You may remember slam poet Shane Koyczan from his moving poem We Are More at the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in Vancouver. That poem may have been what introduced him to the world, but this seven-minute poem and video may change it.

Seems that at least one teenager has a price. And it is only $200. 

A 14-year-old girl asked her dad to help her stay off Facebook so they came up with a Facebook Deactivation Agreement. He gave her $50 to stay off for a month and will give her another $150 to stay off until the end of the year.

The 14-year-old handed over her password, which her dad promptly changed and now she is Facebook-free.

My son went to bed one night and woke up in full-fledged puberty the next morning. Suddenly, he is tired all the time and we need to wake him. He is flouting a dirtstache and he seems larger, thicker and more gangly.

I'm scared.

And I have reason to be. Teens these days are subjected to a fast-paced world without rest. According, to a new study by the Toronto School Board teens are feeling overwhelmingly anxious, worried and down.

Anne of Green Gables is the book for me. I love Anne with an E; her red pigtails getting pulled by future husband Gilbert, her tart tongue and propensity to talk herself into and out of trouble. She is the heroine of my childhood and untouchable.

So, when Today's Parent blogged on a new smutty book cover for my favourite heroine, I was dismayed. How could they turn Anne from a carrot-top into a strawberry blond? Why would they?

"I think," I tell my husband, "that he has THE FLU." Dun dun dun DUNN!

I then immediately come down with guilt for not schlepping my 12-year-old son to get the flu shot out of sheer laziness on my part. 

"Maybe it is just a cold," says my husband. "And who cares what it is?"

And then hit me. As long as the kids are sick but not overly sick; why should I care if it is the flu or a cold? Just because the government has released more Tamiflu; and flu season has been "nasty and deadly and normal"? This does not mean we are in a pandemic, or that I should panic, because that's the nature of influenza. (I don't do well in pandemic season, one day I will write about our SARS experience that left me scarred forever).

So, I set off to find the differences between the common cold and flu:

When 13-year-old Gregory opened his brand new iPhone, it came with a contract -- not just from the provider -- but from his mother. And it is a long one.

Janell Burley Hofmann wrote up the 18-point contract covering everything from privacy to porn to music to reminding him to look out the window. The mother of five's post on the contract has over 1,000 comments on the Huffington Post, and has been labelled "the first viral sensation of 2013." The contract's popularity shows our deep-seated fear of our teens' love of technology.

Some highlights of the contract:

Teen McKenna Pope walked into her 4-year-old brother's room to find him cooking tortillas on top of a light bulb. She knew then and there that she would get him an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas.

That is, until she went shopping and realized that the pink oven was overly girly and her brother wouldn't like it. She wanted to show him that it's "it's not 'wrong' for him to want to be a chef." So she did what an enterprising teen does these days.

She started a petition and Change.org and then she went viral.

Five teens in Brampton, Ontario were suspended for tweeting allegedly disparaging remarks about their science teacher.

The tweets were sent on their private time and off of school property. When the Catholic school heard about the tweets, nine girls received varying levels of punishment with five of them being suspended. (The tweets were between friends, which makes them less public to the entire world but visible to anyone who followed both sides of the conversation.)

The principal said that she hopes everyone learned a lesson from this incident.

Could there be a worse idea than putting a bunch of hormonal, insecure, gawky 12- and 13-year-olds together in one building and expect them to learn something?

As it turns out, no.

Much hullabaloo has been made about girls hitting puberty earlier without a word said about the boys. That changed when a recent study says that yes, boys are also reaching puberty sooner than in the past, some almost two years earlier than what was considered average.

It is easy to chart the onset of puberty with girls because the start of menstruation is easy to document. Researchers use testicle size to figure out when puberty starts in boys (I can't imagine how they can find test subjects for that.) They have found that boys are getting larger testes and bigger penises at a younger age (mothers of tweens refer to that as "man penis" and now I go off and cry).

It seems like a no-brainer -- if girls are hitting puberty younger than obviously boys should be as well. But some of the accepted explanations for girls' early maturation has been the increased amount of estrogen that girls are exposed to through their environment and obesity. An increase in estrogen should, theoretically, be slowing down puberty in boys.

But it's not.