More than $22 billion -- that's how much researchers estimate underage drinkers spent on alcohol products in 2001. That's almost as much as was spent by alcohol-dependent adults -- $26 billion. And together, these two groups of people (who according to law and convention shouldn't be drinking at all) account for more than a third of the alcohol industry's sales.

The findings, from work led by Susan E. Foster of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, make it pretty clear that the public health messages young people get about the dangers of drinking are no match for the societal forces that make it not just acceptable, but expected, for this age group to experiment with alcohol.

And they raise some very tough questions for parents of pre-teens and teens, especially those many millions of us who buy and consume alcohol ourselves. My husband and I never thought twice, when our kids were young, about drinking wine with dinner or having a couple of cocktails at a weekend party. But now, I can't help thinking about the "do as I say, not as I do" message that we're sending. Not that my parents' generation ever seemed to feel much angst over that -- "Because I said so" seemed like enough of a reason back then.

But alcoholism runs like a destructive thread through so many families, including my own, and no one wants to see their child wrestle with that.

And then there's the research that indicates one of the best ways to prevent alcohol dependence is to delay the age at which regular drinking begins. According to some research, people who begin drinking before age 15 are four times as likely to become dependent on alchohol as those who start after they turn 21.

Of course, that's another example of research that really doesn't do much to help set practical parenting guidelines. I can't help wondering if the kids who start drinking before age 15 aren't already predisposed to do so. So, is the early onset of drinking the cause of later dependence, or simply a symptom?

No way I can figure that out in my free time.

I gave up alcohol while I was pregnant. (But not caffeine. Got to draw the line on maternal sacrifice somewhere.) Should I give it up while my kids are teens? That's a long time to go without -- especially during what are billed as the highest-stress years of parenting. But it would be good for my health, no doubt. It's worth thinking about.

The Florida legislature has agreed to do away with the state's four remaining boot camps for juvenile offenders, and replace them with a "softer" program. The decision, which includes some increased funding, is a fitting memorial for 14-year-old Martin Anderson, who died one day after entering the Bay County boot camp in January. Though the doctor who performed the first autopsy on Anderson ruled his death was due to sickle-cell trait, a usually non-fatal blood disorder, the release of a video from the boot camp showing guards beating Anderson raised questions about that result. A second autopsy was carried out with the consent of Anderson's parents, but the results haven't been made public.

The new plan calls for the four boot camps to be reorganized using a program called STAR -- Sheriff's Training and Respect.

The key difference: a prohibition on using psychological intimidation techniques and physical force, except in very specific instances when guards or other young people are in danger of physical harm. And there's going to be more rigorous training for staff. The Bradenton Herald has a good overview.

The camps would be monitored by an independent body, the Juvenile Justice Accountability Commission, whose members will be appointed by the governor. The boot camps were not subject to independent monitoring, which may have led to some of the problems. There will be a new focus on education, and juveniles will be monitored after they are released through an after-care program in an effort to reduce recidivism.

Three of the four boot camps had a recidivism rate of close to 50 percent with a year of "graduation," pretty poor results for a system that put kids at such risk. To me, any program that has "pain compliance" as part of its strategy for dealing with teenage offenders is wrong-headed and wrong-hearted from the get-go, but you'd like to at least see results....

(The fourth camp, with a recidivism rate of 23 percent, differed from the others in that it included an after-care component to help kids transition back to school or work in their communities.)

It won't bring back Martin Anderson, but it's a step towards more humane -- and effective -- juvenile justice in Florida.

Congress returns to DC this week. First up will be more budget negotiations to try to get a budget blueprint that can pass the House. But many advocates for children and families argue that no budget blueprint is better than one that favors tax cuts over investing in improving schools, health care and access to college.

In the "are you scared yet" department, Brookings analysts say rising deficits and growing national debt will crowd out investment, slow economic growth and reduce the average family's annual income by $1,800 in just eight years. Government debt is also likely to drive up interest rates, making the typical $250,000 mortgage cost about $2,000 more a year.

Rob Portman, President Bush's new pick to head the Office of Management and Budget, faces a $318 billion deficit.

