More American teens die from the result of texting than drinking.
Serious as a heart attack here, dudes. It’s not drinking and driving that is taking out our teens (although it is doing its share, no question), but, rather, it’s texting and driving.
Chilling new research from the Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York suggests that texting while driving has become the number one cause of death amongst teenagers behind the wheel, surpassing drunk driving for the first time.
An estimated 3,000 teenagers die each year due to sending and receiving text messages while driving, as compared to the 2,800 who died due to drunk driving. Another 300,000 teenagers were injured via texting – a number again higher than the 282,000 injured due to intoxicated drivers.
This is bad, dudes. Appallingly bad.
I mean, really. Just how important is it to know that your friend laughed. Or knows which is the 11th letter of the alphabet.
To sound just like the advertising campaign started by AT&T and now endorsed by the four major cellphone carrier companies, It can wait!
Seriously. We as parents need to drill this into the heads our our teenaged drivers and, more importantly, the young dudes and dudettes who aren’t drivers yet, but will be soon.
The best way to teach these impressionable minds not to text and drive is by making sure you — VISIBLY — don’t mess with your phone when you drive. Talk to them. Lecture them. Show them newspaper articles or vids from the nets. . . Whatever it takes.
Texting is not worth someone’s life. It’s not worth my son’s life. It’s not worth your life. My wife. Anyone. It’s just a text. Heck, if it’s that important, pull over and stop before taking the text. If it’s that important, you’ll want to give it your full attention.
And, you know, it’s not just teenagers who are being stupid behind the wheel. I mean, it’s not like they have a monopoly on the practice, even though it might seem that way sometimes.
The researchers involved in the study suggest that the problem isn’t that texting behind the wheel is more dangerous than driving under the influence. The problem is that teenagers text far more often than they drink, especially while driving. Having more opportunities for accidents results in, predictably, more accidents.
Though the survey only took a look at the driving habits of teenagers, it would be safe to assume that texting while driving is just as dangerous to adults. A recent study by AT&T showed that nearly half of all adults text while driving– a rate even higher than amongst teens.
Do yourself a favor. Heck, do me a favor. Stay off the phone when you’re behind the wheel. Show your young dudes the right thing to do.
When our first little dude came around, our house was a demilitarized zone. Nothing moved without registering on the sensors, being tracked by anti-injury warheads and intercepted as necessary.
By the time our third little dude came toddling by, we were lucky if the guards hadn’t showed up for work drunk and then got bored before selling off parts of the wall to pay for the weekend cookout.
We were getting a bit slack, is what I’m saying. Mostly because we’d been through it all before.
One of the things I know I did, and possible done by She Who Must Be Pretending She Can’t Hear Me, with Hyper Lad when he was young was take a shortcut to cleaning his pacifier. When Sarcasmo and Zippy the Diaper Boy used binkies, a dropped binkie got sterilized in boiling water before being reinserted in wailing mouth.
We had a number of spares sitting around, just waiting to be used.
Hyper Lad. . . not so much.
If he dropped his pacifier, I mostly just picked it up, sucked off any dirt, spat it out, wiped it off and then reinserted now-clean binkie. None the worse for wear.
What I didn’t know was that I was doing something to Hyper Lad’s immune system. Namely making it better. Yep. Really.
Parents who suck on their child’s pacifier to clean it may be inadvertently reducing that child’s risk of developing allergies, researchers found.
At age 18 months, children born to parents who said they cleaned their child’s pacifier with their mouths were less likely than those born to parents who cleaned the pacifier in other ways to have asthma (odds ratio 0.12, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.99) and eczema (OR 0.37, 95% CI 0.15 to 0.91), according to Bill Hesselmar, MD, PhD, of Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, and colleagues.
So, yeah, it seems as if slobbering on your little dudes and little dudettes can modify the bacteria in their guts and also modify their bodies’ response to various allergens. How cool is that?
We’ve always known that babies who drank breast milk inherited a portion of their mother’s immune resistance to various bugs and such, but this here is new. There are concerns, however, mostly with. . . cavities?
There is the possibility that cariogenic bacteria (which can cause dental cavities) can be transferred: “However, caries seems to be unrelated to pacifier use and may even be negatively associated with ‘close’ salivary contact between infant and parent,” the researchers wrote.
They acknowledged that the study was limited by the small sample size and by the difficulty of diagnosing asthma in early childhood, and called for replication in larger studies and in older children.
Still pretty cool. I wonder if I can get away with spitting on the little dudes now and then telling them it’s for their own good?
How I used a really cool film that’s coming out today to sort of talk about my actual topic? Not that I’m trolling for click bait or anything like that. It’s not like I’m mentioning sex or nudity or naked or something like that in the third sentence.
heh
Anyway, let’s get the last of this sunscreen out of the bottle and onto the blog.
There is, according to the American Academy of Dermatology, a right way and a wrong way to apply sunscreen so you don’t get burned. Who knew?
I figured just slathering it on until you could slide down a grass-covered hill at full speed was the way to go. And the grass leaves would scrape off the excess. Of course, that left grease tracks in the steep hills and killed the grass, but hey. . . That’s just the way we roll. See what I did there? A punne, or play on words?
Let’s head on over to listen to the fine skin doctors at the American Academy of Dermatology before I speak another horrible punne and really deserve punishment.
We’ve already talked about how the sunscreen you should be using should have a sun protection factor (SPF) of at least 30 and be broad spectrum to block out ultraviolet A and B rays (UVA and UVB). The next thing you need to know is that you’ve got to start slathering yourself up well before you head outdoors.
Apply sunscreen generously before going outdoors. It takes approximately 15 minutes for your skin to absorb the sunscreen and protect you. If you wait until you are in the sun to apply sunscreen, your skin is unprotected and can burn.
Which means you also need to make darn sure you cover every bit of exposed skin if you want the benefit of sunscreen. I mean, if you do most of the body and then leave, say, an unprotected stripe down the side of your torso where your arm would be if it weren’t in constant motion playing beach volleyball — just to pull an instance out of the air — it can really, really, really hurt.
Even worse, getting a severe sunburn can be bad news for future you. Damaging your skin with major doses of UVA and UVB can lead to more of a chance of skin cancer. Cover up. Get slathered. And make sure you use enough of the right kind of sunscreen.
Now watch this cool public service video. I’m sure it’s not corny at all.