Guest Blog: Jamie Bachmann

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move anti-obesity initiative is out to get kids and families to make healthy eating a priority. And it’s really a big issue: A recent study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that obese children are more than twice as likely to die prematurely than their thinner peers.

But healthy living isn’t just for young kids. Fast forward through childhood to college life, where on my college campus, Spring Break is around the corner. I can tell you, along with intense studying for midterms, there has been plenty of intense dieting, as girls and guys alike strive to reach the Spring Break perfect body.

Girls restrict their food intake with the strategy: eat less, workout more. Facebook albums titled "Spring Break Diets = Empty Beds" suggest that if you sleep out at night, you’ll be less likely to succumb to nighttime munchies. So, we have girls starving themselves and increasing their promiscuity in preparation for spring break — not exactly healthy life choices.

But not everyone has approached the Spring Break diet negatively. A friend has used her Spring Break motivation to whip herself into shape using the P90X program. She’s drenched in sweat every morning and has seen some pretty amazing results. Yet, the very same girl who has dedicated herself to 90 days of pre-Spring-Break P90X declared, "Once I’m there, the diet’s over."

When we were younger, most of our food choices depended on our parents: meal preparation, activities and even transportation to sports practices and lessons. But in college, Mom’s not shoving a well-balanced breakfast down your throat or at the dinner table making sure you eat your vegetables, or even putting them on your plate.

Now with our college independence, it’s time for even older teens to step up to the healthy living plate. We can choose to eat junk food, consume mass quantities of alcohol, indulge in the late night munchies, and sit in the dorm room all day, racking up the "freshman fifteen" (which can continue well past freshman year). Or, we can get involved, become active, schedule time for working-out, and buy healthy snacks.

Really, healthy eating is not just about Spring Break and the crash course diets, obsessive-compulsive exercising, or starving yourself. However, Spring Break can serve as great motivation to jumpstart the healthy lifestyle, if done properly. Changes involve becoming educated consumers; we must know what we are putting into our body. Learning to make healthy choices will make you feel great and look great, not just for spring break, but for everyday. I’ve learned to push myself harder to meet my personal best when it comes to my workout goals. We could use each other as motivation, not competition. In the long run it doesn’t matter who looked better in their swimsuit; what matters is that we are healthy.

Plus, part of a healthy lifestyle just might be a healthy acceptance. While we would all like to have Fergie’s abs, Sarah Jessica Parker’s legs, and Beyonce’s entire body, realistically, no matter what we do, that’s probably not going to happen. It’s not about achieving a celebrity body or even about looking good in a bikini. Though Spring Break can be great motivation, healthy exercises and food choices need to become a life-long routine. Our health is in our hands, and as a college student, it’s time to start taking control.

But today, aside from our middle school basketball finals, the greatest competition in the world is playing out right before our eyes: The 2010 Olympics. Whether or not your family’s schedule revolves around sports, you have to admit the Olympics offer a ring-side seat to watch thrilling sports competition – and to discuss and explore with your kids some truly character-defining moments.

More than the character words on our school marquee, the next few weeks provide an Olympic opportunity for families everywhere to bring character education home. Like the chapters featured in Inside Out, real stories make ideas about building character come to life.

What kind of courage does it take for those luge competitors to race down the track, knowing that one of their fellow competitors lost his life doing the same just days before? What kind of perseverance does it take to get back up on your skates after a fall and complete an ice dance? What kind of self-control does it take to go through the hours of training and conditioning to make the team? How do the losers demonstrate civility in the face of defeat? And imagine the peace in a world in which the biggest competition between countries takes place on a ski slope or ice rink?

For the next two weeks, I say to families: Turn on the TV and watch the Olympics! Enjoy the competition, while sharpening your parenting skills. There’s a character-building moment around just about every turn – for the Olympian athletes and viewers alike.

The key to how they manage this privacy is our “connection” to them. How closely do we stay in touch with our kids and pay attention to what they’re doing and when and with whom? And how often do we talk to our children…and really listen to them? If they trust us and know that we will be there for them, they’re more likely to adhere to the ethics of our family, the standards that are never more important than when parents are not around. If we talk openly about what we believe in, what we stand for, before long those values will become their own.

The challenge for parents is that our kids have a whole new set of communication tools and many of these young people don’t fully understand that the old rules apply, even here, even in the brave new world of social networking and text messaging. We actually need to teach them, literally and plainly explain to them how ethics apply to these tools. “If you wouldn’t wear it in front of your grandmother, don’t wear it to school or to the dance. If you wouldn’t do it in the middle of a packed football stadium, don’t do it anywhere someone has a camera or a cell phone. If you don’t want that picture on the front page of the newspaper, don’t send it on your cell phone.”

Kids just don’t think through the consequences. They don’t think, “If I send this picture out to Bobby, he might send it to some friends, who might send it to a hundred others and the next thing you know, it’s on a dozen Facebook sites and all over the internet, forever.” This just doesn’t occur to them; they don’t think that way because they don’t have the life experience that we do. We have to help them.

