There is a lot of discussion about the effects that peers and parents have on teens, especially when it comes to negative outcomes like substance use and delinquency.  The notion of “peer pressure” has become particularly popular, and while it is useful to consider the influence of friends and social life it’s been difficult to specifically pin down how this might work.  A study calls attention to the importance of social stability for young people’s health by connecting frequent relocation to clinical depression and suicide.

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 Obesity in Africa?!  It seems that not all South African children are necessarily those starving, emaciated children we’ve seen on ‘pennies a day’ infomercials to feed the poor.  According to a 2005 report (Steyn, Labadarios et al., 2005) there is a prevalence of overweight South African children (19%) under the age of 9 years.  As if Africa doesn’t already suffer from the well-documented HIV/AIDS epidemic, tuberculosis outbreaks, and other infectious diseases, now some parts of the continent suffer from the once Western-now-global public health issue of obesity. 

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 IMIN is changing the image of high school after school programs. If you are thinking of latchkey and detention that sounds nearly impossible, right? First off, you have to stop saying after school. IMIN is slang for “What I’m in” because no teenager says, “I participate in an after school program.” An IMIN is anything formally know as an after school activity and is a used as a noun, as in IMIN Dance or IMIN Photography.

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Hey, Lil Wayne, you went platinum in 7 days last year. I’m pretty sure there’re no Bloods on your block these days. Why flaunt your maybe-probably-definitely fake Blood status?

Gangsta rap exploded into the mainstream consciousness in the late 1980’s when N.W.A. dropped the seminal album Straight Outta Compton.  Sure, Ice T was rhyming about the gang life, pimping, and hustling drugs before that, but N.W.A. took the genre out of SoCal and into suburban junior high schools across the country. Dan Quail and every middle/upperclass English teacher were given the forum they always wanted to condescend to poor non-whites under the veil of Quaker moral high ground. And while “family values” waged war against “gangsta rap,” the underlying importance of the music was lost.  Rap is the black CNN, as Chuck D once said, and if that means talking about the gang life you lived, then that’s just a part of the broadcast. But, in 2009, when rappers are spending more on their wrist game than my annual rent, is claiming affiliation with a specific gang really necessary or just a fashion statement? 

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The Fresh Prince may have put it best when he said “parents just don’t understand.” Of course, back in 1988, the ‘worst’ thing kids were doing was buying dunks, flipping up the bills of their caps, and watching too much MTV.

Imagine a parents surprise when they walk up the stairs to see if Junior wants to come to Dairy Queen with the rest of the family and they open the bedroom door to see their kid gyrating against the wall in a bright pink thong, a slice of kiwi dangling from their lip, their 16-year-old body greased with baby oil and…is that sparkly eye shadow? I think that’s sparkly eye shadow! All of this is, of course, happening in front of their child’s webcam.

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“Abstinence only.”  What a phrase, what a concept, what another waste of taxpayer monies on programs that are not just unsuccessful, but logically unattainable. The government and numerous prevention foundations have tried to rally around “abstinence only” not only for platform credits, but to reach out to those that write the campaign donation checks and vote as the majority in almost every election, people ages 40-65, people that are no longer teenagers, people not directly effected by teen pregnancy. I can hear the roar of the grand majority spiting out stat after stat of their hard earned dollars going into our dilapidated welfare system, and 100’s of millions of dollars go into abstinence only, a program proven to be an ineffective means of curbing teen pregnancy. Religious zealots will jump on the moral bandwagon speaking of virginity, purity, and chasitity, but no mention of reality. The recent twist in the Palin pregnancy drama is a perfect example of the hypocrisy.

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So New Yorkers aren’t exactly strangers to the freaky/crazy/scary, being that, you know, we live in a city where we can listen to a diatribe about the government testing anthrax on children from a guy with pieces of food in his beard and a “Mom of the Year” shirt on without batting an eye.  But recently, Mayor Bloomberg’s dedication to reducing the number of New York smokers has lead the Department of Health to create a series of ads that can best be described as a “f@#ing horror show.”

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If you take a shower before you have sex, are you less likely to get pregnant? Do I love her or do I love the sex? I like boys but I also like girls. What should I do? These are just some of the questions that curious and hormonal teenagers are texting to the new Birds and the Bees text line.

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