Vote for my advice and read more on Good Morning America’s “Advice Guru” search.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/DearGMA/dear-gma-advice-guru-finalist-vicki-iovine/story?id=12343097

I’m not too proud to beg at this point. Just tell me what you want in return; a foot rub, to borrow my clothes, to have me care for your aging parent or write your kid’s college application essay. I am not above groveling and pandering ‘cuz I know doing this during the holidays is a fun as hair removal. But think, if I get the job, I will stay out of your hair and send you swag from ABC, like t shirts and mugs and pictures of Sam Champion, the Weather Anchor.

Just click on this red button! Easy, right? Then click the Like box (if you’re a FB member, and who isn’t these days?) and scroll to the end of my advice and rate is as high as you dare without feeling like a total sell-out (a “4″ rating would be worth a cuticle push from me.) You can send me your payback demands at the end of January, when they announce the winner.  Love, Vicki

1. VOTE for Me on the GMA Website Please vote for my first advice as an Advice Guru contestant to a GMA viewer. Voting is on the second page, vote “4″.

2. JOIN the Make-Vicki-Iovine-GMA-Advice Guru Facebook Page (comment and hit the LIKE button)

3. FOLLOW Me on Twitter (Kill me now! Tweeting! But I do really want the job)
www.twitter.com/vickiiovine

4.TWEET About It! If you tweet please support me, and let GMA know you’re doing it @gma!

Watch My GMA Pitch

I’ll keep you posted, and let you know what else you can do!

With gratitude, Vicki

That first year was spent feeling buffeted about by the universe, and aside from looking out for the kids, and going through the legal and financial arrangements of the divorce, getting a house and furnishing it AND cutting all my hair off, I was in a spin. I must have looked half-insane much of the time, but I was paying attention to what was happening around me. What I learned is that there are a lot of misconceptions about divorce and I’m sharing them with you now, as your Girlfriend, because you’ll need all the tribal and anecdotal information you can get from those of us who have already walked a mile in divorce moccasins. Here are my Top Ten…

1. When My Mate Is Cheating On Me, The First Thing I Must Do Is Expose Him/Her
While that may be emotionally fulfilling in the short term, the first thing you should do is make sure your wandering spouse is not spending community funds on an affair! You don’t want to see your money burned on B&Bs in Napa and fancy restaurants, do you?? Get a lawyer to discuss freezing the accounts!

2. I Don’t Want a Killer Divorce Attorney Representing Me
Why not? A meek lawyer doesn’t make you look less greedy or grasping to an opposing spouse, nor does he/she inspire a conciliatory mood for the sweet and generous dividing of assets. Weak representatives just make YOU look weak. Where money is concerned, assume your mate will fight hard, as should you. No one ever looked back on a financial split and said, “Gosh, I wish I’d asked for less.”

3. Everyone Will Take My Side Because I Wasn’t the One Who Had the Affair/Became a Drug Addict/Discovered I Was Gay
Almost every state is “No-Fault” and that really means that bad behavior on either spouse’s part is not a consideration. You don’t win because you played by the rules. In fact, there are no rules. Get smart because you won’t get even.

4. The Kids Will Never Survive A Divorce
While divorce is devastating to the entire family, it’s not so much the actual split that damages the kids, but rather how it’s handled by the couple.

5. The Kids Will Accept the Divorce If They Understand Why We’re Getting It
The last thing you should ever do is consult or inform your kids (young or old) about the circumstances leading to the demise of your marriage. Sharing details may make you think you’ll look reasonable or justified in separating, but it will really only devastate the kids and falsely empower them to make grown-up decisions for an infantile parent. It’s never fair to blaspheme the other mate because you ask the children to question their own security and belief in the family they have experienced up to this point.

6. My Mate Just Asked For Full Custody of the Kids even though He/She has never been their primary caregiver Because He/She Really Wants to Spend Time With them!
This is rarely a gesture that is inspired by a Higher Income-Earning Spouse yearning to have more quality time with the kids or to quit working and be a stay at home parent, but rather a money ploy. In other words, if the parent with the higher income has full custody, it really means that parent hopes to avoid paying YOU child support.

