Category Archives: Parenting

Failing the Treadmill Test

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 19, 2005

At prices ranging from $299 to $4000, treadmills are the number one exercise machine in America, with sales reaching 11.3 million in 2003.  No longer dedicated to simple walking-in-place exercise, treadmills are specially designed to suit every possible need.

For serious workouts, treadmills can be electronically programmed to simulate hilly terrain and adjust to a runner’s pace.  “On the gimmicky side,” Consumer Reports says, “a growing number of treadmills load the console with gadgets such as fans, a CD player, a cubbyhole for a TV remote, and backlighting on the display that for some may evoke a digital watch.”

The popularity of treadmills should be a good thing.  Based on a report in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, 1996), treadmills provide the most efficient way to burn calories when compared to other popular exercise machines.   Researchers asked young adults to exercise on six different machines, including a cross-country skiing simulator, cycle ergometer, rowing ergometer and stair stepper.  They found that subjects who exercised at an RPE of 13 burned approximately 40 percent more calories per hour on the treadmill as compared to the cycle ergometer, the lowest ranked machine.

So…if the popularity of treadmills is a good thing, if they are the number one exercise machine, and if they are made to suit every person’s walking or running style…why are we flunking the treadmill?  Yes.  A new study just published in JAMA shows that a third of U.S. teens would flunk a treadmill test.

Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston, calls the study results, “very concerning.”  As reported by Lindsey Tanner, “Ludwig, who was not involved in the study, called treadmill tests a good measure of fitness.  He said the results show that ‘at a time in life when adolescents and young adults should be at peak levels of fitness, there’s in fact a very high prevalence…of very low fitness.’”

The JAMA article comes at the perfect time.  Christmas pies and cakes abound.  New Year’s resolutions are in the making.  Surrounded by temptation, we attempt to compose a list of good habits and set a new course for our future.

Yet, the path to good health is fraught with challenges.  Treadmills, cheap or expensive, are only one part of the total program.

How do we put our teens on a pathway to good health?  How do we help them pass the treadmill test?

A website, 4teenweightloss, dedicated to teens, weight control and fitness tackles this question.  Armed with statistics demonstrating the seriousness of the problem, it gives suggestions and encouragement in equal measure.

It’s no surprise that parents are at the top of the list for creating solutions for teens.  “Parents,” 4teenweightloss says, “play a big role in shaping children’s eating habits….Parents have an effect on children’s physical activity habits as well.”

Our expectations for our children and our lead as role models for our children are the key ingredients in diet and exercise plans for our children.  Are we surprised?

Consider other threats to the well-being of our children…tobacco, drugs, fast driving, violence…and consider the role of parents in shaping the behavior of our children.  There is only one risky behavior where we waffle in admitting our leading role…the sexual well-being of our children.

When it comes to risky sex, sex outside of a lifelong, faithful relationship…marriage…we continue to look around for an easy fix.  In the same way we hope a grapefruit diet will take off pounds or paying out big bucks for a treadmill will create muscle tone, we hope that baskets of condoms will be the magical solution to unwed pregnancy, disease, and broken hearts.

A new year approaches.  New hopes.  New dreams.  New goals.  Good health is within reach.

If we want our children to pass the treadmill test, it’s a lot harder…and a lot easier…than paying $4000 for the latest and greatest machine.  It begins with us, parents.  Our dreams.  Our goals.  Our commitment.

May this year bring a renewed dedication to the well-being of our children.

Merry Christmas!

 *************

Good-Health tips for teens:  http://www.4teenweightloss.com/weight-loss-resources.html

 February 14, 2005 – All the Condoms in the World

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The Best Christmas Present Under the Tree

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 12, 2005

In the 1940s, it was a Red Ryder BB gun…in the 1960s, a GI Joe.

In the 1980s, when my own children ran through the house, it was a Cabbage Patch Doll.  Over the past hundred years, several hundreds of toys have made the “most popular Christmas present” list:  Crayolas, Raggedy Ann dolls, View-master 3-D Viewer, Rubik’s cube, Mr. Potato Head, Beanie Babies, Razor Scooter and more.

