Between 1997 and 2003, the country saw teen smoking rates plunge steadily, according to a story in the Washington Post. But as the Post recently reported, those numbers have plateaued between 2003 and 2007, suggesting anti-smoking advocates are not making any more inroads.

One in five teens still smokes, according to Terry Pechacek of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which released the new data:

Pechacek blamed the trend in part on cuts on anti-smoking campaigns by states that had been funded by a nationwide 1998 settlement of a class-action lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

"Many large states had very active campaigns that went off the air," he said, citing Massachusetts, Florida and Mississippi as examples of states that had cut their programs.

At the same time, cigarette companies have continued to increase their spending on promotional activities, including heavily advertising brands that teenagers are most likely to smoke, working to feature smoking in movies and videos and offering pricing incentives that offset increases in cigarette prices.

A spokesman for Altria Group, the parent company of Philip Morris USA, said his company has a number of programs to discourage teen smoking like punishing stores for selling cigarettes to minors.

Well, considering the company has no moral qualms of marketing its deadly products to an 18-year-old -- and the rest of us for that matter -- this sounds like it is simply covering its ass.

The Washington Post's "Ask Amy" columnist recently doled out some harsh words to a cohabiting couple who were wondering if it was couth to ask for money in lieu of wedding presents. (Answer: It is not.)

In some cultures, brides and grooms are traditionally given cash at the wedding. I can see how fetching that idea is to you, but if this is not your cultural tradition, and if asking outright makes you squirm, there is a fair chance it would make your family and friends uncomfortable too.

You've been living together for many years. You've flouted marriage tradition and enjoyed the benefits of cohabitation. Perhaps you could also reject the tradition of expecting gifts to establish a household you already maintain.

It is not your guests' job to help you recoup the cost of the wedding. Your wedding should be a gift from you to your friends and family, who will share this day with you. You shouldn't have a larger wedding than you can afford.

Ouch. But this makes sense.

We, too, got married after three years of living together and grappled with some wedding traditions. Because we had our ceremony in El Salvador, we decided we did not want to lug back a bunch of gifts to California. We actually wrote "no gifts, please" on our wedding invitations, although DH's family insisted on giving us presents since they had no traveling expenses. They gave us typical art and relics from El Salvador, which we so appreciate eight years later.

How did you handle gift-giving and some of the more traditional aspects of the wedding? What did you change? What was unique about your ceremony?

The good thing about getting married in El Salvador in 2000 was how affordable it was. We were able to pay for airfare, hire one of the best salsa bands in the country, have a fireworks display, and a tasty buffet for well under $10,000. Then again, my free wedding planner, dear mother-in-law, was quite resourceful!

Will Smith and his actress wife Jada Pinkett Smith will open a private school in the fall focused on academics and the arts, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The school, New Village Academy, is slated to open this September at the Indian Hills High School campus in the Las Virgenes Unified School District.

In a statement, Will Smith said of the school: "About 10 years ago, Jada and I started dreaming about the possibility of creating an ideal educational environment, where children could feel happy, positive and excited about learning. . . .

"New Village Academy was born of a simple question, 'Is it possible to create an educational environment in which children have fun learning?' Jada and I believe the answer is 'Yes.' "

New Village Academy began about three years ago as a home school for the Smiths' youngest children -- Jaden, 9 and Willow, 7 -- and those of several other families. After an extensive search, Jacqueline Olivier, previously an administrator at private schools in Santa Monica and La Jolla, was hired to head the school...

The school, she said, will use many philosophies, including Montessori, Bruner and Gardner. Olivier said the Smiths would pay nearly $900,000 to lease the Indian Hills High School campus in the Las Virgenes Unified School District for three years. Fall enrollment is expected to be about 40 students and will eventually rise to about 100, she said. The school will include pre-kindergarten through sixth grade, with a top annual tuition of $12,500.

Being celebrities, the opening of their school is already mired in controversy. Among other media outlets, Fox News made a big deal that some of the teachers are Scientologists who will use teaching methods steeped in the religion. But Olivier said the teachers are of many religions, including Scientology, Christian and Muslim -- although the school is secular.

