A recent study say teens who get fewer than eight hours of sleep on school nights are more likely to get involved in risky behavior. Well, that’s most high school students.

The authors of the study say it’s difficult to know if teens are drinking, using drugs or exhibiting other behaviors because they are not getting enough sleep or if the risky behavior keeps them from going to bed earlier. Either way, according to the study, a change in a teenager’s internal clock makes them want to stay up late and get up later.

Getting to bed at a decent hour has been a challenge in our household since my 16-year-old started high school. Here in Charlotte, high schools start classes at 7:15 a.m., which means that students have to get up mighty early to catch buses if their parents can’t drive them to school. And, in the evenings, there’s plenty of homework.

I’ve insisted that my daughter aim to be in bed by 10 p.m. on school nights. Sometimes she is, sometimes she isn’t, depending on the school workload on a given day. She gets up at 5:30 a.m. so she can get to the bus stop by 6:20 a.m.

It’s a difficult situation. Teenagers everywhere don’t get enough rest. And parents everywhere worry about them.

Is there a solution?

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My 16-year-old is signing up for driver’s education classes set to begin in a few weeks at her high school. Meanwhile, I’m practicing how to remain calm when it’s time for her to do her practice driving with me in the passenger’s seat. I’m also developing plans for some classes that she won’t be getting in traditional driver’s education. My father gave me these special classes when I was 16, and I hated them. But she’ll probably look back on the lessons one day, as I do, and be thankful that she got them.

Before my father allowed me to drive alone, he set up three or four classes on Saturday mornings in our driveway. The first was learning how to change a flat tire. It took a while but I finally mastered it and he moved on to basic maintenance skills: how to check the oil and other car fluids, how to check the air in the tires, how to check air filters. He talked to me about the necessity of getting the oil changed regularly and overall car care.

I didn’t like these Saturday sessions at all. A boy I liked lived a few doors up the street and as a teenager, I found it embarrassing to be outside working on a car. But a few years later, I understood the value of my father’s lessons and why he insisted that I do them. While driving to visit my parents one weekend while in college, I had a flat tire. I pulled over to the side of the road and changed it. I can still see my father’s pride when I shared the experience with him.

Over the years, I have relied often on these basic car maintenance skills. For my daughter, I’m going to turn to a mechanic to do the teaching. She’ll grumble, I’m sure. But at least she’ll be inside a garage.

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But I think he would be honored by this national memorial and urge us not to get stuck in the controversies over the various aspects of its construction but to keep pushing for change and equality. And these days, as our political environment reflects a troubling chaos and anger, we must heed his call to pursue the day when “people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

My 16-year-old daughter and I were in Washington a few days before the memorial officially opened, and in the spirit of those who make pilgrimages to someplace sacred, we found our way to the Tidal Basin and the 30 foot tall statue of King. After having not lived in the Washington area for a few years, I didn’t exactly remember how to get to the Tidal Basin and there were no signs along the way to serve as a guide. I’m hoping the lack of signage that day just means that they hadn’t been put up yet, not that they won’t be put up at all.

But we strolled through the monuments, enjoying the specialness of the Washington Monument, the Vietnam Memorial, the World War II Memorial. We gazed over at the Jefferson Memorial as walked along the basin under the cherry trees. And when we saw the King monument, both my daughter and I nearly gasped.

Oh, how can I describe the pride. I began talking to my daughter about my memories of King — watching him on the small, black and white television sitting on the dresser in my parent’s bedroom, hearing my parents talk about him over dinner, and crying when I heard that he had been assassinated. I told her about the riots, the pain and anger.

A fence kept us from getting close to the memorial, so we gazed at it along with other people who had made the pilgrimage too.

The memorial is not perfect, and neither was King. But his legacy rightfully deserves to be recognized among Washington’s treasures. I’ll go back to see it during my next visit to Washington. And every other time that I’m in the area.

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As the women gathered around tables to begin the discussion, the moderator asked the black women, “How many of you have someone in your family who worked as the help?” All the black women raised their hands. Nearly all the white women raised their hands when asked if black women had worked for their families.

It was a profound experience, one black woman said, to watch the movie that celebrated the courage of black women who worked as the help.

Three large churches — two mostly black and one mostly white– arranged the event to help create better dialogue and understanding among women in this southern city.

In two sold-out theaters, the women laughed and cried as they watched the movie about black maids working in a Mississippi town in the 1960s and their willingness to risk their lives to share their stories to a white woman who compiled a book about their experiences.

