Happy Thanksgiving, CV!

Thanksgiving is all about the three Fs – family, football and food. When my older brother was in junior high, our entire family would participate in a local Thanksgiving tradition, “The Coconut Bowl.” His football team played a team from Willow Brook, Pennsylvania, and we housed players who had funny accents. Now together we say: Go, Falcons!

Please ask returning co-eds if they felt like they were adequately prepared for the campus party scene. They’ve heard all the lessons and lectures; please ask, was the information relevant? So they don’t feel threatened or interrogated, start questions with “how” or “what” and you’ll learn a thing or two. I ask because some parents have asked CV Alliance to host a presentation on ways to prepare our kids for the time when they do drink and/or do drugs. To keep them safe, we tell our daughters not to drink from a glass or container they didn’t get and to keep it covered. Should we teach them how to monitor the amount they’re drinking? Underage drinking is illegal; still, a friend showed her son how to stack his cups or suggested putting bottle tops in his pocket to track consumption even though he doesn’t drink. Yet. Discuss this over turkey and share your thoughts on our Facebook page, please.

Finally, as the family gathers remember the brain. Thanks to Tina Givrad, PhD, we know about the developing brain, that the pre-frontal cortex doesn’t close up until a person is in his/her mid-20s, making the amygdala (the pleasure center) the ruling agent of our children’s thought processes. Tina told us that to reach kids we have to make sure we don’t stimulate their fight, flight or freeze reaction and we cannot be boring.

Okay, that’s an underage brain. What about that distant relative across the Thanksgiving table who is wrong on every political issue discussed and is more stupefying than tryptophan? Scientists discovered that conservative and liberal brains might be wired differently. Instead of losing your cool, tap into your emotional intelligence and think, “It’s their brain.”

Then pass the yams and say, Go Falcons!

Suzy Jacobs
is the executive director of

CV Alliance located at 

3131 Foothill Blvd. Suite D

La Crescenta, CA 91214

(818) 646-7867  http://cv-alliance.org/