It’s late August, and finally I feel ready for summer. You don’t need to remind me that I’m late: Our five children have no fewer than eight school orientations this week. The extras are because new high schoolers need two sessions, one for their parents and another just for students, where they tell them all the really important stuff, which the kids then forget until second semester when it’s too late. Can I go to the beach now?
Of course the orientations are mainly just a chance for teachers to pass out supply lists, which, with severe budget cuts in our state, now include items like, “one bottle of hand sanitizer, five dry-erase markers in various colors, one qualified teaching assistant.” Also, I know why my 4th-grader needs to start the year with 24 #2 pencils: He chews them. But do all the kids have an oral fixation? Or is it that when my son has polished off his small forest of Ticonderogas, his classmates are expected to lend him theirs? I guess I’ll ask at orientation.
Hand-me-downs
Fuse
Some kids actually prefer the Ticonderoga pencil to the new, healthier school lunch program
Here’s my question: If we saved all the money parents are about to spend on classroom hand sanitizer, could we actually afford a teaching assistant? Or at least a few more dry-erase markers? Because a study from New Zealand suggests that as long as soap and water are available, hand sanitizer does nothing but to give schoolchildren another excuse to get up out of their seats.
Patricia Priest and her colleagues from the University of Otego in Dunedin (I, too think it sounds made up) studied school absences among 2,443 students aged 5 to 11 in 68 schools. They performed the experiment during the winter (read “summer”), placing alcohol-based hand sanitizers in half the schools and relying on soap, water, and Kiwi common sense in the other half. Then they sat back and counted the absences, going as far as to call parents and force them to invent diseases for children who were actually playing hooky to quest after the One Ring to Rule Them All.
When the investigators tallied everything up, hand sanitizer appeared to make no difference in the number of absences from all illnesses or from any specific illness (respiratory or GI). Also unaffected were the length of illness, the length of the absence, or the likelihood of another family member contracting the illness. (That last endpoint confuses me, unless the kids were taking hand sanitizer home every night.) What this study proved was that whether or not children in New Zealand have access to hand sanitizer, they will still all be mistaken for Australians.
I think we’re alone now
If you can just spend a little one-on-one time with teenagers, they’ll reveal the most amazing things about their lives. That’s why I have five children: to make sure that kind of thing never happens. But in the pediatrician’s office, it’s a good thing. We need to know what’s going on in adolescents’ lives in order to help them avoid the dangers of substance abuse, high-risk sexual behavior, and whatever boneheaded dare has been going around YouTube this week. A new study out of Indianapolis confirms what common sense already tells us: If you don’t talk with teens’ parents out of the exam room for a few minutes, you miss the good stuff, (read “the bad stuff”).
To prove it, the researchers surveyed around 500 adolescents (ages 13-17 years) and their parents regarding conversations they had with providers during their wellness exams. The best single statistic from their study was this: 89% of parents believed adolescents should be able to talk with their doctors privately, while 61% of parents preferred to stay in the exam room for the entire visit. That means that 50% of parents misunderstand one of the following terms: adolescent, private, or exam room.
Kids who did get to talk to their doctors alone discussed almost twice as many sensitive topics as did kids whose parents policed their conversations. On the up side, when parents refused to leave, kids were more likely to say “ma’am” and “sir,” to sit up straight for once please, and to brush that hair out of their eyes so the doctor can tell you’re looking at them, honey, thank you.
Call me maybe
Speaking of counseling teens and parents, do you sometimes think we’re talking with the wrong person? The National Institutes of Health just completed a study of distracted driving, a cause of 11% of fatal crashes among adolescents. Since 21% of those crashes involve mobile phone use, researchers asked 400 15- to 18-year-old drivers who in the heck they were talking to on the phone that made it worth risking their lives. Of the 86% of teens who reported talking on the phone while driving, 100% of them said the people they were talking to were their parents.