Question: I am a 23-year-old single mother with four children. I love them with all my heart, but lately I am easily affected by their defiance and disrespect. I have been reading your book, “Making Children Mind Without Losing Yours.” I have been using some of the guidelines, but it doesn’t seem to be enough.

My biggest issue is my 4-year-old son. We have been struggling with him listening and getting ready for school, and he has become violent. He has hit me, spit in my face and told me that he hates me. I broke down, because I have been trying to make them happy.

My other son is 6. He doesn’t like to do homework and has been lying and stealing.

My daughter is 5 and has the habit of destroying things that I recently accomplished. I mop my floor, and she will urinate on it or if I clean my bathroom, she takes a roll of toilet paper and stuffs it down the toilet. I made her clean it, but I almost lost my temper. My 2-year-old son has been acting out, too.

I don’t like the way that I have been feeling. I am under a lot of stress, but I don’t like regretting the life that I have. Can you help?

Answer: It seems like there might be more to the story than what you are sharing. Kids don’t just pee on floors.

You said you almost lost your temper, and I wonder if maybe you are losing your temper. You need to do a gut check to figure out if you are the stimulus that creates this unhappiness.

I also think you would be smart to move to Parenting 102, which would include reading the book, “Have a New Kid by Friday.” It details precisely what you need to do in situations such as yours.

For example: You never allow a child to hit you. You can hold a child’s arms close to your body, walk them to a safe place, close the door – holding it closed, if necessary – until your child calms down.

It’s really important that your kids see you as a loving authority figure, rather than a reactive authoritarian.

Your plate is very full. But you are the adult here. One of the best lines in “Have a New Kid by Friday” is “An unhappy child is a healthy child.”

If you are starting your day with, “All my four kids must be happy at all times,” you are barking up the wrong tree.

You need to get predictability in your home, a healthy routine. Routine is what gives young kids a sense of security. Discipline should be swift and effective.

You’d be surprised what good listeners kids can become if they know mom is just going to say things once.

Good luck.

Dr. Kevin Leman is a Tucson psychologist and author of more than 30 best-selling books, including “Have a New Kid by Friday.” E-mail questions to him at whatsupdoc@tucsoncitizen.com. Photo by Tom Spitz Photography.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column originally appeared July 22, 2008.

Question: I am pregnant with my second child. My son is 3, and I am feeling very guilty about the whole thing. I am worried I won’t have enough time and energy for my son, what with a new baby coming. It seems like our perfect little family will be changed forever.

I also worry I could never love another child as much as my son. Everyone says your capacity for love grows with each child, but I’m worried about it.

We planned this pregnancy, and I very much want this baby, but I’m worried I won’t have enough time and love to spread around. I can’t help but mourn the fact that our family is changing. Are these feelings normal?

Answer: Thanks for the good question. It’s one that a lot of mommies can identify with because a lot of women have gone through the same feelings you are experiencing.

When you have that little firstborn, you devote so much time and attention to get them to the ankle-biter stage, it’s hard to imagine having another one, for several reasons.

No. 1: the exhaustion factor. You know how exhausting it is to have a little one around. Add another to the equation, and you have a realistic idea of the battle that lies ahead.

Well, it’s a great battle, and it’s a battle that you can win.

No. 2: the love factor. You will have enough love and enough attention and enough desire to care for and take care of this new little gift of life. I think it exemplifies what love and a family is all about.

Trust me, as the dad of five kids, you love them all, but you do love them differently. You love them differently because they are different people.

I have to admit to you that the very first thought I had when my secondborn came into this world was that she didn’t look like her firstborn sister.

Now, I ask you, why should she look like her firstborn sister? But it is a natural inclination that a parent has when about to have the second child.

In some ways it makes you realize how different each little cub is.

You ask the question, are your feelings normal? They are more than normal. It’s almost expected.

Enjoy this new baby. I won’t tell you to keep busy because you are going to be more than busy.

But as a reminder, parents are the ones who leave an indelible imprint on our children’s lives. Just be a good parent and you will end up with great kids.

Dr. Kevin Leman is a Tucson psychologist and author of more than 30 best-selling books, including “Have a New Kid by Friday.” E-mail questions to him at whatsupdoc@tucsoncitizen.com. Photo by Tom Spitz Photography.

JACOB APPEL

When physicians at University College in London recently announced the birth of what they described as the world’s first “breast-cancer gene-free baby” – a designer infant pre-screened for the BRCA1 cancer gene – critics focused public debate on the question of whether such screening should be permitted.

Yet as genetic screening becomes increasingly routine, it is the opposite question that will likely raise far more ethical challenges:

If pre-implantation genetic diagnosis during in vitro fertilization (IVF) can successfully prevent children from developing serious illnesses, why shouldn’t such screening be required?

Women who carry the BRCA1 gene have approximately an 80 percent chance of developing breast cancer and a 40 percent chance of developing ovarian cancer. The mother in this particular case opted for screening after the mutant gene had triggered malignancies in her husband’s mother, sister, grandmother and cousin.

While breast cancer can be treated – five year survival rates now stand at 88 percent – a girl born without BRCA1 has a drastically reduced likelihood of confronting mastectomy or chemotherapy.

