I've been editing Connect for Kids for five-plus years now, coming from jobs in tv news and newspapers. When I first started out, I undertook a battle against some of the words and phrases that are commonly used by those who work with and advocate for children, but that sound strange to the rest of the world.

One of my pet peeves has been the overuse of the word "youth" as a singular noun referring to a person, instead of its first meaning, "the period between childhood and maturity." It's not that it's wrong -- it just isn't the way real people speak. When's the last time you heard someone say, "Hey, youth, have you done your homework?" or, "Isn't he a nice youth?" However, over time, the drip-drip-drip of constantly encountering the word used in this way has worn me down, and while I still take it out more often than I leave it in, sometimes I just let it go. I've learned to live with youth.

However, I'm going to draw the line right now on another little quirk, and that is the overuse of the tired, misleading, and to my mind positively toxic phrase "at risk," often irritatingly hyphenated to "at-risk" as in "Is your Teen At-Risk?" (the title of a brochure for parents at the end of their rope with their defiant, disobedient or otherwise troublesome teen).

In my early days with CFK, I honestly didn't get it. What was it supposed to mean? At risk of what, exactly? "At risk" doesn't make sense by itself. It needs some follow-up.

Eventually I figured out it was sort of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge verbal shorthand that could often be translated to something like: "at risk of winding up in juvie", "at risk of getting pregnant at 13", "at risk of flunking out", "at risk of getting hooked on drugs." Sometimes it meant something less concretely connected to some bad future outcome, but still ominous, like, "poor, urban, minority" or "in foster care."

And here at CFK, we also lean on the at-risk crutch. Youth At Risk is a major topic area in the taxonomy of our site, where we gather information on academic achievement gaps, teen pregnancy, service learning, substance abuse and some other stuff...a list that in itself says a lot about what a lame catch-all at risk has become.

Interestingly, though "at risk" has always bothered me, I only recently really put my finger on why. I was listening to Prof. Carol D. Lee of Northwestern University talk about what she and other researchers refer to as the "deficit discourse" that is so often the lens for looking at issues like black student achievement, the causes of the achievement gap, etc. Lee said that when educators start out believing that certain aspects of a child's experience are negatives that must be overcome (poverty, race, living in an urban setting)they simply cannot even perceive the strengths that might come from that experience. (Lee was speaking at a forum about a new book attempting to set a research agenda for the study of black education.)

It seems to me that when we label a kid "at risk" because he or she is in foster care, or is the child of a single low-wage working parent, or lives in a bad neighborhood, it darkens the lens through which we see that kid. At risk is just a short step from risky, and perhaps even dangerous. It's another example of the "deficit discourse" Lee was talking about, and stops us from seeing the light that shines from so many kids.

So, it's back to the barricades for me, and I will try even harder to reduce our reliance on this sneaky shorthand.

Last week, I wrote about the American Academy of Pediatrics latest pronunciamento on preventing crib death, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which re-emphasized that babies should be put to sleep on their backs.

But there are signs that while most new parents are well aware that stomach-sleeping is a risk factor for crib death, more and more of them are flouting the back-sleeping recommendation for one simple reason: babies sleep better on their tummies. They wake less often, and are more likely to achieve that Nirvana (for parents) known as "sleeping through the night" at an earlier age.

This quiet bassinet revolution is revealed on the Web, where feelings of anonymity and community combine to let parents feel safe in revealing their secret. According to a New York Times article, blogs such as BloggingBaby and web sites such as Baby Center reveal that many parents are rejecting the AAP recommendation. A Baby Center poll of more than 24,000 users of the site found that 42 percent said they put their babies to sleep stomach down.

The Baby Center poll doesn't claim to be scientific, but it does make me wonder if it's time for NIH to revisit its estimates of baby sleeping positions. According to NIH figures, in 1994, when the feds launched their public education campaign on the dangers of tummy sleeping, 70 percent of infants were sleeping on their stomachs, and by 2002 that had dropped to 11.3 percent. Over the same period, deaths from SIDS dropped by half, to 0.57 per 1,000 live births.

