Members of my daughter’s Girl Scout troop were on their  first of three planned weekend camping trips this spring. With some guidance from the leaders and several chaperone moms, the girls pitched their tents and cooked their food, the old -fashioned way. It wasn’t one of my daughter’s traditional lessons in my one-year effort to teach her to cook, but she learned how to make-do without the convenience of electricity. I learned a few things, too.

Of course, the first step was starting the fire, which took lots of coaxing from the girls and scurrying to find kindling and wood. Then, they had to learn how to manage it, figuring out how to avoid smothering the flame and keeping it alive until the late evening when they would roast marshmallows.  

The troop leaders gave them their dinner recipe: chicken breast smothered with some cream of chicken or mushroom soup, onions, potatoes and frozen mixed vegetables. The girls hauled water from the pump to prep their food, then each took foil and piled on their own mix of ingredients for their individual meals.  The dish was tasty and can easily be prepared using a grill. It took three times to successfully cook the dump cake; the first two times it burned.

My daughter and I will be doing plenty of grilling this summer, using some of the tips offered in “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook, which I’m using as a guide for our cooking lessons. My mother also will be teaching some of her recipes.

At the campout, the girls also baked canned biscuits in a Dutch oven to eat with sausage and bacon for breakfast. And, they had plenty of Girl Scout cookies for snacks.

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3. Me & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

How are we supposed to explain to our youth that the first black president of the United States has been disrespected like no other leader in that office recently? How are we to explain the undercurrent of animosity that many of us haven’t seen since the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s? How are we to explain that our country has seemingly lost its mind, again?

I don’t need to recount everything that’s been happening. Most of you know about the outbursts in the Congress, the internet pictures, the threats, the town hall meetings that nearly erupted into riots. What has been unleashed? This is about more than providing health care insurance to more people.

I’m happy to live in a democracy that allows free speech, but why, in 2010, are many people on the edge of madness over this issue? What has been unleashed?

I’ve been talking about health care reform with my 15-year-old daughter and she can’t quite understand all of the anger and nastiness. What about the children of the folks who have been spitting, yelling threats and ignoring the political decorum in this country? What are they thinking?

What has been unleashed?

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Parents, we have to. No matter how much they protest or complain about an invasion of privacy. Without this type of parental guidance, our children are roaming dangerously in cyberspace. I began to better understand the risks of this new playground while attending a social media conference here in Charlotte. I got the point about our kids but I realized that many of us Baby Boomers are just as naive about our online privacy.

Why, the social media experts asked, do we put our birthdays (with the actual year), religious views and other personal information on Facebook pages? Just because it was requested on a form? Why do our children think nothing of wanting to plaster their images all over MySpace? Because that’s what their friends do? Many of us parents do the same thing on Facebook.

Here’s the advice from the experts: Read and understand the Facebook and MySpace privacy settings and make sure you reserve some information, such as family photos, only for your identifiable friends. If not, it’s all free territory for anybody with an internet connection. Talk to your children, over and over, about using good judgment about what they say and do online because it never goes away. Monitor them during the turbulent high school years. A study this week showed that 70 percent of employers now do online searches on applicants, young and old.

My daughter grunted when I told her we would be having a family meeting to talk about sensible use of the internet. I’ll be looking more into privacy matters to help both of us. What about you?

As a start, check out www.mashable.com, an online guide to social media.

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She returned from a weekend church youth group retreat, smiling and bubbling with stories. She talked and talked, about her new friends, the Bible study, the group discussions and the singing. In the midst of recounting the events, my 15-year-old turned to me and said, “Mom, I realized that I had not been connecting with God.”

What a powerful spiritual awakening. I looked at her in awe and admiration, silently giving thanks. She is on her journey toward a stronger faith.

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Both my daughter and I were partly drawn to the Baptist church by the strength of its youth program. There’s a separate youth service that the teenagers crowd into on Sundays as well as other opportunities for study and participation in church ministries.

My mother also encouraged my involvement in the youth activities at the Methodist church our family attended. There were rap sessions with the ministers, prayer time, hot-dog sales to raise money for charity, good times with friends and Saturday-afternoon choir rehearsals. Those days marked the planting of the seeds of my faith.

We all think about what we want our children to be when they become adults. My prayer is simple. I want my daughter to first be a woman with faith and compassion. I’m doing what I can to make sure she’s on the path to developing a long and deep spiritual relationship.

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This new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation tells us this: Average American youths between ages 8 and 18 spend virtually all their time, except for school, using a computer, smart phone, television or other electronic device. They constantly send text messages and talk on cell phones. They surf the internet while listening to music on their ipods. Even the authors of the study said they were stunned  by the dramatic increase in media use since similar research was done five years ago.