7. If I Get a Divorce After All This Time, I’ll Be Alone The Rest of My Life:
All statistics say the opposite. Even if you don’t remarry, it’s your choice whether you will fill your life with other meaningful relationships and find love again. It usually takes a year or so to grieve and regroup, and you’re entitled to every minute of it, but after that you can and will learn to move on to your next chapter.

8. Most Divorces Result From The Man Straying
Actually, women are almost as inclined as men to cheat throughout a marriage. (The figures would probably be equal if the childcare responsibilities were shared 50/50, fatigue being a big wet blanket on libido.) According to AARP, after a couple reaches their forties and fifties, two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women. Think about it; the kids are raised and the only thing standing between a middle-aged wife and liberation may be the guy beside her who has dangerously high cholesterol and thinks foreplay is showering within the last 24 hours. By then, the bigger determination is whether a woman has financial independence from her spouse.

9. People Don’t Really Divorce Because They ‘Have Grown Apart’
Yes, they do. Studies show that people who no longer have a mutual and shared purpose, such as raising children, building a career, a satisfying sex life or shared goal for the future drift from each other. Long after the multi-orgasmic years had passed, Marie and Pierre Curie stayed married through their mutual interest in Physics. Same thing with the philosophy giants Will and Ariel Durant. But if a couple’s only mutual purpose is to co-sign for a second mortgage or to carry the new flatscreen together into the living room, there might not be enough passion or emotional glue for the long haul.

10. Just Considering Divorce is A Sure Sign of a Doomed Marriage
The way I see it, if you haven’t considered suicide in developing your 5-Year Plan, you haven’t considered all your options. Likewise with divorce; if you haven’t even considered it, you haven’t given yourself the full spectrum of choices for your happiness or fulfillment. Don’t be superstitious or guilty about your thoughts—your Girlfriends will never out you!

I’ve been on summer vacay, professionally known as a hiatus, but even fun in the sun couldn’t distract me from the Mel Gibson debacle calling to me from supermarket checkout lines to the evening news to family dinner conversations.

He’s a beast, isn’t he? Rage, mixed with misogyny and racism is just too grotesque to be ignored. What do you think we should do about it? Ban him from “The View?” Applaud that his talent agency has kicked him to the curb? Go easier on those Russian spies, to show solidarity to Oksana Grigorieva, his baby mama? Torch his homes? Start recording all our distasteful private conversations for future evidence?

I, for one, am microwaving popcorn and settling in with my iPad, TV and gossip mags on my sofa. It’s many things, but to me it’s entertainment. It’s so extreme and perverse, yet somehow non-threatening, that I find it diverting. Lust, greed, lots of injectibles and orthodontia combining with one man’s struggle to deny time and the diminishment of his potency are the stuff of King Lear and MacBeth. How fun! I just wish it were better written.

If I were Lindsey Lohan’s P.R. agent, I’d be squeezing myself with delight right now. Only Mel and Oksana’s cocktail of narcissism, sex, ambition and treachery could have diverted America from her jail sentence and entrance into drug rehab. Or is it vice versa, I can’t recall. Then again, Lindsey is existing on the fumes of celebrity rather than an actual career these days and might resent every anguishing moment of the Aussie actor’s compelling disintegration.

Who is Mel Gibson to you or me anyway? A performer. An actor, folks, and a good one. His most distinguished contributions to the screen have always been sociopaths and extremists. Mad Max, Lethal Weapon, Braveheart — not a single character you’d want to leave your dog and kids with for a weekend. Sure, he has played other, more moderate men, but he vibrates in an irresistible frequency when he plays men with outsized egos who are seized with paranoia. We can’t get enough of that guy.

And then we have Apocalypto and The Passion of the Christ, for Christ’s sake (pardon me, I couldn’t resist)! What right-sized person would write and direct such arrogant and agonized films? It’s not like he wasn’t preparing us for this less-compelling and sordid drama in his personal life. To borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald, the artistic are very different from you and me, and I find them exhilarating.

Singer/songwriters, painters, writers and actors, not to mention inventors and philosophers and architects are often very tortured and self-involved people. Being one of their intimates, lovers, spouses, or children can be so damaging as to require them to wear asbestos suits. But for the rest of us it is often moving, inspiring and transcendent to share the fruits of their insanity.

