Birthday Tradition Continues (1)

Have you ever started a family tradition that has carried on throughout the years? Some of ours have included:

Sharing Thanksgiving dinner together and then planning to put up our Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving.

Attending Christmas Eve service in the evening and then getting Chinese food to bring home (a tradition that started by accident when we first went to a late Christmas Eve service – only to find zero restaurants opened for business, until we came by a Chinese Restaurant near our home – we have done the same every year since).

And, of course, as I wrote last week, celebrating our kids’ birthdays twice –  once in the morning of the big day and once on the next weekend complete with cake and ice-cream!

But, have you ever started a family tradition that you later saw your children continue to carry out? If so, you know that this is one of the richest rewards that you can experience!

I have often told my kids that, as lame as they might find me to be as they get older, they will use some of my parenting skills and silly family traditions with their own families.

Little by little, there is evidence that I am correct! YES!! My kids are all too happy (at least in this case!) to admit that their dad just might be on to something.

Here are the details:

As I shared way back on April 25, 2009 (http://paulwreeves.blogspot.com/2009/04/happy-birthday-to-me.html), we have started each child’s birthday morning by getting all other family members to quietly enter the birthday person’s bedroom in the morning and then wake them up with a variety of musical “Happy Birthday” performances, complete, in various years, with guitars, drums, trumpets, trombones, clarinets, and, with great pride, some terribly off-key singing, mixed in with some in-tune singing for good measure! 

Yes, a truly awful, yet strangely pleasurable, way to be awakened on the big day!

All in all, since this tradition started when our youngest child was a year old, our kids have looked forward to this every year with the same anticipation with which one looks forward to Christmas! It’s a great family tradition; they love it; we keep doing it; and I just know that they will do the same when they have kids someday (hey, maybe they’ll invite grandpa over in the morning to help!).

So, what happened this year to keep the tradition alive while I was out of town? (Please come back next Saturday to find out!)

Paul W. Reeves

Let Us Eat Cake!

How was your birthday celebrated when you were a child? Was it a big deal in the home, an important day to be celebrated when more time would be available, or was it just another day?

When I was a young whippersnapper, my parents made birthdays an important part of our family’s culture. Each year on my birthday morning, my parents would awaken me together and wish me a happy birthday. It was a great way to wake up, with both parents letting me know that they were glad that I was their child!

In some years, my parents gave my birthday present to me in the morning and other years they waited until the evening.

My friends also had parents who thought that a child’s birthday was a pretty big deal, so all of us in our neighborhood grew up believing that birthdays were important!

Fast-forwarding several years, before we had any children, my wife and I encountered a distant relative who gleefully announced that she celebrated each person’s birthday together on the same day! “One cake, one day, and it’s over until next year” was the accepted mantra in that family! Each year on the 4^th of July, her family celebrated birthdays that had been observed in February, May, and June, thereby, in my view, negating the special feeling for each child on his/her special day.

My wife told me that she believed that celebrating birthdays on the closest weekend day was her thought of celebrating our future kids’ birthdays. However, after I told her how my made parents made me feel extra special on the actual date of my birthday each year, we agreed to somewhat celebrate each child’s birthday on the actual birthday morning with a larger celebration coming on the weekend.

So, as all three of our children were born in January, while we have a mini-celebration each birthday morning (please click on the link to read my post on celebrating birthdays - http://paulwreeves.blogspot.com/2009/04/happy-birthday-to-me.html), we have the larger family celebration on the following weekend for each child, with each birthday celebrated with music, a gift or two, photos, and, of course, a cake for each child!

While each child gets his/her big wake up call on the morning of their own birthday, they also get to feel special on the next weekend, as all eyes are on them for their special day!

And, as you have already calculated, this means that we are eating cake on three consecutive weekends! And, of course, cake is not complete without ice-cream. And, as you already know, since there is too much cake to eat in one day, there is cake for the whole week and with three children, we have cake (and ice-cream) in the house for three straight weeks in January each year!

