MALE PATTERN FITNESS: Family/Parenting Archives

March 28, 2007

Mother and Child Disunion

I once knew a pregnant vegetarian. She was one of the most judgmental people I've ever known, a self-righteous scold who took offense at pretty much everything. Unfortunately, she was married to a friend of mine, so we had to find ways to engage in polite conversation when we found ourselves in the same room.

About the only time I ever liked her was when she was pregnant. She told me she'd started craving beef, and had to back off from her militant vegetarianism for a while. I liked hearing that, not because I care one way or the other what vegetarians do, but because it seemed to give her an insight into what it means to be human. Sometimes you have to do what your instincts tell you to do, and instincts rarely follow a strict ideology.

I bring that up because of this story about the perils of maternal meat-eating:

U.S. women who eat a lot of beef while pregnant give birth to sons who grow up to have low sperm counts, researchers reported Tuesday.

They believe pesticides, hormones or contaminants in cattle feed may be to blame. Chemicals can build up in the fat of animals that eat contaminated feed or grass, and cattle are routinely given hormones to boost their growth.

"In sons of 'high beef consumers' (more than seven beef meals a week), sperm concentration was 24.3 percent lower," the researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Human Reproduction.

More than seven burgers or steaks a week? How many pregnant women actually eat that much beef? Turns out, that's a telling question:

The team at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York studied data on the partners of 387 pregnant women in five U.S. cities between 2000 and 2005, and on the mothers of the fathers-to-be.

Of the 51 men whose mothers remembered eating the most beef, 18 percent had sperm counts classified by the World Health Organization as sub-fertile.

"The average sperm concentration of the men in our study went down as their mothers' beef intake went up. But this needs to be followed carefully before we can draw any conclusions," said Shanna Swan, who led the team.

You start with 387 pregnant women. You track down their baby daddies. Then you track down the mothers of the baby daddies. Of those, you find 51 who remember eating beef more than seven times a week when pregnant. And you discover that nine* of the men who sprang from the loins of those 51 women have low sperm counts.

Quick show of hands: If you asked your mother what she ate when she was pregnant with you, do you think she'd remember accurately?

Dr. Swan thinks she would:

"When you are pregnant you are very aware of what you eat -- you are watching your weight and some things make you sick and you need to get enough of x and y so you focus on that," she said.

The mothers of the men were asked only if they ate beef more than once a day or less -- something Swan believes they could remember accurately.

She's studying something important -- low sperm counts in contemporary men -- so I'll give her some slack on this. But still, it seems like a pretty big conclusion to make based on such shaky evidence. Pregnant women are already freaked out over the mercury in fish. Is it really worthwhile to get them freaked out over the hormones in beef?

* Reader Rob Siders pointed out a typo in my original version of this post. I misread the article I was quoting, and thought it referred to 18 people, when it clearly said 18 percent of 51 people. He did the math for me -- that's nine moms who bore sons with low sperm counts, which actually makes a better argument against taking the study seriously.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:48 AM | Comments (2)

March 12, 2007

Sixteen (Roman) Candles

I had a bit of a dust-up this weekend with my eight-year-old daughter. She was convinced a neighbor boy had stolen one of our balls, and she was probably right; another neighbor gave us a bucket of softballs last year, and chances are good the boy thought he could get away with swiping one, since we have so many. The problem is that there was no way to prove the softball he had came from our cache, and the kid's father and other adults were in the vicinity and presumably would've intervened if they'd thought a crime had been committed.

My wife and I both told her to let it go, but she couldn't. Her last words to me, before we got into the house and my expressions of dismay over her behavior melted tile grout in multiple rooms, were that I'm "a lousy excuse for a parent." I should note that she said this loud enough for the aforementioned adults to hear.

If that's a sample of what we're in for when she hits her teen years, we're doomed:

Scientists have found that the mechanism normally used by the brain to calm itself down in stressful situations seems to work in the opposite way in teenagers, making them even more anxious.

When the brain senses a stressful situation, it reacts by switching on receptors, using a range of chemicals, including a steroid called THP. In an adult or even a younger individual, THP would reduce anxiety. But in experiments on adolescent mice, THP increased anxiety.

The experiments, by Sheryl Smith, a physiologist at the State University of New York, offer the first physiological explanation for adolescent mood swings. Previous work has focused on analysing behavioural changes in teenagers during adolescence. Her results are published today in Nature Neuroscience.

In teenagers, the behavioural response to the increased anxiety due to THP would result in even more acute stress, said Prof Smith. How individuals reacted would depend on their personality -- where some people might cry, others would get angry.

And we still have five years to go before she's officially a teen. Looks like Daddy's going to be drinking early and often.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:40 AM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2007

Is That a Wrinkle in Your Abdomen, Or Are You Expecting a Baby?

Here's one of the stealthiest pregnancies of all time:

A woman who weighs more than 400 pounds (180 kg) said on Sunday she did not know she was pregnant until two days before giving birth this week to a healthy baby boy.

April Branum, 39, of Garden Grove, just south of Los Angeles, went to a local emergency room on February 26 with stomach pain only to discover she was pregnant with a full-term fetus.

Doctors discovered the baby as they took X-rays of Branum's abdominal area and referred her to UCI Medical Center in the nearby city of Orange, California, for prenatal testing, said Susan Mancia, a spokeswoman for UCI Medical Center.

No defects were detected and two days later on February 28, Branum gave birth by caesarean section to a healthy, 7-lb 7-oz (3.4 kg) boy named Walter Scott Edwards III.

The weirdest thing about this story is that Branum doesn't come off looking foolish. When she stopped having periods, she thought it was because of early menopause. Plus, she's engaged to the child's father. Usually, when I read crazy stories like this, the people involved have really odd personal histories, including multiple children with multiple partners. But she seems like someone who was so used to having health problems that she didn't realize the abdominal discomfort was caused by a full-term pregnancy.

Another reason she didn't recognize the telltale signs of pregnancy:

Branum [said] that she had struggled with unsuccessful gastric bypass surgery performed seven years ago when she weighed about 500 pounds (225 kgs). She said it did not help her lose as much weight as hoped and left her with a lot of sagging skin.

"That's exactly where the baby was hanging out. He was in the skin and that is why I didn't feel him," she said.

I've never heard of a gastric-bypass procedure with such modest results, but I guess anything's possible, especially at a time when more than 100,000 people a year get the surgery, including an estimated 1,000 teenagers.

And the results could always be worse: More than 200 people a year -- two-tenths of one percent -- die in the hospital during or after the surgery. The latest example is this 841-pound Texas woman.

(Thanks to Rannoch Donald for the link.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:35 AM | Comments (1)

March 06, 2007

Quick Question

We now know that obesity in childhood can trigger early puberty in girls:

Lee noted that girls in the United States are entering puberty at younger ages than they were 30 years ago. Over that same time, there's been a significant increase in obesity rates among American children.

"Previous studies had found that girls who have earlier puberty tend to have higher body mass index (BMI), but it was unclear whether puberty led to the weight gain or weight gain led to the earlier onset of puberty. Our study offers evidence that it is the latter," said Lee, who is also assistant professor in the department of pediatrics and communicable diseases at the U-M Medical School.

We also know that Shaquille O'Neal is trying to help kids with health and weight-control issues:

Shaquille O'Neal will be taking a shot at a TV reality show focused on childhood obesity and health. The ABC summer series will feature the Miami Heat star and his effort to help Florida schoolchildren lose weight, ABC said Monday. ...

The series, being filmed in Broward County, Fla., will track the lives of the children involved. O'Neal will be on hand as booster and, in episodes yet to be shot, will lobby politicians on causes including school nutrition, Daily Variety reported Monday.

The show is an adaptation of the British series Ian Wright's Unfit Kids, which featured the former soccer star.

O'Neal, a father of six, has been outspoken about the issue of children and weight problems.

So this mean we'll someday realize that Shaquille O'Neal prevents early puberty?

That would be a hell of a line to have on your resume:

"... and from 2007 to 2012 I prevented 46.7 million children from reaching early puberty."

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:44 AM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2007

The Juice is Goosed

I'm on deadline and had no plans to blog today, but the headlines are just too good.

You probably know about the big steroid/growth hormone bust in Florida.

Two specific names have been linked to the raid: Gary Matthews Jr., who had a career year for Texas in 2006 and signed a $50 million contract with the Angels this offseason; and a team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But what really caught my eye is the new paperback version of Game of Shadows, the book that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Barry Bonds hadn't just used steroids, he'd used them in massive doses.

Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci offers some of the fresh dirt in the new version:

My favorite fact: the authors detail in their afterword the freakish growth of Bonds' body parts in his years with the Giants: from size 42 to a size 52 jersey; from size 10 1/2 to size 13 cleats; and from a size 7 1/8 to size 7 1/4 cap, even though he had taken to shaving his head.

"The changes in his foot and head size," they write, "were of special interest: medical experts said overuse of human growth hormone could cause an adult's extremities to begin growing, aping the symptoms of the glandular disorder acromegaly."

I'm a sucker for a good acromegaly reference. Photos here.

Wonderful you

In related news, a new study says that college students are more vain than in previous generations:

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to."

