I mentioned I’ve been thinking about addiction lately and here are some further ruminations. Recently on The New York Times’ Motherlode blog there was a post about colleges calling underage students’ parents when they’ve been caught drinking. It made me think about another article I recently read in the New Yorker about anthropologists’ take on drinking.

That article, “Drinking Games” by Malcolm Gladwell, explored the differences among cultures in how people drink and even how they act when under the influence. The interesting and unexpected conclusion is that there is a great deal of variation among cultures in this regard. This seems counterintuitive because we’ve been taught to think of alcohol as a drug with predictable effects that correlate to the quantity consumed. But what if the way we drink and how we act is just as much a product of socialization and acculturation? What impact does that have for social policy? For parents wishing to teach their children responsible drinking habits?

It seems to me there is something problematic in the approach of expecting youth not to drink until full adulthood. Under this scheme — presuming everyone actually adhered to it — parents would essentially have nothing to do with educating their offspring about alcohol because their kids would already be on their own when the behavior begins. We all know that this is not how it occurs in reality. Instead kids drink on the sly, amid their peers in a milieu that emphasizes inebriation.

Still, I am not sure what a better alternative approach is and am conflicted on how I will handle it when my children reach that age. But I think the “no alcohol until 21″ approach is ineffective and counterproductive. I’ll come right out and say that I think the drinking age should be lower and the driving age should be higher. In the end, we accept that it is our responsibility as parents to teach our children how to lead a healthy lifestyle and if we omit to teach them about responsible drinking then essentially we’re leaving the job up to somebody else. I think colleges are right to call students’ parents over alcohol violations but the intent should be education and not punishment.

I made the observation to my husband the other day that when our eldest was around 1-1/2 years old, people would frequently comment that it was “such a fun age.” Funny, now that he’s 3-1/2, people aren’t saying that anymore.

This age, if I had to characterize it, I would say is one of extremes. It brings amazing demonstrations of imagination, insight and sophistication coupled with bouts of exasperating lack of self-control and flat-out cruelty. An example of the latter: his younger brother will be happily toddling along en route to something that has caught his attention and his brother, unprovoked, will give him a full-on, two-armed shove that will send him hurdling floorward. The cry this elicits when the younger connects with said floor is one of heart-wrenching woe and incomprehension. “But why?” it asks. It seems the more blithely oblivious the younger is, the more the older feels compelled to wreck his happy sanctuary. Because he can.

It’s hard as a parent not to watch and wonder what demon has come to possess my little angel, who just yesterday was himself the giddy, grinning toddler. But as quickly as I think it, he’s another self, spinning some outlandish tale that includes scraps of vocabulary that he has collected like shells on the beach but can’t quite marshal into proper usage (i.e. “olfactory instrument,” which he heard in the movie “Babe” and uses as an adjective to describe “truck”).

What’s going on in his rapidly developing brain may not be as warm and fuzzy to witness as watching him learn to walk was, but it’s every bit as important. What he’s learning is self-control and experts have become increasingly aware that mastering this skill is of fundamental importance to children’s success in life. I read a fascinating article about this in May in the New Yorker, which interviewed a researcher famous for his “marshmallow test.” Over decades, he was able to show that children who were able to delay eating a marshmallow based on the promise of a greater reward if they waited were consistantly found to be more successful in life. This is an excerpt:

Psychologists have focused on raw intelligence as the most important variable when it comes to predicting success in life. (Stanford professor Walter) Mischel argues that intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to do their homework. “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”

Similarly, preschools are increasingly focusing on “executive function” — children’s ability to order their thoughts, process information and avoid distractions. A New York Times article in September looked at a couple schools that are at the forefront in forming curriculum to help develop this fundamental ability.

But it’s so hard. Even we adults struggle mightly with delayed gratification. While writing this post, I ate a chocolate chip cookie I intended to save for my after-lunch sweet craving. So I can forgive my 3-year-old for falling prey to an impulse or two. And tempting as it is, I won’t be trying any home marshmallow test. As the song goes, “Que sera, sera.”

The sources of my mommy guilt usually break down into three categories: food (as in “I’m failing miserably at getting my children to eat any green vegetables”), sleep (as in “maybe my child is acting like a banshee because he didn’t go to bed until after 9 p.m. last night) and intellectual stimulation (as in “if it weren’t for ‘Mighty Machines’ I’d never get a thing done around here”).

