risk(within)reason

We’re in Israel on a family vacation for the next two weeks, a trip to mark our twin daughters’ 12th birthday and my mom’s 65th. A big year that required more from us than the usual birthday candles.
Coming here has been a really big deal for us, emotionally, financially, logistically. And although we’ve been planning it for a couple of years, we were a little bit nervous about bringing our children to a place so fraught with tension. It’s hard not to be nervous when you follow the news, when every fresh act of violence twists your insides. I understand that statistically we are in no more danger than we would be on an LA freeway (probably less in fact), but the images from the news get seared into your mind.
Anyhow, in our first two days here in Tel Aviv, I’ve learned a few things. The first is that we carry a very North American perspective on risk. People here (like people in most other places on the planet outside of urban North America) don’t get so worked up about mundane daily dangers.
No one wears a bicycle helmet, for example. Seatbelts seem largely optional in the front seats of cars (never mind the back seats). Kids run freely, seemingly unsupervised, in public spaces. Many more people smoke cigarettes. It’s safe to say our 3 children (along with 2 other pale, blonde kids with English accents we spotted yesterday) are the only ones on the beach wearing sun-protective swim shirts over their bathing suits. In fact, I haven’t seen this many people slathered with baby oil since the early 1980s. I saw one such shiny woman speed down the boardwalk on her scooter in a thong bikini (no helmet), cigarette in hand. I had to laugh, she looked so happy. (Still, I was glad she wasn’t my daughter!)
In fact, everyone seems much more relaxed. People are out with their small children at the cafes on the beach late at night. Women of all shapes and sizes wear bikinis with no self-consciousness. People generally seem fitter and healthier (all that smoking notwithstanding).
I can’t help thinking that these small daily activities must seem much less risky in the face of certain Israeli realities. All teens here spend at least a couple years in the army. Adults put in 30 days of reserve duty every year until late middle age. They’ve all faced some pretty tense situations. They’ve known loss in a way most North Americans have not intimately understood in many years.
They have also seen random, brutal danger in daily life. Arbitrary, life-changing violence on a city bus, an outing to a shopping mall, a nightclub, an evening stroll along a crowded street.
“Ein brera:” A distinctly Israeli expression to express how you carry on despite all this. There is no choice. Life is risky. Get on with it.
The news at home carries the stories of conflict, of course. But it doesn’t show the millions of people who go to work and school on a daily basis. Who relax in cafes in the evening, sell their wares in the markets, ride peacefully side by side on the bus. That’s what you see when you here.
The realities of life in the Middle East are never that far away. When was the last time airport security brushed your fingers for traces of explosives on a flight to Edmonton? Have you ever paid attention to an unattended briefcase? A young man oddly dressed in a bulky jacket in the July heat?
The risks we see at home come to seem like indulgences, like the extra perks we get for living in places like Montreal, Boston or Sarasota.
I’m not saying they aren’t worth our vigilence and care, just that it really is a matter of perspective. Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

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Why do good kids make bad decisions when their friends are around? Turns out there’s a biological explanation for peer pressure. Not that it makes things like this any more comprehensible.)

Scientists at Temple University used MRIs to study the brain activity of 40 teenagers and adults playing a driving game in which participants had to decide whether to speed through yellow traffic lights in order to earn a higher score, even if meant crashing. Adults showed no difference in their playing when their friends were present, but the teens ran 40 percent more yellow lights and had 60 percent more crashes when they knew their friend were watching.

According to the New York Times Well blog:

“The presence of peers activated the reward circuitry in the brain of adolescents that it didn’t do in the case of adults,” said Laurence Steinberg, an author of the study, who is a psychology professor at Temple and author of “You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10 to 25.” “We think we’ve uncovered one very plausible explanation for why adolescents do a lot of stupid things with their friends that they wouldn’t do when they are by themselves.”

“All of us who have very good kids know they’ve done really dumb things when they’ve been with their friends,” Dr. Steinberg said. “The lesson is that if you have a kid whom you think of as very mature and able to exercise good judgment, based on your observations when he or she is alone or with you, that doesn’t necessarily generalize to how he or she will behave in a group of friends without adults around. Parents should be aware of that.”

What this means for parents is that we need to supervise our teenagers very closely. As we’ve seen, good judgment can be as much a matter of biological development as it is a personality trait.

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How much time does your preteen or teen spend online, watching TV, listening to music or playing video games? Turns out the answer may be linked to their racial and ethnic background.

A new study out of Northwestern University has found dramatic differences in the amount of time kids from different ethnic and racial minorities in the U.S. spend online, compared with their white counterparts. Read the full report here.

“Minority children spend an average of 13 hours a day using mobile devices, computers, TVs and other media — about 4½ hours more than white kids,” according to the report.

The sheer number of hours is staggering: Among 8- to 18-year-olds, Asian Americans logged the most media use (13 hours, 13 minutes a day), followed by Hispanics (13 hours), blacks (12 hours, 59 minutes), and whites (8 hours, 36 minutes).

The added time was divided between television, music, Internet and video gaming, but the proportion of television consumption in particular was highest for minority youth, who were also more likely to have televisions with cable and specialty channels in their bedrooms.

“In the past decade, the gap between minority and white youth’s daily media use has doubled for blacks and quadrupled for Hispanics,” says Northwestern Professor Ellen Wartella, who directed the study and heads the Center on Media and Human Development in the School of Communication. “The big question is what these disparities mean for our children’s health and education.”

The study, “Children, Media and Race: Media Use Among White, Black, Hispanic and Asian American Children,” is based on a new analysis, by race, of data from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s previous media use studies. It finds that race-related differences among youth are robust even when controlling for factors including parent education and whether or not children are from single- or two-parent families.

Media usage among kids and teens has shifted dramatically in the last 10 years, and these changes have consequences for families, schools and communities. One Kaiser Family Foundation report found that 8-18 year-olds of all racial backgrounds pack in more than 53 hours a week of media usage (more than a full-time job!). And what’s more, since kids are so adept at media multitasking, the average 7 hours, 38 minutes of media time a day actually condenses almost 11 real time hours of media.

Compare this to how much time your kids spend in school. To how much time they spend with you.

The scale of influence is so dramatically different that it pales in comparison. Do you feel your preteens and teens are adequately prepared to process all these outside messages about their bodies, their sexuality, their values, their life choices?

Parents of all kids, no matter their colour, race or ethnicity, need to carefully examine their kids’ media usage. But the need is clearly greatest in minority communities.

“These findings should be a clarion call to minority communities to protect their children’s future health and well-being by insisting on a right to more media-free time,” Frederick Zimmerman explained in a USA Today article on the report, chair of the department of Health Services at UCLA School of Public Health.

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