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

This is my favorite part:

The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before, said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.

Now, I don't mind if a researcher publishes a major study with the goal of validating a conclusion she's already reached in a book she's already published. But I wonder if she's pointing her accusing finger in the right directions.

For example, she blames the "self-esteem movement" of the 1980s as being responsible for this epidemic of narcissism, along with more permissive parenting. So, clearly, it's the fault of the hippies and parents, especially, I assume, hippies who then became parents.

But couldn't someone argue that powerful forces in society are more responsible than a bunch of pacifist utopians whom none of us paid much attention to in the first place?

For example, could the fact that good-looking people make more money play into an increase in self-consciousness about one's looks?

Could the fact that even relatively prosperous people feel increasing anxiety about their economic security have an effect on their kids, making them focus more on wealth and fame than on goals that might contribute something useful to society?

No, no, talking about that stuff would cause too many of us to question our assumptions about the direction our country has taken in the past quarter-century. It makes us wonder if perhaps we've placed too much emphasis on wealth and status and not enough on what used to be called the common good. It makes us reassess our worship of presidents like Reagan and Clinton, who were celebrated for unleashing the forces of prosperity, and makes us wonder why in the world our celebrity journalists poked such vicious fun at Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, the only two political leaders in a generation who stood for anything besides unmitigated greed and personal power.

No, we can't think along those lines. We can't stop and wonder who decided it was so important to focus on Al Gore's wardrobe and waistline in the 2000 election campaign, rather than on what he might actually do for the country as its chief executive. Or on what his opponent might not do (pay attention to warnings about imminent terrorist attacks, for example).

It's a lot easier to just blame the hippies. They're too busy tending to their patchouli to even notice.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2007

Two-for-One Diagnostic Special!

Asperger's disorder isn't just for kids anymore -- parents of the kids getting diagnosed with this type of high-functioning autism are also finding that the diagnosis fits them.

But with so many people receiving a diagnosis (1 in 150 kids is now considered autistic, as I noted here), you have to wonder if diagnoses themselves are taking on a life of their own. Do the labels help explain the kids, or are the kids being defined by their labels?

This is something that's troubled my wife and me ever since we entered the alphabet-soup world of childhood mental disorders. Knowing your kid has Asperger's vs. ADHD vs. PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified) is only mildly helpful. Yeah, you know there's something wrong, and you get an official reprieve from the "bad parenting" label, and you know it's not just a mean teacher who's keeping your child from doing well in school. But the diagnosis doesn't tell you how to deal with your own child's development in the best possible way.

We wasted a lot of time and effort with Harrison doing variations on physical and occupational therapy to help him with basic skills like handwriting. The problem, though, wasn't with his physical coordination; it was with his mental coordination. Once we started him on medication, his handwriting improved dramatically.

My wife currently runs the local chapter of SEAS (Support and Education for Asperger's Syndrome), and if you put a group of those kids in the same room, you can't fathom any single strategy that would help them all. Sometimes it's hard to believe they've all received the same diagnosis.

The Washington Post article I linked to above gets into some of that:

As Schwarz says: "It's not the label that's the problem, but the baggage associated with it."

Dan Grover, an 18-year-old college student in Boston, co-founded WrongPlanet.net, a site for teens on the autistic spectrum. He was 10 when his Asperger's syndrome was diagnosed. "Sometimes people distance themselves from you when they know," he says. "It's both good and bad -- good because it definitely explains some things and gives you some perspective, but at the same time it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Being aware of [traits related to the label] can magnify them."

Another 18-year-old, David Dunnington of Yorktown, Ind., told me via e-mail that his Asperger's label "used to send me through the roof" because adults would treat him like an infant, but that he now values the photographic memory and problem-solving skills associated with the condition.

One 13-year-old from New York who has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder e-mailed me recently that "labels make me see myself as a painting that didn't come out right, and it makes me feel really bad. I think that having these labels is negative because it categorizes children into groups. These labels can be very hurtful, and they don't truly reflect a person's true personality."

And that's the real problem -- handing out diagnoses like party favors is the start of the journey. What you do with the information is what matters.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:36 AM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2007

How I Flunked First Grade

A few months back, I agreed to speak to my daughter's first grade class about my career. The program is called, ironically enough, Donuts with Dads. (I only agreed to participate if I didn't actually have to bring donuts; lucky for me, they're no longer allowed as classroom treats.)

I asked the teacher if I should talk about fitness or publishing, and over a series of emails, we decided I could split the difference, and talk a little about both.

Now, you'd think this would be a highlight of my daughter's school year. But it wasn't. She was crushed when I told her that I wasn't going to create a special PowerPoint slide show. "You're going to be boring," she said.

I told her I'd take that chance, knowing I had three pretty good reasons for wanting to go low-tech.

First, I'm not worth squat at creating anything with PowerPoint. I've been to conferences where presenters get their slides to dance around the screen, sing in three-part harmony, and do just about everything short of mating with other presenters' slides.

Me, the best I was able to do in my one and only PowerPoint-aided lecture was to project a bunch of words and a handful of static images up on a screen, while I stood next to the screen and read the words that everyone in the audience could easily read without my help.

Second, if I'm going to talk about fitness, I figured it would make more sense for me to move around and interact with the kids, rather than make the kids interact with a bunch of images on a screen.

Third, I'm frantically working toward a March 1 deadline for my next book. So even if I were the best PowerPointer in the world, and even if my subject weren't something that lent itself to interaction with the audience, I wouldn't have had time to do anything more than show up and talk.

Turns out, I should've listened to my daughter.

I don't know if I'll go down in history as the most boring guest speaker the kids in that class have ever had, but I'm sure I'll be in the bottom five.

I led off with a little bit about my publishing career, how I always liked to exercise but didn't know people actually got paid to write about it. Even now, typing out those words, I can see how that subject's a non-starter. Even if I were speaking to journalism students, I can't imagine I'd keep anyone's attention.

So I shifted to exercise itself. I asked kids what was the best type of exercise to do, with the idea that I'd collate all their answers into Lou's first two Rules of Exercise: Do Something, and Do Something You Like. I think I was more entertained by the kids' answers than they were. A couple of the kids told me about the exercise machines their parents use. They could've been talking about flying the space shuttle or using elliptical trainers, and the descriptions and gestures would've been similar.

Like I said, I was entertained.

I finished off with a few words about nutrition. I asked the kids what was the best time to eat, and the third or fourth student I called on gave me the answer I wanted: "When you're hungry." Then I asked about the worst time to eat, and two or three kids got it right away: When you're not hungry.

The really interesting answers came when I asked the kids what they thought the best foods were. Almost all the answers mentioned fruits and vegetables, individually or as categories. One kid (it may have been my daughter) added dairy, and another said "grains." To my surprise, when I asked what kinds of food were made from grains, at least half the kids gave me correct answers -- bread, pasta, rice, popcorn. (I'd guess most adults would describe corn as a vegetable. Isn't it interesting that first graders know it's a grain?)

Finally, after a series of prompts, one kid mentioned meat as a healthy food. But when I asked the class why meat was healthy, the heaviest child in the class said, "It makes you fat."

Normaly, I'm pretty quick with comebacks, but that one caught me flat-footed. Here was the only kid in the class who might be classified as overweight, and someone had told him that meat makes him fat. Just as I was wondering how fast Dr. Atkins was spinning in his grave, another kid suggested that meat makes you strong, and then others chimed in with variations on that theme. (One thing I learned about first graders: They don't mind giving the same answers the last three kids have already given.)

I finished up by asking the kids what else food does, besides making you strong and helping you build muscles. I got a bunch of variations on "it makes you healthy," and one kid elaborated by suggesting it helps make your heart healthy.

When I said, "Food gives you energy," I got mostly blank looks in return. I explained that your body needs energy for everything it does, and that without energy, you couldn't even think, because your brain needs energy, just like your muscles. Again, I got a lot of blank looks.

It was past time to go, but I couldn't end like that. So in lieu of applause, I had the kids get up and do bodybuilding poses. To my daughter's shame, that was the highlight of my talk.

The event wasn't a total waste. I learned a lot about how kids that age think about fitness and nutrition:

* Most of them have already drawn a line between "exercise" -- something their parents do on bizarre machines -- and the things they do for fun.

* The average first grader knows more about nutrition than most of us would suspect. I probably knew what fruits and vegetables were when I was in first grade (vegetables were what you had to eat before you got dessert, and fruit was what your mother snuck into the Jell-O), but I couldn't have told you that breads and pastas were made from grains. In fact, I couldn't have told you what pasta was if my life depended on it.

* Kids are already being taught that carbohydrates are "healthy," and that protein-rich foods aren't. That's disturbing.

* Every single kid in the first grade knows how to do bodybuilding poses. Somewhere, Joe Weider is smiling.

UPDATE:

My daughter's teacher sent us some digital photos she took of the talk. Maybe I was too hard on myself; the kids sure don't look bored in the pix. She had a great three-photo sequence of my daughter listening and laughing. Whether she was laughing with me or at me will remain a mystery for the ages.

