Possibly Triggery: What Is Happening To Our Kids?

[Kobi]

As a father to three young girls, I have been particularly struck over the past several months by the flurry of public activity related to childhood obesity.

Like most parents, I have been aware of our country’s epidemic for a number of years, but I haven’t seen this kind of concentrated attention since the early 2000s. While the efforts are well-intentioned, it’s worrisome to watch the movement gain logarithmic momentum when we still don’t really know whether what we’re doing is actually working — nor do we really know if there will be any downsides to the anti-obesity initiative.

The most recent major move in the fight against childhood obesity came on Jan. 25 when First Lady Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that school meal options were going to get a lot healthier. This represented the first major shift in school nutrition policy in 15 years. It is, undoubtedly, a good idea to make school lunches more nutritious, although some research suggests that by the time a child gets to school, his or her tastes for high calorie or otherwise unhealthy food is already in place and that changing lunch doesn’t make them eat healthier at home. In other words, school-based initiatives may be too little too late for those children who may be predisposed, whether through genetics or environment or both, towards obesity. Which brings us to another problem with the “fight”—it doesn’t target those most at risk.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 17% of all children and adolescents in the U.S. are obese. Yet the majority of obesity programming, especially in our schools, is applied to the child and adolescent populations as a whole. Sure, promoting healthy eating, regardless of one’s weight or age, seems like a positive thing on the surface. But here’s the potential downside: We know kids and teens react differently than adults to external pressures like persistent messaging. Sometimes these pressures can translate into incredible waves of anxiety and fear. At the extreme, a healthy-weight youth could be pushed to monitor his weight more frequently or even begin an unsupervised diet — behaviors that might represent an impending eating disorder.

So the real question is what are children saying and how are they behaving in light of our anti-obesity effort? A nationally representative survey, conducted last September by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, attempted to answer this question. The results, released in January, showed that 30% of parents of children age 6-14 report worrisome eating behaviors and physical activity in their children; 17% of parents report that their children are worried about their weight; 7% say their children have been made to feel bad at school about what or how much they were eating; and 3% of parents report their children had a sudden interest in vegetarianism. Certainly these data do not directly link the anti-obesity effort and eating disorders. They also do not offer any insight into whether obese children are actually losing weight. They do, however, serve as a reminder of how vulnerable these “worried” children already are to disordered eating and that everything we do, no matter how well-placed our intent, carries risk.

Some programs have already come under criticism for being too harsh. Strong4Life.com, an Atlanta-based childhood-antiobesity organization, recently launched an advertising campaign that has attracted national and international attention because of its stark images of obese children. Critics said that the images might serve more to ostracize overweight kids than to help them. And, there’s no telling how kids with already-fragile body-images, whether they are overweight or at a healthy weight, might be affected by such a campaign.

With that said, we shouldn’t stop promoting healthy eating habits in our children. And we shouldn’t necessarily downplay our anti-obesity efforts for fear of increasing the rate of childhood eating disorders. Instead, we should just be mindful — as parents and as organizations — of a potentially evolving, complex situation. At the most basic action level, this might mean making the warning signs of an impending eating disorder more accessible to all of us. A simple notation, for example, on a childhood obesity website (like Let’s Move or Strong4Life) of what parents should look for takes little effort and could have a significant impact. And, on a more advanced level, striving to tailor and target our efforts to those kids who need it most should be a priority.

In the end, this is about health and food. But, more importantly, it’s about our children. With their wonderful and special abilities as well as their unpredictabilities, they surely deserve an approach and awareness that is as well-thought out and balanced as the meals we’d like them to eat.



Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/21/is-...#ixzz1nP7SnWGk

[Kobi]

On Wednesday afternoon, when I asked my 14-year-old daughter Julia what she’d done that day at school, she said she’d learned about relationship violence and self-defense.

This, I thought, was time well spent.

Julia’s school is a short hop across the Potomac from the Landon School, the prestigious all-boys prep school in Bethesda, Md., formerly attended by George Huguely V, who was convicted Feb. 22 of second degree murder in the beating death of his on-and-off girlfriend Yeardley Love, who died in May 2010, shortly before the pair, both lacrosse players, were due to graduate from the University of Virginia.

