My 7-year-old neighbor looked less than thrilled as her mom drove her off for her second H1N1 flu shot yesterday. But she and her little sister both have asthma, and their mom didn't want to take needless risks with a novel flu strain that's hitting children harder than adults.

With H1N1 vaccine gradually being distributed to more pediatricians and clinics, parents will increasingly be getting it for their kids. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll on H1N1 flu vaccine found that about 55 percent of parents plan to have their children vaccinated for H1N1 flu. Unfortunately, more than half of those parents (52 percent) are having trouble finding vaccine. Federal and state governments are still scrambling to organize a national vaccination campaign that has been widely criticized for failing to match supply with demand and for failing to make sure that high-risk children—such as my neighbors with asthma—get vaccinated first. Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, told the Associated Press today that the campaign is "not working right at all."

If you have teenagers, you know that two of their most beloved pieces of hardware are the cellphone and the car. Put them together, and it’s teen nirvana. One quarter of teenagers say they text while driving, according to a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, despite the many public safety campaigns pointing out the dangers. Half of the teenagers polled say they have ridden in a car while the teenage driver was texting.

To say texting while driving is a dumb idea is an understatement, given that all the research shows that doing so—or even just talking on the phone—makes an accident much more likely. (A recent Virginia Tech study says texters are 23 times more likely to have a crash.) But since we regard cars as mobile living rooms, it’s easy to see why it’s hard for us all, teenagers and adults alike, to resist.

I recently suggested three ways to cut the risk of teenagers texting while driving: Set family rules for cellphone use; never use a phone while walking, driving, or otherwise moving; and don’t text and drive yourself. My clever readers came up with many more:

Alcoholic drinks laced with caffeine are increasingly popular on college campuses and among underage teen drinkers, probably because the caffeine in brands like Four Loko, Joose, and Liquid Charge makes it possible to stay awake and keep on partying without having to stop to mix a Red Bull and vodka.

But law enforcement types such as state attorneys general have been pushing to get jazzed-up malt liquors and vodkas banned, arguing that these drinks are dangerous and are often marketed to the under-21 crowd.

It looks like the Food and Drug Administration thinks caffeinated alcohol drinks are a bad idea, too. FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein announced today that the agency is investigating the safety and legality of mixing caffeine and alcohol in a single product. He told 30 manufacturers of juiced hooch that they have 30 days to explain why they think these products are safe. The scarcely veiled threat is that the FDA can ban caffeinated alcoholic drinks under existing law that bars dangerous food additives. Or it could require manufacturers to reveal how much caffeine is in each drink. My bet is that they’ll go for an outright ban.

Don't be surprised if your children just can't ignore the fact that there's still Halloween candy in the pantry. Their brains are designed to be obsessed with Snickers, Nerds, and Reese's Pieces. And that inability to ignore the candy is what makes them such amazing learners and discoverers.

That's what I just heard from Sharon Thompson-Schill, a professor of psychology and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. For 15 years, she's been studying adults who have trouble remembering things because of damage to the frontal lobe of their brains. Along the way, she realized that young children act a lot like brain-damaged adults. "Learning and behaving without a frontal lobe is different than learning and behaving with one," Thompson-Schill says. "[Children are] impulsive, they don't follow rules, don't stay on task."

Indeed, the past decade of research on children's brain development has shown conclusively that they are not little adults and that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain used for higher-order decision making, doesn't mature in humans until the teenage years or beyond. That's undoubtedly an evolutionary development, says Thompson-Schill, since there's no such difference between child and adult brains in other primates. She calls that delayed frontal lobe maturation "cognition without control," the title of her new paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science. Cognition without control is a good thing for children, the scientist says, even if it sometimes drives their parents bonkers.

If you've been frustrated in trying to get your kids vaccinated against H1N1 flu, you're not alone: Two thirds of parents who have sought vaccine for their children have failed to find it, according to a Harvard School of Public Health survey out today. That's no small deal, because 41 percent of the parents polled said they have tried to get their children vaccinated against swine flu. Hearing that big Wall Street firms Goldman Sachs and Citigroup got H1N1 vaccine doesn't do much to reassure worried parents that the system is directing vaccine to the kids who need it the most. Although almost 36 million doses of H1N1 vaccine have been distributed, many parents are still anxiously waiting.

My area is typical. At present there's no H1N1 vaccine to be found through the county health department, and school clinics have been canceled for lack of vaccine. I was able to get FluMist for my child at a county clinic in mid-October, even though she doesn't have asthma or other chronic health problems that would have put her at greater risk of complications. All children and young adults from 6 months old to 24 years are a priority group for H1N1 vaccine because they have little or no immunity to this flu virus. But in hindsight, I wish the county had been stricter with those first vaccine clinics and restricted them only to pregnant women and children who are at greater risk than mine.