Posted by LouSchuler at 04:43 PM | Comments (1)

February 15, 2007

Winter Dreams

Our youngest child revealed to us her ambitions:

I want to be a great skater, a great ballet dancer, a good dentist, and ... I want to go to high school!

Don't you love the priorities of a six-year-old?

And, just to show I'm not biased toward either of my daughters, here's part of the poem our eight-year-old composed for my Valentine's Day card:

I think you're very lucky

To have a girl like me,

Who might someday go to Kentucky.

For the record, she has no ambitions related to the Bluegrass State. She just thought it would be funny to rhyme "lucky" with "Kentucky."

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2007

Monday Linkage

Just because I'm too busy to organize these stories with a unifying theme ...

Why extreme stress makes you stupid

This story shows that when you lose sleep, your brain stops making new brain cells.

This test was pretty extreme, since it kept subjects awake for 72 hours. In real life, that would only happen in times of war, personal tragedy, or natural disaster. And it doesn't really say anything about what happens to brain cells when people just lose a few hours of sleep here and there.

But the news is still kind of scary: If you're involved in something so traumatic that you don't sleep for 72 hours, it takes two full weeks for your brain to catch up.

Sleep it off

It's not news that sleep is important to weight control. So this short item about kids and sleep isn't surprising, but it reinforces what we already know:

Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., used detailed diaries kept by families to examine children's sleep behavior and its relationship with weight. They determined that an extra hour of sleep cut the likelihood of being overweight from 36 percent to 30 percent in children ages 3 to 8, and from 34 percent to 30 percent in those ages 8 to 13.

Not a huge difference, but it's still something. Parents, turn off the TV or computer or PlayStation, and enforce a consistent bedtime. And if you have any of those things in your kids' bedrooms, where you can't monitor whether they're on or off, get them out.

And make sure they get a good breakfast when they wake up.

There. I just solved the childhood obesity problem in two easy steps.

Cut it out

I meant to blog last week about the rise in obesity surgeries for teenagers. But like so many things, I never got around to it. So this morning's L.A. Times has a handy roundup story about how weight-loss surgery is getting safer across the board:

What really improved safety, experts say, was the introduction, in 1994, of laparoscopic procedures into weight-loss surgery. Using lasers and cameras, surgeons make a few small incisions and perform procedures without cutting a person's belly.

Between 1998 and 2004, the death rate of patients undergoing obesity surgery dropped 80 percent, according to a 2006 report by William Encinosa of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, Md. -- probably due to simpler surgery.

Maybe someday surgery will be as common for people tired of being overweight as Lasik is for people who're tired of wearing glasses. If it's truly as safe as it now seems, it's hard to argue against it.

Use it ... and lose it anyway

I spent the weekend watching my older daughter skate. She probably skated four hours on a friend's frozen pond on Saturday, and then another three hours Sunday at an indoor rink -- she had her regular lesson, then tore around on the ice with friends for another hour and change.

At 50, I'm lucky if I get in three hours of exercise a week, but for her that's just a regular old Saturday afternoon.

Of course, I'm only doing what my body tells me to do -- I'm supposed to slow down with age. This is a process that occurs naturally in every species. It's not just activity levels that downshift. Performance declines as well after about the age of 30, even with elite-level talent and serious conditioning.

A new study sheds some light on why our bodies persist in getting older and slower:

The team from the Howard Hughes Medical School at Yale University School of Medicine compared the skeletal muscle of three-month-old rats and two-year-olds. They found that a process called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) slowed down in the older animals.

AMPK's role in skeletal muscle is to stimulate the body to burn off fat and to fuel cells, via the production of mitochondria -- cells' power sources. ...

The animals were exposed to a chemicals which stimulates AMPK and were also fed more food, which also stimulates the process. They found that the older rats had lower AMPK activity than the younger animals.

What's funny about this story is that it portrays this loss of muscle function as all-or-nothing:

Dr. Anne McArdle, an ageing specialist at the University of Liverpool, said: "Loss of skeletal muscle mass and function as we age is a major problem which has a significant effect on quality of life of older people." ...

But she added: "The data suggest that the ability to increase AMPK activity is completely abolished and so there is little evidence to suggest that 'working harder' would overcome these deficiencies."

There's still a pretty big gulf between "doing nothing" and "working harder." No one walking around with a 70-year-old body thinks he just needs to work a little harder to make his body perform like a 20-year-old's. But there's plenty you can do that falls in between the extremes. Some exercise is always better than none, and exercise in combination with a good diet will do wonders to delay the inevitable -- to slow the slowdown.

So what'll you bet the next time we see the acronym "AMPK" in a news story, it'll be about a drug company that's invented a product to increase AMPK activity in older people? "It's Viagra for your muscles!"

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2007

Exploiting My Own Children

This essay in Fit Pregnancy magazine is the last piece I wrote for a print magazine before taking my ongoing sabbatical.

The title, "Not So Great Expectations," refers to pre-fatherhood fears; the story is about one very pleasant surprise of fatherhood -- my older daughter's love of sports. (It would be kind of weird to write about an unpleasant surprise of parenthood in a magazine for expectant mothers.)

It also completes my trifecta of child exploitation -- I wrote about my son here, and about my younger daughter here.

I figure it was a pretty good way to bow out of freelance magazine writing. Now that I've completed the entire set, what's left for me to do?

Posted by LouSchuler at 05:24 PM | Comments (1)

January 15, 2007

Monday Blog Meat

If it's Monday, that means there's a one-in-four chance that the kids are off school for some reason. Today it's Martin Luther King day. Next month it'll be Presidents' Day. We get a break in March, but then double up in April with the spring break/Passover/Easter juggernaut.

I'm not complaining about the observance of any of those holidays in particular. I just wish the MLK/PD holidays could be combined into a single holiday. Call it Great Americans Day. We could have that holiday in early February, when the kids really need a break, as opposed to mid-January, when a holiday is a burden on parents still trying to recover from the kids' Christmas vacation.

I don't say that to disrespect Dr. King, George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln. It's just that in this age of historical illiteracy, it makes more sense to me to have a holiday celebrating all the great Americans and all their great achievements.

Then, in November, we use that holiday for a National Day of Voting. Call it Democracy Day, perhaps. In even-numbered years, the adults vote for congressmen, governors, and the occasional president. In odd-numbered years, the children vote in non-binding polls on the things they'd like their country to do. The point is that everyone celebrates the great individuals of our country's history on a single day in February, and then in November everyone practices what those great Americans gave us: democracy.

Anyway, my point is that the kids are home from school today, I'm on deadline, and I have to travel later this week. So today's blog is a link dump, without a unifying theme.

Downward-facing devil

When Rannoch Donald sent along the link to this story, his only comment was, "I'm not sure what to make of it."

A school program to fight childhood obesity that includes yoga is drawing complaints from some Christian parents in the Quesnel area in B.C.'s Cariboo region. They say yoga is a religion, and shouldn't be taught in public schools.

Chelsea Brears, who has two children in the school system, said her son was asked to do different poses and "to put his hands together." Brears, a Christian, said she doesn't want her children exposed to another religion during class time.

"It's not fair to take prayer out, and yet they're allowing yoga, which is religion, in our schools."

Local rancher Audrey Cummings doesn't believe Christian children should be doing yoga at all. "There's God and there's the devil, and the devil's not a gentleman. If you give him any kind of an opening, he will take that."

This is a new one on me. I guess there's a line of thought in contemporary fundamentalist Christianity that insists every idea not mentioned in the Bible is a competing belief system. Evolution isn't discussed in the Bible, so it must be a competing religion. Jesus and the Apostles didn't practice yoga, so it must be a competing religion.

It reminds me of the Harry Potter flap, with Christians arguing the books are an endorsement of paganism and witchcraft ... which of course are competing belief systems.

Personally, I think the Potter books are profoundly moral. There's good and there's evil. Harry, at various points, is tempted with worldly riches and social position, but shows no interest in either. He spends most of his time either being a kid or saving the world.

Granted, there's no God in Harry's world, even though they celebrate Christmas. The magic is controlled by mortal beings. In that sense, it's like Star Wars. There's The Force, and some are better at using it than others. But there's no God or gods who can save the mortals from their own dilemmas.

What all that has to do with yoga, though, is beyond me.

Eat a steak, save your brain

According to this, low levels of LDL -- the "bad" cholesterol -- are linked to Parkinson's, a secondary symptom of which is dementia. That's right: Low levels of cholesterol are linked to a debilitating disease.

Another way to prevent dementia -- learn a foreign language:

Researchers in Canada, where the official languages are English and French, examined 132 patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease. Those who spoke two languages experienced the onset of dementia 4.1 years later than those who didn't, the researchers wrote in a study published in the February issue of the journal Neuropsychologia. The patients spoke a total of 25 different languages, including Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian.

Previous studies have shown that lifestyle factors such as physical activity, social involvement and education may improve overall brain health. Bilingualism may help the brain build what is called a cognitive reserve, which may provide protection against the onset of dementia, the Canadian researchers said.

"There are no pharmacological interventions that are this dramatic," Morris Freedman, director of the Memory Clinic at Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain in Toronto, said in a statement today.

The difference in dementia onset remained even after the researchers factored in the possible influence of culture, immigration, formal education, employment and gender on the results, the study said.

