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kamurj

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kamurj last won the day on December 13 2020

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  1. Topic has run its course, closed.
  2. It would be nice for the OPs to be part of the discussion but because simply we don't see them posting in the topic never means that they don't read the replies. That also true even if you don't see them visiting the website because there are many ways they can be updated about the replies without even ever visiting the website.
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  5. Dear members, please stop debating each other and focus on the OP's post.
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  8. OP, I see that this is a reddit repost where you received a lot of feedback. The topic is locked, check my pm.
  9. Excerpted from Coming Up from the Down Low: The Journey to Acceptance, Healing, and Honest Love Early last year, my photo appeared on the cover of Jet magazine. I was wearing a slick black designer suit over an open-collared white shirt-the photo was serious, sexy, and undeniably masculine. As a black man who came of age in the 1960s and 70s, appearing on the cover of the legendary Jet magazine was an important signifier that I'd made it. To me, Jet is still the final word on who's who in the black community. But it was even more important than that to me. You see, one of the great fears of every man or woman who hides the truth about their sexuality is that as soon as they're exposed, they'll be cast out of the community, exiled for breaking the rules. For me, that fear was multiplied many times over. When I published my first book, which revealed my own complicated sexual life in detail, I wasn't just exposing myself to my immediate friends and family, but I was basically stripping myself naked in front of the entire community. If I was going to be rejected and cast out for what I revealed about myself, there was no place for me to turn. Which brings me back to that Jet magazine cover. When I got that first copy of the magazine in my hands, my heart swelled-not just with pride, but with relief. I saw in it an affirmation that people-my own people-understood and respected what I was doing and still embraced me. I blew that photo up into a giant poster and hung it in my office. It's there now, the first thing any visitor sees. But the next day, I got a rude awakening when I turned on my radio to listen to the Tom Joyner Morning Show. Tom Joyner's radio show is like the electronic equivalent of Jet magazine; it's the most popular radio show among black people around the country, with a national audience in the millions. I tuned into the show to hear Joyner and his comedian sidekick, J. Anthony Brown, howling about the Jet photograph. They were straight clowning me, talking about how gay I looked and how only a dummy would ever believe that I could pass myself off as straight. I was deeply embarrassed. They went on and on to the point where I decided to go back and look at the magazine myself. By now, I was embarrassed to even pick up the magazine again. For the photo to become such a big joke, I figured it must be pretty bad. Eventually I picked up the magazine and checked out the photo again. Yep, there I was, just as I remembered, staring back at the camera, my features set, my posture rigid, my clothing perfectly stylish but by no means effeminate. I started wondering why Joyner and his morning show crew seemed to be pushing their joke so hard. But then it suddenly came to me. Let me explain: In traditional black male culture, we're taught from a young age to fear the sissy, the freak, the faggot. But we're also taught that it's easy to pick one out of a crowd, which is why as a man, you're taught to be very careful about the signals you give off. For instance, when I was a kid, if my father caught me crossing my legs a certain way when I sat down, he'd rush over and push my knees apart to make sure my feet were planted firmly on the ground. "Never cross your legs like that-that's how women sit," he'd tell me. Really? I clearly wasn't a woman, I was a little boy, but the unspoken message in my father's words was that appearances count-to appear less than manly was to be less than manly. But he also implied that the reverse was true: if you acted manly, it meant you were fully a man-a heterosexual man. So, he seemed to say, if I only sat the right way, everything would be okay. But that's why the idea of the down low threw so many black men for a loop. Here I am, someone who spent time in the military, had a wife and kids, attended church every Sunday, sexed more women than a lot of guys could imagine, and now I'm telling you that I have sex with men. It doesn't make sense to traditional-minded men (or women, for that matter). More than that, it scares them. It means that what they've been taught about identifying sexuality is not necessarily true. It means that sexuality is looser and harder to define than they ever allowed themselves to imagine. It means that no matter how a man crosses his legs, you still don't know who he's f**king when the lights go out and the shades are drawn. That's a threat to people who cling to more traditional ideas about sexual identity and orientation. And the response to that threat is often vicious homophobia. Rather than try to make sense of the complicated reality about sexuality, which is that people get down in thousands of different variations, not just "gay" and "straight," some people will try to attack and banish whatever it is they don't understand. They try to exile the bisexual, or the gay brother or sister, or the brother struggling to come up