Since 2005, British doctors have used the same technology to prevent retinoblastoma, a defect that causes blinding pediatric tumors. More recently, parents have been permitted to screen out highly genetic forms of colon cancer. There is no evidence that the procedure causes any adverse side effects for the offspring

The most obvious advantage of mandatory screening is that it will reduce the long-term suffering of the children who are spared disease.

At the same time, preventing future cancers will certainly save tax dollars. These savings could be redirected toward researching new therapies and providing quality care for current patients.

The money might also help to defer the enormous public costs of fertility therapy, coverage for which a growing number of states now require of private insurance plans.

If all policy holders are indirectly subsidizing fertility therapy through higher healthcare premiums, it does not seem so unreasonable for them to ask that the couples who benefit try to produce healthy kids.

While similar screening cannot realistically be imposed upon individuals conceiving “the old-fashioned way,” for obvious reasons of logistics and privacy, these invasive aspects of screening do not apply to IVF.

Opponents of mandatory screening likely will point out that such a rule significantly limits the reproductive autonomy of parents. This is certainly true.

However, Western societies long have acknowledged that parental authority cannot undermine the medical interests of a child. Jehovah’s Witnesses may not deny their children blood transfusions; Christian Scientists cannot substitute prayer for life-saving antibiotics.

As United States Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge wrote in the landmark case of Prince v. Massachusetts, “Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves, but it does not follow that they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children.”

Child welfare laws certainly prevent a mother from intentionally exposing her daughter to an environmental toxin that produces an 80 percent risk of future cancer. Our society would view this act as child abuse – and rightly so.

Similarly, American courts consistently compel pediatric cancer therapy, even when parents object.

Yet once one accepts the right of the government to elevate the best interests of the child over the parents’ private wishes, as we do in our society, the distinction between mandating pre-implantation screening and requiring post-birth care appears to be both arbitrary and indefensible.

The fear expressed by many opponents of genetic screening, both elective and mandatory, is that our civilization is sliding down a slope toward selecting embryos for their skin complexion or their eye-color.

These skeptics equate all forms of eugenics, even benign and socially-beneficial programs, with Nazi sterilization laws and unscientific theories of racial superiority. The reality is that pre-implantation genetic selection, like many technologies, can be used either for good or for evil.

On this continuum, the prevention of serious illness seems like an unambiguous and inimitable good. Maybe the benefits are so clear-cut that opting out shouldn’t be an option.

Jacob Appel, M.D., taught bioethics at Brown University for many years, practiced healthcare law in New York City and Rhode Island, and publishes frequently on issues at the nexus of law, philosophy and medicine. His essays in these fields recently have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Providence Journal and many academic publications.

Not allowing doctors to weigh patients' individual circumstances because of a blanket insurance dictate undermines the quality of treatment they can provide.

A friend of mine recently went to the medical clinic she’s been going to for 12 years to get her annual physical and renew her prescription for birth-control pills. She was surprised when the nurse practitioner refused to write it.

Citing her age (42) and smoking habit as risk factors for blood clots, the nurse told her that prescribing the pills would create a liability problem for her and the clinic.

The clinic, Ingersoll Family Physicians, which is part of Iowa Health Physicians in Des Moines, blanketly denies the pill to women over 35 who smoke, the clinic administrator confirmed to me.

My friend has been taking the pill the whole time, including the seven years she’s been over 35. Different practitioners have treated her, all have explained the risks and emphatically encouraged her to quit smoking, but let that choice be hers.

It’s a risk she’s willing to take. She doesn’t want more kids. Besides providing birth control, the pill is the only thing she’s found to ease her severe, “life affecting” hormonal problems.

So she took her business to another doctor, who wrote her a prescription. Of the nurse, she says, “She was very obviously more concerned about her own liability and her own values than my own informed judgment and health-care needs.”

An Iowa Health spokesperson didn’t answer my questions about whether the policy is an insurance company dictate, but the chief operating officer of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa was clear on why it has the same policy, which she says is fairly standard nationwide.

“If your insurance company that provides liability insurance says, ‘Don’t do that,’ you don’t do that,” said Penny Dickey. “Ours is very clear on what we can and can’t do.”

Shouldn’t adults in consultation with doctors have the right to make their own medical choices? My friend wondered whether the nurse considered the risks of getting pregnant at 42, both to her and the fetus, such as the dramatically higher risk of Down syndrome and spina bifida.

The Ingersoll clinic administrator forwarded me guidelines from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, listing what it considers acceptable and unacceptable risks.

My friend, as a light smoker with no family history of blood clots, should fall in the “acceptable” range. But the clinic takes a “one size fits all” approach.

“Of course, it is more risky to be pregnant and smoking than to be on a birth-control method,” acknowledged Dickey. “But being a provider that gave you that method could lead to a problem for the provider” – namely lawsuits. “Even though they (patients) say, ‘Yes, I understand the risk,’ doesn’t prevent them from suing us.”

Why not have them sign a liability waiver? My friend says the nurse finally agreed to give her a one-month supply of pills to tide her over if she signed a waiver. She did, and wonders why she couldn’t have that option with a regular prescription.