Healthy? Not even close! Extra treadmill use in January? YES! Special for the kids? Absolutely!!

And that is why we continue to do it. Each child gets a birthday greeting and song on the birthday morning followed by a celebration, cake, and ice-cream to look forward to on the weekend.

So, while I prepare to eat my final piece of cake (or two or three!), please send along your ideas on celebrating birthdays in your home!

Paul W. Reeves

Kids' Drug Use Increases (Pt.3)

(Continued from January 8, 2011) ...... One of my beliefs in the rise in drug taking, smoking, and drinking, is the fact that our children are not as carefully watched as they used to be in the good ol’ days. As children, all of us knew that one slightly less-than-favorable act in our neighborhood probably meant that a few telephone calls would be made to the parents’ house!

Additionally, our parents always made sure that they knew where we were, with whom we were spending time, 100% nixed any relationships that they believed would not be healthy for us.

As I wrote back on January 23, 2010 (http://paulwreeves.blogspot.com/2010/01/teen-drug-abuse-part-2.html), “Again, it goes back to peer pressure, kids feeling unloved, and drug use taking the place of good friends and actively involved parents. After all, no matter who lets the kids down, their old friend “marijuana” is always ready to comfort them. That, coupled with the fact that marijuana is readily accessible, provides a double-edged sword to drug use among teens!

Again, before it is too late, check out everything that your kids are doing, with whom they are doing it, and monitor their expected arrival times. It only takes one lapse in parental responsibility for a child to dive into the deep end of the drug use pool.

Publish Post

Are you scared or alarmed? Good, you need to be. Without question, after seeing literally hundreds of students and parents over the years in my office to discus this exact issue, drug use among our teens is at an all-time high, it’s getting worse, and our kids see no problem with it. Your time to be involved is now. Yes, they’ll think that you’re a pain in the neck, but at least they’ll be alive and healthy. Oh, and a good back rub can take care of that pain in the neck!”

Of course, the bottom line is this – our kids are drinking, taking hardcore drugs, and smoking marijuana at alarming rates! Yes, I know – we have to work harder than our parents did to protect our kids. We have to hide medicine, we have to hide alcohol, we have to keep checking on our kids to make sure that they are following the rules and expectations, and, yes, it can be quite tiring.

Keep a close eye on your kids, their Internet activity, their friends, their telephone calls, and especially their whereabouts when they are not in your home – you need to make sure that your child does not become one of the 20% of our kids who are smoking marijuana, drinking, or taking hardcore drugs. Also, be sure that you know what your kids are doing each day (and with whom!) between the time that school dismisses and the time that you get home.

Again, as I have said so often, nobody said that parenting would be easy. However, by watching your kids closely and putting safeguards in place, you can help to deter the negative behavior that has become so prevalent with our kids today. Remember, it only takes a few moments to smoke a marijuana cigarette, drink alcohol, or take hardcore drugs. 

Keep your eyes on your kids! Sure, they might not like it, their friends might mock you, perhaps even other parents might look at you with disdain, but the last laugh is with you and your kids when the day comes that you realize that your children have made it to adulthood without trying or experimenting with the evils or drugs or alcohol.

Also, please pass along any safeguards that you have put in place with your kids and I might use them in a future post. We’re all in this together!

Hang in there and keep up the great work with your kids!

Paul W. Reeves

Kids' Drug Use Increases (Pt.2)

(Continued from January 1, 2011) ..... "These high rates of marijuana use during the teen and pre-teen years, when the brain continues to develop, places our young people at particular risk," said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in a statement. "Not only does marijuana affect learning, judgment, and motor skills, but research tells us that about one in six people who start using it as adolescents become addicted."

Well, now we go from behavioral and disciplinary issues to the added issue of the retardation of brain growth. According to the report, marijuana use affects learning, judgment, and motor skills when used in adolescence. Concerned, yet?

The perception that regular marijuana smoking is harmful decreased among 10th-graders from 59.5 percent to 57.2 percent and among 12th-graders from 52.4 percent to 46.8 percent in 2010.