Since I only speak one language, I sure hope those cholesterol-raising steaks are enough to protect me.

The height of fashion

I've been reading more and more about height the past few years -- and blogging about it from time to time -- so it's no surprise the L.A. Times would devote a major health feature to the topic, including this:

Take the common perception that employers discriminate against short men in hiring and income. That isn't exactly what happens. It turns out the much-touted income advantage of height is more closely linked to high school experiences than to hiring practices in the adult workplace. And when brothers are studied, one tall and one short, the two have exactly the same employment opportunities and income, regardless of height.

"There's still a widespread perception that male success is measured in stature," says Dalton C. Conley, chairman of the sociology department at New York University. "But in terms of total income, earnings and occupational outcomes, the male height issue is really a red herring."

Other widely held notions about short people do hold up. Based on history, there can be no doubt that Americans like their presidents tall. And on the dating scene, women go for taller men. When it comes to romance, height is often a deal-breaker.

What I didn't know is that some parents are giving normal, healthy kids drugs to make them taller:

Treatment with growth hormone helps some, but not all, children grow taller. Medical tests cannot predict in advance which children will respond. In general, growth hormone works best when started younger, given in higher doses and administered for longer periods of time. On average, treatment helps children grow a little taller -- but not much. An analysis of studies published in 2002 in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that children with idiopathic short stature who were given growth hormone for an average of 5.3 years had an average gain of 1.6 to 2.4 inches in height over what had been predicted when they began the drug.

The added height comes at a cost of $52,634 per gained inch, according to a study in the March 2006 issue of the same journal. About 410,000 U.S. children qualify under the FDA guidelines. If they were all treated with growth hormone, the total healthcare cost would be more than $8 billion a year, wrote Dr. Leona Cuttler, pediatric endocrinologist at Rainbow Babies and Childrens Hospital in Cleveland, in a February 2004 editorial in the journal.

I look at that as a parent who gives one of his children powerful stimulant medication to help him function normally. Nobody who saw our son in school before he started taking the meds doubted that he needed them. We waited as long as we could before starting the treatment. It's helped him in profound ways, but we still struggle with issues the drugs can't treat. That's fine; it's the deal you accept when you decide to become parents.

But to take those kind of risks with children just because they're short? And to spend that kind of money to make it happen? Holy cow.

That said, I do understand that it's kind of disappointing to realize your kids aren't going to be tall. My wife and I are dead-solid-average for American adults -- I'm 5-10, she's 5-4. I'm two inches shorter than my dad, and she's about the same height as her mother.* Both of us have taller siblings, which gave us hope that our kids would be taller than us. Our son may end up being taller than me -- he's about average for his age right now, but started out above average and may end up there again -- but both of our daughters remain stubbornly short for their ages.

Our siblings' children are mostly taller than them, so in that sense we wonder what the hell we did wrong. Two of our kids figure to be smarter than us, and the third is stronger and faster and more athletic than either of us even dreamed of being when we were that age. So why did they get the short end of the stick?

I have no idea how to answer my own question, but it would never in a million years occur to us to try to change that genetic roll of the dice with powerful and potentially dangerous drugs. I hate to judge other parents' decisions, but this is a tough one to understand.

* Actually, she's the same height as her 65-year-old mother now. Her mother was actually 5-6 for most of her adult life, two inches taller than my wife. So each of us is two inches shorter than our same-sex parent, which is bad enough. But now our daughters may end up even shorter than my wife. Where's regression to the mean when you really need it?

UPDATE: Water, water everywhere, but don't let any of it out unless you want to lose the contest

Craig Ballantyne wondered how I could possibly miss this story about a 28-year-old woman who died after a water-drinking contest she'd entered for the chance to win a video-game system for her three kids.

I didn't actually miss the story; I just found it too damned depressing to write about on a Monday morning.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)

December 06, 2006

Wednesday Weirdness

A bunch of stuff that defies categorization:

Parental guidance

Andy Scharlott sent this one along from The Smoking Gun, calling attention to the age of the child and his mother:

A South Carolina boy, 12, was arrested Sunday morning after his mother called police to report that he had unwrapped a Christmas present without her permission. According to a Rock Hill Police Department report [a copy of which you'll find if you click the link above], the child opened a Nintendo Game Boy, though he had been directed not to by family members. When the boy's mother learned that the $85 gift had been opened, she called cops, who charged the juvenile with petty larceny. In an interview with The Herald newspaper, the boy's mother, a 27-year-old single parent, described her son as a disruptive child, noting that she hoped his arrest would serve as a corrective to disorderly behavior at school and home.

I guess she's the last parent in America who hasn't heard of Ritalin ... for herself, if not for her son.

Another contender for worst parent of the year:

For nearly 20 years -- ever since Pete Costello was 8 -- his mother has collected disability benefits on his behalf. In meetings with Social Security officials and psychologists, he appeared mentally retarded and unable to communicate. His mother insisted he couldn't read or write, shower, take care of himself or drive a car.

But now prosecutors said it was all a huge fraud, and they have video of Costello contesting a traffic ticket to prove it. "He's like any other person trying to get out of a traffic ticket," Assistant U.S. Attorney Norman Barbosa said Tuesday. ...

The indictment accuses Costello of faking -- or at least exaggerating -- retardation since August 1997, because that is what prosecutors are confident they can prove, Barbosa said. But the pair first received benefits 10 years before that. The benefits cited in the indictment totaled $111,000.

You know, I have to think that a guy who spends 20 years pretending to be mentally challenged, and then drops his act to contest a traffic ticket while being videotaped, can't be all that bright. At the very least, give him the benefit of the doubt and declare him "certifiably stupid." If that's not an official diagnosis in the DSM IV, it ought to be.

(Thanks to Rannoch Donald for the heads-up.)

You know what they say about idle hands ...

My wife likes to build my self-esteem by sending me stories like this one, about husbands who're demonstrably worse than me:

A man who pleaded guilty to molesting two girls told a judge he did it because of his wife's excessive bingo playing. "My wife was never home," Floyd Kinney Jr. said during his plea hearing Friday.

Kinney's explanation did not sit well with Northampton County Judge F.P. Kimberly McFadden. "Some people, when their wives are not home, decide to do other things, like clean their living rooms," McFadden said. "Your behavior is beyond the pale."

Spamalotmore

It's not your imagination -- there really is twice as much spam as there was a year ago:

Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.

Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says.

I like Kevin Drum's comment:

The internet is arguably the apex of human technological development, the most complex and paradigm-changing invention so far in the history of homo sapiens. And what do we mostly use it for? Porn, Justin Timberlake downloads, and penny stock scams. Makes you proud, doesn't it?

In totally unrelated financial news, the rich are getting richer:

Two percent of adults have more than half of the world's wealth, including property and financial assets, according to a study by the U.N. development research institute published on Tuesday.

While global income is distributed unequally, the spread of wealth is even more skewed, the study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the U.N. University said.

"Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe and high income Asia-Pacific countries. People in these countries collectively hold almost 90 percent of total world wealth," the survey showed. ...

"We've estimated that the richest 2 percent of adults own more than half of global wealth, while the bottom half own 1 percent," said institute director Anthony Shorrocks.

He likened the situation to that where, in a group of 10 people, one person has $99, while the remaining nine share $1.

The cutoff for inclusion in the top 1 percent: net assets of at least $1 million, as of 2000. (I assume it's higher now, but the people who had a million six years ago probably have added whatever wealth it takes to stay in the top percentile.) But this should make you feel better: If you have assets of just $2,200, you're in the top 50 percent of the wealth distribution.

(Thanks again to Andy Scharlott for this one.)

Smells like terrorism

On the bright side, at least she didn't ask anyone to pull her finger:

Flatulence brought 99 passengers on an American Airlines flight to an unscheduled visit to Nashville early Monday morning.

American Flight 1053, from Washington Reagan National Airport and bound for Dallas/Fort Worth, made an emergency landing here after passengers reported smelling struck matches, said Lynne Lowrance, a spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority. ...

The FBI questioned a passenger who admitted she struck the matches in an attempt to conceal body odor, Lowrance said. The woman lives near Dallas and has a medical condition.

The flight took off again, but the woman was not allowed back on the plane. "American has banned her for a long time," Lowrance said.

(Thanks again to Rannoch, who also gets the hat tip for the next one.)

Beyond Gruntgate

Yes, there's another health-club controversy, and this time it has nothing to do with grunting:

Fitness USA, a gym chain, is investigating an alleged civil rights violation involving a local Muslim woman who says her afternoon prayer was interrupted by a fellow patron, and that her complaint to management about the situation was rejected.

"The manager told me, 'You have to respect her (the patron), but she does not have to respect your God,'" said Wardeh Sultan of Dearborn. "I've had my membership for seven or eight years, and I've never had a problem with praying there.

"I told that manager, 'I can't believe you said that'" Sultan said. "Honestly, I feel humiliated and I feel ashamed, right now, to go back to Fitness USA."

I can't understand or justify the motives of whoever interrupted her prayers, but still ... have you ever seen anyone praying in a gym? I've belonged to health clubs almost continuously since 1980, and that's a new one on me.