Granted, the already exorbitant cost of health care goes up when people engage in risky behavior such as smoking. That’s why health insurers add a surcharge for providing coverage to smokers.

But not allowing doctors to weigh patients’ individual circumstances because of a blanket insurance dictate undermines the quality of treatment they can provide.

On top of that, you have to worry whether it’s even safe to confide certain information to your doctor or whether it will end up in insurers’ hands.

Someone else I heard from said she admitted smoking pot to a physician’s assistant, who wrote it into her medical records, where it was seen by a life-insurance provider, which used the information to deny her increased life insurance.

Your doctor, of all people, needs to know the whole truth – and consider the whole picture – when treating you. It’s going too far when insurance companies can interfere with that.

Rekha Basu is an editorial columnist for the Des Moines Register. E-mail: rbasu@dmreg.com.

Riding somewhat to the rescue is a solution right out of the Depression-era playbook: building jobs by building bridges and roads.

The single biggest issue facing women in 2009? Probably the same issue that most concerned women in 1929 – ain’t nostalgia grand?

This time around, our plummeting economy has affected a working world filled with women as well as men, and there wasn’t anyone during the holidays who wouldn’t have picked job security over a new Guitar Hero waiting for them under the tree. (Well, maybe Guitar Hero is a bad example – it rocks! But you get the idea.)

Tough times are everywhere, yet women enter this troubling financial cycle already behind the guys.

More than a quarter of all U.S. households are headed by a woman, and those families earn and save less than all other households.

In addition, single women have a median net worth that is about a third of the $93,000 national average, according to research published in December.

Given these added challenges, can women keep up with their bills? Maybe, but it’s their long-term health that seems to be falling by the wayside.

The American Psychological Association conducted a stress survey last summer that showed that more women than men (84 to 75 percent) expressed fears about the economy, with new physiological and emotional symptoms attending that worry – and that was before the stock market played its own swan song.

It gets worse: Moms are cutting back on health care – both for themselves and their families – just as the added stress makes them ripe for the No. 1 killer of women, heart disease.

Riding somewhat to the rescue is a solution right out of the Depression-era playbook: building jobs by building bridges and roads.

Yet as Linda Hirshman wrote recently in The New York Times, women make up only 9 percent of the work force in construction, and few are trained in alternative energy, another major public-works job source.

She points out that growth in education and child care jobs also promised by this administration would put many more women back on the payroll.

I understand the grumbling about turning into the Socialist States of America – really, I do. But desperate times call for inclusive measures.

I hope that when the new administration creates a plan of attack for Depression 2.0, they remember that women need jobs, too, for the very health of our nation. Wouldn’t that rock?

Andrea Sarvady (w2wcolumn@gmail.com) is a writer and educator specializing in counseling and a married mother of three.

Andrea Sarvady

If our incoming president had ever run a business, there is no way he'd propose massive government works as a means of "stimulating" the economy.

The economy is the most important issue for women, but Obama’s New Deal 2.0 approach risks making it worse, not better.

Moreover, although Andrea sincerely believes Obama’s massive public-works stimulus package can be used to create jobs for women, it will most likely do the opposite.

Primarily because so many businesses and households are struggling, finding the money to pay for the necessary massive new taxes will sabotage the very private-sector engine than can power us out of a recession.

And women will suffer most: Not only do they have less margin (as Andrea notes), but – according to Department of Labor statistics – women make up a larger share of both temporary and part-time workers, who are far more likely to be the first to go when a company is forced to cut costs.

Too many people don’t understand that making businesses pay new taxes means cutting costs elsewhere – especially for the small businesses that employ half of all workers.

Now, having spent years working on Capitol Hill and for the Federal Reserve System, I have a lifelong respect for public servants. But it’s just a reality that most have little or no private-sector experience.

If our incoming president had ever run a business, there is no way he’d propose massive government works as a means of “stimulating” the economy.

He might still propose limited public works in specific areas but would more likely rely on tax cuts to jump-start private business and promote hiring.

Instead, as Cesar Conda explained in an excellent October 2008 National Review article, Obama’s tax hikes – such as for the “stimulus package” – stand to most hurt the small business sector that creates 75 percent of our new jobs.

I know this all too well. As a small-business owner, I employ eight part-time women workers – and this year I also have to somehow find an extra $10,000 for the poorly designed alternative minimum tax, or AMT, that is increasingly pouncing on average Americans such as me.

Since, like most business owners, I have no extra cash lying around, I have no choice but to lay off one of my staff and use what should have been her salary to pay that tax increase.

That stark, depressing, unintended effect will be repeated endlessly under the stimulus package – and is the reality that big-government proponents simply do not understand.

Shaunti Feldhahn (scfeldhahn@yahoo.com) is a conservative Christian author and speaker, and married mother of two.

Shaunti Feldhahn

Children put it all together at a LEGO Club meeting at City Council Ward 6 office, 3202 E. First St.

A few weeks ago, my 8-year-old son sat on the floor building cars out of colorful LEGOs, plastic snap-together blocks.

“I wonder which car will go faster,” he said and pushed two cars down a ramp. “Will it be the bigger one? The one with larger wheels? The heavier one?”