from the down low, thinking that by making these confusing people invisible, it will somehow put their own minds back at ease. They're wrong. So that's why some of my critics do their best to categorize me as gay. I've often wondered where this need for labels comes from. For some people, it's a defense mechanism, a way to strip away whatever masculinity I have and send me off, so they can relax again. That's nothing new. For many men who live in traditional black communities, the word gay is a loaded term, often used as a weapon. It's name-calling and has the same effect as it does in the schoolyard when the guys circle around and start snapping on the fat kid or the skinny kid or the kid with the played-out clothes. The purpose is to intimidate and to silence and to divide, to create an us-against-them mentality. After being so happy about feeling the embrace of the community by being on the cover of Jet, it was a fast turnaround to feel ridiculed on the Tom Joyner Show. Of course, everybody knows that Tom Joyner and his crew talk about everyone, and in our community everyone is fair game for the "dozens," so there's no point in taking it personally. And Tom has since then supported me and my work by having me on his HBCU cruise. Even with his jokes, the fact that he mentioned me and my book on his show helped me get the word out. So I have nothing but respect for the man and the positive work he does in the community. Still, I'm only human. But this low point became a key for me. It helped clarify one of the reasons men go on the down low rather than simply identifying themselves as gay or bisexual and calling it a day. No one wants to be ostracized and excommunicated from the world they know and love. No one wants to lose a place in the culture that sustains them. And no one wants to be the kid in the schoolyard again, being dissed and snapped on until he's forced to find a lonely corner by himself. Labels do count. I have been asked many times what exactly "on the down low" really means. My answer has never changed. The down low, or DL, generally refers to the lifestyle of black men who consider themselves heterosexual and live publicly heterosexual lives-even to the point of being married to women, in some cases-but who also have sex with men without telling their female partners. I've also been asked many times if I am the creator of the term "down low." Of course the answer to that is no. The term was originally devised to describe any kind of slick, secretive behavior, including infidelity in heterosexual relationships. The term has been common in the lyrics of many R&B songs. Singer R. Kelly made the phrase famous in his song "Down Low (Nobody Has to Know)": We can keep it on the down low / Nobody has to know. That song (and the video that went with it) was all about heterosexual infidelity. But the term was eventually adopted by the subculture of men who lead "straight" lives but sleep with other men on the side. The subtitle of my first book was A Journey into the Lives of "Straight" Black Men Who Sleep with Men. This not only raised a lot of eyebrows, it raised a lot of questions: How can you say that sex between a man and another man is not gay? Are you saying that a man who has sex with another man but is married to a woman is still straight? What's the difference between a man on the down low and a bisexual man who practices both hetero and homosexual sex? Aren't down-low men just gay men trying to have it both ways? The mistake in all of those questions is that people confuse what they want to call these men with what these men want to call themselves. Let me explain: If you're a bisexual man who doesn't want anyone to know you're bisexual, you'll simply call yourself straight. If you're a closeted gay man, you'll tell all the world that you're straight. Anyone with any sense knows that a man who is regularly having sex with another man is not straight by any conventional definition of the word. But we used that subtitle to make a very important point: despite their sexual lives and preferences, many DL men consider themselves to be straight because that's the face they put on for the world. This is one of the fundamental features of the DL man. He doesn't necessarily think that his sexual behavior-having sex with men-changes his identity as a straight man. He doesn't want what happens in his sexual life to in any way conflict with the entitlements that go to straight men in the world: a wife, a traditional family, and a secure place in the community. Like many slang terms, DL means different things to different people. There are many variations of DL brothers. Some DL men identify themselves as straight, have wives and girlfriends, but also secretly have sex with other men. Others on the DL are younger men who are still questioning or exploring their sexuality, but are not comfortable yet in claiming a same-gender-loving (SGL) identity, so they keep their sexual identity on the down low. Some DL men are closeted gay or bisexual men-men who acknowledge their gay or bisexual identities to themselves, but who are not open about it. These men may exclusively have sex with other men, or with both men and women, but because of the stigma placed on gay people, they stay closeted. The common denominator is that a person on the DL stays on the DL for fear of the backlash that outing himself will bring on. This is especially true in the African American community, where even a man who claims that he's bisexual is still only seen as gay. And gay in our community usually means faggot, sissy, queer. The lack of acceptance of the gay masculine man in the African American community has led many gay or bisexual men to live their lives on the DL. These men are unwilling