More: http://www.youtube.com/connectwithkids

But it’s also heartbreaking for me to think of the bullies. How can a child, not that many years from the pure innocence of infancy, be that evil? When I hear the agony in the voice of the victim, I want to put my arms around that child… and then go find the bullies and throttle them right before I call the police and have them jailed for assault. But while some of these kids really may be sadistic and mean… I think many of them are just too young, and too poorly taught by their parents, to realize the harm they do, and have done. In the virtual world, just like the children in Lord of the Flies, they are ungoverned. They are left alone in the wilderness of the Web where there is no sheriff, no vice-principal, no hall monitor to keep our kids in line. Which means it is our job. Parents. And since we can’t always be there to see what they write on someone’s Facebook page or in a text message, to prevent good kids from bullying we have to build within them empathy and a conscience that will serve them when we’re not there.

And part of that task is to use your child’s imagination. I think bullies are not so much evil as unfeeling. They cannot feel the pain and tears of the victim because they can’t see it or hear it. We have to teach them, role model for them, describe to them the hurt that you cannot see on the Internet but that we can help them imagine.

More: http://www.youtube.com/connectwithkids

More: http://www.youtube.com/connectwithkids

“I did a lot of stupid things while I was drunk, like about a thousand things, really.”

I think there are two lessons imbedded in his comment. He is not talking about being stupid after having a drink, having one beer or maybe two. He means he got stupid when he drank way too much, when he got drunk. Many will argue that at the age of 18, 19, 20, kids shouldn’t drink at all but the real problem is that so many kids binge drink, they slug down a 12-pack, or six or eight or 10 drinks at one sitting. They haven’t learned to go slow, to pay attention to the signs that they’re approaching the edge of losing control. In fact, that’s their goal, to feel oblivious and bullet-proof. They don’t know, they haven’t learned yet that getting happy and goofy and silly under the influence has a dark side. That’s the other lesson here: he’s right – there are about a thousand things that can go wrong.

Fights, black-outs, injuries, sex, car crashes, crime, lawsuits, arrest & prosecution, guilt, depression, addiction, ruined reputations, heartbreak for family and friends, on and on. And all of these, singly and in combination, happen a thousand times a day.

A central question in parenting is… can our children only learn “the hard way”? Or, said differently, can they learn about the danger of drinking, especially binge drinking, not by getting drunk, but by having lots of lively and informative talks with their parents starting when they’re really young? In conversations repeated year after year, can parents help a teenager feel in his gut the danger of drinking and driving, or does that child have to get drunk, get behind the wheel, and then crash?

Both teaching methods may be effective but it seems to me one of them is obviously better than the other.

I learned a couple of things about bullying that day. One is that, in the heat of the moment, kids don’t automatically know what to do if they witness bullying. We need to teach them; we need to talk it out with them and explore…even role model…different choices they could make. Ask the bully to stop. Pull the victim away. Tell someone. Hit the kid. And then talk about the likely consequences of each.

But I learned something else that day. Bullying hurts the witnesses, too. It hurts to watch someone get hurt. And not knowing what to do, feeling guilty about doing nothing, that hurts too.

That’s why I included hitting the bully. Not a good choice, I know, and not one that I said out loud to my daughter, but I won’t say I didn’t think of it. But then I stopped and said to myself, there is another hurt kid in this story. The bully. Somewhere along the line, she got hurt as well.

It’s not that fame and fortune don’t make you happy; the news is actually worse than that. (Or, in this recession, is it better?) They make you unhappy.

Psychologists at the University of Rochester studied recent college grads over two years, trying to figure what made them happy. What worked wasn’t extrinsic things, a car, a big house, fancy clothes…but then most of us knew that. The joy just doesn’t last long enough, you always need newer and more. (Once you drive off the lot, it’s a used car.) Instead, the researchers find that contentment comes from that list we got from our wise mom or grandmother: good friends, good health, and personal growth.  

I like that last one especially. Personal growth – learning, taking on something new and difficult, getting better at something. 

But here’s the surprise. Edward Deci, the author of the study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, says wealth and fame lead to anxiety and unhappiness. He told a LifeScience reporter the more people achieve their extrinsic goals, the more "they tend to feel like pawns, like they’re on a treadmill running forever and they’re not really in charge of themselves."

Now I guess it’s my turn to be the wise mom. I need to talk about this with my two teenagers.
And I need to wake up every morning and try to remember it… for myself.

Our children were out for Spring Break last week.   As we headed to the beach, I looked through our bookshelf to find something inspiring to read and landed on a book called, The Measure of a Man, a spiritual autobiography by Sidney Poitier.  I had purchased it a few months earlier since Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) has always been my favorite movie and To Sir with Love and A Patch of Blue rank in my top five. Given Poitier’s great body of creative work, I thought he might have something to say on the spiritual side.  Turns out, I was right.  The book is excellent, but more importantly, I made a profound connection with Poitier’s message.

