In their floor-length gowns, up-dos and tiaras, the 70 or so young women swept past two harpists and into a gilt-and-brocade dining room at the lavish Broadmoor Hotel, on the arms of their much older male companions.

The girls, ages early grade school to college, had come with their fathers, stepfathers and future fathers-in-law last Friday night to the ninth annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball. The first two hours of the gala passed like any somewhat awkward night out with parents, the men doing nearly all the talking and the girls struggling to cut their chicken.

But after dessert, the 63 men stood and read aloud a covenant “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.”

The gesture signaled that the fathers would guard their daughters from what evangelicals consider a profoundly corrosive “hook-up culture.” The evening, which alternated between homemade Christian rituals and giddy dancing, was a joyous public affirmation of the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed.

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Note: please be cautioned that this may not be appropriate for certain blog readers.

Group readings of Dolly Doctor at high school are an Australian rite of passage. Most teenagers know exactly how to flip from the cover of the magazine straight to the sex and body advice column at the back. In schoolyards across the country, girls, and sometimes boys, can be found nervously giggling at the questions but eagerly awaiting the answers. “Is my period normal?”, “What’s a wet dream?” and “Can I get pregnant the first time?”

But now it is adults who are gasping at what they read. Dolly Doctor and its counterpart in Girlfriend magazine came under scrutiny last month at the Senate’s inquiry into the sexualisation of children in the contemporary media environment. The inquiry was set up to address parents’ growing concerns about their children’s exposure to sexual material via advertising, pop culture and the internet, and the rendering of them into sexual objects.

But in focusing on these magazine Q&A columns, the inquiry has taken a strange turn. Several senators, particularly the Tasmanian Liberal Stephen Parry, argued they were not appropriate reading material for younger teens. In particular, sexual questions were cause for alarm.

Read it all.

I will consider posting comments on this article submitted first by email to Kendall’s E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Wando High School senior Ian Lund knew he was risking his life when he tried to help a stranger trapped in an overturned van on U.S. Highway 17.

But he also realized it would be worse to do nothing at all.

The decision came to him in an instant, when he looked through the van’s windshield and saw John D. Green, 54, of Charleston bleeding heavily and in pain from a broken arm.

“The first thing I smell is gasoline,” Lund said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, boy, this is not good.’ ”

Lund’s bravery will be recognized tonight during a Town Council meeting. The town also plans to nominate him for a Carnegie Medal, which recognizes heroism.

“Ian showed tremendous courage and put his life in immediate danger to aid a complete stranger,” Fire Chief Herb Williams said in a letter to council. “Ian recognized the inherent danger of the gasoline igniting while the driver was still trapped inside the vehicle. His efforts were extraordinary.”

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Depression, teens and marijuana are a dangerous mix that can lead to dependency, mental illness or suicidal thoughts, according to a White House report being released Friday.
A teen who has been depressed at some point in the past year is more than twice as likely to have used marijuana as teens who have not reported being depressed ”” 25% compared with 12%, said the report by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

“Marijuana is a more consequential substance of abuse than our culture has treated it in the last 20 years,” said John Walters, director of the office. “This is not just youthful experimentation that they’ll get over as we used to think in the past.”

Smoking marijuana can lead to more serious problems, Walters said in an interview.

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Warning: some blog readers may find this story of teenage misbehavior disturbing.

I am not going to spoil it you need to read it for yourself.

Sixteen-year-old Sarah Taylor knows what texting while driving could cause: danger for the person behind the wheel and anyone else on the road.

That’s why the North Charleston teen thinks it’s a good idea that the state might stop new drivers from using their phones while on the road. But will they listen? That’s another question.

“I do think it will be a big uproar if it does actually go through,” Sarah said. “Nobody is going to follow it.”

The bill would allow law enforcement to stop 15- and 16-year-old drivers if they are caught text messaging or talking on a phone without a hands-free device, although the provisions allow for emergency communication.

The issue pits personal rights against safety concerns and is sure to be controversial when the House debates the proposed legislation, said Rep. Bob Walker, R-Landrum.

“You know as well as I do, all of us, young people included, are going to be distracted, listening to the radio, talking on our phones, eating food,” he said.

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And what of today? Who bears witness to the Good News of Jesus on the streets of New York, in the troubled neighborhoods of large cities, in the places where the young gather, seeking someone in whom they can trust? God is our origin and our destination, and Jesus the way. The path of that journey twists and turns ─ just as it did for our saints ─ through the joys and the trials of ordinary, everyday life: within your families, at school or college, during your recreation activities, and in your parish communities. All these places are marked by the culture in which you are growing up. As young Americans you are offered many opportunities for personal development, and you are brought up with a sense of generosity, service and fairness. Yet you do not need me to tell you that there are also difficulties: activities and mindsets which stifle hope, pathways which seem to lead to happiness and fulfillment but in fact end only in confusion and fear.