He experimented with different designs, checking the speed of his cars every time he made a change. Then he put a sign on his door, “LEGO club.”

“If only there was a real LEGO club in Tucson,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be fun to build models with other kids? Together?”

I did an Internet search. “There is a LEGO Club! Meetings are on Sundays at Ward VI District Office. It’s open to all ages and skill levels.”

City Councilwoman Nina J. Trasoff says she is delighted that her ward hosts the club.

“These youngsters spend many Sundays working together . . . and while it is fun, it’s not just games! They’re mastering computer skills, math, physics and more as they program the fanciful vehicles they construct,” Trasoff says. “It’s amazing to watch them run their creation through its paces, collaborating with other young people and their advisers to figure out how to make the vehicle run the course flawlessly.”

That Sunday, my son and I went to a meeting of The LORD of the LEGO Group, a junior division of the Tucson LEGO Club.

“First, build anything you want,” Mikhail Chernobelskiy, associate director of the local club, told a dozen kids seated around a table filled with LEGO pieces.

“When your project is complete, you will take turns describing it to us. Then parents and kids will vote on the best creation and the best presentation. Whoever gets the most votes will get a prize.”

While my son constructed his model, I peeked into the room where advanced LEGO Masters teams were preparing for the annual First LEGO League competition to build and program a robot, and present a solution for a given challenge.

This year, the challenge involves working on a climate problem, anything from global warming to shortage of the desert’s water to snow removal difficulties in New Hampshire.

The regional competition will take place here in December; the state competition will follow in Phoenix. Both events are free and open to the public.

The local LEGO Club – created in 2002 and supported by the Midtown Neighborhood Association, Howard Ward and Ward VI – is the only known community LEGO club in Arizona.

“The LEGO Club is one small part of a larger fabric of community opportunities available to help kids explore and achieve their creative potential,” says Ward, owner of TerraSystems Southwest Inc., a Georgraphic Information System consulting firm.

“With the present-day concern about failing education systems and a looming lack of global competitiveness, thousands of small volunteer programs like the LEGO Club can help fill in the gaps in kids’ education, give structure and adult guidance to developing personalities and, most of all, provide kids with some fun!”

I watched the kids work with their robots, then went back to see my son and his friends finish their creations.

“They play so well together,” another mother said.

Playing well is exactly what LEGO Co. intended. The word lego comes from two Dutch words, leg and godt; it means “play well.”

Later, the company creators discovered that the word lego, translated from Latin, means “I study” or “I read.” And what can be better than studying that happens unintentionally, while playing?

Julia V. Gousseva, a native Russian, has lived in Tucson since 1993.

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To learn more about the Tucson LEGO Club, go to www.tlclub.org.

College presidents wrong in approach to alcohol abuse

Apparently the group believes that if we'd simply lower the drinking age to 18, college students will magically stop binge drinking.

If ever we needed proof that having an advanced degree doesn’t correlate with common sense, we got it this week.

A group of college presidents from some of the most prestigious schools in the nation have called on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age. They call their effort the Amethyst Initiative. (The University of Arizona has not signed.)

Why Amethyst? On its Web site, the erudite group explains to those of us who aren’t fluent in ancient Greek, the word is derived from the prefix a – meaning not – and methustos, which means intoxicated.

“Twenty-one is not working,” the group claims of the current legal drinking age. “A culture of dangerous, clandestine ‘binge-drinking’ – often conducted off-campus – has developed,” they say, as if the law prohibiting underage drinking has created this culture.

Apparently the group believes that if we’d simply lower the drinking age to 18, college students will magically stop binge drinking.

By that reasoning, why not lower the drinking age to 14? That way, we could wipe out binge drinking among high school students as well.

Heck, maybe we could cure alcoholism by eliminating age limits on drinking altogether. Start kids early and they’ll learn to drink responsibly, right?

The facts suggest otherwise. According to a 2007 survey by the U.S. Surgeon General, 45 percent of high school students reported drinking alcohol within the previous month, and more than 1 in 4 said they were binge drinkers.

In 2005, drinking led to 145,000 emergency room visits by youths 12 to 20 years old for injuries related to their drinking. Of the nearly 7,500 traffic deaths involving 15- to 20-year-olds in 2005, more than 2,000 had been drinking.

And young people who start drinking before they turn 15 are five times more likely to become problem drinkers or alcoholics later on.

Lowering the drinking age to 18 won’t solve these problems – and would likely make them worse.

So why do these college presidents want to open this Pandora’s box? It’s simple. They don’t want to be responsible for enforcing the law on their campuses.

Back in the Dark Ages when I started college (1965), colleges assumed the role of in loco parentis, acting in the place of parents for students who were not yet adults.

By 1970 when I graduated, most universities had dropped virtually all the old rules. Once forbidden to do so, students were allowed to entertain members of the opposite sex in their dorm rooms (and soon, those dorms would be co-ed). Curfews were gone.

Indeed, the only behavioral rule colleges seemed willing to enforce after the tumultuous ’60s was the prohibition against drinking on campus. Now, more than 100 college presidents have asked to be alleviated of even this responsibility.