As CEO of Connect with Kids, I often speak on the topic of "Affluenza" to parents, teachers, and students.  And as I read Poitier’s book, I was fascinated by the fact that an African-American man – who is more than 30 years my senior, who was born in the Bahamas and endured the prejudice of the 40s, 50s and 60s, and who has had a world experience far different than my own –provided validation for the very philosophy we promote in our presentations and programs at Connect with Kids. 

I found myself asking, “What do we have in common?  How is it that Sidney Poitier and I — worlds apart — have come to the same conclusion? After some reflection, the answer surfaced. 

At a young age, both Sidney Poitier and I learned the value of poverty.  Although we came to that understanding in a different time, from a different race, a different generation, and on different corners of the planet, we both had families that left a legacy of the significant value of commitment, discipline, and character rather than mere pleasure.  He and I both understood as small children before either of us could tell you why, that as Poitier put it “by having very little, I had it very good.” 

He learned directly by experiencing that poverty as a young child. I, a generation younger, learned indirectly through the legacy of my parents who made sure that even though I was raised in a fairly cushy, white, middle-class environment the lessons they learned in harder economic times were not lost on me. 

But Poitier, far more accomplished than I, says it in a way that touched my soul.  It bears repeating.  So here is a taste of what Poitier has to say about building character in an affluent, pleasure-seeking society, which I hope will whet your appetite enough to find the book and read it in full.

In talking about his own parents, Poitier writes:
"Reggie Poitier (Sydney Poitier’s father) knew what his legacy would be.  He knew and believed in the importance of his role as a father, and he knew that it extended well beyond his capacity as a breadwinner.  He believed in the responsibility and the dignity of his task as a bearer of standards and as an enforcer of standards and he wouldn’t let his relative position in the economic hierarchy of a crazy tourist economy in any way belittle that role. . . The fact is you can’t do that kind of parenting if your values aren’t clear to you in terms of your own life.  You can’t be passing on to your kids a strong foundation if you don’t have one yourself, because whatever foundation you do or don’t have –that’s what you’re going to pass on.  And when we pass on something that doesn’t serve our children, we have to be responsible for that." 

Regarding the subtle shift in values over a series of generations, Poitier writes (and I am paraphrasing) that as early as the 1940s, those coming back from the war were doing a lot of pleasure chasing due to explosive economic prosperity.  It was then that the pleasure principle was introduced.  The war generation of the 40s was responsible for the children of the 60s — who by that time had been so indulged that it caused, for the first time in history, a "distortion of the curve in values."  Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (mind-blowing experiences at the time) — in Poitier’s opinion — were simply a more extreme outgrowth of the same hedonism that began in the explosive economy following the war. And, as prosperity and pleasure-seeking matures, values can continue to erode. 

How do we change the tide?  Poitier offers this: "Focus on and examine people who are making enduring commitments."  He talks about famous people such as Nelson Mandela … but he also talks about simple people, including his mother, who got up every day before the sun to wash dishes and scrub clothes by candle light and who never had an indoor toilet.  Poitier notes that his mother found satisfaction in her commitments and in the discipline of hard work because she had never been introduced to the pleasure principle. 

He writes: "Dirt poor . . . I inherited such a legacy, and I pity the kids today who are being raised in such a way that they will be hard-pressed to enjoy the simple things . . . to endure the long commitments and to find true meaning in their lives. Poverty didn’t kill my soul.  Poverty can destroy a person, yes, but I have seen prosperity kill many a soul as well." 

Poitier notes that when children have a sense of pulling their own weight and contributing to the family, they take pride in that contribution and "learn responsibility and discipline through meaningful work."

In my opinion, Poitier is spot on.  It seems that if we can teach children the value of service, the deep satisfaction one can derive from discipline and commitment, then we will go a long way toward building character. Those values are different from the competitive values that are paramount today.  Commitment to service and to work that is critical for interdependence is not the same as a commitment to make a certain grade or win a certain trophy in order to receive external accolades.  It’s difficult to teach that kind of commitment and discipline in an affluent environment that values instant gratification, consumerism, ego and pleasure seeking. But, if we can create smaller interdependent environments at home and at school – environments that offer a counter-perspective through things like simple chores and clear standards –it’s possible a balance will emerge.

That’s our message at Connect with Kids and our goal in the talks we give to kids and parents and the shows we produce about "Affluenza."   Economic prosperity, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad. But the values it can produce will weaken the next generation if we don’t counteract that which instantly gratifies with that which provides substance and endurance through the promotion of commitment, discipline and delayed gratification.

At Connect with Kids, we don’t pretend to have all the answers. We only hope that raising the issue will at least begin a dialogue within individual communities so that those responsible for the children in their care will think about the legacy they leave to those children.

To all of the schools that have invited Connect with Kids to speak, I thank you for the opportunity to participate with your children, parents and faculty. I hope you will continue to find helpful information on our website, in our programs and through our presentations. And thanks for indulging me and taking a minute to read the blog.