My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers; its influence grew ”“ infiltrating schools and civic bodies, as well as politics and even religion ”“ before it was fully recognized for the monster it was. It banished God and thus became impervious to anything true and good. Many of your grandparents and great-grandparents will have recounted the horror of the destruction that ensued. Indeed, some of them came to America precisely to escape such terror.

Let us thank God that today many people of your generation are able to enjoy the liberties which have arisen through the extension of democracy and respect for human rights. Let us thank God for all those who strive to ensure that you can grow up in an environment that nurtures what is beautiful, good, and true: your parents and grandparents, your teachers and priests, those civic leaders who seek what is right and just.

The power to destroy does, however, remain. To pretend otherwise would be to fool ourselves. Yet, it never triumphs; it is defeated.

Read the whole thing.

God has blessed you with life, and with differing talents and gifts. Through these you are able to serve him and society in various ways. While some people’s contributions seem great and others’ more modest, the witness value of our efforts is always a sign of hope for everyone.

Sometimes it is challenging to find a reason for what appears only as a difficulty to be overcome or even pain to be endured. Yet our faith helps us to break open the horizon beyond our own selves in order to see life as God does. God’s unconditional love, which bathes every human individual, points to a meaning and purpose for all human life. Through his Cross, Jesus in fact draws us into his saving love (cf. Jn 12:32) and in so doing shows us the way ahead – the way of hope which transfigures us all, so that we too, become bearers of that hope and charity for others.

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Pope Benedict XVI continues his tour of the United States on Saturday ”” the third anniversary of his election as pontiff. He began the day with a Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and then spent the afternoon at a mass rally for young people in Yonkers, N.Y. His opening act? Kelly Clarkson.

Nearly 20,000 young people came to see the pontiff, who urged them to take the liturgy seriously and to have hope in Jesus.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Assemblyman Ralph R. Caputo today announced he is drafting legislation that would prohibit minors in New Jersey from purchasing super-caffeinated energy drinks and nutrition supplements.

Caputo said he was alerted to the need for this legislation after seeing a news report on “Blow Energy Drink Mix,” a white powdered drink supplement with nearly seven times the caffeine of a can of cola, manufactured and packaged to look like cocaine and marketed to an audience that includes teens.

“The plain and simple truth is that caffeine is a drug,” said Caputo. “Disguising that fact by targeting children with marketing that chooses to glamorize it by comparing it to illegal drugs does not send the right message.”

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I really love stories like this where people slog it out in the trenches in their local community and seek to make a difference–watch it all.

Teenagers should be given the right to medically assisted suicide and the parents of terminally ill younger children should be able to choose euthanasia under proposals from members of Belgium’s coalition government.

The plans to extend rules allowing doctors to perform euthanasia on terminally ill people suffering “constant and unbearable physical or psychological pain” comes amid heated Belgian debate on the issue.

Under existing Belgian laws, in place since 2002, patients, other than newborn babies, must be over 18 to qualify for assisted suicide, a situation that Bart Tommelein, leader of Belgium Liberals, wants changed.

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Many younger people have very nuanced ideas about Internet privacy. They post deeply personal information on social networking sites, but understand and use various privacy locks so only certain people can see their profiles.

Listen to it all.

Over the course of her career, photojournalist Robin Bowman has worked for People magazine, traveled to dozens of countries and negotiated countless difficult situations, including the conflicts in Darfur and Bosnia.

Recently, Bowman spent four years driving across the United States, covering more than 20,000 miles, and photographing and interviewing more than 400 American teens. Some of those pictures ”” and the teens’ words ”” are included in her new book, It’s Complicated: The American Teenager.

The project was, at times, very different from Bowman’s previous work as a photojournalist. For one thing, although she always obtained a signed release form from her subjects’ parents, she resisted extensive prep work before shooting the teens.

Read or better yet listen to it all. If you do listen to it, take special note of the question and answer interaction with the teen in West Virginia.

All lank and bone, the boy stands at the corner with his younger sister, waiting for the yellow bus that takes them to their respective schools. He is Billy Wolfe, high school sophomore, struggling.

Moments earlier he left the sanctuary that is his home, passing those framed photographs of himself as a carefree child, back when he was 5. And now he is at the bus stop, wearing a baseball cap, vulnerable at 15.

A car the color of a school bus pulls up with a boy who tells his brother beside him that he’s going to beat up Billy Wolfe. While one records the assault with a cellphone camera, the other walks up to the oblivious Billy and punches him hard enough to leave a fist-size welt on his forehead.

The video shows Billy staggering, then dropping his book bag to fight back, lanky arms flailing. But the screams of his sister stop things cold.