“Landon boys” are a big topic of conversation in Julia’s world. They’re said to be really bad news: good-looking and rich and often super-athletic but also (and here the eyes of the speaker widen with a mixture of delight and fear) entitled, obnoxious, even dangerous.

You never drink from a cup offered by a Landon boy, say these girls, who don’t necessarily know any Landon boys and aren’t necessarily up on the news of Huguely and Love but have heard about the school’s 2002 SAT cheating scandal, in which eight lacrosse players were suspended and two other students withdrew under threat of expulsion. Many have also heard some version of a story about a “fantasy girls league” game allegedly concocted by some former 9th-graders planning to compete to win — and chart their progress winning — certain girls’ sexual favors.

“It isn’t fair to prejudge a whole group of guys because of the bad behavior of a few,” is the kind of thing I say to her and her friends, and I try to actually believe it. For it’s true we shouldn’t prejudge people like Landon lacrosse players, who count among their former ranks not just Huguely and most of the Landon SAT scammers but five of the rowdy revelers on the Duke University lacrosse team accused — and exonerated — of having raped a stripper in 2006. We shouldn’t give in to blanket prejudice about their parents or their coaches (one of whom took the boys out for a good time at Hooters) or school administrators who parents have accused of treating misbehavior by deep-pocketed athletes with much greater leniency than similar acts by less high-ranking boys. (Landon denies any unfair treatment of students and a lawsuit by the family of one of the boys who withdrew from the school under threat of expulsion over the SAT cheating incident in which they claimed that their son was defamed was later dismissed.)

Despite all that, I stick by my “don’t judge frat boys and jocks by their labels” stance. But it’s not out of some abstract desire to do the right thing; it’s a gut level urge to protect my daughters from ending up like Love or the singer Rihanna, beaten black and blue by her former boyfriend Chris Brown before the Grammys in 2009 or any of the 1 in 4 women who experience domestic violence in their lifetimes or one of the approximately 1 in 5 female high school students who reports being physically and/or sexually abused by a person she’s dating.

This is a matter of practicality: I don’t think it’s at all useful, in the sense of being proactively protective, to point fingers at a group and say those kinds of boys (or men) do these kinds of things. Doing so both normalizes bad behavior and attitudes (like binge drinking or the disrespect of women) and creates a false sense of security. Avoid lacrosse players or entitled rich guys or guys covered in muscles who drink a lot, girls might think, and you’re safe.

The real message to our daughters from the Huguely/Love tragedy out to be instead: avoid sick guys, whose problems manifest themselves in verbally or physically abusive ways. And if you’re not sure whether an angry outburst crosses the line, ask someone you trust. Preferably a parent. Assuming, that is, that your parent is able to recognize and acknowledge out-of-bounds behavior in the first place, which, unfortunately, isn’t always a given.

That’s another message we have to take in from this sad story: mothers (and fathers) have to force themselves to look hard at themselves and their homes and be willing and able to identify and stop sickness there before it gets replicated in the next generation and spreads to other families. Girls need to know what being safe and respected looks and feels like. If their mothers don’t know, they need to push themselves to learn.

There doesn’t appear to have been a whole lot of that sort of self-and-other awareness going on in George Huguely’s home. His father, George Huguely IV, described to a reporter by friends as a barfly, was accused by his ex-wife Marta of physically barging into the family home to reassert his dominion according to divorce court records acquired by Washingtonian magazine. George V, who beat his way through Love’s door before assaulting her on her last night, was a young boy at the time of that incident. On the morning of the murder, his former teammate later testified that George had started drinking while out playing golf with his father and was visibly intoxicated by the time they left the golf course. George later admitted to having at least 15 drinks on the day of the murder.

In the wake of Love’s death, the Landon School embarked upon an extended period of “self-examination,” the Washington Post reported in 2010. The University of Virginia began a “Are you your sister’s or brother’s keeper?” awareness campaign, and students launched a program aimed at training their peers in recognizing and combating alcohol abuse and relationship violence. These are undoubtedly good things and will, one hopes, raise awareness in such a way that students in the future who see a friend veering down a self-destructive path will speak out to their teachers, coaches and school counselors. But the most meaningful intervention that could have changed the course of the lives of these two particular UVa students would have been for Huguely’s parents to have recognized the pathology making its way down the family line and to have forced their son to seek help while he was still a minor, and they still had the ability to do so.

