News, Advice, and Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Teenagers in Indiana who took driver's education courses in school had five times the number of crashes as those who do not.

Sarah Meyer of the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles, reporting to the state legislature, said that those who take drivers education get their permits at younger ages and have their permits at least six months longer than those who do not. Therefore, they are driving more and have more opportunity to get into accidents.

Nevertheless, the Indiana legislature is considering overhauling the drivers' education system, because, as one law-maker said, "obviously what we have is not working."

Labels: driving, safety

Posted By: Aspen Education Group 2 Comments

Parents need to learn how to use text messages and e-mails to better communicate with their children, especially about the risks of drugs and alcohol, according to a new study from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

• A research team from that organization surveyed 1,200 parents and found that they worry that their teenagers are over-using the new electronic media.
• Twenty-seven percent of parents expressed concerns about texting
• Twenty-seven percent worried about Facebook and social networks
• Nineteen percent had concerns about Twitter.

The Partnership for a Drug-free America recommends that parents use the new media to connect with their teenagers and to text them about risky behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse.

"It is more important than ever for parents to break through the media noise and make their voices heard," said Steve Pasiert, president of the Partnership. "Some parents may still feel apprehensive about embracing media and technology as a way of communicating with their children, but in today's world it is vital that they connect with their kids in every way possible."

Labels: internet, social-networking, parental influence, text messaging

Posted By: Jane St. Clair 1 Comment

For generations, professional athletes have been popular role models for young people. But as more stories surface about athletes egaging in violent behaviors and substance abuse, Stephen Hume from the Vancouver Sun questions whether our kids should look up to professional athletes at all.

“Sports is all about building character, right? Well, I suppose it is, if character means cheating, thieving, lying, philandering, violence, using drugs and going to prison… can there be a worse role model for kids than pro sport?” [Source: The Vancouver Sun]

Where professional athletes used to take seriously their responsibility as role models, many now shrug it off saying they “didn’t ask for this,” or defending their behavior saying their personal lives have nothing to do with their professional performance. Unfortunately, attitudes aren’t likely to change unless the historically-faithful professional sport fan base suddenly disappears.

Labels: athletics, role models

Posted By: Stefanie Hamilton 1 Comment

A study of 2,000 families with three-year-olds found that two-thirds of the parents had spanked their toddlers during the previous month. If parents were violent or if one parent was aggressive, the likelihood of their child's being spanked doubled.

In this study from Tulane University School of Public Health, "aggression" was defined as behaviors such as preventing someone from seeing friends or family, withholding or taking money, or insulting or criticizing one's spouse. Victims of aggression were most likely to be the parent that spanked children.

• The families in this study were 37% African-American, 30% Hispanic, and 28% white.
• All the families in the study lived in large cities.
• About 27% of the mothers had no high school diploma, 27% had graduated from high schools, 27% had some college, and 19% were college graduates.

"The purpose of this study was to understand patterns of common aggression and violence in families, and parents' use of spanking with three-year-olds," said lead author Professor Catherine Taylor. "Parents that find themselves in relationships where there is aggressive or controlling behavior, even if it is a minor, may want to seek counseling for themselves and for the good of their children."

Dr. Lori Evans, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Child Study Center at New York University Medical Center, said it did not surprise her that parents who are violent toward one another are more willing to spank their children.

"But what is really surprising," she said, "is that something we know is not effective with kids is still so accepted and used."

The study appears in the journal Pediatrics.

Labels: violence, corporal punishment, spanking, discipline

Posted By: Jane St. Clair 1 Comment

Children who start kindergarten too early are often misdiagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), according to a new study from Michigan State University.

• Dr. Todd Edler and his colleagues studied 12,000 young children.
• The researchers found that those in the youngest percentiles in kindergarten were 60% more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than were the oldest students in their classes.
• By the time the children got to the fifth and eighth grades, the youngest students were more than twice as likely to be taking prescription stimulants for ADHD.