The aggressor heads to school, to show friends the video of his Billy moment, while Billy heads home, again. It’s not yet 8 in the morning.

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If the three deaths were connected, no one on the island could say exactly how. The first, a 15-year-old, killed himself at his home near the high school in February 2007. The second, a 17-year-old ”˜A’ student and an athlete, committed suicide last October.

The third, a 16-year-old found dead at home in January, may have been an accidental death, not a suicide. None had been good friends.

Yet they were all islanders, talented and well-liked students in a high school of 400 that had not had a suicide for more than 40 years.

The small year-round community on Nantucket Island, deeply shaken, turned to outside experts for help.

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More than 3 million teenaged girls have at least one sexually transmitted disease (STD), a new government study suggests.

The most severely affected are African-American teens. In fact, 48 percent of African-American teenaged girls have an STD, compared with 20 percent of white teenaged girls.

“What we found is alarming,” Dr. Sara Forhan, from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a teleconference Tuesday. “One in four female adolescents in the U.S. has at least one of the four most common STDs that affects women.”

“These numbers translate into 3.2 million young women nationwide who are infected with an STD,” Forhan said. “This means that far too many young women are at risk of the serious health effects of untreated STDs, including infertility and cervical cancer.”

Makes the heart sad–read it all.

For generations, driver’s licenses have been tickets to freedom for America’s 16-year-olds, prompting many to line up at motor vehicle offices the day they were eligible to apply.

No longer. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration.

Reasons vary, including tighter state laws governing when teenagers can drive, higher insurance costs and a shift from school-run driver education to expensive private driving academies.

To that mix, experts also add parents who are willing to chauffeur their children to activities, and pastimes like surfing the Web that keep them indoors and glued to computers.

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Last week, an intriguing proposition was mooted by Government minister Dawn Primarolo.

Teenage girls, she said, could be steered towards what is described as “long-term contraception”.

This is now possible thanks to the development of contraceptive jabs and implants which can last up to five years.

In other words, there is a way of effectively sterilising girls for a lengthy period of time.

At what age? Well, doesn’t 12 until 17 sound rather sensible?

Read it all.

Watch it all.

Caught this one during the early morning work out–very sobering.

Sean Shevlino and Mike Anthony had every opportunity to succeed: loving parents, good homes, strong schools and the natural ability to play sports. But a series of bad decisions in the summer of 2006 changed the course of their lives.

In a matter of days, the two Wando High School students and a group of friends robbed a store at gunpoint. Sean and Mike then continued with the theft of a car and another robbery.

Now, as many in their graduating class prepare to head for college, Sean and Mike wait to see which state prison will be their home for the next 10 years.

How did this happen?

Read the whole article from our local paper.

Last month, a 15-year-old boy was charged with murdering an 18-year-old North Charleston man off Dorchester Road as he took out the trash.

In December, a 14-year-old boy was convicted of shooting into a car and murdering a 22-year-old North Charleston man in Waylyn four months earlier after someone in the car fired a shot into the air.

On Sunday, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the back and head in the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood by a group of men thought to be in their early 20s as he and others sat outside. The boy was treated at and released from a local hospital. The shooting came after a fight earlier in the day, according to a police report.

Young people are becoming more involved in crime that often involves young blacks, and community leaders are perplexed by how to stop the escalation of violence. They point to churches and schools helping in the absence of solid family structures in many homes.

“I don’t know if it’s drug-related, but the age group is becoming younger and younger,” said Mary Ward, president of the North Charleston branch of the NAACP. “I have often said that guns are too readily available. We are just having too many of our young people gunned down.”

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

Watch it all–inspiring stuff.

Natasha Randall was 17, had a large circle of friends and was studying childcare when, without any indication that she was unhappy, she hanged herself in her bedroom.

Her death last Thursday was the latest in at least seven apparent copycat suicides in Bridgend, South Wales, that have alarmed parents, health authorities and police, who believe that they may be prompted by messages on social networking websites such as Bebo.

Within days two 15-year-old girls, both of whom had known Tasha, as she called herself, had also tried to take their lives. One cut her wrists and was later discharged from hospital into the care of her parents. The other tried to hang herself and spent two days on life support before showing signs of recovery. Police have since visited the families of 20 of Tasha’s friends, urging them to keep an eye on their daughters.

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THE movie “Juno” is a fairy tale about a pregnant teenager who decides to have her baby, place it for adoption and then get on with her life. For the most part, the tone of the movie is comedic and jolly, but there is a moment when Juno tells her father about her condition, and he shakes his head in disappointment and says, “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.”

