Colleges email aggressively to recruit 10th-graders

My 10th-grader took the PSAT exam last fall. A few weeks later, we received an email from a prestigious college. No, not Harvard, but a decent, private, liberal arts school. I was thrilled. I thought, "She must have done very well on her PSAT." I told my daughter about the email, and then we were both thrilled.

Poor, gullible Mom.

Shortly after receiving that first missive, I began fielding a flood of emails from colleges and snail mail, too.

When we met with her guidance counselor to discuss her 11th-grade class choices, I asked about all the mail. She said this is typical. The schools get names from the PSAT registrations and begin to woo the college-bound.

Our counselor advised me to hang onto the materials until Isabelle is ready to begin her college search. So, I created a virtual folder for the email - up to about 75 unread at the moment - and set a basket on her desk for the paper brochures and envelopes.

It's looking a little overwhelming to me, all of these choices. But I feel we'll narrow it down in time.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Don't boycott Common Core standards, tests

There's so much noise around school testing this year that one would think "high-stakes" and "standardized" were New York's newest cuss words.

The noise has been so distracting that it took me quite a while to understand what's really been going on in classrooms. As a sometimes critic of how the United States stacks up for education, I'm encouraged by the changes.

It took a visit to Newsday by New York's top education officials for me to get what was really going on. I'm embarrassed to admit this, since I consider myself an involved mother of two teenagers. I attend all the parent-teacher nights, meet or talk with guidance counselors several times a year, communicate with my kids' teachers, check eboards and volunteer in the school. So, I was aware of something called the Common Core - usually mentioned by teachers with an eye roll. But I didn't have much of an idea of what it meant until seven months into the school year.

Last week, in fact.

I had thought that the Common Core was a new curriculum fad, one of the many waves to roll through over the past 30 years. Instead, it's a way of training students to attack problems and think analytically.

Sure, I had noticed that my daughters were doing different homework. Instead of the floppy standards of prior composition, they were having to write introductions, provide evidence and craft conclusions - in subjects from social studies to science, not just in English class. In math, they were required to show the steps they took to get their answers.

Standardized tests began this week, and some parents are boycotting them, in part because they're making kids so anxious. But the new standards have been making my kids (mildly) anxious all school year. So, when I finally understood the Common Core myself, and its goals, I sat down with them and explained it.

My eighth-grader seemed relieved to finally understand why this year had seemed so much harder.

"That would explain the lower grades," my 10th-grader mused about her academic performance this past year. But in the next breath, she said, "Well, I guess I'll be better prepared for college."

Then she pulled up a YouTube video from HBO's "The Newsroom," in which actor Jeff Daniels rants about how great America used to be. "We aspired to intelligence," he said, "we didn't belittle it." He rattled off statistics on how poorly we compare to other countries in education.

Note to the nation's parents: We're not doing our kids any favors when we fail to raise education standards. And they know it.

State Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. notes that only 75 percent of the state's students graduate high school. Only 35 percent of ninth-graders graduate in four years ready for college coursework. The rest are taking remedial classes in college - high school classes that they and their parents get to pay for. Again.

The public school system, from King on down to the teachers, has done a poor job of explaining the Common Core. Too much of the focus has been that teachers will be evaluated, in part, on students' test results.

But I wonder, if teachers' job ratings weren't on the line, would they take the Common Core so seriously? Or would it become another of the fads that seem to wash in and out of our country's classrooms like ocean tides?

Along with New York, 45 states, the District of Columbia, four U.S. territories and the Department of Defense schools have adopted Common Core standards. Will this new national standard raise the fortunes of America's future graduates? Not without some anxiety.

But let's not allow that to distract us from a worthy effort.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Believe it, teen years aren't all bad

People say some incredibly unhelpful things to parents. At the top of my list: When your child turns 11 or 12 or 13, he or she will become unbearable for roughly the next decade.

I'm here to tell you that my daughters are 14 and 15, and I actually like them most of the time.

A few years ago, people would often comment, "Well, you've got a couple more good years with your daughters before they turn into teenagers." And this comment is supposed to be ... what, exactly? Certainly not helpful. It's not even constructive criticism. I heard the comment so often that I began to truly fear the teen years.

I also receive email from organizations called "EmpoweringParents" and other such names. The organizations offer advice on how to handle hostile, angry, back-talking, defiant, disrespectful, anxious kids.

I know that the teen years can be rough. I was one difficult, angry teen myself. But this can be a wonderful phase of life, too. Tweens and teens are deciding whom they want to be. It's been magical to watch my daughters discover interests that light them up - marching band, acting, lacrosse, the Warped Tour. Sure, I sometimes wish they cared more about what interests me - community service, books. But they have broadened my world.

There's nowhere I'd rather be than talking with one of them when they have a decision to make about how to treat a friend, stand up for themselves or style their "look." They usually don't ask for my advice, but if I listen carefully, I know when there's an issue they might want help with.

So, now I make it a point to tell parents with younger kids, the teen years can be OK. In fact, exciting. One kind mom - out of dozens of moms and dads - told me that along the way, and I'm grateful she did.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Parents need paid sick days to care for kids

Places around the country with any labor union strength at all - New York City among them - are passing paid sick day laws. By October 2015, nearly a million additional New Yorkers in the city will be guaranteed paid sick leave, and it will be against the law to fire a worker for calling in sick.

Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Seattle and Connecticut have recently enacted similar measures, and Democrats in the House of Representatives are talking about a national law.

The New York bill is a result of years of debate and expert testimony about workers' rights and employers' costs. Yet, in all, very little has been said about an underlying cause of sick days - that is, sick children. The rise in the number of working parents and single-parent homes has meant that the common childhood cold, flu, earache or strep throat has inserted itself into the workplace. For this reason, sick-day protection is an idea whose time has come.

"Workers will no longer have to choose between their jobs and their health or their children's health," one labor leader, Stuart Appelbaum, told the media after the New York City Council reached an agreement.

So often, our public discourse about work and family concerns the upper echelon: Can new mom Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, really "have it all"? Stay tuned! This shift in focus to a benefit that potentially affects a broader swath of parents in retail, restaurant, hotel and other service jobs is welcome.

People who work with children know how often parents must choose between work and staying home with a sick kid. Recent advice to day care centers warns about the "drop and go" syndrome. Some parents leave a child with a caregiver and run out the door before it's noticed that the child is ill. Some parents give their child a dose of medicine to ease symptoms just long enough to sneak him or her into school or day care.

