parents in touch (p.i.t.)

With spring break just a few weeks away, hundreds of thousands of high school and college kids across the country are planning on a big trip to a warm destination to be with their friends.

If you're the parent of a junior or a senior in high school, do you let your child go?

The answer to that question gets even tougher when you listen to what spring break means to teenagers.

"Binge Drinking"

"People on balconies taking their clothes off; kids getting drunk on the beach"

"Yeah, you do get drunk; there is underage drinking and stuff."

But experts say that spring break can also be a final testing ground for a high school senior to show self-restraint and maturity.

The Oscars are still a few weeks away, but most publications and critics—not to mention The Golden Globes—have long since picked their top movies of 2009. So now it's our turn.

This week we feature our 10 Most Redeeming Films of 2009. What do we mean by "redeeming"? We mean movies that include stories of redemption—sometimes blatantly, sometimes less so. Several of our films have characters who are redeemers themselves; all of them have characters who experience redemption to some degree—some quite clearly, some more subtly. Some are "feel-good" movies that leave a smile on your face; some are a bit more uncomfortable to watch. But the redemptive element is there in all of these films.

That may be hard to believe sometimes. And it's true kids won't always follow your health and safety rules. But studies show parents who keep setting boundaries make a huge difference. In other words, "parenting works," even for teens, says Alanna Levine, a pediatrician in Tappan, N.Y., and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The latest example: a survey on media use by the Kaiser Family Foundation. It found that typical kids ages 8 to 18 spend an astounding 7 hours and 38 minutes a day consuming entertainment media, drinking deeply from the fire hose of TV, computers, game consoles, cellphones, music players and other devices (while occasionally glancing at books and other non-electronic media). Many experts, including the pediatrics academy, consider that much screen time bad for mental and physical health.