Speaking of Gruntgate: My friend Nick Bromberg quoted me in this story for the Columbia Missourian.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:28 AM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2006

Pick Your Parents Well

I love health stories where the bottom line is that you can't do a damned thing to act on the information.

Consider:

Firstborn children of women younger than 25 are nearly twice as likely to defy the average life span and go on to live beyond 100, according to a new study.

Leonid A. Gavrilov and his colleagues at the University of Chicago's Center for Aging have relied on a wealth of Internet data -- including genealogy websites and federal death indexes -- to figure out why so many firstborns seem to outpace their younger siblings in the longevity race.

Although there is no clear answer yet, scientists believe the phenomenon may be related to the physical youthfulness of young mothers and the eggs they produce. ...

Besides the youthfulness of the eggs, another theory, still unexplored, is that younger women haven't been exposed to as many viruses and diseases as older women, which in turn makes for a healthier uterine environment.

So I'm screwed, because I was the third child, born when my mother was 30. All three of my children are screwed, because my wife was 33, 36, and 38 when they were born. Not a single one of 'em enjoyed that "healthier uterine environment."

But then there's this:

People from broken homes may be more prone to psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia, research suggests. Researchers said their findings suggest the illnesses are not simply brain diseases, but linked to factors such as social adversity. ...

[T]hey found that separation from one or both parents for more than a year before the age of 16, as a consequence of family breakdown, was associated with a 2.5 fold increased risk of developing psychosis in adulthood.

Which raises this question: Aren't women who marry and have children at the youngest ages the most likely to get divorced, and thus raise the risk of psychosis in their children?

According to this (which is from the very conservative Focus on the Family, so it may not be entirely trustworthy), a handful of factors are consistently shown to contribute to marital longevity. Among them:

* higher family income (over $50,000)

* being older than 25 when you get married

* having some college education

All three of those -- especially the obvious one in the middle -- would mitigate against the success of a marriage in which children were born before the mother turned 25. So that "healthier uterine environment" comes with the baggage of a greater chance that the child will be raised by a single parent and/or as part of a stepfamily -- and, thus, have a greater chance of serious mental illness.

Isn't that just great to know, especially the day before the ultimate family holiday?

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2006

The Best-Laid Plans ...

I tend to be instantly hostile to any type of family planning that doesn't involve contraception, as I noted here. But even with contraception, accidents happen, as happened in our family a little over six years ago.

I guess my wife and I aren't alone:

The study, published in The Lancet, found a third of pregnancies ending in childbirth were not "clearly" intended.

One in 10 were totally unintended while a quarter of women were ambivalent about their intention to get pregnant.

Nice to know we fit right into a statistical pattern -- a third of the children born in our family were unintended.

These days, #3 is providing some of the best entertainment value. She's been telling us for more than a year that she's going to be a dentist when she grows up. Sometimes it's "a famous dentist," or "a dentist and a ballerina," but the DDS thing is pretty consistent.

She's also had a very consistent crush on a boy in her class, whom she's decided she's going to marry. (Not sure how he feels about it.) The boy is of Asian descent, and was adopted into a Jewish family, so the other day Annelise asked me if it was possible to marry someone who celebrates Hannukah while we celebrate Christmas. I told her it was fine, and that lots of people do it and make it work. I'm not sure if she believed me, but she did conclude that it might be feasible, as long as Hannukah and Christmas are on separate days.

The things a six-year-old worries about ...

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:48 AM | Comments (1)

November 14, 2006

Fun with PhotoShop

According to Drudge Report (which means, "consider the source"), Marie Claire magazine photoshopped Elizabeth Vargas' head onto the body of a woman breast-feeding an infant to create the illusion of Vargas nursing her newborn at a TV anchor desk.

As reported by Drudge:

A source close to the anchor says Vargas is disappointed but has a sense of humor about the whole thing.

"Elizabeth was more than happy to sit for the interview but was disturbed that the magazine would set aside basic journalistic standards to photoshop her head onto a fake image. Vargas did joke that her real baby is cuter, that she is proud to breastfeed her newborn but wouldn't do it at the anchor desk and that she wouldn't be caught dead in that ugly gold blouse!"

One other thing about the fake photo of Vargas: The unnamed woman holding the baby isn't wearing a wedding ring. Surely someone is going to jump on that as an editorial endorsement of unmarried motherhood.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

November 07, 2006

SS Family Values

Here's something I didn't know about the Nazis:

Lebensborn, or spring of life, refers to a series of clinics scattered throughout Germany and neighboring countries, to which pregnant women, most of them single, went to give birth in secret. They were cared for by doctors and nurses employed by the SS, the Nazi Party’s feared paramilitary unit.

One such clinic sits at the top of a gentle hill in Wernigerode, a remote town near the Harz Mountains. The building, long abandoned now, was part of a bittersweet homecoming tour for the 40 or so people who turned out for the meeting of an association known as Traces of Life.

To be accepted into the Lebensborn, pregnant women had to have the right racial characteristics -- blonde hair and blue eyes -- prove that they had no genetic disorders, and be able to prove the identity of the father, who had to meet similar criteria. They had to swear fealty to Nazism, and were indoctrinated with Hitler’s ideology while they were in residence.

Many of the fathers were SS officers with their own families. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, encouraged his men to sire children outside of marriage as a way of building a German master race.

The New York Times story goes on to say that some 6,000 to 8,000 children were born in those circumstances. Most grew up without knowing the truth about their patrilineage, and only learned about their Nazi origins as teens or adults.

The upshot:

If anything, the reunion served as proof that racial engineering has its limits. The Germans here looked no different from those at any other gathering of Germans in their golden years: the men with salt-and-pepper beards and balding pates, the women with eyeglasses and frosted hair.

How about that? You start off with visions of The Boys from Brazil and end up with Ordinary People.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:02 AM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2006

For the Drunken Preteen Slut Who Has Everything

Can the news possibly get any stranger than this?

Tesco has been forced to remove a pole-dancing kit from the toys and games section of its website after it was accused of "destroying children's innocence".

The Tesco Direct site advertises the kit with the words, "Unleash the sex kitten inside ... simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go! Soon you'll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars."

The £49.97 kit comprises a chrome pole extendible to 8 ft 6 ins, a 'sexy dance garter' and a DVD demonstrating suggestive dance moves.

This isn't a joke. (If you click on the link, you can see a photo of the actual product.) Tesco is described in the article as "Britain's number one chain," which I assume makes it the equivalent of Wal-Mart. And they're selling pole-dancing kits aimed at pre-teens.

Meanwhile, as long as I'm working the teen beat, there's this:

New animal research suggests that teenagers' brains may be better at adapting to certain short-term effects of drinking. But that's not a good thing, researchers say.

In experiments with rats, scientists found that adolescent rodents developed an "acute tolerance" to alcohol, quickly recovering from the immediate effects alcohol had on their social behavior, while their adult counterparts remained impaired for a longer stretch.

For rats, social behavior essentially consists of sniffing and play fighting. In human terms, the animals' alcohol-induced impairment was akin to being unable to speak with your drinking buddies.

The teenage rodents, however, quickly regained their social skills. Thirty minutes after being given alcohol, their social behavior appeared normal; in contrast, the adult animals were still unable to interact normally, according to findings published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

The take-away here is that teenagers may drink to excess simply because they can, whereas an adult will generally stop when he realizes he's inadvertently placed a hand on the boss' wife's breast.

Finally, there's this:

Teen girls actually believe that they can control as well as lose weight by smoking. However, researchers say this is a load of rubbish. In fact, smoking has absolutely no impact on weight loss, and research proves that both smokers and non-smokers among teen girls gain weight at the same rate.

Teen boys, in fact, have a lot to lose by smoking, since it actually retards their growth. They end up leaner and shorter than non-smoking boys. Igor Karp, a McGill University researcher, interprets that this is not so in the case of girls, since they achieve maximum growth before puberty unlike boys.

And now we've hit the trifecta of parental fear: If you want your daughter to end up fat, drunk, and promiscuous, we now have the formula.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2006

The Elbow's Connected to the Asshole

Since I wrote this post, about my daughter's disastrous soccer game last Saturday, I've gotten some great responses from readers who chose not to navigate my blog's Rubik's Cube comment system.

The first is from Scotland Bureau Chief Rannoch Donald:

Children's Sunday football is an institution here in Scotland, and it brings out the worst in people. My boys often play away matches in some of the less salubrious parts of town, but the parents there always turn out in force. A generalization, I know, but the majority are overweight and chain-smoke on the sidelines. They are vocal to the point of abuse (mainly at their own teams).

The teams my sons play for have a positive coaching approach. While they're fiercely competitive and each boy has to justify his place on the team, they are also full of praise, even in defeat.

That said, I heard the coach of the opposition team on Sunday say to his players at the end of the match (which they won 5-1), "That was shite! You were fuckin' useless out there!"

My guys love playing and love training, and as a consequence love competing, even if they do get beaten.

From my friend Sean, who used to live in this area but moved to New England a few years ago:

You’re absolutely right that kids' sports today (at least for the under-12 set) is out of control, [in terms of] how it’s managed and how kids are groomed.

