Teenagers tend to wildly overestimate the odds of dying young, and teenagers who think they'll be dead before age 35 are far more likely to abuse drugs, attempt suicide, get arrested, or contract HIV. Scientists have known for quite a while that teenagers tend to think that an early death is much more likely than the infinitesimally small risk it really is. What's recently been discovered, and is intriguing for teens and the people who love them, is that there seems to be a connection between having a fatalistic take on life and behaving in ways that actually make it more likely that you will die—or at least be sick and miserable—instead of blossoming into a healthy young adult.

Here's the back story: When 20,745 teenagers in grades 7 to 12 were asked about their chances of living to age 35, about 15 percent of them said there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that they would not make it. In truth, the odds of dying that young are almost vanishingly small. Interestingly, it seems that death is uniquely confounding as a risk, because teenagers aren't off base when guessing their chances of other life-changing events, including getting pregnant, becoming a parent, being a victim of violence, or being jailed.

Are Ritalin and other stimulant drugs too risky for children? That’s the question raised by new research that found a higher risk of sudden death in children taking stimulants for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I wrote about that study yesterday, but it’s worth an update because the issue continues to be so confusing and controversial. And Madelyn Gould, the author of the study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, gave me practical advice for parents of the 2.5 million children who take stimulants for ADHD. Her recommendation: Stay the course, but make sure your children’s doctor is taking all the recommended steps to screen for the heart problems associated with sudden death.

The Food and Drug Administration asked Gould, a professor of clinical epidemiology in psychiatry at Columbia University/New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City, to investigate the safety of ADHD drugs after a handful of deaths were reported in children, starting in the 1990s. It would be the first rigorous attempt to figure out whether there's a real risk. Gould examined death records of 1,128 children from 1985 through 1996. She found that children taking stimulants were seven times more likely to die than children who were not taking the drugs. There are methodological limitations to her study, including the fact that parents reported their children's medication use after the children had died, and therefore might not remember correctly whether the kids were taking stimulants. Nevertheless, Gould thinks the stimulant-associated risk she found is real, rather than a statistical fluke. Still, she says, the fact that the risk is real doesn’t mean children should stop using stimulants that have been prescribed to them.

Just when parents thought they could spend a week or two not worrying about the health effects of Ritalin, Adderall, and other drugs used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, another study comes along to raise the question once again: Are the medications used to treat ADHD safe enough for kids? Again, the answer is: Probably.

The latest worry spike comes from a report that assessed the risk in children who died suddenly between 1985 and 1996. Researchers led by Madelyn Gould, a professor of clinical epidemiology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, found that 10 of 564 children who died suddenly had been taking stimulant drugs, compared with 2 of 564 who died in car accidents. That would make you think that children taking stimulants are much more likely to suffer a sudden death. And that would square with ongoing concerns that stimulant drugs raise the risk of heart problems in children, which culminated in an April 2008 recommendation from the American Heart Association that all children be screened for heart problems with an EKG before being prescribed stimulants for ADHD.

We’re now officially in the world’s first flu pandemic of the 21st century and the first in 41 years. Strangely, a pandemic doesn’t feel much different from ordinary life. But that’s no surprise to the flu specialists. The United States and the rest of North America have actually been in a pandemic since May, when the swine flu began spreading easily in communities. It turns out it’s a mild pandemic, thank goodness. But that soon could change. The World Health Organization’s declaration of a pandemic was based on its global spread to 70 countries, not on its severity.

But flu experts are worried that the H1N1 virus could mutate and become more dangerous in its travels around the globe this summer, coming back to hit us hard in late summer or early fall. In the horrible 1918 flu pandemic, the deadly second wave hit in August.

Computer-related injuries on the rise in children? Sure, I thought, their thumbs get sore from playing Grand Theft Auto for hours on end. But I was wrong; we’re talking real injuries here, the kinds that land kids in the emergency room. Computer-related injuries serious enough to send someone to the emergency room have increased 732 percent from 1994 to 2006, even though home computer ownership rose less than half that. The data are gleaned from a federal database of 100 emergency rooms around the country. Children under age 5 were most likely to be hurt, and the injuries were caused by tripping over cables or equipment, being hit on the head by a falling computer monitor, or getting caught on equipment. Deep cuts, bumps, and bruises are the most common injuries.

Monitors are the most likely culprits, causing 37 percent of all computer injuries in 2003, according to researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who reported in the July American Journal of Preventive Medicine. (That number has been dropping, thanks to the growing popularity of flat-screen LCD monitors, which are much lighter and less likely to cause harm than the hulking cathode-ray-tube monitors of computers past.)

Culture has a big effect on how parents raise children, and since 20 percent of children in the United States were born to immigrant parents, with that number expected to rise to 30 percent by 2015, those families have a big impact on American culture, too.

As a member of an immigrant family (my husband grew up in Russia), I’m intensely curious about how parents use their native culture for better or worse in raising children. The current issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, which is all about immigrant families, gives clues as to how culture affects child rearing. For instance, immigrant Chinese-American moms and dads are much better at being on the same page in their expectations for children than are European-American mothers and fathers, who vary much more in their parenting style and behavioral standards, according to research by Carol Huntsinger and Paul Jose. The Chinese-American parents present much more of a united front.