In the meantime, obesity is increasing among our young people because of their sedentary lifestyles, and eating habits. The Kaiser study found that a significant percentage of the heaviest media users had lower grades and behavioral problems, though the findings could not determine whether the media use causes those problems. 

Some experts say it’s time to stop debating whether this reliance on electronics is good or bad but to accept it as a part of the environment. Parents, what are we going to do? We aren’t powerless, though trying to help our children manage the use of all these devices is challenging and frustrating.

I’ve set up rules of etiquette for texting and cell phone use, and a limit on computer use for fun. My 15-year-old daughter seems to always be listening to her ipod. She complains that I’m a mean parent for not allowing her to send late-night text messages. It seems as if the cell phones and ipods and other electronics are somehow addicting and our children just lose themselves when they’re using them.

Parents, speak up. How are you maintaining some control in your home? Send along your tips and advice. We need to help each other.

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She’s not a complainer but there are days when I look into her eyes or listen to her voice and I know she’s struggling to keep it together. She’s coping with chronic pain and other problems.

Sometimes a hug is not enough. But the words always come through prayer.

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I know too many people who don’t do anything to recognize the legacy of the civil rights leader. Instead, it has become a shopping day, a day to sleep late, a day to clean up, or a day to run errands. Don’t waste the holiday, please. We must make sure our children not only understand the role of King and others in ending segregation and other injustices, we must teach them that they, too, must continue the fight for access to higher education and for economic parity.

It took supporters 15 years to win enough votes in Congress to create a national holiday; it was proposed eight days after King was killed in 1968. Three years after it went into effect in 1986, 44 states had adopted it as a state holiday, too. New Hampshire was the last state to adopt it.

While there are usually organized holiday events in most cities, we can figure out our own ways to celebrate. Volunteer today, and the rest of year. Talk to your children about their heritage and take them to an African-American-inspired museum. Go with them to the library and start a reading program of some of the great black authors – James Baldwin, Richard Wright and others. (Unfortunately, these books are not on many school reading lists.)

My daughter and I are going to a couple museums, one featuring African American artists and the other focusing on the South. Along the way, we’ll talk a lot. The King holiday ought to be more than the annual singing of “We Shall Overcome” or the playing of excerpts of King’s famous speeches.

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Their puppies were Christmas gifts, from me.  Both of the pets are toys. Their eyes open and close and they make sleeping sounds. They can lift their heads and lay them down, and with a little petting, they’ll fall asleep or wake up. They have blankets to keep them warm. Both Cody and Chance spend most of their days comfortably perched on pillows on my mother’s and daughter’s beds.

My nearly 80-year-old mother has wanted another pet since she lost the real Cody about four years ago. He had been a part of our family for 11 years and my mother still gets sad when she talks about how he went blind and suffered before he passed away. She isn’t able now to take care of another animal and she has missed the company.

My calico, Afi, had been with me for six years when my daughter became the baby of the house. Afi refused to eat and started having difficulty walking before the veterinarian figured out she had been overcome with jealousy. Once Afi realized there was still a place for her in our home, she and my daughter became great pals over the years. We lost Afi a little over five years ago. My daughter has been talking about pets more often since we moved to North Carolina a few months ago so I knew she’d enjoy another pal, too.

 My mother says she has a lot of fun with her new Cody and plays with him two to three times a day. He makes her smile and helps take her mind off her ailments. My 15-year-old daughter, on the other hand, doesn’t tend to her puppy as much, but she’ll pick it up and stroke it after tough days at school.

While their needs often are vastly different, I’m so happy to have found a single solution to offer comfort to my mother and daughter.

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It’s challenging, sometimes, trying to communicate with a teenager. But there are delightful moments when they let us into their orbit. My 15-year-old daughter pulled me in for a ride the other day.

Mom, she asked during dinnertime, “How do you say red?” I was puzzled but said the word anyway. Then she repeated it, asking if I noticed her accent. We both laughed, and the story began.

Another ninth-grader had teased my daughter about her “northern” sounding rendition of the word. Other kids in class joined in as they sounded out some colors – red, green, blue, orange. One student had recently moved to our Charlotte, N.C., neighborhood from New York; we arrived from Maryland a few months ago. Others were from Michigan, Illinois and Paraguay. A few were native Southerners and another spoke English tinged with a Spanish accent. They giggled at the sounds of their voices, dissecting each other’s inflections. What better way to use some of the time the teacher had given them to study for the mid-term exam?

The final word of the sound-off: Sauce. My daughter offered up the different versions she had heard at school. I repeated the word, too, along with green, blue and orange. During those moments, nothing was funnier or more important. For a while, I was enjoying, along with my daughter, the sounds of high school.

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