I put a lot of blame on the parents (sometimes including myself), as we sink too much emphasis into organized sport and then pump too much money and expectations into it. On the girls' travel hockey and soccer squads, if you don’t make it [by age 10 to 12] you can pretty much kiss high school varsity goodbye. And I hear it’s worse with boys.

I find these organizations to be dominated by a sect of parents that run the teams, and if you don’t drink the same Kool-Aid, your kid is screwed. I call it the "failed jock/uptight mother" syndrome.

My main thought is that the girls need to go out, have fun, work hard, and learn team dynamics while they’re playing. There’s plenty of time in life to develop physical skills as they get older, and to specialize and excel in a sport, if that’s the path they chose. However, that thought process is definitely in the minority.

A good example: We have three baseball fields at the end of our development. Unless a parent organizes it, there are never any kids playing on those fields.

And Rob Duffield had this to say about the elbow to the face my daughter took from the other team's best player:

I was in college and had the exact same experience. The shot to the face looks accidental -- it isn’t. I side with Meredith on this one, based on experience.

I picked myself up after the trainer came out. The ref gave [the other team] a free kick because [the guy who hit Rob with the elbow] had possession when I “went down.”

I “expressed my astonishment at the call” (a move heard by everyone at Homecoming Weekend, including my parents, seated halfway up the hill), and earned a yellow card.

It wasn’t the best move, but then I went back to stoning the guy and letting him know I was going to do it all day long. He was really pissed, but didn’t retaliate again.

At first, as I wrote in the post, I wasn't sure if the elbow that knocked my daughter out of the game was intentional. Since then, I've been assured by Rob and others that an elbow to the face in soccer is rarely an accident.

And, at last night's practice, other parents told me their daughters had reported lots of elbows and shoves during the game, which helps explain why the other players on our team were backing off from the big girls. Meredith, the smallest player on the field, didn't back off from the biggest player on the field, and was rewarded with an elbow to the bridge of her nose.

On the bright side, she's gotten over it, even if I haven't. She was sprinting all over the field in practice yesterday, having enough fun for two kids. I guess she's more resilient than her dad. So she's got that going for her, which is nice.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:35 AM | Comments (5)

September 19, 2006

Lead Zeppelin

I don't know what to make of this report:

About one-third of attention deficit cases among U.S. children may be linked with tobacco smoke before birth or to lead exposure afterward, according to provocative new research.

Even levels of lead the government considers acceptable appeared to increase a child's risk of having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the study found.

It builds on previous research linking attention problems, including ADHD, with childhood lead exposure and smoking during pregnancy, and offers one of the first estimates for how much those environmental factors might contribute.

A third attributed to prenatal tobacco smoke and postnatal lead? Doesn't that seem like an absolutely huge number? As in, possibly, a million or more children?

I guess this could have affected me, since both of my parents smoked, and I sure as hell have ADD. But then again, I suspect both my parents had ADD as well, which is why this, from the same article, is an interesting perspective:

Dr. Helen Binns, a researcher at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, said the study is a thoughtful analysis but doesn't prove lead exposure is among the causes. It's possible, for example, that young children with ADHD are more likely than others to eat old leaded paint chips or inhale leaded paint dust because of their hyperactivity.

Could the case also be made that smokers are more likely to have ADD?

The answer is ... yes!

This study, conducted at Duke and published a year ago in Archives of General Psychiatry, shows a clear link:

Self-reported ADHD symptoms were found to be associated with adult smoking outcome variables in this nationally representative sample, providing further evidence of a likely link between ADHD symptoms and risk for tobacco use.

Interestingly, the ADD cases associated with a mother's smoking are the most severe and the most difficult to treat, according to this Dutch study published this month.

Last tidbit:

There's a new blood test for lead exposure that gives results in three minutes. The test will be available in 115,000 locations, "including healthcare clinics, mobile health units and schools." I assume they won't be able to give the test in schools without parents' or guardians' permission. But still, it's interesting that some schools will be able to give the tests at the very place where problems associated with lead exposure are most likely to manifest themselves.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:25 AM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2006

Pot Luck

Rob Duffield and Michael Navin both sent me versions of this story, about a mother who had a unique way of rewarding her son for doing his homework:

A woman facing drug charges admitted in court that she smoked marijuana with her 13-year-old son, often to reward him for doing his homework.

Amanda Lynn Livelsberger, 30, pleaded guilty to several misdemeanor drug charges Monday in Adams County court.

She admitted she had been smoking marijuana with her son since he was 11 and said she had also smoked with two of his friends, ages 17 and 18.

My first reaction is along the lines of what Michael noted -- "At least the kid was getting his homework done."

But my second reaction ... well, look at the ages. Mom's 30. Her son is 13. No dad in the picture. I can't imagine what it would've been like to start the parenting experience at 17. I was 36 when Kimberly and I got married, 39 when our son was born, 41 when our older daughter popped out, and 43 when our happy little accident made her debut. (She smiled minutes after being born, and hasn't stopped since.) Kimberly and I were already adults who'd had more than enough time to do all the things adolescents and young adults are supposed to do. We weren't just ready to become parents, we were tired of not being parents, if that makes sense.

And even then, the transitions weren't easy.

So, yeah, it's awful that a 30-year-old woman gets high with her teenage son and her friends. But I think it really sucks that she became a parent before she'd had a chance to finish being a kid.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:51 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2006

How to Screw Kids Up In Five Easy Steps

Scotland bureau chief Rannoch Donald sent along this letter, signed by what looks like hundreds of scientists and child-development professionals in the UK.

Rannoch notes that it was published in a very conservative paper, but the signatories include people from all over the political spectrum.

Here's what they have to say:

As professionals and academics from a range of backgrounds, we are deeply concerned at the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children’s behavioural and developmental conditions. We believe this is largely due to a lack of understanding, on the part of both politicians and the general public, of the realities and subtleties of child development.

Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust -- as full-grown adults can -- to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change. They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed “junk”), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives.

They also need time. In a fast-moving hyper-competitive culture, today’s children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum. They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.

Our society rightly takes great pains to protect children from physical harm, but seems to have lost sight of their emotional and social needs. However, it’s now clear that the mental health of an unacceptable number of children is being unnecessarily compromised, and that this is almost certainly a key factor in the rise of substance abuse, violence and self-harm amongst our young people.

This is a complex socio-cultural problem to which there is no simple solution, but a sensible first step would be to encourage parents and policy-makers to start talking about ways of improving children’s well-being. We therefore propose as a matter of urgency that public debate be initiated on child-rearing in the 21st century. This issue should be central to public policy-making in coming decades.

So if you want to guarantee screwed-up kids, all you have to do is ...

1. Ignore their nutritional needs by feeding them crap.

2. Give them as much TV, computer, and PlayStation time as they want, even if it means they stop playing outside.

3. Confine them to school, home, and designated actvities, without ever getting them out to see the rest of their world.

4. Make sure they get as little one-on-one time with parents, teachers, neighbors, and other adult family members and friends as possible.

5. Put intense pressure on them to make meaningless academic achievements, regardless of their developmental stage.

Mission accomplished!

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2006

The Teletubbies Theory of Autism

Gregg Easterbrook admits that his theory is based on pure speculation, but still, I find it hard to fathom how something as stupid as this ended up in a respectable online magazine like Slate:

As recently as the 1970s, cartoons and children's shows were aired only on Saturdays and perhaps a few hours per morning, and there were no movies on cassette. Since about 1980, cartoons and children's shows have become available all day, every day, on TV or through VCRs and now DVD players. Television watching by the very young, rare a generation ago, has since skyrocketed. Shows for infants, such as Teletubbies, have come into being. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation report found that 1-year-old children now average almost an hour per day viewing television and videos, while children ages 2 and 3 watch television and videos an average of about two hours daily.

As young children begin to experience the world, their brains organize partly in response to the stimuli received. Science magazine, the technical publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recently reported several studies showing that "problems in autism result from poor connections among brain areas rather than from defects in a specific brain region."

Recent studies have found that when a healthy child is exposed to stimuli, many areas of the brain become active and communicate with each other; in an autistic child, fewer brain areas light up and there is little communication. Studies at the Brain Development Imaging Laboratory of San Diego State University have found that autistic children have a "lack of synchronicity between visual areas in the back of the brain."

Of the new research suggesting that defects in brain organization track with autism, Science concluded, "If a neuronal imbalance is to blame, no one knows how it arises." No one does. But the rise in autism disorders during the very period that early-childhood screen-watching has risen is disturbing. Eyes glued to a colorful tube is an intense form of "exposure" for any young child. Correlation does not prove causation, but there's an awful lot of correlation here. ...

Common symptoms of autism include sudden withdrawal from the real world into a world inside the child's mind; transition from love of parents to constant anger against them; engaging in the same actions over and over again, always with an object close nearby. Don't these sound, in a creepy way, like television's unintended effects?

Screen-viewing conditions the young mind to withdraw from the real, three-dimensional world of social interaction into a two-dimensional world of internalized fantasy. Parents stop being objects of love and become the child's enemy -- after all, they are the ones who turn off the TV! And every parent who has had children with access to a VCR or DVD player and a library of cartoon movies has observed the same phenomena: Young children watch the same movie over and over again.