I don't get it. A big deal has been made about the Scientology, but what exactly would it look like in a classroom? The New Village curriculum sounds very rich, including literacy, math, "living skills," Spanish, karate, yoga, robotics, technology, etiquette and art. "Parental involvement is encouraged, as is limited access to television and sugary foods," according to the L.A. Times.

This doesn't sound much different than a montessori, waldorf or any other private school for that matter. What do you think? Is critique of the Smiths' new school warranted?

Sorry I couldn't get the article to link in the text, so there's a weird link at the jump.

Cross-posted at Fussbucket (also can't get the link to work right...)

Sometimes the timeout is a mom's only friend. Gone are the days that many of us would feel comfortable giving our naughty one a swat on the behind, a mouth full of soap, or an admonishment to "Wait until your father gets home!" But according to this article in Slate, we may not be using the technique correctly and might even be reinforcing bad behavior.

Most parents already have a rough working notion of how to use timeouts. When a child does something wrong, you send him off to sit somewhere by himself and do nothing for a set amount of time, like a hockey referee putting a player in the penalty box. Two minutes on a bench for hitting at the playground, five minutes on a stool in the corner for talking back, and so on. Because the timeout seems so simple, most people feel comfortable using it intuitively, guided by assumptions that the punishment should fit the crime, that a timeout gives the child an opportunity to reflect and repent, and that it teaches the child who's in control.

The problem comes when parents use more and longer timeouts. These proportional punishments, such as deciding to leave a child in timeout for only a few minutes for a minor infraction and longer for more egregious behavior, won't help change the behavior that's causing you to give the timeout in the first place, the article says.

Excessive timeouts do more harm than good, making a child irritable and more volatile in his reactions, and more inclined to escape and avoid the adults who punish him. Just as important, parents who punish excessively tend to escalate punishment, increasing the side effects and losing track of the original intent of giving a timeout, which is to improve a child's behavior. The opposite happens, in fact.

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I know there are a few of us with kids either starting college in the fall, or starting Senior year and so right in the middle of college planning.  And, I don't know about your house, but ours has been a little stressful over the past few months!  My DD is a good student - good grades and good SAT scores - so she has her sights on very competitive colleges (many overlaps with parentalunit's recent college trip!).  I'm proud of her and want the best for her, but I also see the pressure she puts on herself.  In her view, every decision impacts on her college application!

If you like learning about your brain and how your body works, you may enjoy The Itch, by Atul Gawande (The New Yorker, June 30, pp.58-65). It discusses a new theory in neuroscience circles called the "brain's best guess" idea.

[Perception] is the brain's best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picketfence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

The other day, the Washington Post ran a compelling editorial in favor of vouchers for poor D.C. students:

AMONG THE most maddening arguments used against the D.C. school voucher program is that it hurts the public schools. Any money set aside for vouchers comes on top of a generous federal allocation for the city's public and charter schools. Any effect of the vouchers on public education has yet to be established or studied. Most of all, which members of Congress would accept an argument that they should be forced to send their children to a failing school for the good of the school?

Yet critics repeatedly return to this canard. That's why it's important that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) reiterate to Congress that his school reform efforts will not be helped by depriving 1,900 poor children of an opportunity to choose their schools.

I waited for the letters to the editor as I knew there would be some opposition, including this letter writer from the Secular Coalition for America:

For parents who are looking for real school choice, there are public magnet and charter schools. The OSP does not offer school "choice" at all. When the Government Accountability Office published a study on the program last year, it concluded that Opportunity Scholarships fail to deliver the promise of school choice, because the bulk of participating schools are religious. Worse yet, the GAO also noted that the program lacks an opt-out clause for students wishing to avoid religious exercises.

The Post claimed that stopping this federal funding will amount to "depriving 1,900 poor children of an opportunity to choose their schools." But every student is welcome to stay in the school of his or her choice. Why would a school that is supposedly doing a good job be unable to raise private scholarship money for tuition? Students' religious training needs to be privately supported; given the cost of this program to taxpayers and to our secular tradition, extending a five-year mistake into a six-year one is just not justifiable.

Initially, I was torn after reading the Post editorial. No doubt many of the voucher recipients are low-income minority students living in run-down neighborhoods -- pretty much my family in Miami. Thanks to the generosity of the Catholic Church and my parents' own commitment, I received a kindergarten to 8th grade parochial education free of charge.