Is the number of stomach-sleepers on the rise? Was it ever as low as NIH estimated? It's not easy for parents to admit they are putting their child at risk, even if the risk is statistically very small.

Another factor may be playing in to the resistance to back-sleeping, and that is the stunning increase in rates of plagiocephaly, a deformation of the skull that is more common in infants who sleep on their backs. Doctors say that risk can be reduced by making sure infants spend time on their stomachs while awake, but that message doesn't seem to have broken through.

Back when the whole "parents with kids in school" gig was fresh, my husband and I were among the first to sign up for our precious slot on parent-teacher conference day. Even though, back then, I spoke to my children's teachers every schoolday when I dropped the kids off and picked them up.

It seemed like a meaningful ritual. I was working from home then, but even so, I'd dress up a little bit, throw on some lipstick, ditch the t-shirt and jeans for something a bit more professional...since there really is no recognized clothing style called "parental". It was a great chance to have at least a little bit of private time with people with insight into life's great mystery -- what my boys were like on the school stage.

The first time out of the box, there can be almost a voyeuristic thrill to hearing your quiet-at-home child described as "funny and outgoing," or learn about a previously unsuspected talent for coloring inside the lines.

But as the years go by, the ritual loses its thrill, becomes bleached of meaning, begins to irk more than inform. For one thing, in my district, once the kids move up to middle school, the conference time gets whittled down to 10 minutes. And you don't sign up for a time that works for you, the school sends you a letter with your time. We seem to be permanently stuck at 2:40 in the afternoon.

Most frustrating, the conference would be with the homeroom teacher. So our first year of middle school conferences were with -- the girl's PE teacher. Did I mention we have sons? Year two, we pulled the study skills teacher. So, after signing in, getting the report card, and making nice, another hour or so would be devoted to lurking vulture-like outside the classrooms of the teachers we really needed to see, hoping that we could grab a couple of minutes during a lull in their actual scheduled conferences.

Not very dignified, and only sometimes successful.

There's an interesting review of the research into what exactly is wrong with the whole parent-teacher conference gig on the American School Board Journal site. Turns out teachers can't stand them either.

What can be done to make conferences useful for parents, teachers and students, and less of an incredible drain of teacher time and energy and parent goodwill?

There's no getting around the fact that Cathy is a little strange. A middle-aged, indeterminately-shaped blond woman, she's always smiling -- a rather tight smile -- standing with her hands behind her back. The hubbub of a school cafeteria rises up around her, while she blurts out encouraging comments like, "You're a Vitamin Superstar! There's both Vitamin A and Vitamin C in that food!"

I met Cathy, the virtual lunchroom lady, on a website run by the Carollton-Farmers Branch school district in Carollton, Texas and designed by a company called Winning Habits.com. The site is designed to educate students and parents about the nutritional content of school meal menu items.

You can go online and pick your school from a drop-down list. Once you click your way into the cafeteria, Cathy appears, standing behind shelves holding the day's menu choices. Users can click and drag items to their tray. When they do, the price of the item pops up on the left, a nutritional analysis appears along the bottom, and the clock behind Cathy flashes either green for go, yellow for slow, or red for "whoa!" (I thought that was a nice Texas touch.)

As you load your tray, the program keeps a running total of the price of the meal you've selected, and of the nutritional content -- calories, carbs, fat, sodium, the works.

The idea, according to an article in eSchool News, is that parents and kids can sit down together and make menu choices for the next day, or simply experiment with what makes a healthy meal. It's part of an overall effort to help stave of childhood obesity. And at least for a one-time visitor like me, it's kind of fun. I can't imagine some of the more attitudinal middle schoolers of my acquaintance finding it anything but lame, but can see it working pretty well for some upper-elementary kids.

There are a couple of quirks -- I couldn't figure out how to put things back after putting them on my tray, so some inadvertent clicking loaded me up with three chocolate chip cookies and a bowl of "cheddar shreds." The caloric impact was devastating, and I may not eat again for a week.

