Month: February 2016

Dorothy said it best: There’s no place like home. But what about those people who pick up their entire lives, move to the other side of the world and thus begin grappling with the task of redefining the concept of home? We sat down with four local families who did exactly that.

La bella vita

Slowing down doesn’t come naturally to the Damianis. Between jobs, school, music lessons, play dates, community involvement and college applications, the family of five seems to always have something going on, as is the American family norm. But for 12 months beginning in July 2012, Michelle and Keith Damiani, their three children and the two family cats immersed themselves in a culture that’s more relaxed, more indulgent, more free-form—more Italian.

“Keith and I had wanted to live abroad for a really long time before we had children,” Michelle says. “And then we had children and stopped talking about it. The idea hit us again and we started asking, ‘Could we do this with kids? Why not?’”

In 2007, Michelle and Keith began researching and established a five-year plan that would allow them time to save money, find the right destination and ensure that the timing was right for the kids. The desire to live in a small town where they would feel like part of the community and “not be so anonymous” led to their deciding on Spello, a quaint, ancient town in the Umbria region of Italy. Despite their minimal Italian language skills before moving, Michelle and Keith were drawn to Spello in part because it would push them out of their comfort zone.

“We were cautious not to end up in a town with lots of English speakers,” says Keith. “We didn’t want to have that luxury to fall back on.”

That meant the kids dove headfirst into public school, where they had to rely on Italian-English dictionaries, hand signals and patient peers and teachers to communicate.

Nicolas, 13 years old at the time, “stubbornly refused to speak English” with his friends at school, determined to make Italian second-nature. And it worked—his father says Nicolas was “the first one to dream in Italian.”

Overall, Michelle and Keith weren’t impressed with the education system—Michelle describes the high school curriculum as “extraordinarily intense and boring at the same time.” But even so, they say it was worth it.

“I still believe there’s so much that you learn just by being there that any deficiencies in standard education are offset by that,” Keith says.

Siena, who was 10 at the time and who tends to be more introverted than her brothers, had the hardest time in school, mostly due to the language barrier and teachers who lacked empathy and understanding. Three years later, she’s able to offer advice to other kids who may find themselves in foreign territory.

“Put yourself out there as soon as you can,” Siena says. “That really makes a difference because once you have friends who are engaging with you then the language and social norms will come.”

From a mother’s perspective, Michelle would encourage other parents to be patient if their kids are struggling.

“As a parent, understand that you cannot rush that process. I tried to rush that with her, to make her engage and to push her, and that did not work,” Michelle says. “Rather than that, if I could go back, I would tell myself to just trust her; she’s going to get it on her own time.”

After walking the kids to school every day, Keith worked as a graphic designer for clients back in Charlottesville and Michelle worked on her blog that she later published as a 466-page memoir, Il Bel Centro: A Year in the Beautiful Center (which she’ll discuss in March at the Virginia Festival of the Book). After work and school (which let out at 1pm) the family filled its days with espresso, Italian lessons, visits to the local butcher and fishmonger, homemade pasta and endless scoops of gelato.

Naturally built into their new lifestyle was more proximity to one another. Siena and younger brother, Gabe, who was 5 at the time, shared a room, and Michelle says she wondered how the tighter quarters and extended time together would manifest. Turns out there was nothing to worry about on that front.

“There was a lot more intensive family time, which is one of the reasons I was looking forward to it,” says Keith. “And we all still like each other.”

It’s been two and a half years since they returned to Charlottesville, and sometimes, they say, it feels like they just dreamed those 12 months. Siena would prefer to spend all four of her high school years in Charlottesville, but Gabe, who’s in third grade, is up for anything.

“I want to go somewhere in Japan,” Gabe says. “And I think Brazil because I really want to go to South America.”

Home sweet home

“Amsterdam wasn’t exactly at the top of our list,” Bree Luck says frankly.

People already tend to be surprised when parents announce their plans to move the kids overseas to live in a foreign country for 12 months—and then factor a Red Light District into the mix? Not the most traditional choice for a temporary family relocation. But Bree and her husband Geoff, parents of daughters Camden and Anna Brynn, had long been discussing the possibility of spending a year abroad when a job opportunity for Geoff came up in the capital of the Netherlands. The job appealed to him and the family’s plan all along was to find a home base that would allow them to travel all over Europe. So in August 2014, the Lucks found tenants for their home who were willing to care for their husky, Zeus, packed two bags each and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Pijp neighborhood of Amsterdam.

