Still, there are other times when I want to press down really hard on top of my kids’ heads in the hopes that they will stay exactly as young and precious and perfect as they are right now.  Both of these impulses are reminders of what the essence of childhood really is, and how we react to it is what makes us parents in the first place: Children are ever-changing on the trajectory toward adulthood.

Navigating the different rates of physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, and how they interact within one kid, is sometimes tricky.  Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, documented different rates of growth for cognitive skills vs. psychosocial maturity in kids ages eleven and up.  He found that cognitive skills like logical reasoning top out at around age 16, while social and emotional maturity isn’t reached until our early 20s.  That bodes well for our educational system, which loads the bulk of complex academic foundation work in the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. It also explains a lot about the classic adolescent repertoire, with it’s seemingly incongruent mix of math wizardry, goofy social skills, and out-of-the-blue meltdowns.

Some other things you might have noticed about your kids as they grow up: Kids have long periods of no growth, with intermittent rapid maturing.  When your kid looks larger and seem more mature overnight, it’s because they are.  Kids also grow more in the spring and summer, which is why when we drop our kids off on the first day of school in the fall, those newly giant classmates are such a shock.  Kids will mature, in fits and starts (around here, mostly fits), whether we like it or not.

I picture a baton hand-off from the seniors to the juniors at this point.  The college admissions process starts in earnest this month, with standardized test preparation, a barrage of “look at us” mail, and college tours.  Juniors will strategize on letters of recommendation, how to best spend the upcoming summer, and a senior class schedule that reads “superstar,” not, “slacker.”

Most of these things will happen with help from parents.  Some will take time, some will take money, and some will take both.  Some will simply require knowledge that not everybody has.  Just because you applied to college yourself back in the day, you’re not necessarily qualified to guide your own kids through the process.

The college admissions scenario has changed radically in 25 years.  More students than ever are applying to college, and the Common Application means that all those kids are applying to more colleges than ever before (at Vassar College, the kids they accept have applied to an average of 11 schools).  When you have more kids applying to more schools, the odds of being accepted to any one school are exponentially reduced.

When enough people have the money, but not necessarily the time or knowledge to do something, one can generally find a professional to fill the void.  In the case of college-bound kids, that person is a college counselor, who is either employed by a private high school, or directly by parents, to shepherd a child through the admissions process and maximize the kid’s chances of getting into the best-fitting school that they are qualified to attend.

I’m convinced that a parent with enough time and access to information can do without hiring a private counselor, and I was advised by a college admissions director that private counselors’ interventions are transparent, and not necessarily beneficial.  Considering this, they probably don’t hurt.  But what about children who have neither a private school counselor, nor the family resources to get the information and advice they need?

There is at least one non-profit organization in L.A. whose mission is to help children through the college admissions process.  They provide college tours, test preparation, and advisory services at no charge for students from 14 L.A. public schools.  Ask your school about College Match, or see collegematchla.org for more information.

On the face of it, this is a simple matter of geography.  Hiring a woman in Ohio to be one’s surrogate isn’t physically any different than hiring a woman in India.  There are just longer plane rides involved when the biological mother first creates the embryo, and then later when she goes to collect the baby.

However, there are ethical differences in hiring women in developing countries to carry pregnancies.  A woman in India will make only a fraction of the fee that her Ohio cohort would earn.  And that woman will sign a contract stipulating that she cannot abort the pregnancy, and that the baby will be delivered by C-section in order to control the timing of the baby’s birth.  Both of these agreements could potentially endanger the surrogate’s health.  The surrogates are also closely monitored, living in supervised housing where their diets and lifestyle habits are controlled throughout the pregnancies.  I can’t help but think of these facilities as baby farms, which has a uniquely dystopian ring.

These issues have already been covered in media like the Wall Street Journal and on Oprah, but the recent attention to outsourcing as economic and political issues in this country makes foreign surrogacy arrangements newly relevant.  As companies like Apple face scrutiny for the labor abuses that its factory workers in China endure, and companies like Nike and even the Kardashians make pledges to treat their work force in other countries with the same rights as American workers (albeit paying them less), it seems that U.S. legislation might be in order to ensure that women who purchase surrogate services abroad uphold the same human and labor rights for their employees that would be enforced if they were to enter into similar arrangements at home.