Who remembers the must-have toy of 1996?  On a web site where comments (most of them) extol the virtues of this stuffed creature, one web writer tells about the “loons who went to the stores at the crack of dawn to fight the crowds to have a chance to buy a Tickle Me Elmo.”

A lot has changed in the past hundred years.  Only in America have toys taken on a new personality indicative of our wealth.  Mr. Potato Head, 8-1/2 inches tall and 8 inches wide, is now offered encrusted with gems and priced at $8,000.  If you want your Monopoly set in tooled leather, be prepared to fork over $5,840.

If money is absolutely no problem this year, parents can splurge on Microsoft’s new Xbox 350 costing around $300…or an original Teddy Bear available at Christie’s auction for $17,000 to $26,000….all the way up to a $300,000 3-D motion simulator from the “Rolls-Royce of toy stores” FAO Schwarz.

Advertised as a replacement for friends, you can buy your child Hammacher Schlemmer’s 7-foot, remote-controlled Robby the Robot…that is…if you have a spare $50,000.  Makes a parent long for a return to 1975 and the Pet Rock craze.  Like most fads, it never totally died.  There is even a web site titled, Pet Rock Sanitarium, where you might find a cheaper-than-cheap abandoned “pet” looking for a new home.

So…what’s hot this year?  You can bet merchandisers know.  Base on one survey, thirty-eight percent of U.S. teens would prefer cash for Christmas this year, followed by cell phones or portable electronics.  Other in-demand holiday gifts include clothing and a car, according to a survey of 700 U.S. teens conducted by Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

Engrossed as we are at this time of year in looking for all those special ways of bringing joy to our children, it seems fitting to look to the type of joy that lasts beyond Christmas.  That’s exactly what Otis and Elaine Dickerson of Duluth, Georgia, did over fifty years ago.

“On December 18, 1953, on the first birthday of their baby boy Eric,” writes Benin Dakar, “the young and determined African-American couple were married in the modest home of Otis’ mother in a working-class Baltimore neighborhood.”  Today in their 70s, the Dickersons talk about their commitment to marriage as a way of providing joy and security for their four children.

Dakar notes that their story is worth telling in an age when “fewer and fewer young black couples who find themselves in a ‘family way’ are following their lead to the altar.”  Indeed, statistics from the Brookings Institute show that 70 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock.

For the country at large, 24 million children (34 percent) live absent their biological father, and 40 percent of children living absent their father have never set foot in their father’s home.  The Dickersons wanted better for their children.

Their lifelong commitment to each other in marriage helped them through the rough waters that all married couples will face.  Dakar notes, “their partnership enabled them to succeed in the workplace, to become homeowners and to rear stable and productive children.”  We can learn from Otis and Elaine.  Their experience is confirmed through many important studies on the welfare of children.

In a report issued by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), important details outline the challenges facing single parent families.  “When an unwed couple has a child, the resulting family faces heightened vulnerability to a variety of economic and social problems affecting the couple, the parents as individuals, and the child.  In particular, there is a high risk they will be unsuccessful in forming a sustained and close family unit.  Because of these well documented risks and the consequences of nonmarital childbearing for parents and children, these families are now commonly called ‘fragile families.’”

This same report goes on to say, “research shows that children who grow p with married, biological parents have better outcomes than children raised in a different family structure.  On average, the former are more likely to be healthy, to complete high school, and to become economically self-sufficient adults; and in turn, they are less likely to be involved in drug and alcohol abuse or juvenile delinquency, or to be come teen parents.”

At Christmas, when we focus our eyes on what will bring joy to our children, the best present we can give is right within reach.  This is the perfect time to recommit to our marriages.  Married couples, attending marriage seminars, kissing under the mistletoe and holding hands in front of the hearth are building the perfect gift for their children, a secure home today and a vision for their children of what their own future could be.

The best Christmas present under the tree this year will cost the least.  But its value to our children is priceless.