“Taking a year away with the kids was a dream that we had always had as parents,” says Bree. “The timing was right and we wanted to make it work, and the exciting thing about Amsterdam is how easy it is to get all over Europe, and it’s a very livable city,” she says, noting that no one in the family seemed to miss using a car to get around.

Public transit and the fact that bikes seemed to outnumber cars meant the girls could get from point A to point B using two wheels or their tram cards, but it wasn’t until she was accused of being “too American” that Bree began to reassess the helicopter parenting that’s become the norm in the United States.

“At the beginning of the year it was definitely different,” Camden says with a laugh, recalling her mom’s initial insistence that she and her sister call and check in several times throughout the day. “But the more we kind of immersed into the culture, the more freedom we had. That was really nice.”

Camden and Anna Brynn, 13 and 9 years old at the time, respectively, both enrolled in an English-speaking international school, where, despite the fact that most of their lessons were taught in English, the girls shared their classrooms with kids from every corner of the world.

Everyone in the family learned a smattering of Dutch over the course of the year—enough to successfully order Dutch oliebollen (donuts) at bakery counters, Anna Brynn points out. Admittedly it wasn’t the “most practical language” to learn, Bree says, adding that her and Geoff’s combined knowledge of Latin, French and Spanish didn’t help them at all. But by July, when Bree took her final trip to the market and said goodbye to the vendors she had communicated with in a broken Dutch-English hybrid all year, one responded with, “You’re leaving? But your Dutch was finally getting good!”

By the time the Lucks returned to Charlottesville, they were torn between feeling thrilled to be back in their house with Zeus and nostalgic about the life they built overseas. They’re already talking about doing it again, and if you ask the girls where they should go, the answer is: back to Amsterdam.

“It’s weird because when I was there I was homesick, I missed my home,” says Camden. “But now I’m homesick, I miss my other home. I never had that feeling before.”

Culture clash

Brian Wimer’s work has sent him all over the world, from Haiti to Ghana to Iraq, and his wife, Ivana Kadija, moved to the U.S. from the former Yugoslavia when she was in middle school. Having both experienced firsthand what different cultures have to offer, the couple had for years played with the idea of putting their Charlottesville lives on hold and taking their two daughters, Luka and Maya, overseas. Both Wimer and Kadija are deeply involved in the community and devoted to causes like local art and healthy food in schools, but they could never shake the question of whether being immersed in a different way of living would manifest in a different way of being.

“There’s that notion of somebody moving here and assimilating to this lifestyle, but can the reverse be true?” says Wimer. “Can my kids assimilate to another lifestyle? And is that other lifestyle, perhaps, preferable?”

Having switched careers four or five times in his adult life and lived in several different states before settling in Virginia, Wimer says he’s never been risk averse, and he knows that “you can move and life doesn’t end.” So when he and Kadija finally “just dared each other to do it,” they talked it over with the girls—who were 14 and 11 at the time—and settled on Portugal as their new temporary home. In December 2014, the family of four moved into a three-bedroom house with a courtyard, four blocks away from the beach—where it was too cold to swim, Luka laments—in Cascais, “perhaps one of the nicest towns in Portugal,” Wimer says.

Standing at the kitchen counter in their Charlottesville home slicing an apple, Luka, who was a high school freshman when the family moved, sighs nostalgically and says she misses the abundance of fresh, inexpensive fruit in Portugal. Her dad emphatically agrees, adding that the nearby parks were “bursting with rosemary, thyme and bay leaves and you could just go pick it!”

What Wimer misses most, though, even more than the €2 (roughly $2) bottles of wine and summer diet of fresh figs and prosciutto, are the public services that are ubiquitous in so many European countries—mass transit, bicycle accessibility, universal health care.

“There’s that element of not having to worry about your support systems like transportation and health. Food is cheap,” Wimer says. “And we had to come back into a system where we had to pay for health care, had to get a car.”

With that comes a work-life balance that’s the polar opposite from what we’ve grown accustomed to in the U.S., Wimer says. People don’t define themselves by what they do for a living, and, in general, the Portuguese seem more interested in their lives than their jobs.