Unfortunately, even today, few parents, particularly in the privileged and status-obsessed sorts of milieus in which Love and Huguely were raised, are willing to look hard at the ugly problems playing out amidst the hustle-bustle of their everyday family lives. No matter how much our awareness and knowledge of domestic violence and mental illness have evolved in recent decades, it’s still all too common to shrug off verbal abuse as Mommy or Daddy’s “bad mood.” Too easy to dismiss night after night of nonstop drinking as a way to “relax” after a hard work day. Too common still to shrug off unacceptable behavior — red flag sorts of behavior — as boys-will-be-boys hijinks.

Girls are forever, it seems, attracted to boys’ “swagger” and “prankster ways,” as the Washingtonian’s Harry Jaffe described the traits that drew Love to Huguely. That’s fine — so long as we adults make sure to draw an immoveable line in the sand between what’s fun and what’s just plain sick.


Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/24/the...#ixzz1nP9K6CzR

[aishah]

Originally Posted by Kobi

There doesn’t appear to have been a whole lot of that sort of self-and-other awareness going on in George Huguely’s home. His father, George Huguely IV, described to a reporter by friends as a barfly, was accused by his ex-wife Marta of physically barging into the family home to reassert his dominion according to divorce court records acquired by Washingtonian magazine. George V, who beat his way through Love’s door before assaulting her on her last night, was a young boy at the time of that incident. On the morning of the murder, his former teammate later testified that George had started drinking while out playing golf with his father and was visibly intoxicated by the time they left the golf course. George later admitted to having at least 15 drinks on the day of the murder.

[B]In the wake of Love’s death, the Landon School embarked upon an extended period of “self-examination,” the Washington Post reported in 2010. The University of Virginia began a “Are you your sister’s or brother’s keeper?” awareness campaign, and students launched a program aimed at training their peers in recognizing and combating alcohol abuse and relationship violence. These are undoubtedly good things and will, one hopes, raise awareness in such a way that students in the future who see a friend veering down a self-destructive path will speak out to their teachers, coaches and school counselors. But the most meaningful intervention that could have changed the course of the lives of these two particular UVa students would have been for Huguely’s parents to have recognized the pathology making its way down the family line and to have forced their son to seek help while he was still a minor, and they still had the ability to do so.

Unfortunately, even today, few parents, particularly in the privileged and status-obsessed sorts of milieus in which Love and Huguely were raised, are willing to look hard at the ugly problems playing out amidst the hustle-bustle of their everyday family lives. No matter how much our awareness and knowledge of domestic violence and mental illness have evolved in recent decades, it’s still all too common to shrug off verbal abuse as Mommy or Daddy’s “bad mood.” Too easy to dismiss night after night of nonstop drinking as a way to “relax” after a hard work day. Too common still to shrug off unacceptable behavior — red flag sorts of behavior — as boys-will-be-boys hijinks.

i found this article interesting because i was in grad school at uva when love was killed and i lived directly across the street from her. i was just back in town visiting a couple of weeks ago when the trial started. i didn't know her, but our area and the entire uva campus were crawling with media afterward. at first (and sometimes even well after) the local media coverage was done in a way that was really victim-blaming and avoiding of placing blame on huguely. it made me really angry.

i don't feel that uva actually changed in a meaningful way after love died. there's a new on-campus initiative (student-run) called the white ribbon campaign to bring awareness to intimate partner violence, but it doesn't have a lot of visibility. as far as i know, a lot of the harmful traditions around binge drinking that uva has haven't changed at all (and there are a LOT - not to imply that drinking and ipv are always related but just to underscore the lack of, well, give-a-damn that seems to go on there with regards to creating an environment that's healthy for student). overall the feeling i've gotten being around uva after this incident has been mostly that it was a sad, isolated incident but it has no connection to anyone's day to day life. which isn't actually the case at all.