or afraid to be labeled by the stereotypes that society and the media have placed on anything attached to the word gay. These men don't want to have their lives turned into some Will and Grace stereotype-they're not dressing like the men on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or hanging out at the "Birdcage." In other words, they have difficulty accepting the whole package of the gay lifestyle. And, in many cases, their own sexuality is not simply a matter of preferring men over women-they actually like both. For these men sexuality is a not an item on a menu, but a long, varied buffet they want to pick and choose from. More important, they don't think that the way they behave in their sexual lives should have any impact on the rest of their lives-they don't think sex is the thing that defines them. So rather than come out and let people label them in a restrictive way, they create a secret life for themselves where they can practice their sexual preferences as they choose, while still maintaining a straight identity to the public. They start living their lives on the DL. This complexity about labels and identity extends to black men who are already out of the closet and living openly gay lives, who still reject obvious, flamboyant displays of their orientation and even reject using the word gay. Black men who reject the labels of gay or bisexual have received negative criticism from the white gay community. If you talk to many African American gay community leaders, they will tell you that this tension is growing. I have been told by many of my gay friends that the tension stems from the lack of support the African American gay community shows to the gay movement as a whole. Some claim that while the white gay community is extremely open about their fight to be accepted and have equal rights, the black gay community has not joined that struggle, yet still benefits from the progress the movement has brought. Some in the white gay community feel that black gay men need to join the fight. Many of the African American homosexual friends I have object to the idea that they have to adopt the same tactics as the white gay community. They feel that their fight has to be waged internally, inside our own community, before we can begin to make any efforts outside. This isn't to say that there are no black men who have taken up the cause of gay rights. There are African American gay men who stand shoulder to shoulder with their white gay counterparts and joined them in the fight for equal rights and for equality in general. There is an organization headed by an outspoken black gay activist that is on the front lines of gay rights. But I recently said in an interview that many of my gay friends find that they cannot be both black and gay in their community and still find acceptance. This activist disagreed and claimed that there are many out and proud black gay men who feel comfortable being black and gay in their 'hood. I don't know about that. When I asked my gay friends if they feel like they can be out, gay, and proud in their hometowns and communities, not one of them said yes.
  10. Peppermint, bayberry, cranberry, wintergreen. Breath mints? Scented candles? No — they're "flavors" of oxygen offered at your local oxygen bar. Since oxygen bars were introduced in the United States in the late 1990s, the trend has caught on, and customers are bellying up to bars around the country to sniff oxygen through a plastic hose (cannula) inserted into their nostrils. And many patrons opt for the "flavored" oxygen produced by pumping oxygen through an aroma en route to the nose. The oxygen experience in a bar can last from a few minutes to about 20 minutes, depending on customers' preferences and the size of their wallets. The price of about a dollar a minute could leave you gasping for air, but frequent inhalers may get a discount. Most oxygen bar proprietors are careful not to make medical claims for their product, and state that their oxygen is not a medical gas — it's made and offered strictly for recreational use. But under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, any type of oxygen used by people for breathing and administered by another person is a prescription drug. "It doesn't matter what they label it," says Melvin Szymanski, a consumer safety officer in the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). "At the other end of the hose is oxygen, and the individual that provides you with the nasal cannula and turns on the canister for your 20-minute supply is actually dispensing the prescription drug oxygen to you." Although oxygen bars that dispense oxygen without a prescription violate FDA regulations, the agency applies regulatory discretion to permit the individual state boards of licensing to enforce the requirements pertaining to the dispensing of oxygen, says Szymanski. Many states choose to allow oxygen bars; others discourage the businesses by requiring strict compliance with the law. However, serious health claims made for oxygen, such as curing cancer or AIDS, or helping ease arthritis pain, would be investigated by the FDA, adds Szymanski. Healthy or Just Hype? Oxygen fans tout the benefits of oxygen as reducing stress, increasing energy and alertness, lessening the effects of hangovers, headaches, and sinus problems, and generally relaxing the body. But there are no long-term, well-controlled scientific studies that support these claims for oxygen in healthy people. And people with healthy lungs don't need additional oxygen, says Mary Purucker, M.D., Ph.D., a pulmonary specialist in CDER. "We've evolved for millions of years in an atmosphere of about 21 percent oxygen." The American Lung Association says that inhaling oxygen at