“This was the first time in years that I could stop working so hard. It was a very big shift in myself. I’ve always had this need for projects and constant productivity,” he says, adding that around the six-month mark he began feeling like he was transitioning from vacation to living in Portugal. “I finally was assimilating to more of a Portuguese way of ‘Let’s just chill, have an espresso and talk for two hours.’ I really didn’t think that I was able to live in a different gear.”

One element of Portugal that didn’t impress the family was the girls’ experience in public school. Their classmates were friendly and welcoming, Luka says, but the language
barrier and overall cultural divide made it a challenge to settle in and find friends. One of the biggest differences Luka and Maya found was the absence of extracurricular activities at school—no football team, no drama club, no pep rallies, no prom.

“They don’t have sports teams, they don’t have a school mascot,” Luka says. “School is very much just to go learn math, science, literature and such.”

The disconnect with the Portuguese education system led the girls to be homeschooled during the fall semester, which Luka says gave her more time to focus on things like exercising, practicing yoga and spending time with the family, like when she and her mom would walk along the beach nearly every day. And when they weren’t reveling in the fact that they lived in a beautiful beachside town with so much art and culture that even the sidewalks were made of mosaic tiles, they were taking advantage of the access to cheap train and plane tickets, visiting places like Rome, Copenhagen, Paris and Croatia.

The family returned to their Charlottesville home in December 2015, so they’re still adjusting and reassimilating into their American lifestyles.

“I’m really torn being back,” Luka says. “I have such a great community here, but at the same time I really want to get out again and explore. There are so many options and so many different places, and now everything seems less set in stone.”

IF BY SEA

After cruising as a couple in the mid-1990s, Nica Waters and her husband, Jeremy, took their two kids, Julian and Maddie,
on an eight-month sailing trip. We asked her a few questions about the journey.—L.I.

Where did you go? Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, and the Dominican Republic

How old were the kids? Julian was 10; Maddie 8. 

How did the kids react to the news? “I’m not going” was the initial reaction.

Did the family already have sailing experience? Did you already have a boat?  Jeremy has been sailing since he was 4; I started in college. The kids have been sailing since they were tiny (Maddie’s first sail was when she was 2 weeks old). We have owned our sailboat, a 28′ classic design called a BCC, since 1992. We still have her and plan on future cruises.

How did the kids keep up with their schoolwork? We took school books from their elementary school and did school on the boat. They had to do certain amounts each week. By the end of the year, they had both gone through all their texts.

How long was your trip? We left in October and returned in June.

How much time did you spend on the water as opposed to on land? We slept on the boat every single night. We spent maybe three nights in a marina or tied to a dock and the rest were at anchor. We went ashore most days (except for a couple of really windy days when getting in the dinghy would have been tough).

What was most challenging about the trip? The kids had their challenges in terms of being away from friends, and that was hard and relatively unexpected.

What was most rewarding? Being together as a family. Discovering new places that so very few people have ever been. Meeting new friends (who we still count among our closest friends). Just spending time living at our own pace.

What advice would you give to parents who want to do something similar? If you have any inkling of wanting this kind of adventure, and you have the background and knowledge to pull it off—go. If you don’t yet have the background and knowledge, start getting it. Life is for living, not for dreaming of living. Go do it.

TRAVEL TIPS

Think this sounds like fun, but not sure where to begin? Michelle Damiani says, unfortunately, there’s no magic formula for success with moving abroad. But she does have some tips for families who might want to try it.—L.I.

Set a deadline and create a budget. The Damianis came up with a five-year plan to save up, find a destination and
make sure everything was right for their kids.

Choose a location. “I’d advocate for scoping out towns ahead of time,” Damiani says. “We thought we’d love this one town because it was small, but it ended up being full of English-speaking people, which we couldn’t have known from our online searching. Other towns high on our list were just dead and unappealing.”

Research visa requirements. If you’re moving for work, that’s not too complicated, but if you’re getting an elective residency visa (or the equivalent, based on the country), you’ll need to explore what kind of visa you should apply for. “Some people make the decision about what country to live in based on the difficulty of getting a visa (we were denied the first time around),” Damiani says. “We’ve heard of people moving to another state during the visa process in order to be eligible to use a consulate that’s more willing to grant visas.”

Find a place to live. The Damianis explored where to move by combing vacation rental websites to find houses that met their needs. Says Damiani, “If you know someone where you are moving, they can help find a more local (and inexpensive) choice, though those are often unfurnished.”

Connect online. Each country has its own expat communities on the Internet.