I don't think there's a serious researcher out there who doesn't think autism is a genetic condition. There are certainly cases in which brain injury produces the same behaviors, and I don't have much trouble believing that, in some cases, there's an environmental trigger that might affect a developing fetus, such as exposure to mercury. We also know that exposing a child to lead can have disastrous effects on the child's developing brain.

But Teletubbies? Isn't that like saying overbearing mothers turn their sons into homosexuals?

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:19 AM | Comments (2)

September 05, 2006

Kids on the Fat Track

My wife and I are way, way, way behind the pop-culture curve in many areas, especially TV. Since we signed up with Netflix, we don't bother following any series in real time; we wait for the full-season DVDs to come out, and then watch all the episodes in order.

To give you an idea how far behind we are, we just completed the first season of 24. For the life of me, I can't figure out how that show got so much attention and critical acclaim, aside from the gimmick of pretending the events are happening in "real time." I'll acknowledge that the cliffhangers are exciting, but I couldn't stop thinking that everything that led to each crisis was transparently phony -- cops don't act like cops, terrorists don't act like terrorists, politicians don't act like politicians, and no one ever gets hungry, thirsty, dirty, or sweaty. The characters were better-groomed at the end of the "day" than they were in the beginning.

Our new series is Weeds, which isn't as slick or ambitious as 24 but still has its moments. My favorite parts, for pure shock and horror, are when the evil Celia bullies her overweight daughter.

In real life, the brightest and best-intentioned parents of even slightly pudgy kids often obsess over what to do. Make a big deal out of the weight, and risk scarring the kid for life? Ignore it, and let the kid be fat but potentially happy? Split the difference, and do everything you can to monitor the diet and encourage exercise without specifying the reasons why?

The third option looks right to me, and it's important to realize that baby fat isn't always something kids grow out of:

Pudgy toddlers face a good chance of becoming overweight 12-year-olds, according to government research that shoots down the notion that children naturally outgrow early chubbiness.

Children who were overweight at age 2 or later during their preschool years were five times more likely to be overweight at age 12 than youngsters who were not overweight early on, the study found. Sixty percent of the children who were overweight at any time during the preschool period were overweight at age 12.

Children were considered overweight if their body mass index was in the 85th percentile or higher for their gender and age. That means they were heavier than at least 85 percent of children their same age and sex.

"These results suggest that any time a child reaches the 85th percentile for BMI may be an appropriate time for intervention," the researchers wrote.

That said, it also seems important to note that 12-year-olds still might grow beyond their residual baby fat once the hormones kick in and the bones start growing like bamboo shoots.

But that's a pretty big "might," especially when you consider this:

The researchers also found that 40 percent of children whose BMIs were between the 50th and 84th percentiles by age 3 -- or in the normal to high-normal range -- were overweight at age 12. By contrast, no children with a body-mass index below the 50th percentile throughout elementary school had become overweight by age 12.

Curiously, our very skinny son was off the growth charts as an infant. He was very, very good at breast-feeding, and who can blame him? Somewhere deep down inside he must've realized that this boob-in-the-face thing would only last so long. He was relatively big at birth (8 pounds, 12 ounces; 20.5 inches long) but by six months was a chunky monkey, a Buddha baby. Today, he's around the 80th percentile for height and 75th for weight, with an upper body that looks like a skeleton with abs.

Conversely, at her recent doctor's appointment, our older daughter registered in the 25th percentile for height but the 50th for weight. I have no idea how to explain the numbers, since she has no visible fat and is actually muscular for an eight-year-old. Seems impossible that this short, wiry kid is exactly average in weight for her age, but there's no point arguing with the numbers. As long as she's lean and healthy, I don't know what we should do differently.

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2006

The Titty-Cut Follies

In Australia, a politician has proposed new laws making it more difficult for teens to get cosmetic surgery:

Teenage girls should not get breast implants simply to boost their confidence, [New South Wales] Premier Morris Iemma says.

The NSW government is considering introducing legislation to make it harder for teenage girls to undergo cosmetic surgery, with Mr. Iemma concerned by an apparent trend of girls seeking packages including breast implants, nose jobs and botox.

"There's a disturbing trend of more teenage girls seeking breast implants and tummy tucks, these sort of makeover packages," Mr. Iemma told reporters.

"It's timely that we put out the alternative message, which is the right one, and that is to respect people for who they are, not what they ought to look like."

As you might imagine, Australian plastic surgeons aren't wild about their specialties being singled out for approbation:

Doctor Norm Olbourne, of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons, says while there may be a few more patients, it is always done with parental consent and a cooling-off period.

He says most teenagers who do have cosmetic surgery are worthy cases and legislation could interfere with that.

"I think that the Premier may not have sufficient numerical data and statistics to justify rushing to legislation," he said.

"But I'm concerned that if there was legislation it might preclude young people who not only deserve but need cosmetic surgery for their well being."

Dr. Olbourne says many teenagers have worthy cases for plastic surgery. "A young person whose ears stick out, or somebody who's had an accident and their nose has been pushed out of shape, a young girl of 15 or 16 who's had huge breasts and won't do sport and has pain around her neck," Dr. Olbourne said.

Let's go to the science: Is there some inherent danger with teenage girls getting cosmetic procedures? This University of Pennsylvania study, published in 2005, doesn't suggest that:

Thirty (5 percent) of the 559 women surveyed reported that they had undergone cosmetic surgery. Two thirds of respondents reported knowing someone who had received cosmetic surgery, and approximately one third indicated that a family member had undergone surgery. Overall, participants held relatively favorable attitudes about surgery. Regression analysis suggested that a greater psychological investment in physical appearance and greater internalization of mass media images of beauty predicted more favorable attitudes toward cosmetic surgery.

I guess you could read that two ways. It could be that young women don't feel bad about having plastic surgery, and don't judge others who've had the procedures harshly. Or you could say that young women are being turned into beauty-obsessed zombies by the mass media, and don't even realize they're supposed to feel bad about the investments they and their friends have made to improve their appearance.

Hard to say which is the more realistic take.

This study, from 2003, looked at the attitudes of younger girls, juniors at a suburban high school:

Although two thirds of the respondents knew someone who had undergone cosmetic surgery, only one third would choose it for themselves. Those who desired aesthetic surgery described people who have cosmetic procedures as "motivated," whereas those who would not choose this option believed individuals who do so are "vain." The most desired procedures were liposuction, rhinoplasty, and breast augmentation. The main reasons for not proceeding were health risks, cost, and fear of a bad result. The most common source of information about plastic surgery among the students was teen magazines and television.

The part I highlighted, I would guess, applies to society as a whole.

Some see nose-reshapers and boob-builders as people eager to make their way in a world in which we're all judged by our appearances: "Hey, if a weird-looking nose or tiny titties are going to prevent me from getting what I want, why shouldn't I fix the problem and get on with pursuing my dreams?"

And some look at the same bulbous nose or less-than-luminous headlamps and say, "Hey, that's the way your genes lined up. Get over it and focus on what matters."

Who's to say which is the superior attitude? I don't spend a lot of time around young women, but it seems to me that it's increasingly rare to see someone who doesn't have straight and unnaturally white teeth, or hair that's been highlighted and permed. Is it really that big a leap to a nose job or retail rack?

I've written before about how odd it is to consider how few celebrities or public figures who appear on TV do so with their original equipment. Everyone has capped teeth, most of the ones over 30 have had brow lifts, many of the men have had hair transplants, and most of the women you see have upgrades in the thoracic region.

If that's the standard, it's hard to tell girls and young women that they have no right to achieve it. On the other hand, the idea of cutting up teens gives me the creeps.

Final thought:

Here's an argument for one type of elective surgery for teens:

How about a radical solution—stomach stapling for teenagers? It may sound crazy and desperate, but several major children's hospitals, including Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Texas Children's Hospital, and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, have started offering obesity surgery in recent years. Nightline recently followed a 16-year-old Texas girl who underwent stomach stapling and lost 129 pounds in six months, down from a starting weight of 368.

The worry is that such stories distract from workaday efforts to improve school lunches, promote exercise, and establish good eating habits for kids. Critics also point out that stomach stapling is expensive and can cause serious complications, like intestinal leakage, bowel obstruction, and nutritional deficiencies.

But for extremely obese teens -- especially those who already have a related health problem -- less radical treatment options may not work, or at least not work fast enough. Surgery, by contrast, can not only lead to dramatic weight loss but also improve or reverse conditions like sleep apnea and diabetes. Only a small group of kids should be eligible for the surgery, but for these few, it can be a very good thing.

Hard to argue with that, as long as the emphasis remains on that small group of kids.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2006

Back to School

Summer can't end soon enough. Since I work at home, I find I get about half as much work done on a typical summer day, vs. any other day when the kids are in school. It's not just the interruptions that throw me off; it's the constant threat of interruptions. I'll hear the kids screaming and fighting, and I know the odds are about 50-50 that the next sound I hear will be one of the kids pounding on my office door, demanding that I mediate in his or her favor.