[Kobi]

CHARDON, Ohio (AP) — Teacher Joe Ricci had just begun class at his suburban Cleveland high school when he heard shots and slammed the door to his classroom, yelling, "Lockdown!" to students.

A few minutes later, he heard moaning outside, opened the door and pulled in student Nick Walczak who had been shot several times, according to a student whose sister was in Ricci's classroom.

In the end, a teenager who opened fire in the school's cafeteria on Monday killed one student and wounded four others before he was captured, authorities said.

The teen was identified as T.J. Lane by his family's lawyer, WKYC-TV in Cleveland reported.

FBI officials would not comment on a motive. And Police Chief Tim McKenna said authorities "have a lot of homework to do yet" in their investigation of the shooting, which sent students screaming through the halls at the start of the school day at 1,100-student Chardon High.

Two of the wounded were listed in critical condition, and another was in serious condition.

A news conference was planned for midmorning on Tuesday.

Gov. John Kasich has ordered flags at the Ohio Statehouse flown at half-staff in honor of slain student Daniel Parmertor. Flags in Geauga County will also be lowered.

Parmertor was an aspiring computer repairman who was waiting in the cafeteria for the bus for his daily 15-minute ride to a vocational school.

His teacher at the Auburn Career School had no idea why Parmertor, "a very good young man, very quiet," had been targeted, said Auburn superintendent Maggie Lynch.

"We are shocked by this senseless tragedy," Parmertor's family said in a statement. "Danny was a bright young boy who had a bright future ahead of him."

A student who saw the attack up close said it appeared that the gunman targeted a group of students sitting together and that the one who was killed was gunned down while trying to duck under a cafeteria table.

Lawyer Robert Farinacci, who is representing Lane and his family, told WKYC-TV that Lane's family was "devastated" by the shootings and offered their "most heartfelt and sincere condolences" to Parmertor's family. He said they also were praying for the wounded students.

When asked about Lane, Farinacci described him as "a fairly quiet and good kid" with grades that are "pretty impressive."

The FBI said the gunman was arrested near his car a half-mile from Chardon. He was not immediately charged.

An education official said the suspected shooter is a Lake Academy student, not a student at Chardon High. Brian Bontempo declined to answer any questions about the student. Bontempo is the superintendent of the Lake County Educational Service Center, which operates the academy.

The alternative school in Willoughby serves 7th through 12th grades. Students may have been referred to the school because of academic or behavioral problems, among other issues.

Long before official word came of the attack, parents learned of the bloodshed from students via text messages and cellphones. They thronged the streets around the school, anxiously awaiting word on their children.

Teachers locked down their classrooms as they had been trained to do during drills, and students took cover as they waited for the all-clear in this town of 5,100 people, 30 miles from Cleveland. One teacher chased the gunman out of the building, police said.

Fifteen-year-old Danny Komertz, who witnessed the shooting, said the gunman was known as an outcast who had apparently been bullied. But others disputed that.

"Even though he was quiet, he still had friends," said Tyler Lillash, 16. "He was not bullied."

Farinacci told the television station that Lane "pretty much sticks to himself but does have some friends and has never been in trouble over anything that we know about."

Komertz said he saw the shooter point a gun toward a group of four kids sitting at a table. The gunman fired two shots quickly, and students scrambled for safety. One of them was "trying to get underneath the table, trying to hide, protecting his face."

Officers investigating the shooting blocked off a road in a heavily wooded area several miles from the school. Federal agents patrolled the muddy driveway leading to several spacious homes and ponds, while other officers walked a snowy hillside. A police dog was brought in. It wasn't clear what they were looking for.

"Everybody just started running," said 17-year-old Megan Hennessy, who was in class when she heard loud noises. "Everyone was running and screaming down the hallway."

Rebecca Moser, 17, had just settled into her chemistry class when the school went into lockdown. The class of about 25 students ducked behind the lab tables at the back of the classroom, uncertain whether it was a drill.

Text messages started flying inside and outside the school, spreading information about what was happening and what friends and family were hearing outside the building.