This can't be good for public health. Kids in groups spread illness among themselves, then return home and infect their parents - who in turn go to work and expose their co-workers and customers. What kind of sick way is that to run a healthy planet?

A friend of mine works from home when her infant son is sick. But she's well aware that not everyone can do that. And so, she worries about bringing him to the day care center even when he is well. He might catch something.

A better option would be child care for kids who are too sick to be in regular day care. But it's very hard to make these work financially. Most day care in the United States is supplied by people who take children into their homes, according to the Census Bureau. Were an operator to convert to sick care, the caregiver could charge higher rates. But he or she could go weeks without a client dropping off a sick child. There's also the liability of dispensing medications, and dehydration and other medical problems.

A physician in Arizona last year announced the opening of two "get well child care" centers. They are run in conjunction with a preschool, so the income is steadier. Still, they won't take children with measles, mumps, hepatitis, chickenpox or flu in its early, most infectious stage.

The new sick day laws are a sign of the times. Industrial production and factory jobs at one point in our history led to laws limiting the workday to eight hours and banning child labor. Sick day standards are simply one more way to shelter the nation's families.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Young men are most in need of mental health intervention

A 17-year-old who had no issues growing up begins to be annoyed by everything: lights in the bathroom, the sound of water running. He has trouble sleeping. He begins self-medicating, turning to drugs or drinking to quiet the anxiety he feels. He also wants to silence the voice in his head that is telling him to throw rocks at anyone who tries to get him to come down from the roof of his home.

This boy is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, but only after he has had multiple episodes, according to a story told by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) at a hearing on mental health reform. Experts say it takes one to two years, typically, after teens' first episode of psychosis for them to be diagnosed and helped. The longer they go on unstable, the worse their illness gets.

When it returns to session next week, Congress is scheduled to take up mental health care reform, an issue touched off by the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School and other recent mass murders.

There are many good proposals. One bill from Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) would train law enforcement and school officials in "first aid" for mental illness - how to detect problems early and intervene effectively. The Obama administration is also working on a public awareness campaign.

But there are off-point ideas too. One of them is broad funding of community mental health clinics - a bipartisan bill introduced by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.).

It's not bad to promote better access to and affordability of mental health services. But, if we want to prevent massacres, let's be more direct. Let's shrug off the fear of stigmatizing one group, shed the political correctness, and admit to ourselves that untreated psychosis is a crisis among mostly young men.

These are the facts: Adam Lanza, 20, attacked a school in Newtown, Conn.; James Holmes, 24, shot up a Colorado movie theater; Jared Loughner, 22, opened fire in a Tucson supermarket; Seung-Hui Cho, 23, killed 32 at Virginia Tech.

There are two current political distractions to talking plainly about the causes of mass shootings. One comes courtesy of the National Rifle Association, which is trying to turn the national conversation away from gun control. David Keene, NRA president, has repeatedly called for Americans to "fix the mental health system." Yet NRA opponents are so virulent that they seemingly refuse to agree with the NRA about anything, even this commonsense goal.

The other distraction is from advocates for the mentally ill. They seem to believe that if we admit that some mentally ill people are violent, then we are painting all as violent. This intonation surfaces after every mass murder: People with mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of violent crimes than they are to be the perpetrators.

Fine. Let's agree to this and get down to solving the problem.

At a congressional hearing in January, Dr. Thomas Insel, director of mental health at the National Institutes of Health, talked about why mental illness is difficult to diagnose. There are no blood tests, and it's often a disease that starts young.

"When we talk about mental illness, we're talking about illnesses that begin early in life," Insel said. "It requires a different mindset about how do you detect, how do you intervene, and how do you make sure that you can make a difference."

Before treatment, people are at a 15-fold greater risk of becoming violent than after treatment, Insel told the congressional committee. There's hope in that statistic. It means that treatment can work, he said, and people can recover.

Like treatments for cancer and heart disease, cures are most effective when the illness is caught early. Allowing people to suffer for years with paranoia and hallucinations is cruel. To catch this killer, let's be honest enough with ourselves to look at young men.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

A few women at the top isn't enough reform

Last month, news broke that international consulting giant McKinsey & Co. is recruiting moms back from stay-at-home status.

In a Wall Street Journal Web video, reporter Leslie Kwoh said, "From what we understand, this is really an effort for them to get back some of the talent that they lost ... as women left to become mothers."

Sadly, the hopeful-triumphant gleam in Kwoh's eyes was all too familiar.

I say sadly, because it's been 20 years since I've been reporting such hopeful developments for working mothers. I interviewed the originator of the "mommy track" idea, Felice Schwartz, back in 1993. Sadly, we are still having the same discussions. And, sadly, we've learned very little.

Even if McKinsey is successful at luring MBA moms back from the home front. Exactly how many moms are we talking about? A few dozen? A few hundred?

The numbers are small, and the potential benefits are reserved for the highly educated - not to mention, those women who had enough financial security to leave work in the first place. That is, they are very likely married, and likely married to a fast-track partner.

Are these ranks seeming more infinitesimal by the minute? McKinsey alumnae, with kids and high-earner husbands? Whoa. Stop the revolution!

In fact, we have been settling for years for tokenism - the vision of a few women at the top as a signifier that we can have it all, every one of us.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, is one of the successful working mothers we're looking to today. Her recently published "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead" advises young women to emphasize career and believe in themselves, so that by the time they have children, they'll have a career that's worth staying for - and bargaining power to make the work-life combination livable.

That's fine in theory, but how many chief operating officers does Facebook need? I wonder if women - and parents in general - wouldn't be better served if Sandberg were to argue for changing the practices of the workplace.

Marissa Mayer is another symbol for working mothers, having accepted the chief executive spot at Yahoo a month before giving birth to her first child. She has subsequently revoked the work-at-home privileges of her staff, which appears anti-parent, and she has built a nursery next to her office to care for her own newborn.

Talk about bargaining power.

I don't second-guess Mayer's decision to bring her staff back into the office. She knows more about the business needs of Yahoo - the grandfather of the Internet - than I do. However, perhaps when she's done rejuvenating this granddaddy, she could get around to opening a day care center for the employees.

Schwartz had a lot of good ideas for working parents that didn't deserve to be buried under the derisive name "mommy track." That wasn't Schwartz's term; it was a name given by journalists and feminists who were aghast at her suggestion that women couldn't combine ladder-climbing and child-raising. She published a study, "Management Women and the New Facts of Life," in the January-February 1989 issue of the Harvard Business Review noting that companies were losing women midcareer - an effect that is still blamed for the dismal number of female chief executives.