Cognitive behavioral therapy can prevent teenagers from becoming clinically depressed, even if their parents are depressed, too. That’s great news, because serious depression afflicts 2 million teenagers each year and puts them at greater risk of suicide and depression throughout life. Anyone who’s been depressed knows how miserable it is; one friend described it as “having the flu all the time.” I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, and especially not a kid.

This latest news, in a depression study just out in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is yet another bit of evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy is a valid treatment for depression. Half of the 316 teenagers in the study, led by Vanderbilt University psychology professor Judy Garber, took part in eight weekly, 90-minute group sessions, in which they were taught problem-solving skills and practiced them. Cognitive behavioral therapy isn’t traditional, long-term “talk therapy”; it’s a short-term treatment, usually lasting no more than 20 sessions, based on the idea that people’s thoughts cause their feelings and behaviors. Thus if people change how they think about a situation and how they respond to it, they can feel better, even if the situation hasn’t changed.

Surely I'm not the only parent who was frustrated to find that the most up-to-date Consumer Reports safety ratings for car seats, cribs, and other essential baby gear are scattered across the website—making for a bunch of dog-eared printouts at the New-Parents-Spend-a-Squidrillion Store. As of today, that problem's solved. The latest Consumer Reports Best Baby Products guide morphs the group's essential safety-testing reports and bargain-hunting advice into a 368-page book that will fit easily into a diaper bag.

There are other great baby-product buying guides out there: Denise and Alan Fields's Baby Bargains helped us make it through our daughter's infancy without going bankrupt. But Consumer Reports remains the gold standard when it comes to independent safety testing. This new book is full of eye-opening advice, including:

Don't buy a drop-side crib. Even though they're the kind we all grew up in, recent safety recalls suggest they pose too much of a risk. Go for a fold-down side or stationary side instead.

My heart goes out to Colleen Hauser, who was near tears in Minnesota this week as she agreed to bring her 13-year-old son in for chemotherapy after the two spent a week avoiding the treatment. Reasons offered for that varied, between the Hausers’ religious faith and their son’s desire to avoid the miseries of chemo. I’ve been working on another article about how patients use the Web to find medical information, and that got me thinking about whether the Hausers might have benefited from the free expert help I've discovered is available to all parents facing agonizing treatment decisions about their children’s health.

Parents facing a child’s health emergency, as the Hausers are with Daniel’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis, can connect with parents who have been there, too. These networks of expert parents are as close as your computer, in online patient groups. They offer hard-won wisdom and up-to-date medical information that can be invaluable to families facing tough treatment choices. “Amateur” medical information isn’t clinically tested or peer reviewed, of course, so it shouldn’t be considered a sole source. But it can serve as a guide to navigating the tsunami of information on Google and other search sites, as well as the often confusing information that patients get from their doctors.

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was 8, and patient advocates have seized on her nomination as proof that diabetes is no longer a life-limiting disability. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the number of children with type 1 diabetes continues to rise, and doctors don’t know why. A new study out in today’s Lancet projects that the number of new cases of type 1 diabetes in children under 5 will double by 2020. Yikes. That is just a projection, based on data from 17 countries in Europe, but it still has distressing implications for families in the United States, particularly since our environment and cultures are so similar. About 3 million Americans have type 1 diabetes now, and 30,000 are diagnosed each year, about half of them children.

Doctors still don’t know what causes type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder in which insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas are destroyed by the body’s own immune system, causing a lack of the hormone that makes it possible for the body’s cells to absorb glucose from food. The disease usually surfaces in childhood, as it did with Sotomayor, or early adulthood. There’s speculation that the lack of early-childhood infections somehow makes the immune system attack beta cells, or that environmental and lifestyle changes, such as the fact that children in developed countries are taller and heavier than in decades past, may play a role.

Do you know what your daughter’s online avatar looks like? If it’s sexually provocative—more Bratz than American Girl doll—it’s time for a chat. “I’m amazed at the grotesqueness of some of these avatars,” says Jennie Noll, a developmental psychologist and associate professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who asked 173 teenage girls ages 14 to 17 to make avatars, then rated their provocativeness—skimpy clothing, body piercings, exaggerated curves. Girls who created provocative avatars were more likely to get sexual come-ons online, not surprisingly, and also more apt to agree to an in-person encounter with someone they met online. Noll's study is published in the current issue of Pediatrics. The girls who chose provocative avatars were also more likely to be preoccupied with sex—and, Noll speculates, they might be more likely to try on the role.

Parents can use avatars as an early warning system, Noll says. “Parents should be interested and aware of how their children are presenting themselves online,” she says, and prepared to talk with them about "the implications of presenting themselves as a sexual being online.” The next step: Run through scenarios about what could happen if someone wanted to meet up in real life, and role-play how to fend off a come-on that could lead to more than they’re able to handle. Not all offline encounters end in sexual abuse or exploitation, of course. But Noll, who studies the effects of child sexual abuse, cautions that the potential is there.