"We all have cellphones, so people were constantly giving people updates — about what was going on, who the victims were, how they were doing," Moser said.

The school had no metal detectors, but current and past students said it had frequent security drills in case of a shooting.

Joe Bergant, Chardon school superintendent, said school was canceled Tuesday and grief counselors would be available to students and families.

"If you haven't hugged or kissed your kid in the last couple of days, take that time," he said.

___

http://news.yahoo.com/school-day-ohi...GVzdAM-;_ylv=3

[Kobi]

LONG BEACH, Calif. – The coroner's office ruled Monday that the death of a 10-year-old Southern California schoolgirl after a fight with another female student was a homicide.

Blunt force trauma to the head killed Joanna Ramos, who collapsed at home after a fight on Friday in Long Beach, coroner's Lt. Fred Corral says Monday.

He did not immediately have details about her injuries or the circumstances of her death.

The girl's older sister said Joanna died after surgery for a blood clot on the brain after the fight in an alley with an 11-year-old girl.

Joanna Ramos' mother rushed her to the hospital Friday evening after the girl began vomiting and complained of a headache, said Vanessa Urbina, 17, who was at the hospital with her sister.

Joanna was unconscious by the time she arrived at the emergency room, but hospital staff revived her three times before she went into surgery for the blood clot, Urbina told The Associated Press.

"They did surgery on her brain because she had a blood clot, and after surgery the doctor said she was still alive, and then a few minutes later he comes back and tells us that her heart stopped and they couldn't bring her back," Urbina said, crying as she sat on the steps of Willard Elementary School near a memorial of flowers and balloons.

In the hospital, "She was covered up, you could only see her face," Urbina said.

Joanna was pronounced dead at 9 p.m. Friday, about six hours after she and another 11-year-old girl had a pre-planned fight near the school.

No arrests have been made.

The circumstances left family, friends and authorities seeking answers.

There were seven witnesses to the fight, which lasted less than a minute, police said. It didn't involve any weapons and no one was knocked to the ground.

Detectives have interviewed family and friends of both girls, but there is no indication that Joanna was bullied, police said.

"I personally don't hear of 11-year-old fights like this, especially girls. I can't say they never happen but I think everyone was completely caught off-guard by this event," police spokeswoman Nancy Pratt said Sunday.

Joanna returned to her after-school program after the fight, where her friend saw her with blood on her knuckles from wiping at a bloody nose, said Cristina Perez, the friend's mother.

Perez said her daughter, who is 10, heard about plans for the fight during recess earlier in the day and knew to stay away from the alley after school.

"We've just got to pay more attention to our kids too, not just dropping them off at the school. I'm always on my daughter, always," Perez, 30, said as she gathered with other concerned mothers outside the school Monday. "I tell her, `You see a fight (and) you stay away from it."'

Perez and other mothers outside the school said their children told them the fight was over a boy.

"They took off their backpacks, and they put their hair in a bun, and then that's when they said `go' and that's when they started hitting each other," Joanna's friend and classmate Maggie Martinez, who watched the fight, told KNBC.

Martinez and other friends said they tried to stop the fight, but were held back by boys who were watching and wanted it to continue.

Worried parents gathered at the school after dropping off their children to look at a memorial of flowers, balloons and drawings dedicated to Joanna and to read a letter distributed by the principal about the fight. A sheriff's deputy lingered in the background and a police car circled the block, monitoring the activity.

Mother Victoria Pyles said her daughter had started classes at the school last week after the family moved to the neighborhood. Her daughter likes the school, Pyles said, but now she isn't sure whether to leave her there.

"This is her third day here and this is happening and I'm just so confused at this moment, thinking should I take my daughter out of this school," Pyles said. "If this is what is going on, I don't like it. It's very scary."

Urbina, Joanna's sister, remembered her sibling as a happy child who liked to sing, dance and watch soap operas and loved having her hair curled by her older sister. She had asked Urbina to curl her hair for her birthday on March 12, and had asked her parents to take the whole family to an amusement park to celebrate.

"She was so young for this to happen" Urbina said. "She was so happy and so many people loved her."




Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/02/27...#ixzz1nfjMJ61q