Schwartz suggested, for employees who desired it, offering part-time and flexible schedules, shared jobs, telecommuting and even the possibility of leaving work altogether and returning years later. It's time to revive those ideas for working parents. A few token moms at the top don't represent enough change for the majority.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Long work hours cut into family life

The news that the Dow Jones industrial average is at record highs is perplexing, given that the companies doing so well are apparently not creating jobs - or, at any rate, not creating jobs here. The U.S. unemployment rate remains stubbornly stuck just below 8 percent, and is 7.1 percent on Long Island.

Normally, you'd think that more workers would be required to fuel companies' growth. Instead, a lot of employers are "doing more with less" - a phrase for our time. In many jobs, technological advances allow people to produce more in the same amount of time, so fewer people are needed.

But another factor is that those fortunate enough to have jobs are working longer hours. Everyone seems to have a story about someone who's taken over the jobs of three people, or is answering work emails from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. In Europe, the average employee works 1,625 hours annually; in the United States, it's 1,797.

All this work can take a toll on family life. Most parents have outside employment; in just a quarter of American homes are children cared for by a stay-home parent. We should be asking, what portion of time should paid work justly demand, and what portion is necessary for family and community well-being?

A lower quality of life for families can have vast repercussions - for crime, unwanted pregnancy, poverty rates, domestic violence, education levels. Ultimately, our economy will suffer if family life does.

There's growing evidence that the psychological, physical and economic life of the family is eroding. Of 3,000 adults interviewed for the American Psychological Association's "Stress in America" survey in 2010, 75 percent said they were "stressed to unhealthy levels." A 2004 study of working New York parents in Erie County demonstrated a strong relationship between family-work conflict and depression, heavy alcohol consumption, poor physical health and high blood pressure.

Parents are caught between spending time with children and maintaining an income that will pay for kids' higher education. Wages of middle-class workers in the United States, adjusted for inflation, are lower than they were in 1970. And it's not just the middle and working classes that feel this pressure. Six-figure earners are often connected to their jobs - via laptops and smartphones - so that work invades every minute of their waking lives.

Experts say that kids do better emotionally - they are more able to combat bullying and suicidal impulses - when parents are more involved in their day-to-day lives. Yet, studies show that daily work stress causes parents to withdraw from family interaction because their capacity for intimacy and emotional engagement has been used up at the office. Parents are often so worn down by their multiple demands that they have nothing left for the effective nurture, structure and discipline that children need.

We need to update societal supports for families. Longer school days and years, for example, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has proposed, would better match parents' workdays. Employers should consider the social consequences of their decisions. Some companies are broadening their goals to encompass the so-called Three Ps: profit, planet and people.

We also should look to rewrite some public policies - as California and New Jersey have done with paid family leave - and raise the quality and availability of child care.

Today's upcoming generation is expected to be educated, technologically savvy and self-starting. Families and communities can prepare them for these challenges - but only if families' psychological, physical and economic health are strong.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Gov't spends $18B in training; where are the jobs?

I don't know how often Republican members of the House of Representatives use quotes from President Barack Obama in their slideshows. Given the caustic partisan scene in Washington, it's probably rare.

But on Tuesday morning, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), who chairs the Higher Education and Workforce Training Subcommittee, included a promise from the president's 2012 State of the Union address as she rolled out hearings on her job-training bill.

"I want to cut through the maze of confusing training programs, so that from now on, [job seekers] have one program, one website, and one place to go for all the information and help that they need. It is time to turn our unemployment system into a reemployment system that puts people to work," the president said on Jan. 24, 2012.

Foxx then declared, matter-of-factly, that her SKILLS Act - short for Supporting Knowledge and Investing in Lifelong Skills - is "the only proposal that moves us toward the president's goal." She looked around the meeting room. "We had a quote up there a second ago, and I hope everyone had a chance to see it."

It was good political theater - diplomatic and pointed - and I hope it works. The jobs crisis in this country is entering its fifth year, and notwithstanding the president's statement, the Obama administration has focused too little on expanding opportunities for people to work.

Foxx's bill, by contrast, could bring some much-needed reform. Though her delivery was subdued, the facts she cited were startling. The federal government is spending $18 billion a year on employment and training services. That's a lot of money. There are more than 50 programs, spread across nine federal agencies.

About 2 million people have managed to find their way through this maze to enter a federal program, according to Foxx, yet only a pitiful 14 percent finished the instruction. And less than half of those who received employment assistance - resume writing or job searches - found work.

It makes you wonder what we're getting for that $18 billion. That's like building five new Tappan Zee bridges each year. If we spent the money on bridges like that instead, at least we'd get about 16,000 jobs per bridge out of it.

Foxx's SKILLS Act would eliminate 35 ineffective and redundant programs in favor of a one-stop workforce investment fund.

It would give more flexibility to regional workforce investment boards, which are responsible for policies and oversight of the programs, and require two-thirds of the board members to be employers. That makes unions nervous, but we have to do more for the estimated 13 million people out of work, and 8 million part-time workers who want more hours.

To date, the workforce investment boards, which were created in 1998, have followed 19 federal mandates about who can serve - leading to "large, unmanageable and unengaged boards," according to Todd Gustafson, executive director of Southwestern Michigan's workforce investment board. That can make it hard to recruit good people for the boards, he told Foxx's subcommittee on Tuesday.

More dynamic, locally focused employment boards could make better use of that $18 billion. When you have 7.1 percent unemployment on Long Island, and an executive of the North Shore-LIJ Health System writing that he's unable to fill high-skills jobs, as he did on these pages in January, you know that some puzzle pieces are missing.

The SKILLS Act would also give local boards freedom to contract directly with community colleges - important players on Long Island - to provide training for large groups.

We shouldn't allow these good ideas to sink under the weight of partisanship. As Foxx made quite clear this week, we all agree on the goal.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Schools can teach using mobile devices

On a recent morning, my eighth-grader grabbed her cellphone as she was leaving for school. In my house, this calls for an explanation. She told me in a rush: "We can use them in art class. We listen to music, and we look up images."

With that, she was gone.

This is a big change from two years ago, when her teacher summoned me to the school to personally retrieve my daughter's phone. He had confiscated it after she was caught with it a second time.

Cellphone bans in school are widespread. A friend told me about a deli that makes a good living holding cellphones for kids while they are in school, for $1 a day. Kids want their phones, and schools want them phone-free. At least, that's what the rule seemed to be until the other morning at my house.