Misdiagnosing children with ADHD wastes between $320 and $500 million dollars a year, according to the study.

"Many ADHD diagnosis may be driven by teachers' perceptions of poor behavior among the youngest children in the kindergarten classroom," Dr. Edler said. "But these 'symptoms' may merely reflect emotional or intellectual immaturity among the youngest students."

The study appears in the Journal of Health Economics.

Labels: school, students, adhd

Posted By: CRC Health 1 Comment

An abundance of research shows that most teenagers do not get enough sleep, and that teen sleep deprivation is linked to lower grades, depression, and even suicidal thoughts. However, many parents tell researchers that they have trouble getting their teenagers to go to bed, according to an article in the Washington Post.

Most parents do not know what time their teenagers go to bed, according to Dr. Judith Owens, a researcher at Brown University Alpert Medical School, and most believe their teenagers go to bed much earlier than they actually do.

"There is a real disconnect," Dr. Owens said.

Teachers also told the Post that more students are falling asleep in class more often.

"It's not just the tired thing, but they are zoning out in class," said James Fernandez, principal of Albert Einstein High School near Washington DC. "It's a big problem. If you get a substitute in the classroom, they all go to sleep -- it's looky here, a 40-minute nap."

Nature and technology are the causes of teens' sleep deprivation. Most teens cannot fall asleep at early bedtimes, and that probably has an evolutionary basis. Teens like to stay connected with their friends into the wee hours, either via cell phone or computer. A Pew Institute survey found that 80% sleep with their cell phone nearby, and many prefer to wake up to receive new text messages.
 

Labels: suicide, technology, depressoin, sleep_deprivation

Posted By: Jane St. Clair 1 Comment

It's that time of year when parents drop their children off to college for the first time. It's also the time of year when colleges are increasingly facing a new problem -- "helicopter parents" who refuse to drop their children off and then leave.

• The lingering of "helicopter parents" during their child's first week on campus has become a major problem for institutions of higher learning in recent years.
• Many parents are actually trying to attend orientation sessions designed for freshmen only.
• They are disrupting the natural bonding which should take place among new dormitory mates as they unpack their suitcases and settle into their new homes away from home.
• At Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, a set of parents actually went to their daughter's classes on the first day of school, and then demanded changes to her schedule, according to Beverly Low, freshmen dean.

Some colleges are coping with helicopter parents by staging separate events for parents only. Morehouse College in Georgia has begun a formal "Parting Ceremony." Parents of freshmen at the University of Minnesota attend a reception while their children are meeting their new roommates and setting up dorm spaces without adults.

However, the strategy colleges most commonly use blunt language in the orientation materials designed for parents. Officials at Princeton University proclaim in their brochures that "subsequent orientation events are intended for students only as of 5:30 PM (on a specific day)."

Houston Dougharty, vice president of student affairs at Grinnell College, said that it is necessary to be explicit about the exact time parents must say goodbye. During a ceremony in the gymnasium, students sit on one side and parents sit on bleachers on the other side to create what he calls an "aha moment."

"A good deal of this has to do with the evolution of over-involvement in our students' lives," said Mr. Dougharty. "These are the baby-on-board parents, highly invested in their students' success. They do a lot of living vicariously and this is one manifestation of that."
 

Labels: helicopter_parenting, parental-involvement, college

Posted By: By Parents For Parents 1 Comment

Middle school boys who remain close to their mothers and who value "feminine" qualities such as emotional openness enjoy better mental health, according to a new study from Arizona State University.

• Dr. Carlos Santos and his colleagues studied 426 boys through their middle school years, having them fill out questionnaires about their attitudes toward stereotypical feminine and masculine attitudes.
• The boys answered true or false to questions like, "It is important to talk about my feelings with my friends," and "If I have a problem, I take care of it on my own."
• Those who valued openness and communication over traditional male qualities such as emotional stoicism and physical toughness scored higher on a measure of mental well-being called the Children's Depression Inventory.
• Boys who were close to their mothers were more emotionally available, and were less likely to adapt the hypermasculine behaviors.

