Boarding Schools for Girls

Girls who go through puberty early are at risk for aggressive behaviors such as getting into fights or teasing other children. However, their risk returns to normal if they have a nurturing relationship with their parents.

Dr. Sylvie Mrug of the University of Alabama at Birmingham interviewed 330 girls who had started to menstruate at least one year earlier than their peers. She was unclear why these girls were more likely to become both verbally and physically more aggressive than other girls, or why nurturing, communication, and monitoring by parents mitigated that situation.

This study appears in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Labels: aggression, puberty

According to a report from the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina, cheerleading is the most dangerous sport for girls. Though cheerleaders comprise only 3 percent of the nation's 2.9 million female high school athletes, the activity is responsible for 65 percent of all catastrophic injuries in high school girls' athletics, and 67 percent in colleges.

Gymnastics was a distant second, accounting for only 9 percent of injuries. The study included only injuries that caused death, permanent disability or serious long-term impairment.

Labels: cheerleading, safety, sports

Intense remedial instruction can permanently "rewire" the brains of dyslexic students and others with poor reading skills, helping them to become better readers, according to a new study from Carnegie Mellon University.

Professors Marcel Just, Ann Meyler, and Tim Killer studied 25 fifth-graders who had undergone an hour a day of intensive reading instruction over a 100-day period. The scientists used magnetic resonance imagery (MRIs) to demonstrate that the children showed increases in activity in cortical regions of the brain associated with reading. Many of the students' brains activated at near-normal levels after the round of remedial instruction.

The research team expressed hope that remedial education may help students in subjects besides reading.

"We are at the beginning of a new era of neuro-education," said Dr. Just, director of the Carnegie Mellon Center for Cognitive Brain Imagery.

This study appears in the journal Neuropsychologia.

Labels: brain-chemistry, reading, school

Teens who value power are more likely to engage in school violence, including hitting and threatening others. Teens who value conformity or universalism are less likely to engage in such behaviors, according to a new study published in Child Development.

For purposes of the study, "power" meant "trying to attain social status by controlling and dominating others," conformity meant "limiting actions and urges that might violate social expectations and norms," and universalism was "promoting, understanding, appreciation, tolerance and protecting the welfare of all people and nature."

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studied the attitudes and behaviors of 907 students in grades 10 through 12 in order to test their hypothesis that a teen's values predict behaviors. Their research indicated that values come not only from the home and parents, but also from peer groups and the culture of the teen's school.

Labels: aggression, values, violence

Eighth graders will be able to take their first College Board examination starting in 2010, according to the nonprofit College Board, which owns the SAT, PSAT, and other tests.

Most college-bound students take the Preliminary Scholastic Achievement Test (PSAT) in their junior year. PSAT scores are used to award National Merit Scholarships. During senior year, students take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as well as tests in individual subjects. If the students do well on their subject tests, they can qualify for college credits.

College Board's rival, the American College Test (ACT), has already introduced an eighth grade exam called "Explore," now used in California.

College Board officials said results from the "8th grade SAT" would not be given to colleges. Instead, parents and school counselors would use the grades in writing, mathematics, and reading to develop a realistic assessment of each student's abilities, and thus become better able to guide them in college choices. The test would identify academic weaknesses and strengths so that students could make better choices in planning their high school curriculums.

Labels: colleges, high-school, tests

One hundred twenty-three college presidents are taking part in the Amethyst Initiative, an effort to stop college binge drinking. The controversial plan calls for lowering the drinking age to 18 years old.

Binge drinking, defined as having five or more drinks in a row, took the lives of 157 college-aged individuals between 1999 and 2005, according to the Associated Press.

All 50 states set the legal drinking age at 21 years, partly in response to pressure from Congress. If a state raises its drinking age, it loses federal highway funds.

The presidents, including ones from Duke, Tufts, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Ohio State, and other major universities, signed a statement saying that the current laws are not working, instead creating a "culture of dangerous, clandestine binge drinking." Many privately acknowledge that they cannot enforce the law on campus or control underage drinking.

"Kids are going to drink whether it's legal or illegal," said Johns Hopkins President William R. Brody. "We'd at least be able to have a more open dialogue with students about drinking as opposed to this sham where people don't want to talk about it because it's a violation of the law."

Some of the college presidents who signed the Amethyst Initiative argue that having the legal limit at 21 years old means that many students drink in the early evening because they know that once they go out to parties or public places, they will not be served alcohol.

"If they drink too much in the beginning [of an evening], they can get alcohol poisoning," said Baird Tipson, president of Washington College in Chestertown. "They're really not aware of how their judgment is impaired. We hope they don't get into a car. Or, if they're a young woman, go to a fraternity party. It's just not healthy."

Many experts oppose lowering the drinking age, arguing that it will simply push the current problem on to high schools. Donna Shalala, former Secretary of Health and Human Services and current president of the University of Miami, said, "I remember college campuses when we had 18 year-old drinking ages and I believe we have made some progress since then."