College should be a time for students not only to acquire knowledge and earn a degree but to form character. College presidents could help fulfill their role in that endeavor by promoting less, not more, alcohol on campus.

The National Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council have outlined several proposals to reduce underage drinking. Among their recommendations are increasing alcohol taxes, reducing youth exposure to alcohol advertising, and enforcing underage drinking laws more aggressively, not less.

And they call on colleges and universities to collaborate and implement programs to prevent underage drinking.

The average cost of a four-year public college was nearly $13,000 a year in 2006 and more than $30,000 for a private college.

You’d think for that kind of money we could get college presidents to do something as simple as to discourage underage drinking on their campuses. Instead, too many don’t only look away but want to define the problem out of existence by lowering the legal drinking age.

Alcohol abuse is a serious problem in our culture. It ruins lives and kills thousands of Americans every year on our streets and highways.

Alcohol devastates the health and well-being of those who abuse it and destroys innocent family members.

We need to do everything we can to discourage drinking, especially among the young.

The last thing we need is a bunch of college presidents to pretend that redefining the legal drinking age is a step in that direction.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

Several weeks ago, Gloria James, the mother of LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers, shouted at Paul Pierce of the Boston Celtics for tangling with LeBron as he headed for a slam dunk.

Then millions of Americans saw LeBron yell at his mom, “Sit your (butt) down!”

Comments on the Internet denounced Gloria James as an overbearing mom who needed to leave her grown son alone.

“Miss James, stay home, throw a shoe at the T.V.,” read one post on sports.yahoo.com.

“She is obnoxious and crude,” said another.

Only a few days before, “American Idol” producers banned David Archuleta’s dad Jeff from rehearsals, and headlines chastised him, too.

The heated criticism of these celebrity parents is not surprising because there are few groups in America we criticize as easily as parents.

Mother blaming may have gone out with miniskirts, but it has given way to equal-opportunity parent bashing.

Books and articles castigate parents for helicopter parenting, overscheduling, living through our kids, and even using them as Prozac. We’re too affluent and buy our kids too much! chants the chorus. We’re raising a nation of wimps!

Finding fault with parents is a national sport. Any other group criticized so regularly would long ago have launched a civil rights movement.

But when we criticize rather than empathize, we miss an important opportunity to understand ourselves – because while parent-bashing may make us feel one-up on other parents, at the same time we’re riveted, because we see a bit of ourselves in the transgressors.

Take the slam on helicopter parents. Critics often give examples of high anxiety and control – the dad who won’t let his child get a word in edgewise on a college tour or the mom who writes a child’s homework essay.

A little empathy would go a long way here: what motivates such parents are their loving and protective feelings, heightened by anxiety about whether their children will “make it” in this uncertain and highly competitive world. These feelings have contributed to a very healthy modern trend: the ramping up of parental attention to their kids.

Helicopter parenting may step over the line – it can be intrusive and infantilizing. But parents quite rightly bristle at the implication that there’s something wrong with staying close to and supporting their kids as they grow older.

Critics need to understand that involvement with our kids – helping them learn, providing structure and knowing what they like and dislike – is not only good parenting. It also has biological roots.

Because parenting is key to survival and reproduction, evolution has shaped it. We humans are what biologists call a K-selected species. We live in a stable, predictable environment and our survival strategy is to groom a few large offspring to be highly competitive. (R-selected species, in contrast, live in short-lived unpredictable habitats and maximize their broods’ survival by quickly reproducing many offspring, giving them little time, care or food.)

Nature has given us a system of affiliation or love that sets this intense parenting in motion. That’s why we want the best for our kids and are hellbent to guide and nurture them.

Far from condemning intense parental involvement, psychological research has found that the more parents are involved with their children – be they toddlers or teens – the healthier and happier the kids and the more they achieve in school. High parental involvement gives kids solid self-esteem and helps them feel secure and strongly connected to us.

When Wendy studied parents of elementary school children, for example, she found that the more-involved mothers were with their children – that is, the more time they spent with their kids and the more they knew about what their children did and about their likes and dislikes – the better their children did on report cards and standardized achievement tests, and the fewer learning and behavior problems they had in school.

Those highly involved parents weren’t necessarily at home more than other parents, but when they were, they made sure to spend time with their children.

Researchers Xitao Fan and Michael Chen have found that students with involved parents are 30 percent more likely to achieve higher grades and test scores than kids with less-involved parents.

Helicoptering also derives from a related evolutionary impulse that all parents recognize.

The panic we feel when our kids compete in today’s hypercompetitive world gives us the urge to take matters into our own hands – just as our ancestors felt when they saw a tiger leaping toward one of their cubs.

Today our children’s lives aren’t at stake when they apply for college, take a crucial exam or audition for an arts magnet program: we parents just feel like it is. Often we’re far more anxious than our kids, and feel like relieving that anxiety, at least temporarily, by leaping into the breach and taking over.

Empathizing with helicopter parents would make us examine the crux of the matter – the dilemma that well-meaning parents face almost every day: “How do you draw the line between supporting your child, and pushing?”

Today’s constant competition drives parents nuts. You don’t want to apply pressure, yet what if you don’t sign her up for Soccer for Toddlers?

