Passing along dinner tradition.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

COTTAGE GROVE - Family dinners are not about the food, 16-year-old Alyssa Humberston says.

Don't misunderstand: She's a big fan of her mother's grilled chicken, cranberry-almond rice, baked beans and green salad.

But the real point is the conversation that happens amid the clink of forks on plates,

Alyssa says. Which is why she pushed for Cottage Grove to become part of a national "family dinner day."

On this night, Humberston is eating with mother Pamela Leah, grandmother Eileen Pipes and Cottage Grove High School classmate Shelby Beauchamp. Talk quickly progresses from "Please pass the salad dressing" to what's on the teens' minds. For Alyssa, that's an upcoming town hall meeting to set goals for what Cottage Grove will be like in 30 years.

"We talked about it in Mr. Dudley's class today," she says. "One of the main things people wanted was to be a meth-free community by 2037."

Shelby chimes in.

"One of the girls in class said she can smell the meth when she walks down the street in her neighborhood," she says.

Pipes, who saw a meth lab bust when she lived in California, says she can relate.

"I smelled that awful smell, but I didn't know what it was," she says. "The people who came to clean it up were wearing masks and gloves."

"It's hazardous stuff," Leah agrees. "That girl really needs to tell someone."

For Alyssa, family dinners are the norm - although her father, Mark Humberston, usually only partakes on Friday and Saturdays these days because of his work schedule at Weyerhaeuser. So she was surprised to learn as a member of the Cottage Grove Youth Advisory Council that most young people don't regularly eat with their parents.

This is Alyssa's second year on the panel, established by the City Council in 2004 to advise city officials on matters affecting area young people. At a meeting last year, she says, the Cottage Grove city administrator told the youth council's 17 middle and high school members about a study sponsored by Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.

"It said that teens who eat dinner with their families are less likely to do drugs," she says. "I was really intrigued by that, so I started researching it on my own."

Alyssa shared her findings with the City Council last month, in the form of a YAC-proposed proclamation urging Cottage Grove area parents to participate in a national "Eat Dinner with your Children" day. After she cited studies showing a twice-greater risk of illegal substance use among teens who don't regularly eat with their families, the council adopted the YAC recommendation and declared that Cottage Grove would join other communities around the country recognizing this Monday as "Family Day - A Day to Eat Dinner With Your Children."

Alyssa and Shelby agree that mealtime is among the best time for parents and teens to talk.

"It's so much easier to talk when you're around a table with other people - it's not as scary," Shelby says.

"You don't feel like they're trying to interrogate you," Alyssa explains. "And we laugh a lot, especially when we eat with Dad, because he's pretty funny."

The family dinner initiative is just one of many projects taken up by the YAC since its creation four years ago. The student panel also sponsors "Battle of the Bands" concerts and movie nights. It published a youth activity guide, "101 Things to Do in Cottage Grove."

City Administrator Richard Meyers will receive an Excellence in Prevention Award from Lane County Coalition on Wednesday for his work in "growing and nurturing" the student panel, which meets with him twice each month.

`Richard has given them the capacity, education and confidence to go in front of the City Council and say, `for our community to be safer, healthier and more connected, we need to do these things,' '' says Brinda Narayan-Wold, the coalition's Drug-free Communities coordinator. "He's doing great work."

But Meyers attributes the council's success to its enthusiastic teen participants.

"When I first talked about this with the city council, we originally thought we'd have a group of 12 kids," he says. "But the first year we wound up with 37 applications, and could only whittle it down to 17, so we set that as the number."

To further boost student involvement in city government, one YAC member is appointed each year to sit on the City Council, casting advisory votes on nearly all issues. Some youth councilors have not hesitated to publicly disagree with their adult counterparts. Jessica Campbell, for example, broke ranks with the council majority in 2005 over a flag-company-backed proposal to commemorate Sept. 11, 2001, victims and Iraq war casualties with a huge local display of American flags.

In comments after a short film pitching the idea, Campbell said she found the proposal a distasteful effort to capitalize on Americans' grief.

"I absolutely had to say something," says Campbell, now attending the University of Oregon. "I'd spoken with a lot of my peers and they had the same opinion about this, so it was important to speak out - even though it was pretty intimidating to do it after such an emotionally charged movie."

Meyers said YAC members also have showed moxie on the family dinner issue, encouraging area restaurants to promote the event and writing public service ads to get the word out in the community.

"They just took off with it," he said.

FAMILY DINNER DAY

Youth leaders persuade Cottage Grove to join communities nationwide in encouraging parents and children to eat together Monday

What: A Day to Eat Dinner With Your Children

Local Sponsor: Cottage Grove Youth Advisory Council

National Sponsor: Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, Columbia University

Information: www.cottagegrove .org/YAC or www. casafamilyday.org