oxygen bars is unlikely to have a beneficial physiological effect, but adds "there is no evidence that oxygen at the low flow levels used in bars can be dangerous to a normal person's health." People with certain medical conditions are another matter. Some need supplemental oxygen, but should not go to oxygen bars, says Purucker. People with some types of heart disease, asthma, congestive heart failure, pulmonary hypertension, and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, such as emphysema, need to have their medical oxygen regulated carefully to oxygenate their blood properly, says Purucker. "If they inhale too much oxygen, they can stop breathing." People who have received bleomycin, a chemotherapy used to treat some types of cancer, are in danger if they are exposed to high levels of oxygen for too long, adds Purucker. "People think oxygen is good, but more is not necessarily better." One of the FDA's biggest concerns about oxygen bars is the use of "flavored" oxygen, says Purucker. The flavor is produced by bubbling oxygen through bottles containing aromatic solutions and then pumping the vaporized scent through the hose and into the nostrils. Some bars use oil-free, food-grade particles to produce the aroma, but others may use aroma oils. Inhaling oily substances can lead to a serious inflammation of the lungs, known as lipoid pneumonia. Even if an oil-free medium is used, the purity or sterility of the aerosol that is generated cannot be guaranteed. Susceptible customers run the risk of inhaling allergens or irritants that may cause them to wheeze. Inhalation of live contaminants such as bacteria or other pathogens may lead to infection. Other Oxygen Hazards Although oxygen doesn't burn, it does fuel the combustion process. "Smoking anywhere near oxygen, even in the same room, can be extremely dangerous," says Duane Sylvia, a consumer safety officer in CDER. While some oxygen bars are located in health spas or other facilities that don't allow smoking, others are found in nightclubs or casinos where smoking is common. Another fire hazard is the addition of substances, such as oils, in an oxygen-enriched environment. Improper maintenance of oxygen equipment presents a potential danger. Some oxygen concentrators use clay filters, which can start growing pathogenic microorganisms that can cause infection if they are not changed regularly. And oxygen cylinders can be very hazardous if they are stored on their sides or not kept in a well-ventilated area, says Sylvia. Pumping Oxygen Most oxygen bars use either "aviators breathing oxygen" or oxygen extracted out of the air in the bar. Aviators breathing oxygen (ABO) is a medical-grade oxygen, not less than 99.0 percent pure, intended for commercial or private aircraft use. ABO should not be used for recreational inhalation or medical therapeutic treatment of humans or animals. Many oxygen bars use a concentrator, which filters out the nitrogen and other gases in the air circulating in the room, and then delivers the concentrated oxygen, about 95 percent pure, through a hose at a continuous flow rate. But oxygen users inhale the surrounding air along with the oxygen pumped through the nose hose, which decreases the concentration. The concentration is further decreased when oxygen is pumped through an aroma. According to one oxygen bar supplier, the customer gets less than 50 percent pure oxygen. Although breathing these low levels of oxygen may not hurt a healthy person, "people have nothing to gain by frequenting oxygen bars, and subject themselves to unnecessary risk," says Purucker. Oxygen and Sports We've all seen it on TV — a football player runs off the field after a play and dons an oxygen mask. "They don't need it," says Conrad Earnest, Ph.D., director of exercise physiology at the Cooper Institute in Dallas. "It's one of the biggest placebo effects going," he adds. "It's a combative activity, so yes, the players are going to be out of breath, but it's because of massive exertion — not because of lack of oxygen." The exception, says Earnest, might be athletes who play at higher elevations than they are used to, and don't have time to acclimate. "If the New York Giants go to play the Washington Redskins, the benefit of oxygen — if any — would be so small it wouldn't be measurable. But if they go to play the Denver Broncos — going from sea level to a mile-high altitude — they may be helped by oxygen while recovering from a play." And products with added oxygen, such as oxygenated water, sports drinks, and skin sprays don't impress Earnest, who refers to their suppliers as putting "sales before science." "If you drink oxygenated water, either the water passes through the gut and has no effect, or the acid in the stomach reacts with it and the only effect of the oxygen is that it will cause you to burp more," he says. The Air Up There Atmospheric pressure decreases as altitude increases, making it more difficult to breathe. But people living at high altitudes do adapt to their environment without using additional oxygen, says Mary Purucker, M.D., Ph.D., a Food and Drug Administration pulmonary specialist. "The blood becomes more efficient at transporting oxygen to tissues." Healthy people traveling from lower to higher elevations don't usually need extra oxygen either, says Robert Mazzeo, Ph.D., an exercise physiologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. But if people who live at low elevations try to exercise at higher elevations, such as the mile-high city of Boulder, they should be aware that exercise will be more taxing. "Maximum capacity declines as altitude increases," says Mazzeo. "If you're used to running two miles a day, you can still run two miles, but not at the same speed."