She’ll start league play behind the other kids! What if you don’t make your son take that second SAT prep course? The other kids are doing it! They’ll go to Harvard, but he’ll be stuck at the local Typewriter Repair Institute!

Empathizing with helicopter parents would focus us on the solution to this dilemma, which lies in understanding psychological autonomy.

Political autonomy means independence or self-government, but autonomy in people is simply the feeling of initiating an action.

Children, in fact all human beings, need to feel that what they do is self-initiated. You can give children maximum care and structure and stay emotionally close without lessening their feelings of autonomy.

If you read an essay and give praise and suggestions for improvement, that doesn’t interfere with the child’s autonomy. If you choose the essay topic and write an outline, that does. You can be highly supportive of your daughter while encouraging her autonomy. The distinction is not between “doing or not doing” for her – it’s whether she feels autonomous.

Empathizing with helicopter parents would also reveal that some parents, in contrast, don’t hover over their children enough. The sensationalistic criticism does them a disservice, too, by implying that parents should “let go” as children grow older, rather than increasing their kids’ autonomy while staying highly involved.

Hovering parents act out of mainly positive desires that all parents recognize in themselves. Rather than ragging on parents, why not empathize with their feelings of caring deeply for their children?

Why not applaud the millions of well-intentioned parents trying their best, praise them as examples to learn from, and help everyone resist the impulse to violate their kids’ autonomy?

Kathy Seal (kathyseal@gmail.com) and Wendy Grolnick, professor of psychology at Clark University (WGrolnick@clarku.edu), are co-authors of “Pressured Parents, Stressed-out Kids: Dealing With Competition While Raising a Successful Child” (Prometheus, 2008).

By Wendy Grolnick, Kathy Seal

Was the California Supreme Court acting properly when it overturned the gay marriage ban?

Andrea Sarvady, from the left: Gay marriage ruling ends second-class citizenship

Shaunti Feldhahn: Gay marriage: Court overstepped bounds

Several books have been written about the so-called Millennial Generation, born between 1982 and 2002. Most of the authors make the point that this cohort is self-absorbed to the point of narcissism, consumed by fame and fortune, plagued by a sense of entitlement, and averse to concepts such as "paying your dues" or "working your way to the top."

When you grab hold of the thorny topic of immigration, sometimes you can’t tell what part of the discussion will prick your finger.

I recently addressed the subject as part of a panel. Given the questions – one person suggested opening the U.S.-Mexico border – I’d say the audience was fairly liberal.

When I called for punishing employers, insisted that racism was part of the debate and asserted that much of the ruckus was based on the fear of a changing America, I didn’t get much reaction. But then there was the comment that hit close to home.

“You know,” I said. “It’s worth mentioning that not only do illegal immigrants do jobs that Americans won’t do, but many of the jobs they’re doing were once done by young people in their teens and 20s – your sons and daughters – who, as a generation, have shown themselves to have a terrible work ethic.”

My point was that besides better immigration laws and better enforcement, we also need better parenting – the sort that produces young people who know how to work and aren’t afraid to break a sweat.

Then, the employers I’ve heard from – apple growers in Washington, restaurant owners in North Carolina, etc. – who claim they can’t find young Americans who want to work wouldn’t feel as if they had to hire illegal immigrants to pick up the slack.

Afterward, I was surrounded by a group of angry folks who said they were offended. They insisted they had good kids – the kind who worked hard in school and volunteered for worthwhile causes in the summer.

But when I asked whether their children had after-school or summer jobs, they changed the subject. Some told me what they have told their kids – that their “jobs” are to study hard in school and get good grades.

Fine. But young people also need to learn how to find a job, take orders, show up on time, and be a dependable employee. Those, too, are valuable skills.

And if many young people aren’t learning them, we shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve arrived at a point where many jobs would go undone if not for illegal immigrants.

What evidence did I have that young people had a weak work ethic? one man demanded to know.

I responded that several books have been written about the so-called Millennial Generation, born between 1982 and 2002. Most of the authors make the point that this cohort is self-absorbed to the point of narcissism, consumed by fame and fortune, plagued by a sense of entitlement, and averse to concepts such as “paying your dues” or “working your way to the top.”

Many of these kids were raised to believe that they were “special” and now they consume a steady diet of “American Idol”-type reality shows where the right break, and the right amount of talent, can make you rich and famous overnight.

When they do show up in the workplace, many young people are – according to those who supervise them – notoriously tough to manage. They dress like slobs, question authority, shrug off criticism and impatiently wonder why, if they start in the mailroom on Monday, they’re not on their way to being vice president by Friday.

Besides, I said, the MySpace generation has such high self-esteem that many of them would never debase themselves to take the hard and dirty jobs that go to illegal immigrants.

The guy shrugged and walked away. He didn’t want to be persuaded. He just wanted to defend his kids. That’s natural. In fact, it’s commendable.

It’s just not helpful. We’ve blamed Mexico, big business, the media, special interest groups, the U.S. government, and, of course, the illegal immigrants themselves for our current plight.

In fact, we’ve just about run out of blame. Is it any wonder that there’s none left for those of us who are raising children?