Kids are stressed out, and their parents all too often don't know it. That's the word from the American Psychological Association's Stress in America survey, which for the first time asked children about their stress levels. One third of the 1,206 children ages 8 to 17 said they were more stressed now than a year ago. And parents seem to be missing those clues:

• Thirty percent of children said they worried about their family's financial problems, but only 18 percent of the parents thought this was a source of stress for the child.

• Almost half of children worried about doing well in school, while just one third of parents thought that was an issue for their child.

• Twenty-nine percent of teenagers said they worried about getting into a good college or getting a job after high school, while only 5 percent of teenagers' parents thought that was a source of stress.

• Two thirds of parents thought their own stress levels had no impact on their children, but 80 percent of the children said they learn healthy living habits from their parents.

There's no shortage of flu fear these days. We're either afraid our children will get the flu—and mad/scared/frustrated because there's no vaccine to be found—or afraid that the vaccine will cause grievous harm. Those last fears were stoked by the story of Desiree Jennings, a 26-year-old Washington Redskins cheerleader from Ashburn, Va., who fell ill 10 days after getting a seasonal flu shot. Antivaccine activist group Generation Rescue, founded by actors Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, seized on her story, saying her apparent dystonia—manifesting itself in seizures and the inability to walk forward—was caused by the flu shot.

After the local Fox TV station here in D.C. reported Jennings's story, neurologists who saw the video (which is now a fixture on YouTube) said the symptoms didn't appear to be dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes sustained muscle spasms, but rather a psychogenic disorder, meaning the symptoms are real, but the cause is psychological. People with dystonia and the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation also spoke up; they were not happy to have their very real ailment pulled into the mix, especially since it has never been associated with the flu vaccine. Faced with the criticism, Generation Rescue pulled Jennings's story from its website.

Teenagers spend lots of time on MySpace, Facebook, and other social media sites talking about what they do. Often that talk is about underage drinking, risky sexual activity, and violence. But does it describe their actual activities, or is it just bragging?

About half of teenagers' social media posts refer to drinking, sex, or violence, according to Megan Moreno, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That discovery, which was reported earlier this year, left Moreno wondering if all that chatter was reality or trash talk. She's still working on answering that question, but she has found out this: Kids do think that what they see on social media sites is real, and the younger they are, the more they believe it. That's important, because teenagers are powerfully influenced by the behavior of their peers.

Is my child getting enough vitamin D to stay healthy this winter? That was my question in the early morning gloom as I scanned the label of our Dora the Explorer multivitamins. The 400 IU listed meets the recommended daily value for children. But that may not be enough, according to new research from Children's Hospital Boston. How could that be? I quickly called Jonathan Mansbach, a pediatrician and coauthor of the study, to get the scoop.

About one third of the children in his study, which looked at blood levels of vitamin D in about 5,000 children, were taking multivitamins. Most of those multis, like my family's, contained 400 IU of D. But of the children taking multivitamins, 62 percent had blood levels of vitamin D below 75 nmol/L, a level increasingly thought to be a better reflection of the amount of the nutrient needed to prevent disease than the 50 nmol/L recommended by the American Academy of Pediatricians. (Ten percent of the kids taking vitamins had a D level below the AAP's recommended level.) "The conclusion there is that 400 [IU] may not be enough," says Mansbach. Good to know, but what should I do? The doctor's next sentence was not what a mother wants to hear. "What is the correct amount is kind of hard to say."

I no longer need to wonder what it will be like when H1N1 swine flu hits my town. About 10 percent of the kids at our neighborhood elementary school are home sick, and a friend just E-mailed me that her 5-year-old is home, terribly sick with swine flu. This was not a mild illness. The poor girl ran a fever of 105.5, and the fever didn't respond to medication. She's better today, thank goodness. But I share this to make the point that H1N1 can cause serious illness in healthy kids. And the number of children falling sick has risen steeply in the past few weeks. So has the number who end up in the hospital.

No child should have to suffer unnecessarily. I know this girl's mom tried hard to get an H1N1 vaccine for her daughter, but supplies are scarce around Washington, where we live. So that girl suffered, while my daughter, who got vaccinated for H1N1 last week, should be fairly well protected by now, even though she hasn't had the recommended second dose.

Kids aren’t the only critters getting sick with swine flu; a ferret has come down with it, too. The pet's owners took their ferret to a vet in Portland, Ore., on October 5, and the ferret’s nose mucus tested positive for genetic markers for H1N1 flu. Scientists have known for a long time that ferrets can get human flu; in fact, they use ferrets in the laboratory to test flu treatments. But ferrets are also popular pets. In this case, first reported in the Oregonian, it sounds like the ferret got the flu from its owner. And it appears to be the first reported case of H1N1 flu traveling from people to animals.

That’s not all the animal flu news today. A pig at the Minnesota State Fair also tested positive for H1N1. Human and pig influenza viruses are very similar and can infect both species, but there’s no indication that the state-fair pig has infected any humans. (Here’s the federal Department of Agriculture's press release on the swine with swine flu.)