  11. Excerpted from The Young Athlete: A Sports Doctor's Complete Guide for Parents Valuing preparation. Sports help kids learn to distinguish between effort and ability. Sports increase self-discipline and the awareness of the value of preparation because kids can see the difference in their performance. Competitive athletes learn the importance of effort, being prepared (mentally and physically), and enlightened risk-taking. They see that raw physical talent is not always sufficient to win the game, but that preparation is essential. This includes mental preparation (staying focused) and physical fitness as well as practicing the plays with their teammates in team sports. They learn to evaluate risk versus reward. Another invaluable lesson is discovering that mistakes are part of learning; they signal that a particular approach is unsuccessful and you must try another. Kids also learn to deal productively with criticism as part of improvement and preparation. Resilience. Sports provide an unparalleled model for dealing with disappointment and misfortune. Young athletes learn to handle adversity, whether it's picking themselves up after losing a big game or not getting as many minutes as they wanted. They find ways to deal with losing and go on, because there's another big game next week or next year. They figure out what to do to get what they want for themselves. They put in extra time on fitness or work on specific weaknesses in their game (long-ball trapping, hitting to the opposite field, looking the ball into their hands). Athletes also learn to deal with the physical and psychological effects of injury. I broke my jaw playing soccer and missed most of the season my junior year in high school. I went through the classic stages of grief, from "This can't be true" to ultimate acceptance. Two months of sitting out, waiting to heal, and dealing with physical and emotional pain was devastating. There were times early on when I sat in my bed whimpering from pain. But as time went on and my jaw began to heal, I somehow began to realize what almost all athletes in pain realize: the only person who is going to help you is yourself. You find the limits of what you can ask of yourself and know that you will deliver. This learning to get the best out of yourself carries over into all aspects of life. People can find their internal drive through training and hard work, but adversity really brings it out. In my case, I came back with stronger resolve. In my senior year I became an all-district soccer player and was propelled toward a college soccer career. Attitude control. Older teens learn that a confident attitude improves their performance, and that they have some control over their attitude. They learn to disregard comparative stats in preparing for an opponent and instead to adopt "attitude enhancers" such as visualization exercises, team or individual rituals, singing specific songs together, or having dinner as a team the night before the game. Some might call these superstitions, others, self-fulfilling prophecies, but they work. Leadership opportunities. Team sports offer kids a rare opportunity to serve as leaders. Kids can be in a position to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their various teammates and help to exploit their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. They can minimize conflicts among players. They can reinforce values-such as fair play, teamsmanship, hard work, mental preparation-by speaking up when appropriate and setting a good example. They can also take the initiative in arranging for team dress on game days (football players wear their jerseys to class, female basketball players wear their warm-up pants), organizing team dinners or team movie nights, and inviting teachers and administrators to their games. Identity and balance. Being part of a group is inordinately important to kids, and sports make kids feel like they belong, whether it's to the group of athletes in general or their team in particular. Sports also contribute to a teenager's sense of a stable identity with particular values. "I'm a football player" is a very different statement than "I play football." People are complicated, however; no individual is just one thing. It's better to encourage children-and adults-not to assume a single identity to the exclusion of all else. Time management. Young athletes learn to manage their time productively. They know they have to get their homework done, so they learn not to waste time (some of them even quit watching television and hanging out at the mall). They plan ahead, so that big school projects don't catch them by surprise. They even figure out they have to eat well and get a good night's sleep. Countless athletes, in school and the workplace, say that being an athlete taught them discipline that is invaluable in their lives on and off the field. Long-term thinking. Athletes learn the fundamental lesson of sacrificing immediate gratification for long-term gain. This is the basis for personal success as well as for civilization in general, and no lesson can be more valuable. Fitness. Kids who play sports develop general physical fitness in a way that's fun, and they establish lifelong habits for good health. This is particularly important at a time when obesity in the United States has reached epidemic proportions: the incidence of obesity has increased by more than 50 percent among America's children and teens since 1976 and continues to grow at a staggering rate! Stress relief. Sports allow kids to clear their minds of academic and social pressures, to literally run off the tension that's accumulated in their muscles. In the words of one patient, "If you play really hard, you feel better because playing takes your mind off things that bother you, and afterwards you can concentrate better." Most doctors recognize the positive mental effect of physical exertion, even though we're not sure exactly why this is so. I know that my ability to study in college and medical school was greatly enhanced when I ran during the day, and I'm not the only athlete to find this true. Many athletes get better grades in-season (theories posit the discipline and the need to manage time, along with an increased ability to concentrate). During exams, Duke University opens its gyms twenty-four hours a day to provide stress relief for its students. Mastery. Sports give kids a satisfying, enjoyable way to develop their own talents: through personal effort they get good at something they're interested in. Doing something well makes them feel good about themselves, but equally important, it teaches them about the process of how to improve and work more effectively. Learning a skill-to dribble left-handed, say, or to execute an effective second serve-entails a recognition that practice is essential and that improvement is incremental. The process of repetition teaches the athlete how to master a move and also how to experiment with different approaches to improve a skill. The feedback in sports is usually immediate and visible-does the ball go into the basket?-so that the athlete can change or repeat what she's doing and figure out how to get better. Not only that, the whole process of seeing practice lead to improvement gives kids a feeling of control, a feeling all too rare in their lives. Healthy habits. Because sports increase an awareness of one's body and how it responds to different stimuli and circumstances, sports help prevent drug and alcohol abuse. Most athletes value what their bodies can do and want to maintain those abilities. Being an athlete also gives kids an acceptable reason for telling their friends no to drugs, booze, and other high-risk, unhealthy behaviors. (Of course, not all athletes avoid drugs and alcohol.)