A couple of days later, I received an email from a publication called Education Week, saying that it would be hosting an online chat with two school administrators who were deploying BYOD - bring your own device. It appears that my daughter's teacher is not alone in inviting technology into the classroom.

One of the first to try it was the Forsyth County School System in suburban Atlanta, which allows students to use their own Wi-Fi-capable devices, such as iPods, Kindles and iPads. Students use them to take notes, conduct research, produce videos and access online apps. Here in New York, my daughter is taking photos of an art project as it progresses.

It sounds chaotic - and potentially exclusionary for kids who don't have any D to BYO. That can lead to envy and, worse, unequal opportunities to learn. Each school district must judge those perils for itself. The Oak Hills district in Ohio works with a local vendor to provide low-cost refurbished devices for kids who don't have them.

With that caution in mind, BYOD seems like an amazing opportunity to reach kids where many are already - in front of a screen - and help them explore the promise and dangers of our digital age.

First, the dangers. Students could be accessing inappropriate content online. But this could happen outside of school as well. Forsyth has set up a Wi-Fi network that works like one in a coffee shop, with filtered Internet access.

Another danger: Students can use devices to look up test answers and commit other creative cheating. According to Education Week, the George C. Marshall High School in Fairfax County, Va., came up with color-coded zones, where different cellphone use is allowed. A green zone might be the cafeteria, which indicates general and open use. In blue zones, like classrooms, the devices are permitted for instruction only. In yellow zones - hallways and non-BYOD classes - devices must be silent and out of sight. And red zones mean devices are strictly prohibited; usually, these are test areas.

Might BYOD contribute to cyberbullying? That's possible. But, more optimistically, having the devices on students' desks might spur a classroom discussion of appropriate "digital citizenship." What are inbounds behaviors when you're online? What's polite? What's safe? What won't come back to bite you in 15 years when your employer-to-be performs a search on your name?

That's one promise of BYOD. But the greater good will probably come when a teacher throws out a question and the class works together to research the answer. That's a lesson in collaboration. It's dynamic and engaging, and it offers invaluable lessons for students about which online sources are reliable.

My daughters' teachers tell them not to trust anything on Wikipedia. Frankly, I think Wikipedia is usually pretty credible. It's some of the other stuff - conspiracy theories and gossip - that's more treacherous.

If we use it to teach students to approach the digital ocean of information with skepticism, the risks of BYOD will be well worth it.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

A homeless shelter in the Hamptons?

The Hamptons and the homeless - two things that don't seem to go together.

And, indeed, the presence of a homeless shelter in Hampton Bays, in the former Hidden Cove Motel, has been under attack almost from the time it opened in October 2011.

But this 28-unit shelter has by many accounts been a good neighbor. It is turning people's lives around. And it seems fair that even this playground for the wealthy should hold up a corner of the social safety net.

With the retirement last week of Gregory Blass, Suffolk County's social services commissioner, Hidden Cove lost a tireless champion. The Town of Southampton has been dragging its feet over simple repair permits, Blass said in an interview, and then claims that the shelter violates zoning codes. "It's like clipping the wings of a bird and scoffing at its inability to fly," he said. The town's supervisor, Anna Throne-Holst, was unavailable for comment. A local organizer, Michael Dunn, has put together the Concerned Citizens of Hampton Bays to fight the shelter, according to online reports. Dunn did not respond to efforts to reach him.

Hidden Cove is one of 54 homeless shelters in Suffolk County. Its residents are often single mothers - often fleeing domestic violence - with children younger than 5. They typically stay four or five months before moving into permanent housing.

Daphne, a real estate agent who didn't want her last name used, lived at Hidden Cove this fall with her daughter for 63 days - she counted the days until she could return to a more secure life. The pair moved to Long Island from Florida in June 2011 and were living with Daphne's husband in his aunt's house. He abandoned Daphne, and his aunt said she had to leave.

With no family nearby, Daphne, 47, turned to her pastor, and he referred her to Suffolk County. Her daughter is now enrolled in high school as a senior and plans to graduate this spring.

"The workers at Hidden Cove kept encouraging me and my daughter," Daphne said. "They helped us in every way that they could." She wants to return the generosity, and is looking for a business partner to launch a service helping homeless people find permanent homes.

Another former Hidden Cove resident, Tanya Haynes, lost her job when her child-care provider couldn't care for her son, now 5. The boy has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Haynes said, and the child-care center kept calling her to come and get him. Because of the continuing absences, Haynes lost her job as a supervisor at Starbucks; then, she couldn't pay her rent.

The caseworkers at Hidden Cove helped Haynes find medical care for her son, and counseling for both of them. They are stable now, living in a one-bedroom apartment in Patchogue. The boy's father lives outside the country.

Haynes had never accepted public assistance before; she goes to church and doesn't drink or smoke. "I never wanted to be on social service. It's shameful," she says. "I want to give my son a better life than I had."

The Hampton Bays school district says it can handle "the ebb and flow of enrollment" that students from Hidden Cove represent, without extra cost. Police calls have reportedly fallen since the days when Hidden Cove was a motel. So, what's the objection to this center of charity? "Some people don't like to see black people pushing baby carriages on the street," says Mary Castro, a neighbor who supports the shelter. I hope the opposition to this good place is not truly that petty.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Helicopter parents need some grounding

Remember the expert advice that parental involvement is the key to kids' school success? Apparently, involvement can go too far.

A new survey of 128 guidance counselors, school psychologists and teachers asserts that many parents are overly engaged in their kids' schooling and, generally, in their lives - and it's hurting the children's maturity and courage. Many parents today are guilty of "overparenting," according to the study out of the Queensland (Australia) University of Technology, which was highlighted in The Atlantic magazine.

It's not a big study, but it raises intriguing questions about how "excessive" parenting affects children. The authors, who are psychology and education experts, find that "an extreme attentiveness to children and their imagined needs and issues" results in kids failing to learn independence, confidence or the skills to bounce back after a defeat.

This will not come as news to many educators, especially those who deal with families at upper socioeconomic levels, where the Queensland study says overparenting is most prevalent. Among the parental coddling cited is cutting up a 10-year-old's food, forbidding a 17-year-old to ride a train alone and rushing to school to deliver a forgotten lunch, assignment or gym clothes.

Survey respondents also listed these sins: taking the child's word against the teacher's, demanding better grades and doing the child's homework.

This list is probably sounding uncomfortably familiar to many parents, but surely it's a matter of degree. Are you dropping off a forgotten lunch a couple of times during the school year or delivering takeout to the child's class on demand? Is the child 6 or 16?