The Mel Gibson who intrigues me is not the ordinary man of Radaronline.com or Entertainment Tonight; in fact that guy is embarrassingly predictable and pedestrian. I prefer my Murtoughs and William Wallaces to be the insane heroes of popular mythology. It would be nice if Mel Gibson could spare us his personal indelicacies and really move us again. C’mon, Mel, put it on the screen!

Here’s my question: What took them so long? Think about it: the Gores are two dynamic, intelligent and passionate people who have met everyone and been everywhere. Their lives have been filled with options and inspirations, seductions and distractions. Who wouldn’t be tempted to wonder what it would be like to rewrite their Third Act? After 40 years of marriage, it could feel like the commutation of a death sentence… I’m just saying.

Oh wait! I’m not supposed to say that, am I? The national dialogue is trending toward shock and disappointment at the Gore’s news. Not me. Call me a cynical recent divorcee if you want, but I think they are both very courageous and clear-eyed in their decision to separate. Not only that, but I don’t think either of them will live to regret the decision, hard as the transition will be.

Right now I can name some great repercussions of this separation: First, Tipper will lose ten to twenty pounds in the next few months. We all do. Al will start dressing more imaginatively. They all do. Both of them will start paying more attention to their undergarments and neither of them will continue driving cars with hatchbacks or “sports utility” in the name.

That said, I’m guessing Al has been tempted to trade on the whole Nobel-Prize-Academy-Award-I-Really-Won-the-Presidency thing that makes a 62 year-old man look and feel like Elvis. I’m also guessing that Tipper has had it up to here with the adoration and indulgence that all middle-aged Elvises require. To be fair, she probably looks at him with that expression that says, “I know who you really are, Bud, and I’m not impressed.” What newly-invigorated and reiterated person wants to be haunted by the one person who knows what a goof you used to be?

They have raised four kids and at least the three girls appear to be doing as well as anybody’s kids. Son Albert III has some dodgy bits with his proclivity for drugs and speeding, but hey, he could be almost anybody’s kid, too. All in all, they seem to have been attentive and loving parents. Call me crazy, but I can’t think of any other reason for people to marry than to raise kids or protect the monarchy.

Sure, Tipper was a little lame in her music lyric censoring phase, and that kiss at the Democratic Convention made most of us vomit a little into our mouths, but they were corny and cute, and besides, they would never have had to stoop so low if the Clintons had at least once acted like they were hot for each other. Besides, any politician who could claim Tommy Lee Jones as a college roommate must have some contact coolness, right?

I, for one, would like to thank Al and Tipper for sparing us the melodrama that typically accompanies such a high-profile split. In fact, I’d consider it a mitzvah if TMZ and the rest of the bottom feeders were to respect the demise of the Gore marriage at least as much as they would, theoretically, respect the creation of it.

It helps, I’m sure, that the Gores appear to have the financial means to create two households without putting either of them on public assistance. Marriage, throughout history, has been an economic relationship that until recently had little to do with romance.

Unfortunately, many people who have reached the romantic ebb in their later years stay married because they simply can’t afford to split up. Tipper and Al can afford it and they’re separating. Good for them that they aren’t forced to stay together to afford their rent-stabilized apartment in Nashville.

You’ve got to be pretty brave to decide to create a whole new life for yourself after your first half-century. Such a decisive split means everything from getting new stationery to becoming accustomed to not knowing what to do with yourself on those weekends when all your married friends are tied up with their families and you would rather stay in bed and watch old movies than have the paparazzi photograph you and your dinner date.

Then again, it’s a new beginning for both of them while they’re young and vital enough to rise to the challenge. The worst part of staying in a stale marriage is the sacrifice of imagination. If a person stays put because they can’t imagine anything better, then they’re probably right where they belong. For the rest of us, I pray the adventure is worth it.

Last Friday, I titled my blog, “We’ll Remember Always, Graduation Day” and was told several times by readers that I needed to clean up my syntax. Really?? Doesn’t anyone remember the Beach Boys’ cover of a song that was first made popular by my mother’s heartthrobs, the Four Freshmen? It’s a song title, people!

So, for those of you who may have taken a pop cultural nap over the last twenty years, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the title of an album and song from Nirvana. Remember them?

“With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us.
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us.”

Anyway, I now know well what Teen Spirit smells like. It’s got a kind of sweet smell that lies somewhere between a newborn’s breath and vomit. It’s full of health and vigor and danger and risk. All I know is, I got a good whiff of it last weekend.