That's a hefty price to pay for not letting time-limited tax cuts expire, especially those for the wealthiest households.

An article in USA Today says researchers disagree on the data on the dropout crisis.

A researcher who should know better is hyping his report by asking "what dropout crisis?"

The Youth Policy Action Center says young people can tell it like it is--there is no question we have a dropout crisis when thousands of young people without a high school diploma can't make it past the waiting list to get a second chance at an education and job training program in their community.

So it's come to this.

Omaha's troubled urban school district is now poised, with the blessing of Nebraska's legislature and governor, to divide itself into three separate districts -- one mostly black, one mostly hispanic, and one mostly white. And the man behind it is the state's one-and-only black lawmaker, State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha.

How Omaha and Nebraska have wound up here is a fascinating and complicated story, with lessons for every struggling majority-minority urban district in this country. And thoughtful Nebraskans have a lot to say about it.

In her piece in the Northern Star Online, columnist Jessica King worries about the inherent lesson children will learn from the proposed district set-up... "How can students learn the cultural value of diversity if they're told the school district they belong to is purposely segregated? How are they supposed to learn that the color of their skin is not their most important feature? How are they supposed to learn about and understand other races and ethnicities?"

For his part, Chambers argues passionately that minority children will gain, because districts will be controlled by adults from the same minority, who will have their best interests at heart.

For some insight into how at least two clued-in Nebraska parents feel about the plan, check out this discussion between A’Jamal-Rashad Byndon, an African-American parent of an Omaha student, and Susan Darst Williams, a white parent in the Omaha metro area.

Here's a thoughtful blog about the law, with insight into what's driving Chambers and like-minded minority residents of Omaha.

As with the issues of charter schools and vouchers before this, in Nebraska disgust with decades of educational malpractice seems to be turning into a potent and unpredictable political force, one that finds minorities making common cause with conservative and rural interests to the befuddlement of mainstream observers.

Massachusetts' Republican Governor Mitt Romney is making a name for himself nationwide by championing a solution to the health care crisis in his state--a sweeping healthcare reform bill that aims to insure almost every citizen by requiring individuals to buy health insurance if their employers do not.

Governor Romney apparently thinks good health care coverage is good for his state's economy, and good for his presidential ambitions.

Gov. Romney is willing to pay for his new plan by using some of the more than $500 million in federal and state money the state uses now to compensate hospitals for treating the uninsured each year. And instead of using an an anticipated revenue surplus for another tax cut, Romney is willing to earmark the surplus for expanded health coverage.

President Bush is campaigning for a different approach to the problem--high-deductible health insurance policies and tax-free personal health savings accounts. Bush argues that the problem of rising health care costs is because too many people seek medical care without thinking about the costs, so his plan puts more responsibility for health care costs in individuals' accounts.

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber figures that President Bush's fully phased-in Health Savings Account plan would cost about $11.6 billion per year -- $7.1 billion to subsidize premiums and $4.5 billion to subsidize tax-free contributions.

Gruber estimates that only 3.8 million of the 16.6 million benefiting from Bush's policy will be those who were formerly uninsured.

What's more, he estimates that the Bush plan would actually lead to an increase in the number of uninsured because the shift in incentives will lead employers, especially small businesses, to drop health care policies for some 8.9 million employees. As a result, Gruber projects the total number of uninsured persons to rise by about 600,000.

And in the end the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the President's proposals would provide their largest benefits to wealthy households who can already afford medical care, and would add some $150 billion to the deficit over the next decade.

Arrest rates for assault are rising for girls but before we start an avalanche of talk shows about what's the matter with girls today, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania say we better look at the data first. They say girls' arrests for homicide, robbery, and rape/sexual assault have not been rising. And the evidence is that assaults by girls haven't been increasing either.

So what's going on? Maybe it isn't girls who have gone wild, but adults bent on punitive policies that redefine aggressive behaviors as assaults and put more girls under arrest for what used to be dealt with through detention and other means outside the justice system.

Juvenile crime has decreased every year for more than a decade--but you wouldn't know it because get-tough policies have pushed more and more girls AND boys into the justice system for lesser offenses.