My wife and I have one big reason to look forward to this school year more than any of its predecessors: Our youngest starts first grade, which means that, for the first time, all three kids will be full-time students in the same school.

That means walking down to the bus stop once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and having all the hours in between to ourselves ...
aside from the days when one of the kids is sick, or a snowflake lands in Pittsburgh and they decide to shut down every school district within a 200-mile radius, or school is closed for one of those mysterious "holidays" that only pertain to teachers and postal workers.

Other than those days, I should be able to get back to business.

There's also a reason to dread school, however: homework. For our son, who has no tolerance for anything boring or repetitive, homework is a nightly struggle. His teachers assure us that they don't really schedule four hours a night of homework; he has time in school to do the work, but plays around instead. That puts my wife and me in the position of being teachers as well as parents in the afternoon and evening hours.

But for all my resentment of this four-nights-a-week battle of the books, it never occurred to me that the entire idea of assigning children homework is a mistake. Then I heard Alfie Kohn interviewed on NPR this afternoon, and my worldview changed.

Kohn's new book is called The Homework Myth. In it, he makes the startling assertion that no research whatsoever supports the practice of assigning homework to children. None. Kids don't learn more, and they don't perform better in other areas of life because of having done homework -- Kohn says that no study has shown that homework instills any kind of discipline that carries over to future employment or endeavors.

I've used this blog to complain about certain aspects of my kids' education, including how much homework they do.

It bothers me that much of my son's time in third grade was spent preparing him and his classmates for standardized tests.

It bothers me that my kids have so far learned next to nothing about history, geography, or civics, and the little geography my son was forced to learn last school year involved memorizing state capitals and learning to group states in pointless geographical clusters ("near south," "upper midwest") that are separated from the importance of different states and regions in our country's history and culture. Why do so many people speak French in Louisiana and Spanish in Florida? You can't answer a question like that if you throw those states into a stew with Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. If you place Maryland in the "mid-Atlantic" region and Virginia in the "near south," you'd never guess that Maryland had more ideological affinity with Virginia during the Civil War than it did with New York or Pennsylvania.

But, as I said, it never crossed my mind that the very idea of homework for young grade schoolers was unsupported by any empirical data.

Getting back to Kohn: In his NPR interview, he noted that the one argument most often made for homework is that all important things require practice, whether it's tennis, the violin, or multiplication tables. He counters by asking this: How is reading like playing the violin? How is learning math like practicing tennis? He says there's no correlation between the way our children learn to do those things, but for whatever reason we pretend there is.

Now, it's impossible to have a serious conversation about this without looking at the politics. We live in a time in which there's extraordinary pressure from all sides to remake schools in their image of an ideal society. And everyone, from left to right and all points in between, wants schools to do everything possible to manufacture better students. So it makes intuitive sense to most of us that schools should assign more work, not less.

More is better, right?

Unfortunately, in the case of homework, our intuition is probably wrong.

Posted by LouSchuler at 03:18 PM | Comments (4)

June 30, 2006

Don't Blame P.E.

In the great debate over the amount of exercise kids should get, and why they don't get enough, and whether activity levels are more important than diet in making kids fat, we now have some clarity:

According to British investigators, ... children's physical activity is not determined by the environment but by some internal regulator of sorts that all children share, according to their paper in the International Journal of Obesity.

"There has been a lot of concern regarding the serious loss over the past decade for children to have opportunities for physical activity at school," Dr. Terry J. Wilkin told Reuters Health. "We believed that the loss of physical education would have its greatest impact on children attending school in areas of low socioeconomic status."

But that's not what they found at all:

"Predictably, children who went to private school had a lot more physical activity during the day compared with the schools in lower socioeconomic areas," Wilkin said. "But when we looked at the activity after school, it was entirely reversed. Then when we added in-school and out-of-school activity altogether, it was exactly the same."

So individual kids -- and we're talking about pre-adolescents here, ages five to 10 -- will get the same amount of activity in any given day, no matter if they're in school or out, no matter if they're involved in sports or not, no matter if their schools offer P.E. or not.

I think parents understand this intuitively. The proof is what we call "bouncing off the walls," which occurs when kids have been cooped up inside too long -- on a rainy day, for example. (Which is to say, just about every damned day so far this summer.)

But here's the real killer, which is going to upend just about everything ever written about childhood obesity:

Moreover, total physical activity scores were independent of the amount of time spent sleeping or watching TV or playing video games, the investigations note.

"There was about a 4-fold variation in activity in each group," Wilkin noted, "that is, some children do four times more activity in a day than others. But the point is, the degree of variation was the same at each school, and the average for each school was the same." The researchers also found that girls were consistently less physically active than boys.

"So if environmental differences do not explain this variation, there must be something else," Wilkin continued. "We called this the 'activitystat,' a kind of thermostat in the brain that sets activity levels for each particular child."

If these results can be confirmed by other researchers, we may have the most important information yet on the problem of childhood obesity. The strategy would, for the first time, be perfectly clear:

We must address this issue in terms of nutrition.

Is there any other reasonable conclusion?

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:25 AM | Comments (2)

June 25, 2006

Out of the Past

For once, I think my wife and I got a family vacation exactly right. We went down to Colonial Williamsburg for the equivalent of three days, including half a day in Jamestown.

As a history geek, this was perfect for me. But it wasn't even my idea. My soon-to-be-eight-year-old daughter got interested in an American Girl doll called Felicity, whose adventures are set in Colonial Williamsburg. So my daughter knew a lot about the era and the location -- what they ate, how they dressed, where they lived and shopped -- and wanted to see it.

My wife wanted to do something simpler and more rustic, but went along with this when she got enthusiastic recommendations from friends who'd been there.

The only downside to the trip was the expense: It worked out to about $1,200 for the five of us for three days. I know we could've done it more cheaply by packing more food for lunches and staying in a less expensive hotel, but my mental cost-benefit analysis told me the stress of being frugal wasn't worth the small amount we'd save.

By eating meals out and allowing our children some expensive diversions ($50 for a 15-minute carriage ride seemed ridiculous to my wife and me, until we realized how fascinating it was to the kids), we all got what we wanted out of the trip. Both girls got to dress up in colonial garb. Our older daughter got to see the places she'd read about. Our son was fascinated by the mechanics of pre-industrial civilization. (As someone who's spent his life in publishing, I got a thrill out of showing and explaining to him how printing worked before they had linotype machines, much less computers.)

In exchange for indulging them, the kids indulged my wife and me while we watched readings and re-enactments and quizzed the re-enactors about the politics and customs of the times.

All of which got me thinking about a topic that's been bothering me: Modern education places no value on history. I've written before about how many American high-school students can't name the first U.S. president. (Since I wrote that, I quizzed a teenaged nephew, who not only didn't know the answer, he didn't even try to guess. "No clue," he told me. "We studied that old stuff in eighth grade, but I forgot it all.")

This article, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, says that historical literacy is in steep decline in the U.S.:

Anyone who has taught history to college students for more than 40 years, as I have, has watched a steady decline in the background they bring to the subject. Increasingly, their studies have been geared to contemporary issues like global interactions rather than a sustained immersion in the rich variety of the past.

Why has this happened? To a large degree, it is a byproduct of schools' new commitments -- classes in character education, conflict resolution, or international holidays; the move from Western Civilization to global studies, which concentrate on the recent past -- accelerated by students' growing attention to sports, community service, and other nonacademic interests. The results, as shown by the Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, tests are dismal.

That was a trend already in place before the current administration took office. Since then, No Child Left Behind has assured that knowledge of history will soon be part of history:

No Child Left Behind is draining academic substance out of the classroom. Increasingly, Americans are being taught skills, not content; they are being trained, not educated.

Here, I would argue, is the most insidious effect of the law: not its financial, pedagogic, or constitutional shortcomings, but its devastation of subjects other than reading and math in the first eight grades.

That outcome is clear and widespread. Because so much money is at stake, school districts are shifting primary- and secondary-school class hours to reading and math, the only subjects tested by the law.

The author, a Princeton history professor, goes on to say that the problem could be solved by adding history to the subjects that must, by law, be tested. But then we start getting into political problems. Ideologues on the left started challenging history education decades ago as too focused on white males. Today, I suspect the problem would be reversed, with ideologues on the right wanting to insert their own made-up version of American history, portraying the Founding Fathers as religious zealots who were driven by their faith rather than enlightenment ideals.

Colonial Williamsburg, though, gets it just about right. It's not all about the dead white males; the majority of humans in Virginia in the colonial and revolutionary periods were slaves or indentured servants, so they're part of every discussion. When they indulge in anachronisms -- such as having a black actor playing Othello in a stage production -- they tell you that they're anachronisms. One actor explained that the Virginia colony voluntarily outlawed theater during the revolutionary period to show solidarity with the Puritan-dominated New England colonies. Virginia, she said, was focused on profit from its origins, whereas the northern and mid-Atlantic colonies had deeper religious roots. (It's worth noting that five of the first 10 American presidents were from Virginia, the first colony to codify a bill of rights -- which it did in 1776, days before the Declaration of Independence was signed.)

When we went to Jamestown, we got a strong sense of what happened to the Indians at the hands of the profit-hungry colonists.

What I don't und