Do television shows like "Sex and the City" and "Gossip Girl" encourage teen girls to get pregnant?  Well that's the finding of a Rand Health study published last week in the November issue of Pediatrics.  According to a New York Daily news article by Jane H. Furse about the study: Rand Corp. behavioral scientist Anita Chandra found teens who watched the sexiest shows were twice as likely to become pregnant over the next three years as those who watched few such programs.

I have been turning the Nebraska child abandonment cases over in my head since I heard about them last week. First, two children were abandoned--a mother abandoned her 11-year-old son at one Nebraska hospital and an aunt left her 15-year-old nephew at another. Both adults indicated they couldn't handle behavior problems. Next, Gary Staton, widower and father of 10 dropped off nine of his children because he could not afford to care for them any longer and feared they'd become homeless. He said he believed the children would be better off without him.

This is a media-saturated culture, resulting in kids with increasingly sophisticated taste. Couple that with tight economic times, and you have a recipe for stress for parents.

Are you afraid of teenagers?  I'm not:  general category.  I am:  my own child becoming.  Teenagers in general are extremely attractive globs of iddy goo, unaware of how frickin' awesome they look now, what with their lack of cellulite, abdominal muscles and unlined skin, unaware of how completely uninformed and unformed they are, convinced as they are that they know everything just because they can hit the eighteenth level of Whatever Game Is Not Important to Me.

We have reached the last weekend of summer.  That can only mean one thing in this house.  We have reached the last minute panic as I inventory closets and drawers to see if I really do have to make that journey to the mall for the yearly Back-To-School shopping torture experience.  After two hours and 5 stores, I left the mall with a teenage son who bought a new pair of shoes, some socks and one shirt.  My tween?  He had one pair of jeans and one shirt.  That's all.So much for getting prepared ahead of time this year!

Of course what teens are wearing -- and what they spend on those clothes -- is always a hot topic, for all of the obvious reasons. But Eileen Putnam's recent article on CNN.com starts out going for flash (the title is Mom shocked by teen's modest clothing) and then goes on to detail a myriad of conclusions which one could argue are both illogical and self-conflicting.

I won't presume to know better than a bunch of college and university presidents...But, I'm just not sure I believe that lowering the drinking age to 18 will reduce teen binge drinking. However, I imagine, it might take some of the responsibility off of the colleges to reduce underage drinking on their campuses.

Can a good movie reduce stress? I've always believed that smiling and laughing is healing in some way. And, there is a lot of evidence that supports that theory. I also know that for me, music can deeply affect my mood. Some songs are sad reminders of the past, and others are happy reminders of experiences I never want to forget. Seeing the movie Mamma Mia with my daughter, and listening to all the music, is definitely going to be a lasting and happy memory for me.

I came home Monday afternoon to a strange house. A confused woman who does not know me had been wandering its rooms, but now sat quietly, staring into space. Another woman that I barely know busily cleaned one room, shaken by what she'd witnessed, and a little old man hobbled in the living room. In the back bedroom, a young giant slumbered in clutter, and the family cat did not peep from behind the kitchen's bay window curtains to see who'd come to visit. Neither did the family dog bark in the backyard as he usually does when anyone arrives.

In my household when we talk about that "soft glowing light flickering in the night" we are not talking about candles. We are talking about the various technological gadgets that our teens- and we as parents- are plugged into every day. My teen and my tween both have a cell phone, an MP3 player, a Nintendo DS and other various hand-held games and portable DVD players. Those are just the electronics they have that are portable. We aren't even mentioning the gaming consoles, computers and laptops that are a part of everyday life.

Do Good Moms Have Teens That Use Drugs? We try so hard to be the best moms we can be. But does that guarantee us drug free kids? Unfortunately, not. I know moms who seemed to do everything right, and their teen still started drinking or doing drugs. Most parents think it could never happen to their child, but it does. So, would you know if your teen was doing drugs? What should you do? Is Your Teenager Using Drugs or Alcohol...

Should YouTube and other online video sites be held more accountable for the increase in fights being posted on their sites? After that horrible incident in Florida a few weeks ago of several girls luring another girl to a house so they could beat her up, videotape the incident and then post it on YouTube, there have been many discussions about whether YouTube bears any responsibility for monitoring what's posted on their site more closely.