I’ve been around the most beloved and wonderful kids who are getting named MVP and Most Like to Be Made President By Acclamation (thereby skipping the filthy business of getting elected in today’s political process) and matriculating to good colleges or graduating college and taking up their adult journeys. Some of them might be my own offspring and others are dear to me as part of the community that helped raise them, but I’ve been told I’m never to name names so…

Last weekend, the daylight hours were devoted to end of season lacrosse barbecues and religious instruction for Confirmation and other such moving and inspiring illustrations of hope and faith in the generation I helped populate with my own contribution of two boys and two girls. I actually made Tollhouse cookies from scratch and did some of their laundry and was grateful for the privilege.

But, to quote Mick Jagger, “The sunshine bores the daylights out of [teenagers]” and I saw the smoke signals over my own home that an ill-conceived party was brewing somewhere in my village. This was a party at a house that was rented for the day. No parents, on the premises or not, and certainly no homeowner’s insurance to cover accidental death or maiming. As if that weren’t bad enough, the kids throwing it were charging admission.

Parents of tweens, take it from me: Parties that start after 10pm and charge admission are Bad News. There are millions of them on your horizon and most of them are as risky as you fear. Kids who throw parties when their ‘rents are out of town or are completely naïve about what kids will do “with the lights out” almost never charge for admission. Teen promoters are well aware that they can only demand money if there are no people with fully developed frontal cortexes involved and way too many kids with no ability to successfully predict the consequences of spontaneous and silly decisions are invited, in the hundreds.

Not only was I once a teen that believed no party was complete until someone threw up in technicolor from all the wine drinks with screw tops that looked like Kool-Aid, but also I’m no stranger to parenting teens. I have a nose for that kind of teen spirit. Nonetheless, I’m also resigned to the fact that three of my kids are now “legally” adult (who the hell thought 18 years on earth indicated a sound mind?) and I try to give privileges where deserved.

Go ahead and throw the first stone; I know I’m indulgent and weak-spined at times where my kids are concerned. Chalk that up to decent kids who have stayed out of jail and not made me a grandmother prematurely, mixed with the effects of brain damage and fatigue at mothering four teenagers at one time.

Still, forewarned as I was, I hired a driver to deliver my kids and stand right outside the door to stack them and their friends inside his car like cord wood if necessary to bring them all safely home. But at 2am, I was wide awake, texting my kids till my fingers smoked and learning that they hadn’t found the driver and that they’d found other rides home. Do you know what that feels like to a mother?

Other rides home? That’s like getting a text that they’ve swallowed glass and don’t know yet if it will slice through their esophaguses! All you can do is wait and pray. These are the times when I couldn’t care less whether my precious children shake hands with adults and look them in the eye when introduced or hand-write thank you notes in a timely fashion. All I want is for them to LIVE!

Once again, they did live, and I am truly grateful. But here is what I learned from this agony: Teen parties are sometimes as horrifying as I imagine. Just as I learned that rock festivals like Coachella are a lot tamer than those of my own youth, I learned this weekend that teen parties are more outrageous than those of my own wild youth in their yearning for extremes. More sex, more alcohol and more MORE characterize these “revels.”

I don’t know if our kids are more easily bored, more protected and hovered over by us Boomer and Gen-X parents, or more insanely pressured by a world that looks as though there is no abundance in their future—only shortages of work, of the assumption of safety and continuity, and of natural resources. Sometimes I worry that teen spirit occasionally smells like fear, and that us grownups are partly to blame.

I should have known I was a goner when I burst into tears at my first child’s preschool Halloween Parade, twenty years ago. I’ve cried at any parade or processional ever since. I feel like I’ve been on a rotisserie and repeatedly basted with loss, pride, fear and joy for the last ten years and I’ve still not built up a thick skin. My children have attended a school where everything they’ve done has been memorialized in professionally recorded DVDs, and what is irritatingly evident in every soundtrack has been my laughter and my absolute delight in their existence. I’m like the Devoted Mommy version of Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem.

This year is a perfect storm of graduations for me. I have a high school senior of my own graduating. His girlfriend is graduating from another school a week before him. My younger daughter’s boyfriend is graduating with my high school son; my college sophomore’s boyfriend is graduating from college, as is my niece and my oldest son’s best friends, and my firstborn’s girlfriend.