Helicopter parents who hover, and lawn-mower parents who remove any barrier or discomfort for their kids, are in danger of robbing their children of learning how to solve their own problems and deal with not getting what they want. According to the study's authors, they risk bestowing their offspring with "poor resilience, a sense of entitlement, high anxiety levels, poor life skills, and an inadequate sense of responsibility."

Most parents, I think, hew to a commonsense middle ground. We let our kids fall down on the playground. We let them drive, even though it's dangerous. But it's not hard to see how we ended up "overparenting" - or, as my parents would have said, being overprotective.

One factor is the still-wrenching cultural divide over whether parents should stay home to raise children. Stay-home parents feel they must do more for kids, perhaps to justify their choice. Some working parents do more, too, when they are anxious to prove they care about their kids. Half a century of expert advice on how to be a better parent, along with mass media that magnify danger, also contribute to overparenting.

Also, it's hard to simply follow our parents' example because the world has changed so much. The study's results are another reflection of parents' trying to cope with the dizzying changes. Most of us do find our center.

However, the ones who are still cutting up their kids' meat are easy to mock. And the researchers indulge in a little educator-on-parent hostility.

"A campaign to the school to make sure their child is in a specific class the following year" was cited as one example of overparenting - a characterization that could rankle parents here who want access to teacher evaluation data so they can do that very thing - as was arranging meetings with school officials "when most issues are normal developmental sequences."

Both sides, parents and educators, would probably do well to generate a little more compassion for each other. After all, our goal - kids' success - is the same.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Inaugural: Obama needs to address unemployment

Taking on the president's jobs performance is becoming a regular gig for Jack Welch. He sent a Twitter message after Barack Obama's inaugural address on Monday, saying the president is apparently "comfortable with high unemployment," because he failed to talk enough about jobs in his speech.

You may remember that Welch, the former General Electric chairman, claimed that the Obama administration had cooked the books in September, when the unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent - below 8 percent for the first time in four years, conveniently just before the election.

For Welch to now champion jobs with such verve, he must be working off some bad karma from his GE days, where he pioneered the concept of firing the bottom 10 percent of workers every year. Or maybe it's politics.

Either way, Welch was wrong in September, but his point is well-taken this time. There's nothing more important than bringing back jobs, and Obama should spend a lot more time thinking and talking about it.

Two stories from earlier this month illustrate the influence of employment on the economic health of every other sector. The first was "Painful drop in home loans," a report in Newsday on Jan. 11 that the number of Long Islanders getting home loans has fallen by nearly two-thirds since 2005. Federal housing data show that homeowners borrowed just $12.1 billion in 2011 to purchase, refinance or make improvements to homes, compared with $31.8 billion six years earlier.

While it's important that homeowners are taking on less debt, I remember how busily Long Islanders were spending that money back in 2005: putting in swimming pools, landscaping, adding on a bedroom or a deck. All of that spending meant jobs for someone - our neighbors.

In fact, the U.S. economy is largely driven by consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of economic growth. You might say consumers are the real job creators. But if consumers are going to keep up their end, we have to be in a good financial position. For most people, that means paid employment.

Another story in Newsday, right next to the housing report, was "Tuition increases slowing." Moody's Investors Service surveyed nearly 300 colleges and universities and found that the schools can't increase tuition at previous rates because students are no longer clamoring for their services. Growing numbers of high school graduates are choosing more affordable community colleges, enrolling part time or skipping college altogether.

Moody's thinks that the poor employment outlook for college graduates since the 2008 financial crisis is responsible for lower enrollment. But I have to wonder if disillusionment with degrees didn't begin 20 years ago or more, when midcareer workers were laid off without regard to how many letters they could tag after their signatures. They are the parents of today's graduating generation.

If there's no implicit promise that pursuing education will get you somewhere, why invest the time and money?

Recently, I saw a man with a sandwich board outside of Penn Station, advertising that he could repair computers on the spot for a fee. Are we becoming a country of people toting our businesses around on our backs?

In his inaugural, the president promised to build roads, bridges, electric grids and digital lines. He referred to harnessing the sun, wind and soil to fuel cars and run factories - which, despite Welch's tweet is a jobs agenda. I hope Obama is indeed "bold and swift" in fulfilling these and other job-creating ideas, before my kids have to don a sandwich board and head for Penn Station.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

U.S., New York sharpen focus on mental illness

For those of us who care about decent care for mental illness, it's been a very good week.

The New York State Legislature bolstered what was already one of the strongest assisted outpatient treatment laws in the country, Kendra's Law. Outpatient treatment is part of the safety net that the United States failed to adequately construct and fund when it began closing psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s - and many mentally ill people end up homeless, abusing drugs, arrested or committing suicide.

Kendra's Law provided for court-ordered, intensive outpatient supervision, to ensure that mentally ill people continue to take prescribed medication. However, in some cases, court orders lapsed without review, or didn't follow people who moved to a different county. Those problems have been resolved.

The law was named for Kendra Webdale, who in 1999 was pushed off a subway platform into the path of an oncoming train. Two subway pushes last month - the killings of Ki-Suck Han and Sunando Sen - reminded New Yorkers of the need to close the holes in Kendra's Law.

Also on Tuesday, the State Legislature placed stronger supports beneath mental health professionals who are treating potentially dangerous patients. A new law directs therapists to report patients they deem a possible threat to themselves or others, and those patients must surrender any guns and permits.

Therapists already had a duty to warn potential victims, in accordance with the 1974 Tarasoff decision, but the threat had to be very specific. Tuesday's vote in Albany may broaden therapists' license to speak up without fear of retribution.

Tatiana Tarasoff was killed by a University of California student in 1969, after the student confessed his murderous wish to a therapist at the campus counseling center. Campus police were notified, but no one told the young woman - with tragic results. Most states, including New York, have since adopted this ethical standard.

The new laws from Albany were, clearly, a reaction to the Newtown, Conn., school shootings. In recent mass murders, the perpetrators' mental problems were often known to family, neighbors and counselors. Yet they slipped through holes in our safety net.

Likewise in response to Newtown, President Barack Obama yesterday signed 23 executive actions into existence, five of which relate to mental illness. Among them, the president's office will release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement officers.

Three further executive actions relate to funding for mental health care, including finalizing regulations covered under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Preventing and treating mental illness on par with physical illness is crucial, and it's the test of a civilized nation. Health insurance companies, take note.