Others, like Joanne Glasser, president of Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, believe that universities should instead promote activities that reduce the abuse of alcohol instead of talking about age limits. The recent deaths of two Bradley students were linked to over-consumption of alcohol.

Laura Dean Mooney, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said that lowering the drinking age will result in more automobile deaths and that "even a 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced on certain college campuses." She is asking the public to call or write to signatories of the Amethyst Initiative and demand they remove their names from the list.

The Governors Highway Safety Association plans a workshop "to help highway safety agencies counter any effort in their states to lower the drinking age."

Labels: alcohol, colleges, drinking-age

A yearlong survey has determined that parents of boys are twice as likely as parents of girls to discuss concerns about their children's behavior and emotional well-being with school personnel and health care professionals.

The survey, which was conducted during the 2005-2006 academic year, was released Sept. 3, 2008, by the National Center for Health Statistics. According to a USA Today article by Marilyn Ellis that was published the same day, experts aren't sure what these results indicate about the state of American families:

Nearly 1 out of 5 boys had parents who discussed such difficulties, and about 1 out of 10 girls, says the report from more than 17,000 parents with children 4 to 17 years old. ...

There's no comparable earlier survey, but some children's mental health experts were surprised at the extent of concern, especially for boys — and divided as to whether it's a good or bad sign.

The high number of parents who confide worries shows "the very, very narrow range of normalcy allowed for children these days," says behavioral pediatrician Lawrence Diller of Walnut Creek Calif., author of The Last Normal Child. "Welcome to the age of anxiety, where more is expected of children academically and in self-discipline, while both parents are working, so there's less support and structure."

Mental health care for children has undergone significant changes in recent years, Ellis reported. Antidepressant prescriptions dropped significantly following a 2004 warning by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but the presence of mental health experts is increasing in schools and pediatric practices.

Labels: doctors, parenting, teachers

Once thought to be limited to drunken fraternity initiations or military rites of passage, hazing has, in recent years, been the subject of a series of high-profile incidents involving an unlikely population: girls and young women.

• In a Sept. 5, 2001, article in the New York Times, Maria Newman reported that 14 senior players from the Northern Highlands (New Jersey) Regional High School girls' field hockey team had been suspended after it was revealed that they had "forced sophomores to bark like dogs, simulate oral sex on a banana and play hockey with syrup in their pants. Some of the students had even videotaped the hazing and had been showing the tape around town."
• In May 2003, 31 students (28 of whom were girls) were expelled after a non-school-sanctioned football game devolved into a hazing incident that would eventually gain worldwide attention. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported that about 20 junior girls "were covered in paint, urine, feces, and animal guts. Some were shot with paintball guns, others were kicked and beaten. After it was over, at least five of the participants had injuries requiring medical attention, including one receiving stitches to her head."
• In July 2008, a group of Morton Ranch (Texas) High School cheerleaders were accused of subjecting members of the junior varsity cheerleading squad to a series of humiliating and potentially dangerous abuses, including being bound with duct tape and thrown into a swimming pool.

The advocacy group StopHazing reports that incidences of the practice at the high school level are "particularly troubling because the developmental stages of adolescence create a situation in which many students are more vulnerable to peer pressure due to the tremendous need for belonging, making friends and finding approval in one's peer group."

Labels: hazing, high-school, trends

Writing in response to the announcement that the unmarried 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is five months pregnant, a New York University professor claims that the "sex ed. vs. abstinence only" debate ignores the greatest influence on teen pregnancy: poverty.

In an article that appeared in the Sept. 4, 2008, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, history and education professor Jonathan Zimmerman wrote that fears of teen moms being condemned to poverty are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between being pregnant and being poor:

Bearing a child as a teenager doesn't hurt a woman's prospects for education, job advancement or marriage. Ditto for her kids, who don't suffer any measurable consequences from having a teenage mother.

Instead, they suffer for a much more basic reason: They're poor. About two-thirds of teenage mothers live at or below the poverty line at the time they give birth. The less income and opportunity that you have, the more likely you are to become a teenage parent.

So Americans have it exactly backward. Teen pregnancy doesn't deprive our kids of life chances; instead, kids who lack those chances are the ones who get pregnant.

Though he admits that "nobody knows why" impoverished girls are more likely to become young mothers, Zimmerman offers two possible causes: that girls in poverty lack the confidence and self-esteem to insist upon contraception, and that financial and cultural pressures make it less likely that poor girls will abort their pregnancies.

"All things being equal, of course, it's still best for our teenagers - and for their offspring - to delay parenthood," Zimmerman wrote. "But all things are not equal, and that's the whole point here. The hype over teen pregnancy diverts us from the truly serious problem in American society, which is the growing poverty of teenagers themselves."

Labels: poverty, pregnancy, sex