  12. Excerpted from And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment, and Emotional Violence Over and over again parents are surprised, even stunned, to discover the extent and nature of the emotional and physical violence that their teenagers face at school. Have parents been blind to the reality right under their noses, or are they in a state of denial? The more likely explanation is that teenagers and their parents live in different worlds. Jason, who is fifteen years old, attends a large suburban high school in New York. He has a small group of friends who, like him, are in the band. He is not the kind of kid who gets into trouble at school or at home. He believes in "minding my own business" and still does not understand why he was singled out at school. He described his sense of surprise and helplessness this way: When I was a freshman, I was attacked by four guys at school. I was coming back from band practice, and they dragged me into the boys' restroom and beat me up. I never knew why. No, I never told my parents about it. What for? There was nothing they could do about it. There's nothing anybody can do about it. We have heard many other teens talk with the same level of conviction that there is nothing that they or anyone else can do to change their circumstances during the school day. They just have to figure out how to "take it." This resignation breeds silence, and the students' conviction is reinforced by the rest of the players in the system. For example, as parents, when our daughters come home and tell us that the boys are chasing them on the playground or teasing them with sexual remarks, we might respond with, "Well, they're just doing that because they like you." While this may be true in some instances, it is not enough of a response to help. We need to say more. We need to give girls strategies for thinking through what to do and how to do it. For many of them, every day that they feel tormented by this kind of bullying, their self-esteem is slipping, and their feelings of helplessness are growing. Boys, too, are the recipients of this kind of harassment, particularly those who are smaller, slighter, and gentler than the typical masculine norm. Teachers and other adults often ignore this kind of "play" between teenagers in the mistaken belief that kids have to figure out how to handle these kinds of interactions for themselves. Some pediatricians have supported this approach, advising parents to allow siblings to work out their rivalries without any intervention. The problem with this philosophy is that the solutions children come up with on their own are not always healthy, and often lead to escalating conflict rather than its resolution. For some children, of course, the solutions turn out to be good and adequate and healthy. They learn how to stand up for themselves. They learn assertiveness. But often we fail to see the full scope and impact of these solutions immediately, if we ever see them at all. For many children, the "solutions" to being harassed, bullied, and tormented can include becoming a bully in response, staying in the building during recess, feeling "sick" at recess or during gym class, joining a group that is "tough" ("my homies") for defense, and beginning to use some sort of drug (whether cigarettes, alcohol, or pot) to try to dull the pain they experience. With these attempted solutions come many future repercussions. Instead of a secure child, we see a child who shuns activities that we consider good and wholesome. We see children who are no longer sure of themselves, and we attribute this to "normal adolescence." We see a child who is full of rage at home or seems depressed, and again, we think, "This is how it is to be a teenager, isn't it?" The sources of anxiety and fear for children are not obvious to adults, and parents are often shocked to find out what their kids have been going through at school. Survey research we conducted with college students revealed that many of them felt threatened when they were attending high school but never told their parents. For example, 51 percent of the males said that while they were in high school they were afraid of people at school, and 46 percent say their parents never knew this. Most parents are unaware of the fact that in confidential surveys, kids say the rides to and from school on the bus are often the periods of greatest vulnerability for them. Why don't parents know? How can they know more? In this chapter we explore the impediments parents and other adults face in trying to understand their kids' day-to-day life in high school. We offer some suggestions on how to break through the domains of silence and misinformation between kids and parents. Parallel Lives Journalist Patricia Hersch spent six years doing research for a book about teenagers called A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence. What did she learn? "Today's teens are a tribe apart. The most striking characteristic of many adolescents today is their aloneness....I've learned how much their world eludes us adults — not necessarily because they are rebelling or evading us but because we are not part of it....That freedom changes everything for kids." She concludes: "There have always been troubled kids, but today their increased isolation allows pressures to build up with no release, no guidance. There is often little monitoring of how adolescents spend their time, whether it be on the Internet, with video games, music, building bombs, or doing their homework." This isolation is the foundation for the secret life of teenagers, a life most teens experience in common ways but taking its darkest form in the life and death of a boy like Dylan Klebold. There are millions of kids around the country who are alienated, who feel like outcasts, who echo the nineteen-year-old boy quoted in Mark Jacobson's May 17, 1999, New York magazine article about teenagers' reactions to the Columbine shootings: "To be