What Briana Delcampo is doing for 18-month-old Isaiah Hernandez would be an incredibly selfless act for anyone at any age. The fact that Briana is just an 18-year-old girl makes her sacrifice nothing short of heroic. 

At the end of this month, Briana is donating a kidney to little Isaiah, who was born with end-stage kidney failure and has already spent more time in the hospital than the average adult. He was just months away from needing dialysis, the prospect of which set his parents on a desperate search for a kidney donor.

Said Isaiah's mom, Terri Hernandez:

"He needs a kidney transplant because being on dialysis is very hard on the body, especially for a baby."

The cool thing about being a woman—one of the many cool things about being a woman, I should say—is that our beauty doesn’t come wrapped up in just one kind of package. We’re a powerful assortment of delectable differences: thick and shapely, athletic and muscular, tall and long-legged. Still, the fashion industry has traditionally celebrated rail thinness as the only desirable body shape. And it’s affected generations of teenage girls. (Twiggy, unfortunately, wasn’t a sensation for naught.) Continual epic fail.

Maybe we should all ship our daughters for study abroad in Israel for a semester or two. Not because of the culture or the history or the lox (though those are all certainly reason enough), but because they seem to be light years ahead of us over there in the effort to broaden perceptions of women’s beauty. 

If Tanning Mom -- you know, the woman who allegedly brought her kid into the booth with her to get some concentrated cancer-causing rays sent in her direction -- has you terrified, how about some good news? The latest trend in pre-prom pledges has turned from the standard no sex, no drinking promises to one that should put a sunny smile on your face. Kids are swearing they won't tan before the biggest dance of the year.

I have one question. Where can I get one of these pledges, and can I make my kid sign it now? OK, I guess that was two questions. But I'm so caught up in the excitement of it all, you'll just have to work with me here.

There’s some good news about your teens and there's some bad. First, the good: Teens ages 13-15 exercise more than any other high-wealth nation in the world. The boys rank #1 and the girls rank #2. Yeah for the gym! The bad news: Teens are probably drunk and high while they work out. American teens rank #1 for pot smoking and #3 for binge drinking. Dude, where's my treadmill?

Have you ever looked at the bottle of hand sanitizer on your desk and wondered, "Hmm, could I get drunk by taking a few sips?" Me neither. But then I'm not a teenager!

So it should surprise absolutely no one that the ER patients who prompted California health officials to issue a warning to the world about the dangers of drinking from that bottle of cleanser were all under 20. They saw the words "contains alcohol" on the bottle, and you can guess what happened next ... glug, glug, glug.

Sigh. The sanitizer warning doesn't worry me, honestly. It's what it represents that will keep me up at night when my kid hits the teen years.

A new report about the choking game provides some shocking numbers. The game itself isn't new, but when 1 in 16 eighth graders survey say they've played, it's definitely a reminder to parents to be on the lookout for telltale signs of this and other extreme tactics kids take just to get high.

If you're not familiar with the choking game it goes like this -- a kid puts a rope or belt around his or her neck and pulls tight enough to cut oxygen off to the brain. That results in a temporary high ... if it doesn't kill them first. According to the CDC, we know that 82 children have died from the game, though as The Los Angeles Times points out, that number could be higher, because there's no reliable way to categorize those deaths. It also doesn't include the many serious injuries -- including brain damage -- children have incurred playing it.

I really wanted to believe 18-year-old Tallulah Willis when I heard her credit mom Demi Moore for her "positive body image." According to Willis:

"My mom was very much like 'Love your body, love yourself, run around naked' ... whatever we wanted to do, it was very accepting."

As the mother of a daughter, I really really wanted to believe it was possible -- that a mom like Moore with obvious body image issues (to put it mildly) could somehow manage to raise daughters who didn't starve themselves or do drugs to stay thin or turn into plastic surgery junkies.

But deep down, I know that's probably not the case. "Do as I say, not as I do." Has that ever worked on any kid in the history of history?

Well, now I know for sure what my answer will be when my almost 11-year-old daughter's pediatrician asks if we want the HPV vaccine at her next check-up: An emphatic "NO." I was leaning in that direction anyway, for various reasons (more on those in a minute), but the latest news on Gardisil pretty much sealed the deal -- and if you have a tween girl, it might do the same for you.

In a study of 900 girls and young women between the ages of 11 and 26 who received the HPV vaccine, it was the 11- to 12-year-old group who experienced the worst side effects, from pain, dizziness, bruising, and swelling at the injection site to (in rare cases) fainting. These symptoms generally showed up about two weeks after the vaccine was administered.