*******************

For a good dose of Christmas Cheer and fun information:

http://mymerrychristmas.com/2005/surveyteens2005.shtml

 

For the Most Popular Toys of the Past 100 Years:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10387831/

 

For the Most Expensive Toys of 2005:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10387451/from/RL.1/

 

For the full story of Otis and Elaine Dickerson:

Benin Dakar, “Drop in black marriages hurts families,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 12, 2005, A13.

 

For Report by Administration for Children and Families: “Helping Unwed Parents Build Strong And Healthy marriages: A Conceptual Framework For Interventions”

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/strengthen/strengthfam/reports/conceptual_framework/framework_toc.html

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Long After the Turkey Is Gone

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

November 28, 2005

The turkey carcass is in the pot…with onion, hominy and hot sauce.  Soup is on the way.

This year, around the table, we were five generations, from 2 to 82.  Twin toddlers climbed into and out of every lap in the room, not counting the times they were carried around by cousins and tripped over by kitchen cooks.

Stirring the soup, I reflect on the last eighty years, a time our two-year-olds will have to read about in their freshman history books.  It’s easy to mark the cultural changes in the lives of people around the dinner table.

Half of the family arrived by plane this year.  Years ago, when my own grandmother came for Thanksgiving, I remember waiting for her at one of the only four gates at the sole Phoenix terminal.

Back then, workers pushed a rolling staircase up to the airplane, the plane door opened, and travelers climbed down the stairs, exposed to the weather—rain, shine, or sleet—and across the asphalt runway into the terminal.  I would stand on my tiptoes, watching for Grandma’s fancy hat with the pheasant feather.  Like everyone who flew in the 60’s, she dressed to kill in her Sunday best.

Only forty years later, we have four terminals and countless gates at Sky Harbor International Airport.  Travelers now step out of the 747 directly into the comfort-controlled terminal.  And seasoned travelers long ago gave up their Sunday best in favor of comfortable jeans and running shoes.  Forget fancy hats with feathers.

A Thanksgiving feast had to have been unimaginably special to my grandmother who remembered her small town canning food in the school basketball gym during the Great Depression.  If you wanted stuffing in the 30s, you made it by scratch, with dried bread carefully saved over the previous month.  No prepackaged stuffing mix or heat and serve dinner rolls.  Worse yet, no stores were open for the cook who forgot to buy cranberry sauce.

Back then, after dinner, Grandma told us how they would entertain each other in the parlor.  As a kid, she did a great Bug Dance, her mom played the piano, and everyone in the family took turns reading stories out loud.

Today we huddle around the large, flat screen, surround-sound television for Thanksgiving football.  If you blink, we have instant replay…from four different camera angles.  And for viewers who need a “trip down the hall,” Tivo will let them back up to any Hail Mary pass reception they missed while gone.

How can any child today ever truly understand the magic of a clunky black and white television console first introduced in the 50s and the four national stations that went dark after 9:00 p.m.?  Tic tack toe has given way to Game Boy.  Pencils are mechanical.  Running shoes now come with lights, buzzers and wheels.  And fancy hats with feathers are crushed in the corner of a dirty thrift store…or rented out by costume stores.

From 2 to 82, at Thanksgiving this year, we evidence the cultural changes already accomplished.   And we guess at coming changes we will never live to see.  What will our country be like when the twin toddlers turn grey and squint to focus through 2.25 reading glasses?

Will stores deliver pre-cooked turkeys ordered online from cell phones?  Will viewers interact with football teams through wall mural televisions?  Will running shoes with wheels be jet powered?

More to the point, what will the crowd around the table look like in another 80 years?  Will brothers pass the gravy to their clones?  Will everyone be 5 foot eight inches tall, thanks to gene selection…an essential way to match the competition in job interviews where physical appearance is more important than resume experience?  Will children with harelips even exist, when elimination of “imperfect” babies is mandated by insurance companies who set medical protocols to keep costs down?

And at the center of it all, what will our families look like?  This current generation of toddlers now is growing up predominately in homes without fathers.  In four more generations of unwed teen pregnancy, will people even be able to imagine a time long ago when mothers and fathers were married for a lifetime and babies were bounced on the knees of Grams and Gramps at their fiftieth wedding anniversary?