Finally, the president called for a "national dialogue" on mental health, to be led by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Congressional cooperation will be needed for other action recommended by the White House: Obama proposed spending $50 million to train 5,000 mental health professionals to work with young people in communities and schools. The president's plan notes that 75 percent of mental illness appears by age 24.

This funding has the potential to help a great many people who may never be tempted to commit mass murder. It's exciting - and civilized - that we are finally ready to grapple with this painful affliction.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Web gives volume to whispers of assault

When I was in college, in the bygone days of typewriters and corded phones, there was a rumor of a gang rape on campus. A "town" girl had gone back to a fraternity house with a boy, and several others ended up having sex with her against her will.

Or so the story went. Many on campus fumed, avoided the suspected rapists and waited for the college administration or the police to act. Months went by. Nothing happened.

We graduated and went our separate ways. I suspect that the officials involved -- not to mention the young men -- were relieved. But regardless of what really happened that night at the frat house, the way it went unaddressed instilled distrust in me, and perhaps in thousands of others who were on campus at the time: Would people in charge stand up for women's safety and dignity?

Having to ask ourselves that question meant we lost some innocence about the world we were about to fully enter. And it raised the possibility that, maybe, ignoring ugly realities is right. The smart thing to do.

But now, that sort of official privilege has gone the way of the typewriter and corded phone -- as two recent stories of rape illustrate. Hundreds of protesters gathered in eastern Ohio last Saturday to "Occupy Steubenville." They called for justice in the case of a 16-year-old girl, who was allegedly drunk to the point of unconsciousness last August, carried around to parties and sexually assaulted while others watched. The girl was from across the Ohio River in Weirton, W.Va., and the accused are Steubenville High School football players.

The alleged assault became public in the days afterward, when partygoers posted photos and reports to Instagram and Twitter. Two 16-year-old boys were arrested and charged, and they face trial on Feb. 13. They maintain they are innocent.

However, some in the community were not finished with this case. They became convinced that the investigating sheriff wasn't taking it seriously enough. Online, a branch of the hacker collective known as Anonymous accused the sheriff of deleting video evidence, noted his friendship with the high school football coach, and began leaking information on people who are believed to be covering up the full extent of the assault.

Last weekend, protesters arrived from around the country -- like Occupy Wall Streeters, many wearing Guy Fawkes masks. Some speakers told their stories of being raped.

Steubenville city and police officials have been forced to respond by establishing their own website about the case, which they say is intended to sort fact from fiction.

Teenagers are obsessed with documenting their lives online, and oversharing and even sexual cyberbullying are real problems. But without social media, this case never would have gotten such broad attention. And it's all but certain that Steubenville officialdom would not be trying to explain itself online to a bewildered international audience.

The Ohio story has parallels to the horrific alleged gang rape and fatal beating last month of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in Delhi, India. Outraged, thousands of people took to the city's streets, only to be met by police with tear gas and long sticks. The government closed roads to discourage protests, but instead, as word spread through social media, protests sprung up around the country. Six men have been arrested.

No doubt, there is danger in rushing to judgment and in anonymous online reports. People's reputations and lives are at stake. But social media are proving to be useful to call for justice in cases of rape, where justice is still too often uncertain, inconvenient and easily avoided.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

We need better involuntary commitment rules for mentally ill

Tomorrow will mark three weeks since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. The wretchedness of that day has touched off a national debate about preventing mass murders -- as it should. But lately the conversation has narrowed to gun control.

In a year-end interview, responding to a question about the political fights ahead, President Barack Obama voiced his support for banning assault rifles and high-capacity clips, and for better background checks for gun buyers. What I didn't hear from the president was a vow to strengthen our mental health system to treat people like Adam Lanza before they descend into madness. Whatever Lanza's technical diagnosis -- schizophrenia? -- executing two classrooms of first-graders is by definition mad.

Gun control is easier to discuss, because there is an identifiable, organized opposition in the National Rifle Association. But mental illness is harder to recognize, reach and heal.

Consider the divergent responses I received to a column that ran right after the Sandy Hook killings. I wrote that in New York, as in most states, the law allows for involuntary commitments of those who are mentally ill. What's more, New York permits someone to alert the authorities to dangerous behavior while remaining anonymous.

Some readers wondered about the potential for abuse of involuntary commitment -- also called civil commitment. "How do [the authorities] know that you are just not furthering a neighborly feud or personal vendetta?" one man emailed.

Others said that even though such laws exist, they are almost unenforceable in practice. A mental-health group home administrator said he has often been frustrated when calling for help: "There is no mechanism for involuntary admission unless the person is either violent or expresses violent ideas in front of a psychiatrist or police."

And so there is the conundrum. The problem isn't the law, exactly, but the judgment, resources and political will to enforce it.

We have yet to find the place where the pendulum should rest since deinstitutionalization began in the 1960s. The idea was to wipe out the abuse of mentally ill people, to respect their civil rights by closing psychiatric hospitals and moving toward community-based care, such as group homes and outpatient treatment. But the system that was supposed to take the place of psychiatric hospitals has never been adequately funded or built out.

The results are cruelly inadequate. Twenty percent of prison inmates, and at least one-third of the homeless, are seriously mentally ill, according to the national Treatment Advocacy Center. Mostly, they are not receiving the care they need to heal, stabilize and lead full lives.

And, as appears to be the case with Lanza, responsibility for care falls to individual families -- sometimes with disastrous results. In two other recent mass murders -- the killing of 12 people and injuring 58 at a Colorado movie theater in July, and the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killing of six others in Tucson two years ago -- family, acquaintances and school officials had been alarmed about the behavior of the two men who became suspects. Yet no one stopped them.

Most mentally ill people are not violent, but statistics favor stronger civil commitment laws. According to a 2011 study by the University of California, Berkeley, states with stronger laws have homicide rates about one-third lower.

Vice President Joe Biden is preparing a report on preventing mass shootings. If he wants a place to start, he might consider our patchwork of state civil commitment laws -- both how they are written and how they work in practice.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Reasons to shoo away the humbuggers

It's been a Scrooge of a year, wouldn't you say? Ebenezer Scrooge - whom I caught on television the other night looking a lot like the actor George C. Scott - was a man who refused to share any of his wealth with the world around him. The year 2012 bears a resemblance.

This year, we endured a divisive battle for the presidency, which was fought at times as though the only thing that mattered was how much money either side could raise. That's a sad statement for a country that stands for democracy.

Thousands were wiped out financially and emotionally by superstorm Sandy. Many innocents were lost to deranged gunmen in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn.