Because I’m a mom, I immediately started to think about ways to foster that same perspective in my kids.  While I was tempted to drive home and just start yelling at them to do more for others, I quickly realized that wasn’t the best tack.  What they really need is to put some hours in on the ground to see how, and more importantly, why, it’s done.

My own track record as a volunteer is spotty at best, and a little selfish at worst.  For instance, donating time and money at the kids’ schools and community activities in the end serves…them.  Much like they’re served breakfast, lunch, dinner, and clean laundry every day.  I was more of a crackerjack volunteer in high school and college.  As an adult I’ve let that slide, maybe because as a parent, 80% of my life feels like service work.

As if I didn’t already have the idea of getting them out volunteering, there are also community service requirements at school that need filling, so I looked for opportunities online and by asking friends.  It took some digging to find organizations that will take kids and teens as volunteers, but if you’d like to use this holiday season, school break, and New Year to get your own kids out there helping others, the following websites can help match them with opportunities: ivolunteer.org, volunteermatch.org, and bigsunday.org.

The following are organizations that have programs in place for children and teens to help.  Please contact each one for their minimum age, training, and commitment requirements.

California Hospital Medical Center

Heal the Bay’s monthly beach cleanups

Los Angeles Mission

Natural History Museum

North Hollywood Interfaith Food Pantry

PAWS/LA

Schools on Wheels, Inc.

Tree People

Vista Del Mar’s Vista Inspire Program

In Los Angeles, transitioning from elementary to middle school, or middle to high school, is not always the simple matter of walking into the next biggest school in your neighborhood with your DWP bill and a birth certificate. As a veteran of the independent school and public school choice admissions process, let me give you an idea of what the next couple of months are going to look like.

The School Tours- If you go on more than a couple of tours and open houses, you will want to write down some impressions as soon as you get home. After the third mention of John Dewey, the schools can start to blend together. But I do hope that the arms race for who has best refreshments continues to escalate.

The Applications – Independent schools and public schools that take students from outside neighborhood boundaries like to express their individuality with achingly different applications and deadlines. One word of advice: Spreadsheet.

The Interviews – If your child has interviews lined up, do a mock session at home for practice. Toss in some oddball questions to keep your kid from sounding rehearsed. I like, “If you were a vegetable, what kind of vegetable would you be?”

Standardized Tests – If your child has to take entrance exams, one or two practice tests will probably help, even if you don’t go for professional prep services. There are a lot of workbooks your child can do at home as well. We liked the comic-themed math books best. KA-POW, fractions!

Financial Aid Forms – These are dreary and trying, but as a college admissions director recently told me, if you do receive aid, it’s the best hourly rate you will ever make. There is also a certain amount of smugness allowed when you’ve filed your taxes by February 1.

The CHOICES brochure – LAUSD’s CHOICES application is now online (echoices.lausd.net), which, considering what’s happened to some paper applications in the past, is a little terrifying. But it’s green, it saves the district money, and they promise a confirmation of receipt. I’m going to take a deep breath and give it a shot, which is not unlike how I plan on getting through all of these other steps as well.

Thinking about the “mean kid” phenomena in particular, I became curious about the intersection of popularity and aggression, which includes things like ostracizing and verbal harassment.  I wondered why it is that the popular kids are often the mean ones.  In the grown-up world, being aggressive is usually a ticket to being shunned (though I’ll grant you that it’s not necessarily an impediment to success).  In the kid world, the social system seems to reward aggressiveness with popularity.  Or is it the case that the popular kids are mean because they can be; that once on top, they take advantage of their power by dishing it out to other kids?  Which is it that comes first, the aggression, or the popularity?

Research shows that the link between popularity and aggression is real, and not just a teen movie trope. Robert Faris of UC Davis reported that the most popular kids are the ones most likely to harass their classmates, with aggression peaking at the 98^th percentile of popularity.