And no matter how badly you choose, Cathy never has a negative word to say about your decisions. She'll praise you for your salad, and even for your "cheddar shreds" ("Way cool! You know where to find your Vitamin C!") but maintain a smiling silence about all those cookies.

I guess that's because there are no bad foods, only bad choices.

The developers hope other districts will be interested in hiring Cathy for their own virtual lunchrooms.

http://studentnutrition.cfbisd.edu/content/story.aspx?type=customcontent&sid=1034036

I hope the guys and gals over at the American Academy of Pediatrics have their flak jackets and helmets handy -- because the latest recommendations from the AAP on reducing the risk of crib death are cultural dynamite.

Yes, they've burst right into the bedrooms of exhausted parents of newborns with the following advice: do give your infant a pacifier to help her go to sleep, and don't share your bed with her. (And, while you're at it, make sure to have her lying on her back when she sleeps, take away the stuffies and the blankies, and keep the little snorfler in your bedroom rather than relying on a baby monitor.)

Why would the good doctors take such a risk of arousing the wrath of a) supporters of breastfeeding, b) abhorrers of pacifiers and c) adherents of attachment parenting? Well, crib death -- aka sudden infant death syndrome -- remains the leading cause of infant deaths beyond the newborn period in this country. While these sudden, unexplained deaths have been on the decline, recently the rate has stabilized at about 2,500 per year.

Recent research has indicated that the rate is higher among infants who don't use pacifiers; higher among babies who share a family bed; and lower among those who sleep in cribs or bassinets in their parent's bedroom rather than in their own room, even with a baby monitor.

Reducing crib death is a critically important goal for the AAP -- but it would be nice to see the new recommendations accompanied by a serious push to encourage and promote breastfeeding, which also has significant health benefits (including being associated with a lower rate of crib death). The "fine print" of the AAP recommendations include the advice to not use pacifiers for the first month of life if the baby is being breastfed -- but isn't explicit about whether or not this one-month delay presents a significant risk, or how to weigh the risks and benefits.

I suppose what we'd all most like to see would be a clear explanation of the causes of crib death, and a firm understanding of how to prevent it. Until then, the AAP is doing the best it can -- and parents, as always, will be the ones making the important decisions about balancing risks and benefits.

And it is a balancing act. My doctors made it very clear, when my first child was born, that babies should always be put to sleep on their tummies (so they wouldn't choke if they spit up). I obeyed, putting my child at risk every naptime and bedtime. When number two came along, my doctors were also clear: babies put to sleep on their sides had the best of both worlds: less risk of crib death, less risk of choking. Since this baby was considerably more round than square, I struggled mightily to get him balanced on his side. Since then, the medical profession has noticed that babies put to sleep on their sides will in fact roll over eventually, and ushered in the back-sleeping-only era.

Please, AAP, just don't ask us to balance them on their little feet.

There's a boy I know who says he's just about had it with school. He says he'll stop going as soon as he legally can, after he turns 16. Naturally, the adults in his life are buzzing about this -- does he mean it? Is he just trying to push our buttons? How can we help?

We try to launch meaningful discussions with him about his future, about opportunity, about responsibility, whenever the opportunity arises -- in the car, when he comes over for dinner, during halftime of the football games he loves to watch. He rolls his eyes.

I suspect we are not getting through. He sees us as well-intentioned, but clueless. And the one lesson he seems to have fully absorbed since starting high school just over a year ago is that neither his school nor his teachers have any real interest in his success.

Of course, that isn't true -- his teachers would like to see him succeed, and most probably understand that the Ds and Cs on his report card are no kind of measure of his worth... that they are instead a more accurate measure of his disdain.

So why can't he see that? One reason is that he has lost respect for school itself, which from his perspective is mindlessly addicted to a system of sanctions and punishments that are ineffective and anti-student. A prime example -- the institution of "tardy hall." Every student who arrives after the first-period bell in the morning is sent to the school auditorium to wait out the remainder of the period.