Almost eight years ago, President Bush started what became a national conversation about immigration reform. We’ve talked about nearly every facet of the issue. We’ve covered it all.

And yet somehow – and I don’t think it was by accident – we never got around to an honest and candid discussion about one of the things that contributes to illegal immigration: the fact that too many of our own citizens, especially young citizens, were raised to turn up their noses at jobs that wind up going to you-know-who.

If we want to find a solution, we should accept our share of responsibility for the problem.

Illustration by ARNIE BERMUDEZ/tucson Citizen

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a columnist and editorial board member of The San Diego Union-Tribune. E-mail: ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com

Question: I recently went to a high school basketball game and as I was leaving, a player’s dad caught up with me and asked: “What do I do? My son doesn’t like basketball anymore. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t like much of anything anymore.

“He doesn’t do things with friends. I don’t even know if he has any friends anymore. He isn’t happy and it looks like he is sad and disappointed all the time.

“He used to love basketball. He was so good. He was always the best on his team, and it didn’t matter who his team was playing against, he dominated.

We often talked about college scholarships and even playing pro ball.

“Now he’s going into his senior year, and isn’t getting much playing time.

What happened? What do I do?”

Answer: Unfortunately, I have heard and seen this story before.

The cause is hard to face, but there is still the possibility that his future can be brighter.

Let’s look at how too many young kids fall into this funk. There are several things that contribute:

• Too much parental pressure. Look out, be careful. Parents need to stop emphasizing and becoming consumed with college scholarships and playing pro ball. Our kids can feel the pressure, and they learn how to protect themselves. They try to guard themselves against disappointment and failure. Many times the desire to give all they’ve got diminishes as soon as they realize there are other players out there that are just as good or better. They figure if they didn’t try their hardest, they won’t look so foolish when they come up short. To fail going half speed is easier to take than failing going all out.

• When they realize that other kids are catching up, or even passing them up, they often retreat. The momentum has changed hands, and they see the writing on the wall. The challengers spend more time practicing and trying to improve, while early achievers are threatened by the realization that they are being passed up; so again, their “fall” can be explained away because they didn’t try that hard.

• They put all their eggs in one basket. Early on, the focus can become too isolated on one sport. Other sport skills and long lasting relationships are compromised for the sake of focusing on one sport.

So, when they aren’t the best on the team anymore, or in some cases don’t even make the team, they have very little to fall back on.

Is there hope?

Of course there is, but the ball is in your court. They need two things from you now:

First, they need affirmation. They will melt into your arms if they feel your unconditional acceptance. They need to be released from the bondage of thinking they have disappointed you. They need your unconditional love and approval rather than your dreams and plans.

Second, they need your encouragement. They need to find their own dreams and challenges. They need your guidance and maturity to go out and find new things to do. It’s never too late for fun and friendship. They need their mom and dad back, not the “coach, trainer and agent.”

Even at 17 years old, they need to feel like a kid again.

If you have questions or comments for Tom Kuyper, e-mail him at tomkuyper@athletesintraining.com.

What is acceptable behavior for kids when they win or lose a game? What is good sportsmanship?

After a hard-fought game, can we expect the losing team to jump up and down and cheer, celebrating their opponent’s victory? Come on, that is way too far out there. It’s unrealistic and abnormal to expect that kind of reaction from our kids in defeat.

Youth sports are all about teaching our kids life skills. The old phrase is still true: It’s not about winning or losing; it’s how you play the game.

It’s all about having fun, and losing shouldn’t spoil that goal. Isn’t the most important thing that they gave it their all and tried their hardest?

So then, what do we do about those feelings? Do we just force our kids to be fake and put on a mask? Should we teach our kids to learn how to bury their feelings? This is not good teaching of life skills.

Kids need to learn that they don’t have to like to lose, but they do have to learn how to accept it.

They have to learn that how they express themselves is important.

My two basic rules of thumb are:

• You never have permission to violate someone else’s heart or spirit.

• You should not draw attention to yourself by inappropriate behavior.

Let’s look at these rules. What does it mean to violate the heart or the spirit of someone else? You see this when you yell at the other team, coach or the officials. They can yell words that are hurtful or degrading. Many things are said in frustration that are manipulative, abusive and penetrating. Most of the time, when people yell at officials, parents, kids or coaches, they are looking for someone to blame or find an excuse for why things aren’t going the way they want.

This rule also holds true for winning. You never are allowed to make fun of or “rub it in” to the losing team.

Second, drawing attention to yourself (either on the winning or losing side of the game) is unacceptable behavior. Stomping your feet, throwing things and yelling are examples of ways to draw the focus to yourself.

Remember, you can’t dictate or force the way each person feels after a loss, but you can help them to release those emotions in a healthier way.

So, is crying OK? Sure it is, if it is not done to gain attention and is a heartfelt reaction to the disappointment every kid experiences in some way or another.

If you have questions or comments for Tom Kuyper, e-mail him at tomkuyper@athletesintraining.com.

"I have no idea where this `nondrinker' information came from, but it is false and potentially defaming if it were to become public. My love for a martini (vodka) is well known among my friends.