Mosaics, pastels, pottery, pencil drawing. Those are just a few of the classes Kamryn Buckwalter, 10, has taken in the six years since she became interested in art. Currently, she’s enrolled in an oil painting class—her preferred medium—at McGuffey Art Center with Renee Balfour. “Renee is a really great artist, and she gives me a lot of ideas,” Kamryn says.

It goes without saying this is a hobby she plans to keep pursuing, and she has the chops to back it up: Kamryn won this year’s yearbook cover contest at Hollymead Elementary and one of her works of art is featured in the Albemarle County Public Schools 2015-2016 calendar. She says her parents have run out of wall space to keep all of her paintings at home, so her dad brought some of them to his office. She’s even sold a few.

Kamryn tried taking lessons for other things—piano, ballet—but nothing stuck. “I really only like art classes,” she says. “I want to be an artist forever.”

I’ll never forget the first time Simon gave me lip about taking his plate to the sink after breakfast.

“That’s a mommy job,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows and said, “No baby. That’s a family member job.” What I actually wanted to say was, “Oh no you didn’t!” But that’s not what this article is about.

I’m a firm believer in preparing my kids for the world instead of trying to shape the world for them.

In my earliest days as a parent, I caught myself avoiding situations or experiences if I could foresee tears or tantrums in the outcome. I would let Simon leave his toys out before he went to bed and clean them up for him after he was down. I would put his shoes on for him, so we could get to preschool on time. I thought I was controlling the chaos, but what I was really doing was creating a world for my son where, with every little toy I picked up for him, I showed him that he could make choices without consequences—that I would literally clean up the messes he made instead of helping him to learn from them.

Growing up, my own mother always said her biggest job was to prepare my sisters and me for the world, and, well, I have never been one to let down my mother, so once I realized the disservice I was doing for my kids, my turnaround was quick. Not pretty, but quick.

I began to see tears and tantrums differently: They weren’t something to avoid. They were opportunities to teach, guide and explain.

“Teaching responsibility and independence is a huge part of being successful in and out of the classroom,” says Laura Schaaf, a third grade teacher at Johnson Elementary. “I always challenge and encourage my students to try things on their own before they raise their hand for help. I want my students to think independently and know that taking risks and working through mistakes is part of the learning process. While they may get frustrated through the process, there is so much more to gain from allowing them to exercise and develop their problem-solving skills.”

The first time I told Simon to clean up his toys before we played outside, he stayed in his room for 45 minutes (yep, we timed it) and cried before he picked up one toy. The next time it was 30 minutes. After that, 15, and so on, until he finally understood that he has responsibilities as a family member and doesn’t just get to do what he wants to do whenever he wants to do it.

Don’t get the wrong idea, here, people. I don’t have a magic parenting wand that entrances my kids and gets them to clean the house. We have moments every day where my kids push back, yell “I don’t wanna!” and ignore me when I tell them it’s time for a chore. But the difference is that now I don’t make exceptions, because the world doesn’t, either.

Children are constantly learning—through lessons from adults and from processing information about the world around them. The Child Development Laboratories, part of the department of of psychology at the University of Virginia, comprise four active laboratories that study children’s cognitive and/or social development: The Child Language & Learning Lab, directed by Dr. Vikram Jaswal, studies how learning language changes the way children think. The Early Development Lab, directed by Dr. Angeline Lillard, studies the role that pretending plays in children’s lives and investigates best practices in schooling. The Early Social & Brain Development Lab, directed by Dr. Tobias Grossman, studies infants using neuroimaging techniques. He’s discovered that when infants see a happy or angry face, for example, infants’ brain patterns show the same responses as adults’. And The Early Social Development Lab, directed by Dr. Amrisha Vaish, studies how young children become moral and cooperative people, focusing on children ages 2 to 5.

These labs work with a number of families in the area who bring in their children, from infants to school-aged kids, to participate in studies year-round. The labs set up tables at City Market, Fridays After Five and other events to recruit new participants.

Alison Mamadou, from Charlottesville, has been taking her son, Isaac, 6, to participate in studies at the early development lab for two years. They first learned about the studies through a summer camp fair, and Isaac has participated in five studies so far.

Isaac’s favorite part about being involved in the studies is he loves “interacting with people and learning fun stuff about the world.” His favorite study was one that required him to bring home a puzzle about Australia and its states and log his practice each day.

