Faint scents of mint and mango emanate from middle and high school bathrooms, hallways and classrooms, from students’ parties and from bedrooms. These fruity flavors, subtle and designed to hook kids, belie the harmful effects of their sources: e-cigarettes, or vape devices. Between 2011 and 2019, vaping increased 1,800% among …
Read More »Tag Archives: teenagers
My Quaran’TEEN’ Diary
March 13 is a day that will forever go down in infamy. OK, maybe I am being a bit dramatic. But the girl who left school on that strange Friday thought she was embarking on what teenagers had dubbed “coronacation.” The previous day state officials announced their decision to close …
Read More »Tripped Out A mother and daughter set out to find the perfect college.
The summer before my daughter’s junior year of high school, a pile of college look books covered our front table. It was a collection of magazines and postcards with clever slogans and beautiful photos of other people’s happy, healthy and presumably smart children who were now advertising their school to …
Read More »Hey Girl, Guess Whose Face Is On My Daughter’s Retainer?
On the endless checklist of things to do before my daughter Leeannah left for college last month was to have her permanent retainer taken out and replaced with a removable one. Not exactly the most memorable or exciting of tasks, but one that had to be done. We made the …
Read More »Do we have to talk about Rob Kardashian?
Not 24 hours before Rob Kardashian lost his mind and secured his place in history as a despicable ex-boyfriend, several of us parent types were sitting on a back deck and talking about the very topic of revenge porn. We all have teenagers and this topic—the online humiliation of an …
Read More »All in a Day’s Work The old-school tradition of a summer job is still important in the modern world
Summer job. Those words may conjure up different reactions, depending on your age. If you are old enough to look back on a summer job, you likely have fond memories of fun co-workers, not-funny-at-the-time-but-hilarious-now workplace horror stories and that feeling of money in your pocket that was all yours. But …
Read More »My teenagers have me tongue-tied, tossing and turning
My 14-year-old son had a day off from school. It was rainy and cold outside, and I figured he’d want to sleep in, so I refrained from calling him from my office until late morning, around 11. He answered the phone in his new weird low man voice that I …
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