I could just die. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not your typical empty nester fretting about my kids leaving me. With two already living away and a third on his way to New York in the fall, I’m kind of relishing the freedom—particularly since I’ve become single this last year, as well. No, what kills me is their beauty, their optimism and their relief in their accomplishments. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.

As many of you know, my next book is called the Girfriends’ Guide to Teenagers, and my focus for the last couple of years has been the scary, alarming, pray-to-God moments of motherhood. Yet today, in this perfect storm, I am at the peaceful center. I am amazed that most of them have survived ADHD, drunken driving, love affairs and irresponsibility. What a relief to know that their DNA has driven them to survive and succeed—in spite of my mistakes in mothering them and the world’s vicious slights like oil spills, terrorist threats and unemployment.

So far, no felons or pregnancies in the lot! Not only that, but their spirits are still vivid and optimistic and eager. It reminds me of the movie I saw on Mother’s Day, “Babies.” Four newborns were compelled to feed themselves, crawl and eventually rise up on two feet—no matter how much or how little their parents were involved. It’s a beautiful thing, Mother Nature; she makes sure that our offspring proceed on that inexorable progression into their own futures. As I wrote in my book, the Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood, a mother can tell she’s done a good enough job raising her children when they feel free to leave her. They are, sadly, meant to leave the nest and fly.

And fly they do. Over the next few weekends, millions of our babies will be launching themselves out of the nest. Most of them know that they can retreat to the nest from time to time, but they are inimitably driven to discover their own futures and prove themselves independent from us, their ‘rents.

If I could bottle that courage and optimism, along with their naïve beauty and vigor, I’d be bigger than the “Sham-Wow” and Donald Trump combined.

Happy Graduation, everyone! And thank you, Mother Nature!

Ok, so maybe I wasn’t really the very oldest person at the three-day festival in the Indio desert last weekend, but I was certainly the most improbable person in the daily crowd of 78,000. I missed Woodstock, but in my teens I had more than my share of dusty and reckless rock bacchanalias. I saw Hendrix burn his guitar and Janis wail and once stood frozen in terror between a battalion of police officers and a gang of Hell’s Angels who were throwing bottles and rocks at them.

Those experiences may look colorful in my autobiography someday, if I can remember them by the time I get around to writing such a thing, but they strike me now as hideous cocktails of second degree sunburns, more dust than a tractor pull, the specter of LSD lacing everything from drinking water to cookies and juice and the inevitable lust and violence that drugs, alcohol and utter exhaustion inspire in young people-or old people for that matter.

So when I was invited to attend and share a hotel room by my girlfriend Wanda, also a mother old enough to know better, I couldn’t decline quickly enough.

But when I heard that another of our great friends was going out to keep a benign eye on her son and several of his friends, I felt like I was surrendering to the inertia and caution of the aged by not going. I called Wanda back and enthusiastically announced I would, indeed, join the party.

My bravado was largely insincere, but since I’ve become single again after nearly 30 years, my weekends largely consist of reading, knitting and waiting for one teen child or another to finally come home (that’s just between us, of course!) and I thought this might be a kick start to my Third Act. The fact that I went to bed at 7pm on Sunday night and wanted to sleep much of Monday to recover is probably a sign that it wasn’t, but…

Three of my four kids, ages 18, 20 and 22 (the youngest having gone for a day last year and succumbing to allergic asthma from the dust, wisely had sworn off such gatherings) were going, for the fourth or fifth year, so I texted them all to let them know I’d be joining in all the fun. My announcement inspired absolute silence in all of them, except the youngest, who told me I didn’t belong there and shouldn’t chase my youth so pathetically. She also admonished me not to make eye contact or greet any of her friends, should I run into them, since I would be a walking humiliation to our family.

Here’s the good news: The crowds of teens and young adults who amassed there didn’t display the depravity I remember from my own youth. This may be attributed to the rigid security that outlawed bringing in or taking off the premises any beverages. Margaritas and beer flowed freely for those who had been duly carded and given a wristband designating them to be over 21. I stood in line to get a wristband and was not even asked for i.d.-in fact the young woman in charge didn’t even make eye contact with me, probably for fear of laughing or showing her disdain. I jokingly asked her if she needed to see my driver’s license and she just smirked.

