperm swimming fast to meet the egg. When I was done he said, “That was quite a story mom.” Indeed.

Well, at least I got the conversation started. What do you think? Is four too young to have this conversation? Or is this the right to time get the facts in before he’s too embarrassed to talk to me about it?