honest, when I first heard about it, part of me feels like, 'Yay!' This is what every outcast kid has been dreaming about doing since freshman year." Ask almost any adult this question: "Did your parents know about everything you did when you were a teenager that was dangerous, illegal, or dishonest?" For most of us the answer is a resounding no. To test this out, we did a survey of undergraduate students at Cornell University enrolled in a course in human development. The results indicate that many of the respondents had some secret life of which their parents were unaware. Even among this sample of particularly successful and well-behaved adolescents and young adults, there were many with substantial dark secrets. Here are some sample responses when asked to describe the "worst thing, in the sense of most dangerous or troubling" that they had done or considered doing as a teenager in high school that "your parents never found out about": I thought a lot about death. I thought about suicide, but after much thought I decided that was morally wrong and I couldn't do it, even if I really wanted to. I often prayed that perhaps I'd be in an accident or something similar so that way I could escape from my abusive father. I was involved in a situation over a girl that escalated to the point that myself and my best friend were threatened with being shot by a guy who had an interest in this girl. I drank almost every weekend of my senior year in high school, and my parents had no idea. On one occasion I almost died due to my impaired judgment. I was so drunk I jumped on the front end of a car full of my friends, and the car drove off down the bumpy road. After a while I slid off the front of the car and landed in front on the wheels. I heard the brakes squeal, and when the car stopped the right tire was flush against my ribs. I couldn't even get up until the car rolled back because my sweater was still caught under the wheel. There are too many for there to be a "worst." I had unprotected sex with my boyfriend when I was fourteen and thought I was pregnant when my period was late. I was seriously depressed and contemplated suicide. I hung out with drug dealers. A group of us broke into an old school during one winter on weekends so we could have keg parties. We vandalized the school and tore up countless records and important documents that were being stored there. Eventually the police found out, but my parents never did. I seriously contemplated suicide for most of my high school years. Also, I often cut and hurt myself during high school as a way to transfer the emotional pain to physical pain, and probably also as an attempt to get their attention from the scars and bruises. They never noticed. I considered suicide in high school. My parents never knew. I was diagnosed as manic-depressive my senior year of high school, which had manifested itself through an eating disorder. In retrospect, I can see that my bipolar disorder had been building since approximately twelve years of age. I was very smart and knew that there was something abnormal in my behavior. I used my intelligence to hide it. These are academically successful young people, responsible and bright enough to succeed in a prestigious elite university, and majoring in human development. If these students have secret lives, then what could we expect of less able, less responsible, more troubled kids? In her work as a therapist, Ellen has heard and seen this firsthand over and over again. Kids and parents sometimes live in parallel worlds, with parents unaware of what their children face at school or what their children are doing to compensate for the pain they are experiencing. Why Don't Parents Know? Swedish psychologists Margaret Kerr and Hakan Stattin shed light on the process underlying teenagers' secret lives in a report entitled "What Parents Know, How They Know It, and Several Forms of Adolescent Adjustment." Kerr and Stattin studied over a thousand fourteen-year-olds and their parents. They found that the more parents knew about what their kids did, the better adjusted those kids were — less delinquency, fewer school problems, less depression, more positive expectations of life, more positive peers, and better relations with parents. It sounds like an endorsement of the popular belief that parents who monitor have better kids. However, that is not the whole story. Kerr and Stattin learned that the spontaneous disclosure of information by children explained more of what was happening than the efforts of parents to track and monitor their kids. The better-adjusted kids simply told their parents what they were doing more often than the less well-adjusted kids. The authors conclude, "There is no direct evidence, then, to link parents' tracking efforts with good adolescent adjustment in a broad, general way." What does all this mean? Kerr and Stattin report that kids who feel that their parents are trying to control them have worse adjustment than kids who feel their parents trust them. Remember that this is a study of fourteen-year-olds. By that age, parents and kids have developed a lot of momentum; there is a history to their relations. Some kids have established a momentum of positive behavior, and their parents rightfully trust them, and so these kids freely disclose what they are doing. Other kids have established a pattern of negative behavior, and their parents rightfully are suspicious (and seek to monitor these out-of-control kids). For the most part, adolescence is the culmination of childhood patterns, not some dramatically discrepant period of life with little relation to what has gone before. This provides a sensible context for understanding Kerr and Stattin's conclusion: "It would be a mistake to conclude, however, that child disclosure is something completely separate from anything parents do, because parents' actions probably play a role in a child's willingness to disclose. How parents have reacted to