Usually, when I get the report after my annual physical at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, I carefully check my cholesterol and PSA and then just glance at the rest. For some reason, last week when I got the latest account from my lead Mayo physician, Dr. Francois Lette, I read the whole thing, including the fine print. Headlines:

My PSA is OK and my cholesterol in the proper range.

But under “Social History,” I was listed as a “nondrinker.”

Shocked, I fired off a letter to Dr. Lette that included the following:

“I have no idea where this `nondrinker’ information came from, but it is false and potentially defaming if it were to become public. My love for a martini (vodka) is well known among my friends.

“Since many of them are nosy news people, if your report listing me as a `nondrinker’ were to leak out, they would expose me as a faker. So will you please correct that part of my Mayo record.”

Quotes from Dr. Lette’s letter in response this week:

“I would not want to defame you by calling you a teetotaler or an abstainer. I used to report `social drinking,’ but this tended to offend some puritans among my clientele.

“I resorted to this other term (nondrinker), which means no pathological drinking, but I see that this, too, can defame some of us if it is read by friends.

“I am sending you an amended copy of your record, which now reads `inconsequential social drinking, i.e. one martini daily.’

“My deepest apologies. Long live the daily martini.”

A doctor with both a sense of humor and an appreciation of a martini?! Let’s all drink a toast to him: Long live Dr. Lette!

Al Neuharth is founder of USA TODAY.

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FEEDBACK

“As America’s most famous distiller, George Washington, once said, `The benefits arising from moderate use of liquor have been experienced in all armies, and are not to be disputed.’ Apparently, Al Neuharth and his doctor agree.” Peter Cressy, president and CEO, Distilled Spirits Council of the United States

“The misuse of alcohol can pose a serious health risk. Unlike Mr. Neuharth, if you can’t be honest with your doctor about your alcohol intake, it could be indicative of a bigger problem.” Rick Kellerman, M.D., board chair, American Academy of Family Physicians

American women, like those in other industrialized countries, take our family planning for granted. But we shouldn’t. It’s only been 40 years since family planning was recognized as an international human right.

It was May 13, 1968, that the International Conference on Human Rights, held in Tehran, declared that “Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children.”

It is an understatement to say that for women worldwide, this was a revolutionary declaration.

For millennia, women were valued almost exclusively as mothers – while family planning was illegal. But women have sought means of limiting their mothering at least since Cleopatra tried using gold pellets.

Women have always known that family planning gives them options – time to mature, to get an education or hold a job or to recover from previous pregnancies.

Women also know that motherhood, though beautiful, is dangerous. More than 40 percent of all pregnancies suffer complications and in 15 percent of pregnancies, the complications are life-threatening.

Infection, hemorrhage, high blood pressure (eclampsia) and obstructed labor, were routine killers of women worldwide, rich and poor alike, until the Western medical advances of the 20th century.

The Taj Mahal is a bereaved emperor’s monument to the wife who died at the age of 39 giving birth to his 14th child. In 1900, death in childbirth was still common, but women around the world bore an average of six children each.

The arrival of the intra-uterine device and the birth control pill in 1960 began the era of safe, affordable and effective contraceptives and pressure from the post World War II generation of educated women gradually led to its legalization around the world.

In the past 40 years, modern contraceptive use has risen from 10 percent of married couples worldwide to about 65 percent today. Women are bearing half as many children as their mothers did: the global average is now three each.

But these averages disguise great disparities. In the developing world, some 200 million women have no access to safe and effective contraceptives. Fully half of the earth’s 190 million annual pregnancies are unintended, and a third of them end in abortions.

Unsafe abortions are among the top pregnancy-related causes that kill one woman every minute – more than 536,000 deaths a year – nearly all in poor areas.

Universal access to family planning could avert at least a third of these deaths. It could also liberate the time, energy and creativity of millions of women to become economically and socially productive in societies struggling for economic development.

However, family planning is no longer a priority for international aid programs. Funding from donor countries and agencies has declined steadily since 1995, even though half of all people on Earth are under 25, and every year, millions more of them become sexually active.

Their needs and rising AIDS-prevention efforts are expected to increase contraceptive demand by 40 percent in the next 15 years. If that demand is not met, international health and poverty reduction goals will not be met, either.

It’s a shame the U.S. government doesn’t set more of a priority on supporting international family planning because the majority of voters would support such efforts.

The Women Donors Network, together with Communications Consortium Media Center, conducted research among voters nationwide, surveying attitudes on important life decisions.

We found that 91 percent of voters agreed that couples should have access to birth control. Voters believe, by 83 percent, that we should respect people’s ability to make their own life decisions, including when to give birth – and not impose our values and views on them.

There also was very strong support for the idea that family planning is a requirement for women’s human rights. An overwhelming majority – 78 percent – told researchers that they agreed with this statement: “For women to achieve equality, they must have access to family planning services, including birth control and contraception.”

The United States should pledge with renewed determination to make sure every woman can plan when and how often to become a mother.

It has officially been a human right for 40 years, but in too many places, it’s not yet a reality.

Donna P. Hall is the president and CEO of the Women Donors Network based in Meno Park, Calif. This commentary was distributed by the American Forum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, educational organization that provides views of state experts on major public concerns to stimulate informed discussion.