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If you have a low opinion of kids today, look again

By SUE CARLTON
Published December 7, 2005

In a busy mall, a teenage girl stopped dead in her tracks and jabbed a manicured finger at her mother.

Her tirade had something to do with not wanting to come to this mall, which had nothing, at at least nothing she wanted. She called her mother "Mother," not "Mom"; I imagine "Mommy" was but a distant memory.

I walked past them, mentally shaking my head and thinking, kids today. (Yes, I have reached the stage where I sigh and think things like "kids today." Worse, I sometimes say out loud, "When I was your age.")

Some of the news stories about kids today can be pretty disheartening, too: guns brought to school, stupid choices that turn tragic, teenagers charged with serious crimes.

This week, I got to hear about kids like Jessica Woolbright instead.

Jessica, a 14-year-old who lives in Weeki Wachee, seemed a little embarrassed that I wanted to talk to her. But how could I resist after reading the letter her mom wrote nominating her for the Kids are Heroes program?

At 12, her mother wrote, Jessica was volunteering regularly at the Hernando County Humane Society, sometimes taking care of tiny kittens at her own home overnight. She set her alarm to get up every few hours to bottle-feed them formula she bought herself.

With her allowance, she sponsored a 3-year-old boy who lives in Mexico. ("His picture hangs on my door," she says. "He's really cute.") She has volunteered, baked cookies for firefighters, filled gift boxes for the needy, gone to Washington, D.C., as part of the Junior National Young Leaders Conference. And when you talk to her, she sounds like a nice, normal kid, a middle child in a big family who likes to sing and play piano and hang out with her friends.

I talked to Susan Yerger, whose daughter Carolyn was only 7 when she helped save her 5-year-old sister Kaylee from a pit bull in their New Port Richey neighborhood, getting bitten herself in the process. "She's a very brave little girl," her mother said.

There's Samantha Cardwell, who was 9 and at a Fourth of July party in Lakeland when she saw a 3-year-old-boy who had taken off his water wings slip into the pool. She didn't think twice about saving him.

"She saw a need and she filled it," said her mom, Kristin Cardwell, who lives in New Port Richey.

Sound like aberrations, tiny dots in a sea of jaded, dull-eyed youth? Well, teachers, parents, police and community leaders managed to come up with 120 of these kids, ages 5 to 18, to nominate for the ninth annual Kids are Heroes award, sponsored by St. Joseph's Children's Hospital in Tampa. Patients at the children's hospital picked first-, second- and third-place winners in three age categories, but all the nominees were honored at a banquet at the hospital last night. "Quite frankly, it's always astonished us the things that kids do," said Mike Aubin, administrator of the children's hospital and one of the contest's creators.

Want more? Okay, there's the Lakeland sixth-grader on safety patrol who kept a kindergartener from being hit by a van; the Clearwater middle schooler who has crawled under Dumpsters and made his parents stop the car to rescue injured birds. There's the Tampa teenager who goes to classes with a deaf cousin to interpret for him, the kids who cut off their long hair to donate to cancer victims.

To help after Hurricane Katrina, kids got creative. They held bake sales, donated birthday money, collected change, made bracelets and crafts to sell and set up lemonade stands (Lemon-Aid, get it?)

I like this one: When a Katrina victim who had lost everything arrived at a local school, a fellow student got her tickets to the homecoming dance and helped her get a dress.

So for now, I'll hold off on my usual when-I-was-a-kid-we-had-nothing-but-headless-Barbies-to-play-with-and-were-happy-anyway stories. It's kind of nice to say it differently for once: These kids today.

Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com

[Last modified December 7, 2005, 00:32:06]