The thing about celebrities is that we feel like we know them, but really almost none of us do. We can laugh at famous people, comfortable in the knowledge that, except for that rare oh-my-gosh-that’s-really-him moment in a hotel lobby, we’ll never see them, and if we do, only one of us will show a flash of recognition.
And yet, the characters celebrities portray can seem almost as real to us as people we actually know. Maybe that’s why the death of actor Cory Monteith last week left our family with a sense of pain and loss much deeper than we’d expect to feel for a stranger. Thankfully, Geraldo Rivera chose that moment in popular culture to post a seminude “selfie” on Twitter. Thanks, Geraldo, we needed that.
Boyz to mantra
In a world with so many acronyms, it’s always a challenge to come up with a good one. My guess is that once someone thought up the name “Youth Empowerment Seminar,” they felt a lot of pressure to make it something good. Ironically, it appears from a new study in the Journal of Adolescent Health that teenage participants in YES are better than their peers are at saying “no,” at least maybe.
YES is described by the researchers as a biopsychosocial workshop for adolescents that teaches skills of stress management, emotion regulation, conflict resolution, and attentional focus. In short, the message is not, “Just say no to drugs.” It’s “Meditate. Then just say no to drugs.” High school students who learned yoga, mindfulness, and relaxation techniques during gym class ended up reporting significantly less impulsive behavior than did their less mindful peers. When they did do stupid stuff, they were fully present in the experience.
The implications for preventing all sorts of tragically thoughtless teen behavior are profound. Meditation and yoga could beat the heck out of traditional scare tactics (nonviolently, of course) in preventing teen pregnancy, juvenile delinquency, and drug use. If only the YES program had reached Geraldo Rivera...
Hard knock life
Compared with the folks at YES, think how the designers must have wracked their brains to come up with a concussion test called “ImPACT” (Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing). The lower-case “m” is a dead giveaway. ImPACT is a popular computer-based tool designed to identify athletes with head injuries that should keep them out of play. The idea is to test youths when they’re well and then again after any suspicious incident. The problem is that a bad night’s sleep may be just as damaging to cognitive function as a concussion, if not as painful.
Researchers presenting to the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine compared baseline scores of youths who reported getting under 7 hours of sleep with those of their better-slept peers and found significantly diminished performance in reaction time, verbal memory, and visual memory, but not in visual-motor (processing) speed. These results have led me to institute a new program for my own kids, called SLEEP, for Slumber Lengthening Enlightens Every Person. I know, it could be better, but cut me a break; I was up early.
Blowing it
What’s the difference between learning to make a blow gun from a video on the Internet and learning it from your dad, a Yanomami tribal elder? In both cases, you’re probably sitting around in your underwear, but the guys on YouTube don’t teach you not to inhale the dart. According to a new article in Pediatrics, whichever teens were still breathing after the Cinnamon Challenge are now crafting homemade blow guns and inhaling the darts when they forget to take a deep breath before bringing the guns to their mouths.
The slender metal projectiles, designed to travel down tubes at high speed, do exactly that, lodging in the lower airway, where they can be retrieved only by a rigid bronchoscope or a very small Pygmy. What’s worse, the kids are so embarrassed about the mechanism of injury that they tend to delay reporting the problem to their parents. I’d say that’s reason enough to enroll every teen in America in a Youth Empowerment Seminar, or in my new program GROW (Geraldo Rivera Obviously Was drunk). I know. Let me sleep on it.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.