Monthly Archives: August 2011

Blame Coco Chanel. Tanned skin used to be a sign of poverty, with pale skin a mark of style, class and status.

Legend has it that the fashion icon accidentally browned in the sun on a yacht and started a craze that’s endured into the new millennium. Unfortunately, the phrase “healthy tan” has proven to be a tragic contradiction. There is no such thing as a healthy tan – even a light glow is a sign of skin damage.

According to the Canadian Cancer Society, cases of life-threatening melanoma increased from 550 in the year 2000, to 740 in 2010, a 34 per cent increase. There has been an additional rise in the other, more treatable forms of skin cancer as well. Even more worrisome has been the dramatic drop in age of cancer development. Doctors are now regularly seeing patients with the deadly form of the disease in their 30s and even in their 20s, cases that were extremely rare a decade or two ago.

Ultra violet skin damage is cumulative over our lifetimes, with the exposure in our childhood and teenage years particularly critical determinants of whether we will one day develop skin cancers. Our skin cells don’t forget. Each serious burn doubles our lifetime risk for developing skin cancer.

All of this explains the concern over teens using tanning beds, and the current drive to ban their use in teens under 18 years of age. This Montreal Gazette article reports that tanning bed usage by people under 35 increases by 75% the risk of developing melanomas. The Canadian Dermatology Association has a compelling video that all teens interested in tanning should see, called Indoor Tanning is Out. They remind us that the World Health Organization has upgraded tanning beds to a level 1 carcinogenic risk, the same category as smoking cigarettes and asbestos.  Yikes.

Having trouble getting the message about sun damage across to your teen? Send them the link to this amazing, awareness-raising video: Dear 16-year-old me. And buy them some cool sunglasses. Coco would approve.

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Sure, it’s a year old already, but this Dear Sugar column from TheRumpus.net is a beautifully written, powerful argument for confronting head-on the hard blows life sometimes serves up. Should be required reading for all teachers, parents, youth care workers.

(Thanks Julie, for bringing this to my attention.)

A selection:

Several years ago I worked with barely teenage girls in a middle school. Most  of them were poor white kids in seventh and eighth grade. Not one of them had a  decent father. Their dads were in prison or unknown to them or roving the streets of our city strung out on drugs or f**king them. Their moms were young used and abused drug-and-alcohol addled women who were often abusive themselves.  The twenty some girls who were assigned to meet with me as a group and also  individually were deemed “at highest risk” by the faculty at the school.

My job title was youth advocate. My approach was unconditional positive regard. My mission was to help the girl youth succeed in spite of the  unspeakably harrowing crap stew they’d been simmering in all of their lives.  Succeeding in this context meant getting neither pregnant nor locked up before  graduating high school. It meant eventually holding down a job at Taco Bell or Wal-Mart. It was only that! It was such a small thing and yet it was enormous. It was like trying to push an eighteen wheeler with your pinkie finger.

I was not technically qualified to be a youth advocate. I’d never worked with  youth or counseled anyone. I had degrees in neither education nor psychology.  I’d been a waitress who wrote stories every chance I got for most of the  preceding years. But for some reason, I wanted this job and so I talked my way into it.

I wasn’t meant to let the girls know I was trying to help them succeed. I was meant to silently, secretly, covertly empower them by taking them to do things they’d never done at places they’d never been. I took them to a rock-climbing gym and to the ballet and to a poetry reading at an independent bookstore. The theory was that if they liked to pull the weight of their blossoming girl bodies up a faux boulder with little pebble-esque plastic hand-and-foot-holds then perhaps they would not get knocked up. If they glommed on to the beauty of art witnessed live—made before their very eyes—they would not become tweakers and steal someone’s wallet and go to jail at the age of fifteen.

Instead, they’d grow up and get a job at Wal-Mart. That was the hope, the goal, the reason I was being paid a salary. And while we did those empowering things, I was meant to talk to them about sex and drugs and boys and mothers and relationships and healthy homework habits and the importance of self-esteem and answer every question they had with honesty and affirm every story they told with unconditional positive regard.

(click here to read from the beginning…)

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