My latest anxiety falls in the third category. I’ve been horrible about teaching my children Spanish. Maybe that would be an acceptable omission for many, but I actually speak the language (for the most part). My oldest was born in Mexico for God’s sake. So I just can’t figure out why I use it so infrequently. Ironically, I’m reminded of the mother of the three children I was a nanny for in Spain. After a month or two in the household, she sat me down and said she wanted me to speak more English to the children so they will learn. “Instead,” she said, “they’re just learning bad Spanish.”

It was true, actually. The 4-year-old would sometimes pronounce R words without the rolled R, the hallmark of a gringo. I suspect, however, it was in part to get under his mother’s skin. At any rate, the reason I wasn’t speaking to them in English was because they didn’t listen. They didn’t listen because they didn’t understand.

So that’s the trap I’m getting myself into with my older child. Because I haven’t spoken enough Spanish to him, he won’t understand me when I do (I’ll note that my husband is much more vigilant about it than me even though he picked up the language much more recently). So along with the green vegetables, I’m committing to do better. (And now that I’ve written it, I suppose I better stick to it!)

A good point that this article in The New York Times makes is that talking to your baby or young children — in any language — is critical for their development. It seems self-evident, but in our busy, over-scheduled, multi-media lives, it’s easy to overlook. There are so many more demands on our attention these days. But making the effort pays dividends. And not just for them. There’s nothing like entering the wildly imaginative mind of a 3-year-old to make all the day’s stresses melt away.

How many times as a parent do we think, “if I could only read my baby’s mind”? I know I certainly have during our long, sleepless night as of late. A new book, The Philosophical Baby, by Alison Gopnik, probes this question to its deepest depths, according to a review on the online magazine Slate.

It’s generally believed that babies, because they have no preconceived cognitive structure to filter their perceptions, experience the world as raw sensation.

“The baby just is,” states reviewer Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale.

And because young children don’t know the way the world should be, it frees them to imagine an infinite number of ways the world could be.

Gopnik argues, “Children are the R&D department of the human species—the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. They [children] think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good one and make them real.”

I haven’t read the book but it suggests to me an interesting correlation to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” (which I read during the endless, blissful nursing sessions of my first baby’s first weeks). It explores the dual operating systems that control our behavior, one intentional and rational, the other unconscious and spontaneous. Interestingly, he notes that sometimes we erroneously allow the former to interfere with the latter when we let misguided reason override our gut. The book also shows, however, how we come up with rational explanations to justify actions that are essentially controlled by our primitive, intuitive brains. (He describes some fascinating research on married couples in which a researcher, based on brief observations, was able to predict with 95 percent accuracy which couples would still be together after 15 years. And it often wasn’t the couples you would think).

Personally, I find watching my children’s unchained imaginations wander in the world is one of the most wonderous parts of being a parent. It reminds me what an amazing world we live in and inspires me to plumb my own creative capacity, so easily neglected in the rat race that is adulthood.

My heart goes out to the parents of Tyler Gordon, the Fort Lewis College student who suffered a severe spinal injury in a single-vehicle car crash in late June. Gordon, who enjoyed rock climbing, snowboarding and other outdoor activities, is paralyzed from the neck down.

Gordon was driving his modified Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution at high speeds on U.S. Highway 550 when the wreck occurred. After the accident, he reportedly told a Colorado State Patrol trooper he was being “stupid.”

Studies have shown that the brain continues to develop through adolescence and young adulthood, making young people suseptible to risky behavior and poor decision making. In fact, researchers are learning that these are the very mechanisms by which the brain develops. The brain is in essense programming itself for better decision making in the future.

“Novelty seeking/sensation seeking and risk taking is the basis for considerable growth during adolescence, as well as for the seemingly reckless behavior of some adolescents,” wrote Dr. Elizabeth R. McAnarney, author of a long-term study on adolescent brain development published last year in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Speaking for myself, I know I made some pretty bad decisions back in the day. Fortunately, most us learn and grow in time to avert disastrous consequences. Others, sadly, pay the ultimate price for one poor choice. As I look ahead to the days when I will watch my sons go through this period, I can only hope that the odds will be in their favor.

On a bright note, the Colorado State Patrol announced last week that the number of youth ages 0-20 killed in motor vehicle crashes in Colorado dropped 44 percent between 2003 and 2008. The greatest decline in deaths was among people ages 15 to 20, which decreased 53 percent. The agency attributed this to the state’s Graduated Driver Licensing laws, which set limitations and requirements on new teen drivers, including a passenger restriction, a curfew and mandatory seat belts.