The early development lab consists of a playroom waiting area, in which children play with toys and “warm up” for the experiment while their parent talks with the lab supervisor about the study and signs a consent form. Each study can last anywhere from five to 25 minutes, and they’ll often group together multiple five-minute studies to maximize a family’s time. Studies can take anywhere from two to six months to complete, based on how quickly they can schedule all of the participants needed: One study could require 50 different 4-year-olds’ responses.

Lillard runs her lab with five undergraduate and five graduate students. They are currently studying how children learn from media and how they interact with new media devices. For example, in one study they are determining if when children watch certain television shows or read books that emphasize pro socialness, empathy and compassion, they then model those behaviors. They are also studying the converse, when children are exposed to stories with negative behaviors. “That is a really important question: When children are watching TV in an everyday way, are they actually drawing from those actions and having them produce actions out in the real world?” says Lillard. “I think we may be finding some surprising things.”

HANDS-ON

The Child Development Laboratories began a partnership with the Virginia Discovery Museum in September in which they set up a Living Laboratory in the Little C’ville exhibit. From 1-4pm each Saturday, the labs bring in current studies or research-based toys with which the children who attend the museum can interact.

“At the museum you have families that might not have been involved in research any other way seeing that we can actually study their children and seeing them give interesting responses, showing knowledge you might not have thought they had or things you thought they knew that they don’t know,” says second-year graduate student Jessica Taggart. “We’ve had really wonderful discussions with families there. People like to stick around and learn about what we’re doing.”

For more information on participating, call 243-5234 or e-mail info@childdevelopmentlabs.org.—J.L.

Three years ago, a friend of music educators Mike and Mary Anderson asked them for a few tips to get her 3-year-old interested in learning to play the piano. Mike, a piano teacher, and Mary, an early childhood general music educator, came up with a few ideas and, when they started talking through them, the friend suggested they record them on video to help her get started.

“It feels cheesy to say this, but that’s when the giant light bulb went off in our brains,” says Mary. “If we could do this for our friend, we could do this for a lot of kiddos.”

They started putting it all together, reaching out to friends and families of their students. But the goal of the original concept (“working together, teaching together and having fun while hopefully having a positive impact on children through music”) morphed a bit last spring, after the couple had their second child.

“We were spending lots of time talking about what we wanted to give our children, how we wanted to live mindfully and with intention, and that we wanted to design a lifestyle that modeled making the world better and the importance of spending time together,” Mary says. They expanded their scope, hoping to reach all children through music—“not just the select few whose parents happen to be searching for music resources online.”

The result is My Piano Starts Here, a web-based learning tool for children wanting to learn how to tickle the ivories.

The couple has made it easy: Parents can subscribe for one, three, six or 12 months and gain access to the entire curriculum—video tutorials, interviews and performances by other kids who are passionate about music, lessons from local musicians on other instruments, a community of parents and children who share an interest in music education and more.

“We believe strongly in a personalized education model, where children have choice and ownership in their learning,” Mary says. “The website is designed to have lots of different options in each category so that children and their parents can choose how they want to interact with the site.” In other words, it’s a complete musical package. For more info, visit mypianostartshere.com.

“Ayoade was always a very curious child,” Seki Balogun says. “She wanted to know answers to everything.”

Balogun, a Nigerian-born physician at UVA whose ability to balance her career and three children has clearly rubbed off on her 16-year-old daughter, says Ayoade never lost that curiosity she had as a little girl. She describes Ayoade as driven and compassionate, with a knack for learning and a seemingly endless list of passions and hobbies. 

Now a junior at Albemarle High School, Ayoade has spent nearly her entire life in the Charlottesville area. It’s home for her, but being less than a year away from filling out college applications (a process her older sister finished recently) has her exploring options “pretty far from home.” These days she’s thinking about pursuing an engineering degree at a research institution, which she hopes will give her the opportunity to tackle problems across all spectrums.

“One thing I like about science and engineering is that it’s not a bubble career,” Ayoade says. “You get to work with people across all other disciplines. I look forward to solving global issues with engineering.”

In November, she attended the White House Summit on Next Generation High Schools, a conference that brought together education professionals and STEM advocates from all over the country to discuss “what needs to be done for American schools to make sure that teens are more prepared for the world.” For Ayoade, the future of education is all about hands-on, collaborative, project-based learning.