information in the past and how accepting and warm they are, in general, are likely to influence disclosure....Parents' past solicitation efforts could influence child disclosure by encouraging the child to develop a habit of disclosing. Very young children could begin talking to parents about their daily activities because the parents ask and listen with interest, and this could become habitual until the disclosure is independent of parents' asking." As always, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Another vital reason that adults do not know some of the secret parts of their children's lives has nothing to do with purposefully keeping adults in the dark. It has to do with teenagers themselves not naming what is happening to them. Because the everyday environment of adolescents is filled with gossip, name-calling, and several forms of harassment, it is often difficult for them to pinpoint which behaviors go over the line into the unacceptable, which behaviors have created the bad feelings they are experiencing. Therapists and other interventionists believe you have to be able to identify or name something for what it is before you can adequately deal with it. If adults fail to react to situations where one kid is emotionally abusing another, it is nearly impossible for kids to label that behavior as abusive. It becomes the norm. Kids, like adults, do not come home and report what they see as mundane or usual. This is true even for kids with the most receptive parents. Why Can't Parents Discover the Secret Life? Why is it hard for parents to discover the secret life of their teenager? Like all the tough questions, this one has many answers. For one thing, most parents have a concept of who their child is, and it is difficult to receive information which contradicts that concept. In a sense, it seems disloyal to be capable of thinking the worst of your child. Parental love is strong — and sometimes blind. Second, parents don't have all the information that they need to draw accurate conclusions. Some of this is because they have no connection with people outside the family who know their child, or because others deliberately withhold information about the child. At times it is because the behavior of children and teenagers differs from setting to setting. Oftentimes, as we mentioned before, it is because children believe that there is nothing their parents can do with the information anyway. Most of us think kids have one identity, but actually they may have several. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error — the tendency to focus on one set of behaviors in one situation and naively assume that this one pattern is the sum total of that person. Different settings and contexts evoke different patterns of behavior in the same person, even if he or she is a child. At the "normal" end of the continuum, many kids have somewhat different personalities at home and at school, for example. A shy, polite child at home may be boisterous and loud at school. At the "abnormal" end, some kids actually are different people in the two settings. This is often the case with kids who are so deeply troubled that they are en route to being psychopaths (like the proverbial "nice guy" who turns out to be a mass murderer). And, of course, some kids deliberately set out to deceive their parents. They create secret lives at home and at school in order to hide their experiences on the dark side of the culture. Writing in Time magazine in May 1999, columnist Amy Dickenson put it this way: "Teenagers are good at hiding their true selves — or the selves they're trying out this month — behind the 'grandma face' they wear when they're trotted out to see the relatives. Behind that pleasant mask there can be volumes of bad poetry, body piercing, and tattoos." But this too is not confined to children and youth. Adults sometimes have dark secret lives that they fiercely work to keep private for fear that disclosure will open them to ridicule or legal sanctions. A word of caution is important here. While it is true that adolescents can have a secret school life (and want to keep it secret due to their growing sense of a right to privacy, feelings of shame, or feelings of helplessness) it is a mistake to conclude that most kids are involved in serious patterns of bad or shameful behavior. Unfounded accusations impede future communication, so get the facts before you say anything, and be careful about coming down too hard on kids. Rather, seek to keep the lines open and find out what you need to know. What is true is that kids keep secrets or perhaps better put, kids don't share information with their parents or other adults, about their school day for many reasons. It is our job to provide room and opportunity for kids to fill in the blanks for us. Yet another issue in understanding the secret lives of teenagers is the way kids and their parents differ in their interpretation of family events and history. Tough as it is for us as parents to see the world through the eyes of our children, we must do so. Too many families get caught up in denial and distortion of family events as a way to save face or avoid conflict, only to find that in the long run any short-term gains are washed away by the costs of secrecy. The Impact of Emotional Violence on "Average" Kids What happens to kids who get harassed or threatened? What are some of the consequences of bullying and emotional violence? While we are beginning to understand that chronic harassment can lead some children to commit serious acts of violence in retaliation toward others or to gain relief for themselves, most adults are not aware of the consequences for their children — the ones who don't act in a violent manner. In Lost Boys, Jim wrote about boys who turn violent to deal with the problems they encounter. But how do "average" kids contend with the obstacles they face every day at school?
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