Female viewers flinch when he says it, because his words lay bare the bitterly unfair truth of sexuality: female desire can bring with it a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine, and so it is one appetite women and girls must always regard with caution. Because Juno let her guard down and had a single sexual experience with a sweet, well-intentioned boy, she alone is left with this ordeal of sorrow and public shame.

In the movie, the moment passes. Juno finds a yuppie couple eager for a baby, and when the woman tries to entice her with the promise of an open adoption, the girl shakes her head adamantly: “Can’t we just kick it old school? I could just put the baby in a basket and send it your way. You know, like Moses in the reeds.”

It’s a hilarious moment, and the sentiment turns out to be genuine. The final scene of the movie shows Juno and her boyfriend returned to their carefree adolescence, the baby ”” safely in the hands of his rapturous and responsible new mother ”” all but forgotten. Because I’m old enough now that teenage movie characters evoke a primarily maternal response in me (my question during the film wasn’t “What would I do in that situation?” but “What would I do if my daughter were in that situation?”), the last scene brought tears to my eyes. To see a young daughter, faced with the terrible fact of a pregnancy, unscathed by it and completely her old self again was magical.

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New Year’s Eve tends to be the day of the year with the most binge drinking (based on drunken driving fatalities), followed closely by Super Bowl Sunday. Likewise, colleges have come to expect that the most alcohol-filled day of their students’ lives is their 21st birthday. So, some words of caution for those who continue to binge and even for those who have stopped: just as the news is not so great for former cigarette smokers, there is equally bad news for recovering binge-drinkers who have achieved a sobriety that has lasted years. The more we have binged ”” and the younger we have started to binge ”” the more we experience significant, though often subtle, effects on the brain and cognition.

Much of the evidence for the impact of frequent binge-drinking comes from some simple but elegant studies done on lab rats by Fulton T. Crews and his former student Jennifer Obernier. Dr. Crews, the director of the University of North Carolina Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, and Dr. Obernier have shown that after a longstanding abstinence following heavy binge-drinking, adult rats can learn effectively ”” but they cannot relearn.

When put into a tub of water and forced to continue swimming until they find a platform on which to stand, the sober former binge-drinking rats and the normal control rats (who had never been exposed to alcohol) learned how to find the platform equally well. But when the experimenters abruptly moved the platform, the two groups of rats had remarkably different performances. The rats without previous exposure to alcohol, after some brief circling, were able to find the new location. The former binge-drinking rats, however, were unable to find the new platform; they became confused and kept circling the site of the old platform.

This circling occurs, Dr. Crews says, because the former binge-drinking rats continued to show neurotoxicity in the hippocampus long after (in rat years) becoming sober. On a microscopic level, Dr. Crews has shown that heavy binge-drinking in rats diminishes the genesis of nerve cells, shrinks the development of the branchlike connections between brain cells and contributes to neuronal cell death. The binges activate an inflammatory response in rat brains rather than a pure regrowth of normal neuronal cells. Even after longstanding sobriety this inflammatory response translates into a tendency to stay the course, a diminished capacity for relearning and maladaptive decision-making.

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To prevent teen pregnancy, should students be taught only the merits of abstaining from sex? Or should they also learn about contraception, just in case? Believers on both sides are facing off again, after a government announcement in early December that teen birthrates rose 3 percent last year following a 14-year decline. Some public-health experts blame increasingly popular sex-ed programs that preach abstinence only and keep kids in the dark about other pregnancy-prevention methods: A study published recently in the American Journal of Public Health attributed most of the 14-year birthrate drop to wider contraceptive use. “Abstinence-only programs are ideology driven,” says Marilyn Keefe, director of reproductive health and rights at the nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families, “and not a good use of our public-health dollars.”

Abstinence advocates, meanwhile, are crying foul, saying the uptick in pregnancies is a sign that a stronger pitch for delaying sex is needed. “Any kind of assertion of blame is a disingenuous attempt to turn these statistics into a political agenda,” insists Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association. Even with more schools teaching the benefits of abstinence, she says, most still emphasize contraceptive techniques over waiting. Huber believes the purist approach is bound to lead to less sex among teens.

Read it all.

I am not going to spoil it by saying anything but you just have to take the time to watch it. Thoroughly inspiring–KSH.

Microsoft has abruptly closed down four “pro-anorexia” websites in Spain following a complaint that they were endangering the lives of teenage girls.

The websites, which offer tips such as “take up smoking” and “if your stomach rumbles, hit it”, were accused of teaching teenagers how to starve themselves.

Internet companies usually wait for a court order before closing any sites that they host. But Microsoft acted swiftly after complaints from a Catalan watchdog that several blogs on its Live Spaces community glorified starvation as a lifestyle choice.

Such sites worship “thinspirational” celebrities such as Victoria Beckham and refer to “my friend Ana” instead of anorexia to avoid discovery by parents.

Read it all.