“As we grow up and enter the real world, we’re not going to get grades on things other than how we feel about it and how it comes across to other people,” she says, adding that her experience at the Math, Engineering & Science Academy (MESA) has opened her eyes to how high school assignments can become real-world projects. “With project-based learning, you get to really put a lot of yourself into it, and it turns it from being just another graded assignment into something you know you’re going to learn from.”

Not only is she a whiz at math and science, but she’s already finding ways to use that knowledge to contribute to her community. Last summer, along with a team of MESA students, Ayoade created and directed the MESA Bridge Camp, a hands-on math and physics camp that taught middle school girls how to build a bridge. And they didn’t just learn the theories and build popsicle stick models of bridges—these girls designed, prepared the wood for and built a bridge on the Rivanna Trail at Leonard Sandridge Road. “I saw in those girls a lot of what I remember about myself at that age,” Ayoade says. “Sometimes it can be overwhelming, and you’re in that inbetween stage when people are asking you what you want to do and you start to rule things out. This gave them real-life applications to stuff they’re learning in school.”

Unsurprisingly, teaching is also a career path on Ayoade’s radar. And when she’s not doing her own schoolwork or explaining physics to seventh grade girls, she’s teaching people how to play the cello, which she began playing when she was in the fifth grade. 

“It’s been fun to watch them progress,” she says of her students, some of whom are older than her. “I’ve learned just as much about being a teacher as I’ve taught them about playing cello.”

When asked how she would advise students who may be struggling in school, her answer is simple.

“It’s good to remind kids that they do have a strength somewhere, even if it’s not something they’ve tried yet,” she says. “Trying something new is often the hardest part, but it’s also the most important part. How are you ever going to figure out what you’re good at if you’ve never tried it before?”

As the father of three girls, local author Marc Boston has plenty of fodder for stories. In fact, it was his middle daughter, Delaney, who provided inspiration for his new book, The Girl Who Carried Too Much Stuff.

Delaney, 7, would gather up as many of her possessions as she could when the family would leave the house. “This created quite a logistical nightmare, as you can imagine,” Boston says, but it was such a unique routine that he wanted to write it down to remember it in the future. “It wasn’t until later that I thought to turn it into an actual story.”

The resulting book, illustrated by Annie Wilkinson, addresses our culture of over-consumption and materialism. Through a light-hearted rhyme, a little girl decides that, in order to play with her friends, she might have to give up some of her things.

This isn’t Boston’s first rodeo. He created a blog several years ago to chronicle his life and, after the birth of his second daughter, wrote his first story, Baby Sister for Marley.

“During that time, writing grew beyond just a creative outlet into an almost spiritual endeavor,” he says. “From that point on, I chose to seriously focus on writing.”

Boston will share his book at the Virginia Festival of the Book, March 16-20. For more information, visit marcboston.com.

THE AUTHOR’S AUTHORS

Boston says there are many children’s books he holds in high regard, but he has a few favorites. Here are his top five.

Corduroy
by Don Freeman

The Way I Feel
by Janan Cain

Jazz Baby
by Lisa Wheeler

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

The Giving Tree
by Shel Silverstein

The current generation of adolescents is projected to have a shorter lifespan than their parents for the first time since the Civil War, so a University of Virginia pediatrician and his collaborators have developed a test to determine the future risk of heart disease in kids between the ages of 13 and 19.

“A significant number of teens are at risk for early onset diabetes,” Dr. Mark DeBoer of the UVA Children’s Hospital says. “This [test] is something that can be used to motivate a teen and family to make some changes and try to turn that around.”

While taking into account a teen’s race and gender, the test gives each person a metabolic score by evaluating each individual’s severity of the metabolic syndrome—a combination of conditions including increased blood pressure, high levels of blood sugar, excessive body fat and abnormal cholesterol levels, which increase the threat of cardiovascular disease.

The score is determined by entering several measures into a formula, including a teen’s body mass index, systolic blood pressure and results from three blood tests. That number shows how far the individual is from the average person.

The score is linear, too, so it can be followed over time—DeBoer says this is helpful because it can help kids and families set goals. For instance, he says he might ask a patient to start exercising four times a week and cutting out sugary drinks and see if his or her score improves. A perfect score is zero.

According to DeBoer, the overall goal of the test is to improve the health of entire families. “The key thing is that families be thoughtful about making healthy choices,” he says.