Instead of lifting more children out of poverty, the benefits of the current economic recovery (and the recent tax handouts) have flowed disproportionately to the wealthiest families, lifting the fortunes for those at the top but leaving more children behind in poverty. Bernstein and Greenberg say it doesn't have to be this way:

"In the United Kingdom, the policy-driven focus on reducing child poverty has helped to ensure that economic growth is reaching those at the bottom of the income scale."

Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, and Mark Greenberg, the executive director of the American Progress' Task Force on Poverty, argue that the British formula for reducing child poverty has been successful, boosting the incomes of working parents mainly through subsidies to low-wage earners by regularly raising the minimum wage, instituting programs to develop healthy and school-ready children, and launching a government agency that specifically tackles the conditions afflicting poor families.

In 2003 Tim Smeeding made the same argument in "Poor Kids in a Rich Country." Using a rich data set from the Luxembourg Income Survey, Smeeding built a compelling case for the argument that it is U.S. domestic policy choices, not economic or social forces beyond government control, that account for the lion’s share of child poverty.

While every other wealthy country is deliberately making budget and policy decisions that directly improve the conditions for low-wage families raising their children, ours is moving in the opposite direction.

Congress has refused to raise the minimum wage for years. And instead of choosing a budget this week that uses the federal budget to help more families keep health care for their children, improve schools, and provide access to college, Congressional leaders are trying to legislate billions in more tax handouts to the wealthy.

There's nothing quite like the first days of daylight savings time to remind us that no matter how plugged in we get, how wired our homes and our lives, we've evolved in tune with the sun, moon and stars. It's hard to get up in the dark; hard to sit down to dinner while the sun is shining brightly. Near impossible, as a young child, to go to bed on a midsummer night before the sun has truly set.

On the other hand, we've gotten used to bulldozing our natural inclinations, in the service of school, work, physical fitness, TV, e-mail, etc. And the evidence is pretty clear that we're not doing a very good job helping our kids listen to their inner clocks.

The latest on the sleep front comes from KidsHealth, which just released the results of a survey of 1,187 children ages 9 to 13 across the U.S.

Turns out that an estimated 62% of kids ages 9-13 do not get enough sleep and 70% wish that they could get more sleep. Experts recommend that school-age children receive 9.5 to 10.5 hours of sleep each night. Many are barely logging 8 hours.

This doesn't just lead to kids who are unpleasant to have around. It leads to kids with lowered immune resistance to illness, kids who feel down and don't know why, kids who don't do as well as they could in school.

Another key finding: children who said their parents imposed a bedtime got an average of 45 minutes more sleep each night than those whose parents did not.

KidsHealth's advice is a good reminder that the venerable institution of bedtime is about more than giving grown-ups a kid-free hour at the end of the day, it's about safeguarding children's health.

An interesting note from research into a more extreme aspect of poor sleep: researchers have found strong evidence that a significant minority of children diagnosed with ADHD may have undiagnosed sleep disorders that can be alleviated by having their tonsils and adenoids surgically removed. As reported in the New York Times, the evidence indicates that in those cases, the ADHD symptoms can go away once the sleep disorder is eliminated.

Does anyone else remember learning "Basic" in grade school? I can't recall any details about it, except that x equalled just about everything, but what I do remember is that it was a powerful lesson in the extreme literal-mindedness of the computer "brain." Even the tiniest typo could result in a complete breakdown of the poor machine, a mini-version of that great scene in the Hepburn-Tracy comedy "Desk Set" when the fact-checking computer starts spewing cards and smoke.

A lot has changed since then, including our understanding of what kids need to learn about the technology that is changing our world. Programming, for instance, is now understood to be very much an elective, thank goodness.

Instead of telling computers what to do, students will increasingly be relying on computers to help them learn. Last week, Michigan took a step towards the cutting edge with legislation that requires every student in the state to take part in some form of online instruction before graduating from high school.

Supported by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, the move is part of a broader effort to make high school graduation requirements tougher. Granholm hopes that "This new curriculum will help give Michigan the best-educated workforce int he nation", according to a report in eSchool News.

Michigan now becomes the place to watch for those interested in the promise of online education.