Clearly, this makes sense from a teacher's perspective -- it avoids the disruption of kids wandering into the classroom for the first five or ten minutes after class gets underway. But, does it make sense for students who have to steel themselves to come to school in the first place? My friend is habitually late -- not surprising for a heavy sleeper, a late riser, and an unenthusiastic student. So far, he's been in "tardy hall" eight times in a school year that is just barely getting underway...each time spending an hour joking and trading insults with all the other habitual latecomers.

In his opinion, what this shows is that even if school personnel SAY they care about his education, they obviously don't mean it. "Why would a kid who doesn't really want to be there anyway bust his butt to get there on time, when it's a much better deal to miss the bell and get sent to tardy hall?" His cynical view is that teachers would rather have these marginally engaged kids spinning their wheels in the auditorium than sitting in the classroom.

It's not a perspective I share -- but it's one that's kind of hard to disprove.

In the current discussion about reducing dropout rates (which are surprisingly difficult to pin down, but seem to be at about 30 percent), there's a lot of attention being paid to fixing whatever is going wrong in the classroom. It will probably be worthwhile to also spend some time looking at non-classroom aspects of school culture that make bright, complicated kids like this one feel that they aren't wanted, won't be missed, and are not gaining anything of value.

I love my computer. I love high-speed Internet. I even love the new IM feature that lets me pester my colleagues so much more efficiently.

But sometimes the stuff that pops up on my computer screen gives me a funny feeling -- a sense that there is a gremlin in my hard-drive, trying to warn me that technology is not all about democratizing access to information, building vibrant virtual communities, etc. etc. -- it can also be about new ways of exerting social control.

Today, I came across two news stories in quick succession, and thought I saw my gremlin at work. The first was from eSchool News Online, and explained how Cornell researchers have adapted some computer exercises that had been used to train monkeys for space travel into computer games for human 4- and 6-year-olds. The researchers wanted to see whether these youngsters' brains could be trained to pay better attention for longer periods of time. The second was from an NBC station in North Carolina, and told how police had, twice in the past week, used Tasers on violently disruptive high school students inside their schools.

The Cornell research is part of a wave of new investigations into the stages of development of the human brain, and how experience can shape that development. It's a fascinating field with exciting implications for addressing learning disabilities and for better understanding cognitive growth. But it raises some ethical and cultural questions that I don't often see discussed. If sitting young children down to play monkey games can change the way they use their brains, how will we use that knowledge? Will it be to unlock every child's potential -- or to engineer quieter, more biddable students, inured at an early age to sitting quietly at a keyboard?

Tasers, which work by delivering a powerful jolt of electricity that causes every muscle in a victim's body to contract at the same time, have been used by law enforcement agencies since 1998. They have been welcomed as a non-lethal and effective method of subduing violent individuals.

(The NBC-17 story on the web includes a poll, which asks readers if they support the use of Tasers in high schools. When I checked, not many had taken the poll, but 85 percent thought that was a fine idea.)

But the jolt of a Taser can cause side effects, including a spike in blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, even cardiac arrest. A Newsday special report in April said that 100 people have died following Taser jolts. A 14-year-old who was Tasered by police went into cardiac arrest, but recovered.

Still, the Taser's reputation as a no-blood, no-bruises approach to messy situations -- may make it a little too easy to pull the trigger. I can't think how else a Miami officer wound up delivering not one but two Taser jolts to a disturbed 6-year-old in a school office.

It's not that I don't appreciate the enormous promise of new brain research for kids, or don't think that Tasers are a valuable tool for people with a very tough job. I just think it's important that we don't let powerful new technologies sneak up on us and become an unquestioned part of our cultural landscape without thinking through what they might mean and what unexpected changes they might bring.

My buddy Captain Underpants has, through sheer rudeness, crudeness, and silliness, soared to near the top of the American Library Association's list of 10 most-frequently banned books for 2004. He and his tighty-whiteys are number four on the list -- leaving the evil Lord Voldemort in the dust. (For the first time in five years, there is no Harry Potter book on the annual list.)