The economy refused to rebound, and Washington wouldn't come to agreement over anything.

And so the year 2012 was stingy like Scrooge. But in "A Christmas Carol," Charles Dickens thankfully gives us examples of two people who don't lose faith in the old miser: his long-suffering clerk Bob Cratchit and his nephew, Fred.

Cratchit raises a glass to Scrooge over the family's meager Christmas dinner - and over Mrs. Cratchit's objections. And Fred continues to invite his uncle to dine, year after year, even though the old man riddles him with insults.

We all know the end of the story. After his ghostly visitations, Scrooge accepts dinner with Fred and becomes a generous benefactor to the Cratchits. And so, neither should we close our hearts to hope for the 21st century.

Taking a wide look around, here are a few silver linings that emerged in 2012.

*Apple announced that it is bringing back some of its manufacturing to the United States. In interviews, Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, said the company would spend about $100 million on U.S. manufacturing operations in 2013.

*Several cities, including New York, are reporting declines in childhood obesity - perhaps showing that public health campaigns can be effective. Obesity is a significant factor in health care costs.

*The years-long deployment of soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in an unexpected gain for quality child care in this country. When parents began shipping out, the Department of Defense realized that there weren't enough approved, private child care slots. So the military worked with a national organization, Child Care Aware, to train and certify child care providers, greatly expanding the supply of quality programs.

*Here's another unexpected gain. During the economic downturn that began in 2008, even as people are hurting financially, they are demonstrating more compassion. The Corporation for National and Community Service reports a rise in volunteerism - exactly the opposite of what happened during hard economic times in the past.

There are many more bright spots; we see them in our personal lives every day. Let's hold a hope in our hearts for rebirth in our public life as well.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

We can no longer ignore need for gun control, care for mentally ill

Make it stop.

That's how I react to yet another horrible mass killing. Like the third-grade class at Sandy Hook Elementary School that huddled into a corner - "squished," as one student described it - and the gym students hidden in a closet, I just want to shrink into a defensive posture. Don't tell me any more.

Don't offer any explanations or reasons. We've heard too many. There is no good reason why, when I talk to my children about mass murder, they've heard it all before in their 14- and 15-year lifetimes. As a country, we should not be resigning ourselves to this reality.

We need to face up to two facts we've been avoiding: that we have permitted an outrageous access to guns and level of gun violence. And we are pitifully inadequate at dealing with people in mental and emotional crisis.

It pains me to say this, but we have gone too far in protecting individual rights, and we must pull back and make this society safer. Get the guns out of madmen's hands, even if it means some hunters and self-defense advocates have to put up with more bureaucracy. The cost is worth it.

Strong and savvy voices - those of Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-Mineola) and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg among them - are raised now on gun control. Let's hope they are not muffled by politics yet again.

And what about the mentally ill? We always seem to find out after the fact that someone suspected this person was about to snap. A college mental-health counselor, or a parent, or a friend.

Does it seem at all likely that no one around Adam Lanza - whom officials have named as the shooter - recognized his potential to break? If someone in your home were about to murder 27 people, wouldn't you have some hint? Wouldn't something feel wrong?

It's not that we need stronger laws on involuntary commitment. For the most part, we already have them. We just don't use them.

Such laws vary by state. In New York, a person can alert the authorities that someone is dangerously askew, and that person will be taken in for observation and evaluation by a psychiatrist within 48 to 72 hours. The person making the report can remain anonymous.

One ready place to research the commitment laws is on each state's department of mental health website. The New York State Office of Mental Health has hotline emergency numbers on its home page. Police and other first-responders also know where to direct people.

I don't know how often involuntary commitment is used. But it needs to be more widely known-about. The symptoms of someone in mental crisis are most times not subtle: mood swings, abusive behavior, isolation, inability to cope with daily tasks like bathing, loss of touch with reality.

Perhaps it's often just too hard to admit that someone you love is so far gone. I wonder what Nancy Lanza - Adam's mother, who was also killed - was going through.

Too often, we look for a history of mental illness and treatment before we act. We want a diagnosis, some proof - someone who has "gone off his meds" or tried suicide.

But a person who is about to snap for the first time slips out of this net. These are the ones who design and execute elaborate schemes to go out in a blaze. It must satisfy something that's gone wrong inside them, but we should not have to be a party to this any longer.

It sickens me to think that I will have to read about the "reasons" for this horror, as though the torments of the shooter could account for the terrible cost for all of these innocent children, their families, their communities - and our country.

I don't want to see the photos of those Connecticut parents burying their kids. And it makes me die inside to think we could have prevented this tragedy but we didn't get serious enough. About guns, about insanity. We need to make it stop.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Can mommy bloggers harness their political power?

When weighing the good and bad technology has brought us, here's one to add to the plus column: mommy blogs.

The cutesy name is deceptive. These online diaries reveal the messy reality of raising children American-style - which has been relatively isolated in each family home. But these web writers chronicling the ups and downs of parenthood have fashioned community support for millions.

Starting small in the late 1990s, the mommy-blog phenomenon has exploded to about 4 million writers in North America, according to online marketers, and many times more readers. One of the most popular writers, Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com, has over a million followers on Twitter. Mommy blogs have multiplied so rapidly that parent website Babble.com expanded its annual Top 50 ranking last year to the Top 100 Mom Blogs. The 2012 list came out last week.

Of course, the profit motive being what it is, companies with products to sell began wooing the bloggers a half-dozen years ago. Disney, Walmart and Procter & Gamble, among others, recognized them as "influencers" of buying decisions. And lately, they've been attracting political attention as well.

In August, seeking re-election, President Barack Obama opened an annual female blogger conference in New York City live by videoconference. Last month, the premier of British Columbia, Canada, Christy Clark - who is polling badly among female voters - invited blogging moms to her Vancouver office for a chat.

Overtly courting women's votes dates back at least to the soccer moms - married, middle-class suburban women with school-age children - in the 1996 American presidential campaign. Women have cast between 4 million and 7 million more votes than men in recent elections, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. And this year, for the first time since the Gallup Organization began keeping this sort of record in 1952, the candidate that men overwhelmingly preferred lost.

So, are mom bloggers exercising political power? As it turns out, they don't blog about much that you'd call political. They're generally not endorsing candidates or advocating for legislation. Instead, their topics are often mundane - recipes, shopping, cute things the kids did, pets, frustrations - and also personal: depression, sex, drinking, rage, boredom, self-doubt.