"We should examine the extent to which the debate over medical marijuana and marijuana legalization for adults is affecting teens' perceptions of risk," Volkow said. "We must also find better ways to communicate to teens that marijuana use can harm their short-term performance as well as their long-term potential."

These last two paragraphs, of course, illustrate a large part of the problem – over half of our 10th grade kids do not believe that regular marijuana smoking is harmful.

The use of the drug Ecstasy also increased, according to the survey, with 2.4 percent of eighth-graders and 4.7 percent of 10th-graders saying they had used the drug in the past year. That's up from 1.3 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively.

Although abuse of the prescription drug Vicodin during the past four years decreased among high school seniors from 9.7 percent to 8 percent, the use of OxyContin, another prescription opiate, stayed about the same for 12th-graders at 5.1 percent.

How do our kids get their hands on Ecstasy and Vicodin? We would have been afraid to touch a candy cigarette and now a few kids are actually able to acquire hardcore drugs.

In a bit of good news, binge drinking continued to drop. Among high school seniors, 23.2 percent reported having had five or more drinks in a row during the past two weeks, down from 25.2 percent in 2009 and a drop from the peak of 31.5 percent in 1998.

Well, some good news – sort of. Yes, binge drinking has decreased, but we still have over 20% of our high school seniors engaging in the nefarious act. 

(Please come back next Saturday for the 3rd and final part)

Paul W. Reeves

Kids' Drug Use Increases (Pt.1)

Well, first of all, Happy New Year! I truly hope that you have a terrific, healthy, and fulfilling 2011.

Not to intentionally start off the new year with a negative story, but I recently read a newspaper article in which the author indicated that new research has shown that there is increased use of marijuana, hardcore drugs, and alcohol – not by adults, but by kids as young as 13-years-old!

Over the next 3 weeks, I will share the story with you, as well as my commentaries. The time to act to protect our children is now! Read on for some frightening thoughts on our kids today.

In a recent story by Rob Stein in the Washington Post, he reported that, “Marijuana use continues to increase among young people in the United States, according to an annual federally funded survey of drug, alcohol and cigarette use among U.S. youths.”

That one sentence should be enough to scare the daylights out of parents of little, medium, and big kids, as well as parents-to-be and grandparents. Read it again – “Marijuana use continues to increase among young people in the United States ……”

The remainder of Mr. Stein’s story appears below in bold print with my comments in regular print.

The proportion of eighth-graders who say they smoke marijuana daily increased from 1 percent to 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2010, while the rate among 10th-graders went from 2.8 percent to 3.3 percent, and among high school seniors from 5.1 percent to 6.1 percent, according to the Monitoring the Future Survey, which questioned 46,482 students from 396 public and private schools.

8^th graders are using marijuana and their use is increasing? Can you read that and not get worried or angry about the current state of our children in the country? Our children of middle school age are using marijuana at an increasing rate! When I was a child in the Dark Ages, a few kids (we called them burnouts or bad kids) smoked an occasional cigarette, but nobody experimented with marijuana at that age. Perhaps it was not available or perhaps they were scared out of their wits as to what their parents would do.

In either scenario, middle school kids did not use marijuana back then, but they use it now and the rate of use is on the rise!

Because cigarette smoking has been declining among high school seniors, marijuana is now more popular than cigarettes by some measures. In 2010, 21.4 percent of high school seniors had used marijuana in the past 30 days, while 19.2 percent had smoked cigarettes, according to the survey, which is conducted by the University of Michigan.

Think about those numbers for a moment. Over 1 in 5 high school students uses marijuana. If a teacher has 30 students in his/her class, 6 of those students use marijuana. If a high school has 500 students, over 100 of them use marijuana. Is there any question as to why behavior and discipline issues are on the rise in our schools in this country? Based upon the research, over 20% of our high school kids are high or suffering from the effects of marijuana.

(Please come back next Saturday for Part 2)


Paul W. Reeves