You go, C.U.!

I've been a fan of the Captain's for years, ever since he helped turn my classic "reluctant reader" son into a kid who does, sometimes, choose to curl up with what he considers a good book. Now, that's a superpower that matters...

This week is Banned Book Week, through Oct. 1, and the ALA is drawing attention to books frequently targeted by efforts to pull them from public libraries or schools. While librarians are as likely as other school personnel to come in for a pasting in Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants series, they should be acknowledged as heros as well, for their efforts to make libraries welcoming, inclusive and broadening.

As ALA President Carol Brey-Casiano puts it, "The abilities to read, speak, think and express ourselves freely are core American values."

The Captain is unpopular with parents and teachers who worry about crude bathroom humor and story lines that revolve around making authority figures (like parents and teachers) look stupid, evil, or both.

So, what else are the strangers who want to decide what kids and teens read taking aim at these days?

Top of the list is The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, first published in 1974, for violence and sexual content, offensive language, and religious viewpoint.

Three books with gay or lesbian themes are on the list this time, an all-time high. That's not too surprising in this particular cultural moment, when there is both a wealth of engaging writing coming from gay and lesbian writers, and a high level of anxiety around issues like gay marriage.

A surprise to me was the appearance of Maurice Sendak's sweet, surrealistic picture book In the Night Kitchen -- apparently because the dreaming little boy is naked.

You can check out the whole list. I'm going to strike a blow for the freedom to read by revisiting perennial contender Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, this year's number 10.

Recently I wrote about what I see as a worrying development in the public school/choice debate -- plans by a suburban developer to help fund the creation of new schools within an upscale development to serve residents' children, so they could avoid the existing local schools.

A story in the Sept. 26 New York Times bolsters my view that allowing middle- and upper-income families self-segregate into quasi-public schools that are not open to low-income children will only exacerbate the big problem facing public education today: the persistent achievement gap between different groups of students.

We usually talk about the achievement gap in terms of race. But it can also just as accurately be talked about in terms of income. And as the Times reports, when the Wake Forest school district in North Carolina adopted a policy of doing everything in its power to make sure individual schools did not have student populations that were more than 40 percent low-income, the effect on the achievement gap was stunning. Ten years ago, only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight scored at grade level on state tests a decade ago. In the most recent round of testing, that percentage had doubled, to 80 percent. Hispanic students have made similar gains.

Wake Forest, which includes Raleigh, has been able to do more to create economically diverse schools than many districts can manage. Because it is a county-wide district, it has access to suburban students. And Raleigh itself has a sizeable middle class population. The district has had to work hard to create these economically diverse schools, and there are some parents who are very unhappy because their children have to travel so far to go to school. But the schools are successful, and the district is gaining students, a sure sign of customer satisfaction.

Connect for Kids also reported this week on another district that has made real progress in addressing the achievement gap: Madison, Wisconsin. There, a strategy of employing an army of volunteer mentors to help struggling students with their reading and math has virtually eliminated the racial achievement gap in the lower grades. The organization that has been directing the deployment of volunteers is now turning its attention to middle schools and preschool.

So, the gap is not inevitable -- there are common sense solutions that are working right now in the real world. But, can they be adapted to the big city schools, where economic integration isn't possible because of a shortage of middle-class families, and where it might be hard to sustain an all-volunteer effort like that in Madison?

Justin Daniel Maldonado.

That's the name of the fifth young person to die while in one of California's youth correctional facilities within the last 18 months.

Maldonado, 18, had been in youth lock-up since for over two years for auto theft. He committed suicide on August 31, inside the N.A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton. I'll leave it to the Pacific News Service to provide the details, in this heartfelt story written by members of the Los Angeles Youth Justic Coalition, all young enough themselves to qualify for "Chad," as the facility is known, should they wind up on the wrong side of the law.

What's clear is that Maldonado, like thousands of young people in California, was a disturbed young man with many needs that were not being met, in the control of and at the mercy of a juvenile justice system that is failing even the basic responsibility of keeping young offenders alive.