Patricia Hawley, of Kentucky University, studies social aggression in adolescents, focusing on the characteristics and behavior of the top dogs in school, and how they got there.  She found that the most popular kids use a combination of aggressive and what we consider more attractive social skills.  Carefully playing both sides, they earn their high regard by being good at getting what they want, regardless of the fact that they use partially negative means to do so.  Hawley compares this behavior to primates, who climb the social ranks by controlling more and more social and material resources.   You can insert your own joke about adolescents and apes here.

While it appears that it’s the aggression that comes first, and that this allows kids to climb the social ladder, Hawley also notes that once they’re at the top, the popular kids have a very high self-regard, and think that they are entitled to their poor behavior.  And unfortunately, once they get there, the most popular kids are richly rewarded: their friendships are rated the highest on intimacy, companionship, and fun, even with all of that lousy aggression thrown in.

What to do about this?  The Committee for Children, in Seattle, creates school curricula that work to change how kids act by changing the norms around what kinds of behaviors are acceptable, or worthy of admiration.  On the home front, it strikes me that if parents have a kid who is quickly rising in the popularity ranks, they might want to take a closer look at the relationships the child has at school, and discuss this with the child and a teacher or counselor.  With education and intervention, maybe we can make school life a little less of a jungle.

The third generation, the cousins, are old enough now that some of them have brought their own significant-others into the mix, and the eldest is planning to marry next year. My generation, the middle one, has been outnumbered for a couple of years now, and rather than a family tree, my mind diagrams us a pyramid, with Granny and Granddad on top, and the subsequent generations spreading out in ever-wider layers below them (Granny and Granddad always strike me as more Pharaonic then tree-like).

It’s not just their numbers that gives the cousins’ generation prominence in my mind, although their volume and exuberance can get anyone’s attention. It’s also that I feel invested in those kids both as a mom and as an aunt, and I spend a lot of time feeling grateful that because of our annual reunions, they’ve had the opportunity to grow up together, even though most of them live hundreds, or even thousands of miles apart.

There’s something special about a cousin, a family peer who isn’t your sibling.  The common family culture is a huge unifier and glue, as well as a support system for them. A cousin of roughly the same age can be a great ally and companion in a way that’s different from an ever-present sibling.  Often cousins are more sympathetic to your plight (maybe about your mean old mom) because they’re objectively removed from your immediate family’s way of doing things, but they’re also subjectively aware of the commonalities among the family as a whole.

Cousins bring fresh perspectives and new ideas into kids’ lives within the comfort and security of a family. As I’ve watched our kid’s relationships with their cousins grow over the years, it’s lovely to see the ease that they have with each other, the acceptance and support they give to each other, the challenges they create for each other, and how that all leads to fun, learning, love, and great memories.

“I don’t want to do something fun for free, I want to do something fun we pay for.”

My kids are so conditioned by this cartoon that if we’re looking for a way to spend a few hours out of the house and I ask them what they’d like to do, the first thing Luke says to me is, “Does it have to be something free?”

There are plenty of things to do in Los Angeles if you’re willing to plunk down some cash. Go-karting, laser tag, “shopping,” amusement parks or even rides at the Santa Monica pier are perennial “asks” around here. But there are a lot of summer days to fill, and not every one of them can include a big bucks excursion.

I thought it might be useful to write down my mental list of cheap and cheerful things to do with the kids around town this summer. There are a couple of caveats, though. First, museum entrance fees don’t count. We need the museums, and they need us. I highly recommend all families with kids who are toddlers or older get memberships to MOCA, LACMA, the Huntington Botanical Gardens, the Autry National Center and the LA Zoo. LACMA even has a NextGen program that provides free admission to kids plus one adult per child. Second, “free” is relative for me; I have included some activities that come in at under $5.