But I can't speak to the academic stellarness of the school as I feel it lagged behind the public high school I attended in New Hampshire and I easily scored the lowest in the SAT at that school. (My friends in Miami, who continued to attend Catholic high schools, scored even lower!)

I did some research on vouchers at Wikipedia and the Milwaukee voucher system, which is the oldest in the country. As it turns out, this whole voucher debate is much more nuanced than politicians and the media make it out to be.

Wow, it must be summer as there is nothing but dreary puff pieces in the news. Newsweek's Lorraine Ali reported that parents are not as happy as non-parents, but there is a lot of nuance in this article I agree with:

Is it possible that American parents have always been this disillusioned? Anecdotal evidence says no. In pre-industrial America, parents certainly loved their children, but their offspring also served a purpose—to work the farm, contribute to the household. Children were a necessity. Today, we have kids more for emotional reasons, but an increasingly complicated work and social environment has made finding satisfaction far more difficult. A key study by University of Wisconsin-Madison's Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, conducted some 20 years ago, found that parenthood was perceived as significantly more stressful in the 1970s than in the 1950s; the researchers attribute part of that change to major shifts in employment patterns. The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a deteriorating education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated—it has become more expensive. Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it costs anywhere from $134,370 to $237,520 to raise a child from birth to the age of 17—and that's not counting school or college tuition. No wonder parents are feeling a little blue.

Yes! This is what gets me: Everyone likes to point out how miserable parents are, but no one is willing to lend a hand -- unless there is payment involved. Thankfully, I can afford the occasional babysitter, which is saving my marriage. But what if you can never leave your home? Of course parenting isn't bliss!

I would disagree with this paragraph in the story though, only because I do believe the lack of help -- a "village" -- is what is ailing parents -- not the fact they have kids:

Societal ills aside, perhaps we also expect too much from the promise of parenting. The National Marriage Project's 2006 "State of Our Unions" report says that parents have significantly lower marital satisfaction than nonparents because they experienced more single and child-free years than previous generations. Twenty-five years ago, women married around the age of 20, and men at 23. Today both sexes are marrying four to five years later. This means the experience of raising kids is now competing with highs in a parent's past, like career wins ("I got a raise!") or a carefree social life ("God, this is a great martini!"). Shuttling cranky kids to school or dashing to work with spit-up on your favorite sweater doesn't skew as romantic.

I don't know. I felt that the puke on my favorite shirts humbled me and I love my children more than any other accomplishment in my life -- which leads me to the often underreported aspect of this story. While the study in question reported that parents experienced "lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," it also stated that parents felt a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than their child-free peers. Said Ali:

And there are other rewarding aspects of parenting that are impossible to quantify. For example, I never thought it possible to love someone as deeply as I love my son. As for (Ali's childhood childless neighbors) the Sloans, it's hard to say whether they had a less meaningful existence than my parents, or if my parents were 7 percent less happy than the Sloans. Perhaps it just comes down to how you see the candy dish—half empty or half full. Or at least as a parent, that's what I'll keep telling myself.

What do you think? Have your relationships or happiness suffered because of children? Please take our own internal poll!

So asks John Cloud in the June 30 edition of Time Magazine. His premise: social-host laws and abstinence-only programs do not prevent teenage drinking and, may in fact be

encouraging kids to leave their homes (presumably by car) and drink in parks or abandoned warehouses or anywhere else they think they won't get caught and their parents won't get arrested.

In case you missed it, Us Weekly ran a cover story on the Obamas. The pictures were gorgeous, especially the wedding photo of the bride and groom with their mothers.

Initially, when I searched the magazine online, I found an anti-Obama website with a very similar URL. Yikes!

The Cost of the Iraq War: Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria wisely pointed out that Sen. Obama should make the costs of the Iraq War an issue in his campaign. From his two-page screed, this is what most popped out at me:

There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before 2003, and Iran's influence has expanded massively since then.