Dr. Santos's study found no differences between American boys of African, European, Puerto Rican, Chinese, or Dominican heritage, but rather that all ethnic and racial groups tended to adopt masculine stereotypes at the same rate.

Dr. Santos believes that culture is the primary influence on boys' behavior, and that the male brain is not "hard wired" for certain behaviors.

This study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.

Labels: mothers, emotional_growth, mental_health, middle_school

Posted By: Jane St. Clair 1 Comment

If your teen is underacheiving in school, the problem could run deeper than a failure to focus or an unwillingness to do the necessary work.

If a student has a variant in the DRD2 gene, he is more likely to get lower grades in history, math, English, and science. A variant in the DRD4 gene may lower math and English, and one in DAT1 may affect the grade in English, according to new research from the Florida State University.

Professor Kevin Beaver and his colleagues used DNA information on 2500 middle and high school students enrolled in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and linked it to their grade point averages.

“We found that as the number of certain dopaminergic gene variants increased, grade point averages (GPAs) decreased, and the difference was statistically significant,” Professor Beaver said. “For example, the GPA of a student with specific variants of three dopaminergic genes might be around 2.8, versus a GPA of around 3.3 without the variants. That could mean the difference between being accepted into a college versus being rejected.

This study appears in the journal Intelligence.
 

Labels: academics, school, genetics

Posted By: Jane St. Clair 1 Comment

Kicking, screaming and running away enabled children to escape from kidnappers, according to a report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

• Researchers looked at 4,200 unsuccessful abductions attempted by strangers and found that children who escaped usually did so by their own actions.
• Adults helped the children escape in only 16% of the cases.
• In 30% of the cases, children escaped by kicking and screaming, and in 53%, by running away.

Girls were involved in 70% of the cases.

• Girls ages 10 to 14 years old were most at risk, although other studies have found that teenagers are those most likely to abducted by strangers.
• Most cases in the new study occurred between 2 and 7 PM, and the child was most often approached by someone in a vehicle.

"Children escape these things not through the efforts of good Samaritans but by recognizing a bad situation and either getting away from it, avoiding it, or screaming and kicking to draw attention," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
 

Labels: safety, predators

Posted By: By Parents For Parents 1 Comment

Over 40% of teenagers send text messages via their cell phones in class, and 17% do it constantly, according to a new survey from the organization textPlus.

Teachers rarely discipline teenagers for texting: 80% of teens said they had never gotten into trouble, and only 26% thought there was something wrong about texting during school.

Some experts believe that texting is a new form of passing notes in class. The new survey found that more than half of those texting are communicating with someone else in the class.

The prevalence of teen texting has raised a range of concerns, including safety issues among teens who text while driving, and the privacy violations (and related stresses and pressures) that are associated with the sending of sexually explicit messages and photos, which is commonly known as sexting.
 

Labels: text messaging, cell phones, sexting

Posted By: CRC Health 3 Comments

Middle school students experience a drop in grades and academic achievement compared to students in traditional schools that follow a kindergarten to eighth grade track, according to a new study from Columbia University.

• Professors Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood studied students in grades three to eight for ten years between 1998 and 2008.
• They found a decrease in math and reading scores and an increase in absenteeism among those who attended middle schools starting in sixth grade.
• Academic achievement as measured by standardized tests fell in math and English during the first year of middle school and continued to fall through the eighth grade.
• This was not true of students enrolled in traditional K-to-8 schools.

Middle schools became popular in the United States between 1970 and 2000 when they increased in number from 1,500 to 11,500.

"Neither the middle school nor the junior high has ever been popular among private schools, which educated only 2% of their sixth and seventh graders in these types of schools in 2007, and maybe the private schools have had it right all along," according to the study entitled "How and Why Middle Schools Harm Student Achievement."
 

Labels: middle_school

Posted By: Jane St. Clair 4 Comments