Biking, scootering or roller skating in Lacy Park
A short hike in Griffith Park or Elysian Park
Feeding the ducks and swans in Echo Park Lake (but hurry, because the park will be closed for dredging and rehabilitation after the Lotus Festival July 9-10)
Swimming at the Glassell Park Recreation Center
Mini-Golf at the Arroyo Seco Golf Course
The California Science Center
Kite flying at the Silver Lake Meadow
Rocket launching on the open spaces around the Rose Bowl
The Griffith Park Observatory
A sunset picnic at the beach

If you have other fun, low-or-no cost things to do in our area, I’d love to hear them. Please share via email, or in the comments online.

Do all kids reach a stage when, in their minds, things no longer have designated places they’re supposed to go, objects are handier if you don’t have to first open drawers to grab them, and, by the same logic, closing a drawer is wasted effort if you’re just going to have to open it again later?

Big kid slobdom must somehow be adaptive, because, seriously, why else would anyone want to live like this? The preteen and teen mapping of the physical world seems to rely on, “out of sight, out of mind,” to the point of absurdity.  Maybe their brains are so addled by expanding neuronal connections and Internet immediacy that they lose the ability to focus on anything that is not right in front of them.  I think this is why they insist on being able to see all of their possessions at the same time, spread out in as wide a radius as possible.  Their chaotic, jumbled minds can’t sort, organize, straighten or stow; they also can’t find anything that isn’t in their immediate sightline.

Some people think that older kids are just lazy, and that’s why they’re way less than fastidious, but not me.  I think they are just more wily in their expense of energy, employing selective effort that’s aimed in laser-like precision only where it’s deemed necessary. Schoolwork, thankfully, is deserving of this effort, but so is hair styling, and getting concert tickets before they sell out. But putting stuff away?  That’s for preschoolers and old people.  Oh, and also themselves, but only when the old people tell them to do it no less then seven, but usually fewer than ten times. I know: I said I’d given up.  Even though I know there’s no point, it turns out that I’m as hardwired to say, “Clean up your room,” as they are to ignore me.

Or should I say, “education?”  Because at a certain point, when 4,500 teachers are let go, when class sizes approach 40 in elementary schools, when the school year is cut to 175 days, when programs for gifted and talented kids are gutted, when libraries don’t have librarians, when music rooms sit empty and quiet…what we’re providing to our K-12 students may not really qualify as an education.

District wide, the situation is grim. The Los Angeles Unified School District is dealing with a $408 million budget deficit for the 2011-2012 school year. The crisis budget passed in March calls for layoffs of more than 7,300 employees, including 4,500 teachers. Funding for Magnet programs will be cut by 90%.

The Marshall High School Principal, Daniel Harrison, told me that the school will lose almost half of its teachers next year, and the general school class size is expected to rise to about 45 students. Marshall High School’s Gifted Magnet Coordinator, Rachel Morton, has been notified that her position will be eliminated. Ms. Morton has been with the Magnet since its inception in 1999, and while she will be rotated to a teaching position rather than fired, she is still concerned about the fate of the popular and successful program.

Governor Brown asked the legislature to put a measure on the June ballot that would extend current taxes and restore a good amount of LAUSD funding, but Republicans blocked the effort.  Unfortunately, the deadline for this measure to make it onto the ballot has already passed, so when the current tax rates expire, all taxes will be considered new taxes, rather than extensions.  We all know just how palatable new taxes are to the public, and to certain legislators seeking re-election.

Looking down the road, you might wonder what’s on tap for 2012-2013. LAUSD is projecting an $891 million deficit, almost 20% of the entire budget (which has already been cut $1.2 billion since 2009).  If this concerns you, I suggest that you contact the Republican State Senators who have refused to extend the current tax rates and vehicle registration fees.  Even though they’re not our district representatives, they hold all the cards for L.A.  Let them know the situation in your child’s school, and what it will mean to you if these cuts to California’s education budget are forced through.

Tom Berryhill, R-Oakdale, (916) 651-4014

Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, (916) 651-4015

Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres, (916) 651-4012

Bill Emmerson, R-Hemet, (916) 651-4037

Tom Harman, R-Huntington Beach, (916) 651-4035