Catherine Connors wrote on her top mommy blog, HerBadMother.com: "I am a bad mother according to many of the measurements established by the popular Western understanding of what constitutes a good mother. I use disposable diapers. I let my children watch more television than I'd ever publicly admit. I let them have cookies for breakfast. ... I have thought that perhaps I am not at all cut out for this motherhood thing."

She goes on to reject the idea of a "community consensus" about what makes for a good mother. In the 50-plus years that child care experts have been judging whether mothers are good enough based on employment, sleeping arrangements, grocery choices, self-abnegation and 1,001 other criteria - having mothers confess who they are and receive the acceptance of a vast online community may be among the more political acts of our time.

Perhaps if we can get past the artificial barriers of who's a good-enough mom - call a cease-fire in the so-called Mommy Wars - we could begin to act collectively and exercise some real political power. We could harness those millions of readers to advocate against cuts to child care subsidies and in favor of paid leave to care for infants.

The Internet has given mothers this platform. It will be interesting to see what they do with it.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Democrats should make good on campaign hints to upper-middle class

It seems likely that we will be hearing about the tortuous dramas of the "fiscal cliff" until the calendar closes on 2012. The president took his case to business leaders this week and will speak tomorrow to workers at a Pennsylvania toy factory, in an effort to ratchet up pressure on Republicans in Congress.

Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), is threatening to push the country into default unless there are drastic spending cuts. And so the wrestling match continues, teetering as close to the Jan. 1 "cliff" edge as possible.

Many Long Islanders, I suspect, will be watching how the debate settles over who is wealthy and who is middle class. President Barack Obama has drawn the line at earnings of $200,000 for an individual, and $250,000 for a household. He wants to extend tax cuts for everyone below those annual incomes.

However, this income cutoff is unfair to high-cost areas like Long Island, as some Democrats have acknowledged. In 2010, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) floated the idea of raising taxes only on $1-million-plus incomes. A year earlier, Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington) was one of eight co-sponsors of a bill, the Tax Equity Act, that would have adjusted federal income tax brackets to account for regional differences in the cost of living.

The bill was popular in the Northeast: Seven co-sponsors were from New York, and the eighth, Rep. Jim Himes, represents Fairfield County, Conn. But the bill went nowhere.

This year during election season, many more Democrats saw the light and began publicly questioning whether $250,000 was the right cutoff. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who represents pricey San Francisco, in May called for a vote to make the tax cuts permanent for anyone making less than $1 million a year. Florida Sen. Bill Nelson and North Dakota Sen.-elect Heidi Heitkamp also supported extending tax cuts for those making less than $1 million. Candidates from Missouri to Nevada to Virginia said $250,000 was perhaps too low. Some floated figures of $400,000 or $500,000 instead.

This campaign-trail flirtation with a compromise obligates Democrats to at least consider a higher-income cutoff.

There are two reasons this is important to Long Island - and, indeed, to high-cost regions around the country. First, many Long Islanders would be affected by the higher tax rate. The IRS doesn't publish data for the $250,000 income level, but about 100,000 Long Island households made more than $200,000 in 2009, according to census figures.

People making $250,000 a year don't necessarily feel wealthy. Their household could consist of a teacher and a police officer - in other words, middle class occupations. At that income, it's not always possible to fund what most Americans would agree is a middle-class life: the ability to save for retirement, afford a home and educate one's children.

More income taxes - on top of high-priced homes, local taxes, transportation, recreation and education - would make this area even less affordable. We are already bleeding retirees to North Carolina, and graduates to everywhere else.

To be sure, it may be hard to muster sympathy for a $250,000-earner when the median family income nationwide is $62,300. And bumping the cutoff from $250,000 to $1 million would lose the government $366 billion in revenue over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

But fairness dictates a second look for high-cost regions. For many people, another few thousand dollars in taxes just isn't affordable.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Embracing the new normal

There's nothing like a life-shaking storm to make people appreciate normal. Usually, normal is ho-hum. But when life is turned upside down, normal is the most welcome feeling.

Normal didn't return for me, after superstorm Sandy, when we got our power back or refilled the refrigerator. It was when I saw faces I hadn't seen since before the storm - about two weeks after it knocked our Island around. There we were, smiling, most of us showered, and whole. Normal returned when I realized that people in my community were, for the most part, going to be OK.

That's not the same as saying life will be the same as it was before the storm, or before this long recession. Instead, we're living with a "new normal" - a sense that we must permanently lower our material expectations. Maybe the new normal will define our moment in history.

Some day, years from now, we may think of these times the way people recall the Great Depression. People who lived through it went on to stash away money - sometimes in places far away from banks they no longer trusted. They hoarded food; waste became a sin. Our recollections of 2012 may be that this was the year we acknowledged how much we depend on each other.

Our country has weathered a long series of blows. The banking crisis of 2008 diminished or zeroed out our home equity. High school graduates applied to cheaper colleges, and college graduates couldn't find jobs. Stretches of unemployment lengthened, people couldn't pay their mortgages, and then ... Sandy.

It's fair to say that many of us are feeling wiped out. Thousands of homes and more than a dozen people on Long Island were lost in the storm. It's the sort of thing that makes normal seem miraculous.

You probably think I'm going to say that we should be grateful for normal. It is Thanksgiving Day, after all. Children's smiles, purring kittens, dry basements and the smell of coffee. Yes, all of that.

But there is another point worth remembering, and that is that as the winds have receded, it's impossible to miss the compassion going around. We heard about the occasional tempers flaring as people waited in hours-long gasoline lines. But for the most part, we were patient with one another. Those with generators opened their homes. A friend cooked all the chicken from her neighbor's powerless freezer and fed the neighborhood. An out-of-state tree cutter returned to one woman's home, after his shift was over, to make sure she had lights and heat. Fire departments set up cots for utility workers who were far from home.

Everyone has storm stories like this.

During this recession, unlike those of the past, volunteerism has been on the rise, according to Wendy Spencer, chief executive of the federal Corporation for National and Community Service. What motivates volunteers, he says, is connection to community, and a sense that we are all going to have to contribute if we are going to achieve community and national goals.

This year's re-election of President Barack Obama seemed to me to be an affirmation of depending on each other, with a vision of prosperity for the broadest number.

I don't hear people talking now about what they can get out of the government. They are discussing buying generators when the price goes down and how long food will keep in a freezer if you leave it sealed. They're vowing to fill the gas tank at the next storm warning.

People aren't acting like victims. They're adjusting. They're finding a new normal. It's one of the things we as a people do best.

This essay was first published in Newsday.