This year’s turkey is gone.  It’s in the pot.  And there’s a lot to think about as I stir the soup.

September 3, 2004 – We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

May 14, 2004 – Order in the Courtroom!

 

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Public Policy Never Mended a Broken Heart

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

November 7, 2005

Maybe Anthony is a good father.

Maybe we need more fathers like Anthony.

And maybe we need more sports heroes to be the kinds of fathers and husbands, like Anthony, who step up to the line of scrimmage and run a touchdown when it comes to being the best kind of dad a kid could want.

Maybe.  But Marleen doesn’t think so.

Marleen read the story about Anthony and how he turned down a pro-football contract to fulfill his responsibility to an unborn child who became his son.  She read how he built a strong, healthy marriage with his teen girlfriend.  She acknowledges that Anthony took responsibility as a husband and father.  And while she finds his example…well…exemplary …she wrote me to complain.

“The problem is not with fathers abandoning their children,” says Marleen, “it is with bad public policy forcing them out of their children’s lives.”  She goes on to list the laws we have on the books to try to provide for America’s children:  child custody, child support, visitation requirements, and shared custody agreements.

Marleen chides me.  She claims the number of “bad men who truly do abandon their children” are “statistically insignificant.”  Citing fathers who are “forced” to pay child support and those who are “jailed for non-payment,” Marleen aims her final shot at me.  “The problem is not with fathers, it’s with the father-unfriendly policies in the U.S.”

While I can agree with Marleen that solutions to father absence are imperfect, she misses the most obvious solution at hand.  She misses the entire point of telling Anthony’s story.  She sees the trees…every oak and pine and aspen…but she misses the forest.

Every one of the 1.5 million births in 2004 to unmarried women produced a child in danger of growing up without a father.  More than 4 in 5 births to teens were to unmarried girls.  In 2004, more than 35 percent of births were to unmarried women.

This is not the kind of problem that is “statistically insignificant.”  Nor is it a problem that can be met by public policy “fixes.”  No child was ever hugged by public policy.

The fix to the problem facing our children and grandchildren lies in the hearts of the adults today, their parents and grandparents, who must face some hard truths.  We must look in the mirror and ask what we could be doing differently.

What would the future look like if children were encouraged to see sex as the behavior belonging to adults who committed to each other in marriage?  What would marriage look like if we taught teens and young adults effective tools to keep relationships healthy and positive?  What would divorce look like if we had a culture that encouraged couples through the hard times with counseling and support?

This is not an impossible dream.  This is the set of expectations that ruled the world for thousands of years.  These expectations succeeded not because they were public policy, but because individual people understood and accepted the importance of sacrificing personal momentary pleasure for the long-term benefit of mutual happiness.

When we teach young men and women to value intimate relationships as a sacred trust, and when we teach them that sex is the ultimate gift of this trust to be fulfilled inside of marriage, we will set the stage for them to care enough to abstain from unmarried sex.  This is the foundation of reversing statistics on unmarried births.  It is the beginning of bringing fathers back home again.

Will life be perfect?  Is life perfect now?  If we use the imperfections of today to disqualify any attempt to teach our children a better way, we are justifying failure.

Yes, Marleen, we can treat failure with public policy.  But we will never overcome failure with public policy.

No child will sleep better tonight, hugging a public policy manual.  Public policy has never mended a broken heart.  And most importantly for the children we love, no public policy will ever make a vow to love, honor and cherish them till death us do part.

 

The Story of Anthony and Mary Ann

October 17, 2005 – Fatherhood Is More than a Paycheck

 April 23, 2004 – m…m…Married?

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TEEN SEX: How Many? So What?

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

October 24, 2005

The Picture of the Problem depends on who is taking the picture.  For us as parents, the picture that matters most to us is the family portrait hanging over the fireplace.  We focus our concerns on the circle of family photographs–in the faces of each of our children and grandchildren, precious lives we hug each morning, tickle each day, and tuck into bed each night.