At one point we were admitted to an area called Backstage. It had no access to any of the three stages and offered nothing that the other areas didn’t, except a few picnic tables-places to sit above the ground, which existed nowhere else. It also had something I’ve never seen at a rock concert, a “safe haven” tent devoted to “Friends of Bill W”, a euphemism for members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Not a soul was in there, but my guess was that sober people were already sleeping on some friend’s floor or acting as designated drivers for those folks Bill W. didn’t know.

I might have fit in better with my few peers who attended had I stopped coloring my hair about three years ago and worn Birkenstock sandals and a peasant skirt with a fanny pack. Wanda and I tried to dress down and inconspicuously, with our SPF 30 and lip gloss in place, our cashmere wraps and designer knock-offs of the trendy clothes the teens bought for about $10 a pound at American Apparel and cut with scissors rather than altered. Our purses, alone, pegged us for middle-aged semi-affluence. Perhaps the fact that I also carried a Costco-sized bottle of Excedrin in one fist was the biggest giveaway.

I might have looked cranky, too, since we’d parked so far from the venue that it took over 20 minutes of wandering in absolute darkness and through such a fine and clinging dust that my feet looked like I was wearing brown socks. If my car hadn’t responded to the beeper on my keychain, I would still be wandering like Moses.

Once we finally got in to the VIP area, which gave absolutely no indication of being any more exclusive than the Selective Service, it was entertaining to watch how young people behave in their natural habitat. Those not old enough for a legal-drinking wristband seemed to have gotten their parties started in the parking lots and cars and wherever they were crashing for the night.

Youth is so beautiful and I was reminded again of this at Coachella. The girls with their faintly sunburned cheeks looked as ripe and fresh as nectarines and most of the boys still had faint traces of the baby faces they’d had six or seven years ago. They all looked “at home” in this unlikely part of the world and certain that they were exactly where they should be (even if their parents might have disagreed.)

If I’d known at their age what I know now, I would have been so much kinder and accepting of myself. I would have surrendered myself to the crazy community of my strange peers. That’s what the festival most revealed to me; the sweet and rowdy fun of kids willingly giving three days of their lives to join the crowd, hear the tunes and slide from scene to scene as if they were jellyfish on a gentle tide. It looked intoxicating.

I, on the other hand, changed into my running shoes with slip-in orthotics by the second day to ease the strain on my lower back. I was not bobbing on any tide, but forever swimming against it. I was constantly taking inventories of where my keys were, where Wanda was, how my kids were, if I was actually standing where I should, if there was a place to sit nearby and when I should leave to avoid the mass exit and resulting two-hour gridlock in the parking lots.

Beneath the chaos of my monkey brain ran the refrain, “Who are all these people?” These people were surely asking themselves, “Is she a narc? Does she know my parents?” Yes, as a matter of fact, I did know some of their parents, but what happened in Indio stays in Indio, and I’d appreciate it if they’d extend the same courtesy to me.

I’ve been working on this blog since the beginning of the week when 9 teenagers were finally indicted for various crimes that appear to have led to the suicide of Phoebe Prince. Phoebe, for those of you who don’t know, was a 15 year-old freshman and new student from Ireland at a middle class Massachusetts high school who made the mistake of having sex with a senior boy on the football team, thereby inspiring several month of harassment and bullying from his female friends.

One day in January, right before the big school dance, a car of these mean girls drove by Phoebe and hurled an energy drink can at her. She went home and hung herself in her closet. Worse, the mean girls continued the hatefest at the dance two days later.

Parents across the country and in Europe are sickened and terrified by such malice. We hate this window into a female version of Lord of the Flies savagery; we recognize the pain of our own old wounds at the hands of our peers in school and feel threatened anew; we believe that there, but for the grace of God, go our own children; and we frantically seek to find a solution to protect all our kids.

I’m still writing this blog at 9pm before my post tomorrow morning because I’ve already thrown out three versions. Three times I’ve attempted to offer warning signs and rescues, and three times I’ve found them insufficient. This last rewrite is to say that I, like so many of you, don’t really know what we should do about bullies and the kids they victimize.