"And then there are the more tangible costs. The war has resulted in over 4,000 U.S. combat deaths, four times as many grievously wounded, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths. Over 2 million Iraqis have fled the country and 2 million more have been displaced within the country. The price tag in dollars has also been staggering. In the last five years, the United States has spent close to $1 trillion on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. That is enough money to rebuild every school, bridge and road in America, create universal health care and fund several Manhattan Projects in alternative energy. Whatever benefits the invasion of Iraq might produce, it cannot justify these expenditures in lives and treasure.

Don't Hire This Dude: CNN ran a parenting series, including testimonials from its female correspondents on how they juggle work and motherhood. After reading the first reader comment, I knew the action was in the thread, including this stinker by "Attorney Douglas Palaschak:"

Reading the news to us is not as important as reading to your own children. Your TV job is trivial. Your at-home job as mother is important. What do you hope to achieve? You can end up on "The View" with a bunch of uneducated losers. There is one thing that you can contribute to society: you can raise a mentally and emotionally well child. You are neglecting that task!

I would put this up there with the guy who signed -- with his full and real name -- a newspaper editorial condemning benefits for pregnant female legislators. What a loser.

I admit it: I'm vain.

While I don't wear makeup on a daily basis and my hair is an au natural mess most days, I do get my eyebrows waxed regularly. I get pedicures during the summer. I recently started getting monthly facials. I go to the gym and work up a sweat in order to keep my weight reasonable. My vanity even extends to my nether regions...where I also get waxed regularly.

But Betty Beauty takes vanity to new levels. With Betty Beauty, your carpet can match your drapes...if you get my drift:

Our Award Winning betty™ products are specially formulated color dyes for the hair down there. In less than one year, over 100,000 happy customers are using betty to naturally match their hair above, cover gray or just for fun! Whether you're a blonde (be a true blonde now!), radiant auburn, rich brunette, raven black or want to try hot pink for fun, our easy to use no-drip formula gives you the perfect finishing touch.

The website also features hilarious (and sad) testimonials from satisfied customers, like the guy who can't wait to go to his next doctor's appointment and show off his jet-black bush (look Ma, no more grays!)

Here's another:

"THANK YOU! I cannot tell you how traumatized I was when I found my first gray hair down there a couple of years ago. You see, I am not yet 40. Now I have hope!"  -Lisa

Betty Beauty is the brainchild of Nancy Jarecki, who together with her husband sold their company, Moviefone, to AOL for $600 million. They moved to Rome, where Jarecki watched in fascination as women were discreetly handed brown paper bags as they left the beauty salon. Inside the bag: a little hair dye for the ladies to color their hoo-hoo nannies at home. Sensing an untapped business opportunity, Jarecki set out to create a product to market to legions of vain American women.

The thought of dyeing the hair on my cho-chah doesn't do anything for me. Heck, I can't even be bothered to dye the hair on my head! Then again, I have yet to find a gray hair on my drapes or my carpet. For all I know, the first sight of one will have me rushing to buy Betty Beauty...but I doubt it.

What do you think? Is this a genius idea? Would you give it a try? Or do you think it's the height of inanity? If Bill O'Reilly wrote a book about Betty Beauty, would he title it, "A Heartbreaking Case of Misguided Vanity"? Do you groom "down there" or let it grow free? Do tell...

Angelina Jolie recently discussed her pregnancy, life with Brad and the U.S. election with that bastion of journalistic integrity, Us Weekly. Here are some of her responses:

On Pregnancy Sex
"We weren't expecting twins!" she admits, adding that she and Pitt, 44, "like a challenge." One pregnancy perk? "It's great for the sex life," she says. "It just makes you a lot more creative. So you have fun, and as a woman you're just so round and full..."

On Family Bedtime
"On weekends we usually have family sleep," she says of the weekly ritual. "Everybody stays up late, watches a movie and stays in our bed....The boys tend to want to be near Mommy, and the girls tend to want to be near Daddy. So it works out nicely."

On Gifts From Brad
"(Maddox), our 6-year-old, draws lots of war scenarios, so for Mother's Day, he drew a machine gun and Brad had it made into a necklace, which is really sweet," she says of the accessory she wore in an EW photo...

On the Election
"I think people assume I'm a Democrat. But I'm registered Independent, and I'm still undecided. So I'm looking at McCain as well as Obama," says the star, who was initially too intimidated to talk politics with Changeling director (and Republican) Clint Eastwood.