For experts studying the Problem, our family pictures and our precious children disappear, buried under an avalanche of statistics.  This is just as much a part of the problem as the problem itself, creating a divergence in views between experts and parents.  We love our children, but who can love a statistic?

Years ago, reading about Andrew Carnegie in my seventh grade history book—for the first time, I realized one person could have millions of dollars in his own personal bank account.  Just imagine it!  What would it feel like to have a million dollars?  The numbers were huge–too big for my young mind.

So it is with teen pregnancy.  The numbers can be simply staggering.  Math teachers labor to impress children with the enormity of a number as large as a million.  One popular lesson has school children working to collect one million of something:  aluminum pop tabs from soda cans or printed letters on a newspaper page.  How far would one million dollar bills reach?  How high would a stack of one million pennies climb?

Thinking of one million pregnant teens, the mind goes blank.  A million?  Maybe the best way to understand the big numbers is to make them smaller.  In truth, the realities of teen pregnancy can best be understood by looking around us, to the lives of our family and friends.

I remember back to a friend in my eighth grade class in 1965, a quiet girl who dated a handsome dark-haired boy.  They weren’t the only “couple” of my eighth grade class.  For instance, Debbie was famous for kissing her boyfriend between classes, and Kathy was the envy of the girls because she went on a class hayride with heartthrob Bob, a source of school rumors and gossip for nearly two weeks.

But the quiet girl and the handsome, dark-haired boy were different.  They were serious.  And then one day, the quiet girl was gone.  Just like that.  Silently, the ripples of gossip carried the news across the classroom, “She’s pregnant.” And no one said anything more.

The choices in 1965 were limited.  In eighth grade, the quiet girl was too young for a shotgun marriage.  Abortion wasn’t legal, nor did it have social approval.  Although we didn’t discuss it, we all knew common practice dictated that she had been secreted off to a home for unwed mothers or to a family out of town where she gave birth to the baby and gave it up for adoption.

The next time I heard of a classmate being pregnant, I was a senior in American History–four years later.  A pretty, athletic girl walked through the desks and up to the front of the room with a withdrawal slip.  Mr. Halbert signed the paper, and she turned to face us on her walk out of the room.  Students moving out of our school always grabbed attention—there were so few of them who left, and, naturally, someone in the room had to ask, “Where’s she going?”  Again, ever so quietly, the news passed around the room, “She’s pregnant.”

A short time later, in May, I graduated from high school with plans to attend Arizona State University.  The birth control bill had just arrived on college campuses around the country, and I was on hand to witness the beginning of a quiet revolution.

Now, after 30 years of “controlling birth” with a pill, the best measure of social change is evident in the lives of the people I know:  in my own family, in the schools where I taught, with the students at my children’s high school, at church, and in the families of friends and neighbors.  Teen pregnancy is no longer a rare occurrence, something we hear of every four years or so.  We all know of young women and men who are parents—unwed teen parents.

And when pregnancy touches the life of a young person we love, there are simply no statistics to measure the impact on their lives.  Statistics are flat numbers, two dimensional counters that fill up governmental reports.  But they fail to illustrate the more personal significance of teen pregnancy for our children and for our nation.

When you hug your child tonight, when you pull the bedcovers under her chin, ask yourself if teen pregnancy is your only fear about teen sex.  If she gets pregnant, she will become the concern of statisticians.  They ask, “How many?”

But you’re the parent.  And you know the meaning of sex beyond the statistics.  Is that the best the experts have to offer us, a few pills or a patch to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg?  Parents have the heart to ask, “So what?”  And we know that the answer to this question is in the family photos on the mantel above the fireplace…in the lives that we cherish, no matter how few.

________________________

One million printed letters on a newspaper page would cover a bedroom wall eight feet high and six feet long; one million dollar bills end to end would reach 96.9 miles; and a stack of one million pennies would climb nearly one mile up into space, enough for four stacks of pennies as high as the Empire State Building.

 

April 11, 2005 – Why I Teach Abstinence

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