I’ve nearly raised the last of my four teenagers and I am writing my fifth book in my series of Girlfriends’ Guides-devoting this one to, naturally, teenagers. In the last two years of conducting interviews and doing research, I’ve met with parents of ‘teens and teens and repeatedly felt the agony and helplessness of parents of kids who were being ostracized, ridiculed or tormented by other kids. With four kids of my own, I’ve experienced enough to feel those parents’ pain, too.

There have been many blogs and editorials since January about Phoebe Prince and the thousands of victims she represents. When the indictments came down, I was hoping to feel some small, albeit pathetic, satisfaction, but I don’t. Phoebe is still dead. My gut tells me that legal action taken against these young people does little to spare future victims.

We’ve learned from scientists that teenagers specifically lack the ability to extrapolate to the consequences of their actions, so I’m thinking that these nine probably are incapable of learning anything more than how expensive lawyers are.

Even that is a lesson for their parents more than for them. An argument could be made that these criminal charges will put parents on notice that they have to try to monitor and control their kids’ behavior, but that urgency will soon pass. Plus, it’s harder than it sounds.

Particularly disturbing to me is my observation that parents often contribute to the problem by seeing this conflict through the eyes of their own ‘teen and teen selves, rather than as fully actualized adults. If our kids seem popular and powerful at school, many of us secretly admire them and thank God that they’re who we always wanted to be when we were their age. If our kids seem to be struggling to “fit in,” we often use our adult power to address the childish need to be in the “in crowd.”

We suck up to the popular kids and their parents, we join in our children’s attempts to get taller, get thinner thighs, get straighter hair, get athletic and get clearer skin. It’s as if we have learned nothing more from our own survival of these treacherous times than how to play the game again through our own kids-hoping this time we’re better equipped to beat up a 16 year-old bully.

When we fail, yet again, to master the subtleties and nuances of ‘teen and teen social hierarchies we turn to the schools to help us rescue our kids. We get primitive in our urgency to protect our kids and would be thrilled if bullies were publicly flogged or put in the stocks, and it’s so frustrating to learn that our child’s personal hell becomes just another aspect of the crowd control that educators must engage in before a single lesson can be taught.

Bullying has turned into Hydra with the advent of social networking. Tormenting has one head in the classroom, another head at the athletic events, another on Facebook and yet another on our kids’ phones. Whom do we blame; Mark Zuckerberg, the teachers, the other parents, the kids? It doesn’t even matter at this point because that is not where the solution will be found.

Our best bet is in ourselves because that’s all we can really control. We have to be alert to the dangers and become activists in our children’s lives.

I’m a divorced mom who was raised by a divorced mom, so I’m not pointing fingers here, but one thing that stands out to me about Phoebe’s life was that she was living with her mother in the US, but she hadn’t seen her father, who remained in Ireland, since the move. We have to at least consider that having a father in her daily life might have influenced her choice regarding the boy she had sex with. I’m just saying…

Another thing I do know is that my greatest insights into my kids’ lives has been gained while driving, cooking or dining with them. These are time-consuming commitments for most of us and our kids often resist our attempts to hang with them, but those moments are worth fighting for-if only to keep them off the computer for fifteen extra minutes a day.

I have a hunch that creating a strong family identity helps our kids survive the times when their friends (or acquaintances) fail them. If they believe that their parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, whatever, are consistently present and supportive of them, this sense of belonging somewhere might protect them in the fragile and vulnerable times. In the absence of blood relatives, trusted friends are just as good.

That means that we parents have to make the time to nurture and sustain relationships with whatever extended family we can muster. Our kids certainly aren’t up to the job and our “family members” may not be as motivated as we are to get together regularly and stay involved. This is where we parents have to stop whining and do the heavy lifting. I don’t care how crazy your sister drives you.

And the last thing I can think of tonight that has looked effective in helping kids to survive bullying is to MOVE THEM TO ANOTHER SCHOOL! I have scores of friends and acquaintances who eventually gave up trying to make the environment change to accept their kids and changed their kids’ environment to suit them instead. It’s never a defeat to decide that our kids can’t thrive where they are. Social rules and hierarchies vary incredibly from school to school and if your child’s school isn’t serving them, you can probably find one that will. Be bold there and make a move because the bullying may be more circumstantial to a certain school than personal to your baby.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Please comment and give me another other suggestions or observations to help us all out. I only have one rule: If you don’t now and have never had a ‘tween or teen, I don’t want to hear what you have to say. No disrespect intended, but you just don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!