One 51-year-old black woman, who grew up in a rural area of South Carolina, said she started working as a maid at age 12, when her mother dressed her in a white shirt and dark skirt and took her daughter to her job. It was the early 1970s. Later, the same white family helped her go to college.

A 58-year-old white woman stood up and told the group, “I grew up in an area where everyone had a housekeeper. Now, at 34, my youngest daughter works as a maid.” I overheard a black woman say, “Now, they’re called nannies.”

There were many more stories of mothers and grandmothers who worked as the help, of the irony of the relationships between the black women and white families.

“We really want to help build better relationships,” one of the moderators told the group as the session ended. Most in the group agreed that coming together around the movie “The Help” was a good start.

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My 80-year-old mother worked as “the help” for many years in the 1950s and 1960s, cleaning the homes of white families and taking care of their children. She worked for one family with three children then practically raised another girl after her mother died when the child was four years old. Later, she helped take care of a disabled man.

“I didn’t have any choice,” my mother said about her work for white families. “It was hard to get jobs doing anything else.”

My mother told me she did not like having to be a servant. She didn’t like that the white families just took her services for granted. She didn’t like feeling that she was invisible to the people who ate her food, slept on the sheets she washed and left for work confident that she would keep their children safe. (Publicity photo from The Help shows actresses Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer who portray maids in the movie.)

The white family with the three children, she told me, regularly got home after the 5 p.m., when my mother was supposed to leave. But they offered no apologies, extra pay or the option of changing her hours. So my mother left home early and returned late to her own children and dealt with the disregard for her time until she found another job. The $18 a week she earned helped pay the bills and buy food at our house, which my parents bought in 1957.

“You never had to go through that,” my mother told me. “You never had to have white people telling you what to do.”

So the mantra in our house when my sisters and I were growing up was this: Study hard. Get a good education. Do your best.

All of us went to college.

I will watch “The Help” with heartfelt respect and gratitude for the black women who bravely and quietly did what they had to do to help their own families.

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My youngest sister was with my 80-year-old mother and called the rest of us after dialing 911. All four of us were in our hometown after returning from a family reunion so we rushed to my mother’s house, arriving moments after the ambulance.

The emergency workers were able to revive my mother and took her to the hospital emergency room, where we spent the next few hours waiting for examinations and tests to figure out what had happened. In the end, the prognosis was good. A visit a few days later to her primary doctor resulted in a change in some medication.

But the experience was unsettling. Through it all, I prayed, not only for my mother’s health and comfort but for steadiness as my sisters and I deal with the challenges of taking care of an aging parent.

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We’ve been figuring out our new roles over the past few years as Mom has faced increasing health issues and has sought guidance in making decisions about doctors and surgeries and other matters. She is no longer able to drive and needs help taking care of the house she and my father bought more than 50 years ago. 

My sisters and I have close relationships and have been able to handle difficulties over the years. We had a strong role model in our father, who until he passed away a little over 24 years ago, maintained close ties with his five brothers and one sister. So it came easily to us to step in and start helping when we realized our mother needed it.

 But we didn’t have a plan. We didn’t understand at first that we needed to sit down with each other, and our mother, to talk about her needs and how we could help collectively and individually. We were on a treadmill of sorts, responding to each crisis without an idea of where we were going. That left us with some hurt feelings.

 More than a year ago we sat down and developed a strategy. We’re now a real team of caregivers, relying on each other for support as we help our mother. How are you and your siblings handling care giving duties?

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 Oh my, we were on top of the world that Christmas Day. We baked our tiny cakes, ate them, baked more and sat down together for tea parties. The oven made me feel grown up and it allowed me to pretend I was a good cook like my mother.

 My daughter got an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas when she was 7 years old. We baked and played and I relived the memories of my childhood. I asked her the other day what was her favorite Christmas toy, hoping she had fallen in love with that oven the way I did. Nope. She loves a stuffed bear that I gave her one year and she still keeps it on her bed.

While the Easy Bake Oven tops the list of my favorite toys, the second was a pair of skates I had begged Santa to bring to our house. It seemed that all the kids in the neighborhood that year got skates and we flowed into the street after unwrapping our gifts. The street in front of our house had a sloping hill so it was perfect for skating and racing. We felt like we were flying.

 P.S. Liking that Easy Bake Oven didn’t mean that I later developed a keen interest in cooking. Let’s put it this way. When it’s time to take a dish to a potluck, I sprinkle on some herbs and spices and put a chicken in my small rotisserie.

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