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I mentioned the surveys in a earlier post. We recruit kids from low and mixed income neighborhoods and ask them all kinds of questions about how they feel about themselves, their families and friends, their neighborhoods, their educations, their futures, and also some personal questions about their experiences with sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence. It takes about an hour and a half and at the end we collect the surveys and each of them gets $15. Pretty sweet deal. What happens, though, is that some kids decide that they could use another $15. And so beings the quest to outsmart us, get past our check-in system, take the survey again, and collect some more money. I mean, I don't blame them. Even if they don't trick us, it's something to do; if they do, it's something to do and $15.

Anyway, one way that kids think they're going to get past us is by giving the wrong name. i.e. Johnny will use his friend Jimmy's name. But we're on top of that. We ask a kid who's trying to check in to tell us her/his address, middle name, and birthday. We figure that the likelihood is not high that Johnny will know all that information about Jimmy.

The thing is, a lot of times, the kids really just don't know their own address, middle name, or birthday. The professor who's running all this talked with us a bit about this today. When you think about it, it makes a depressing amount of sense; it's the birthday stuff that especially gets to me though.

Why would these kids think that their birthday is something worth remembering if they've never had a birthday party, never gotten birthday gifts, never had a cake with candles to blow out? When I was of the birthday-party-having age, I remember that one of the best parts about the whole event was the feeling that that many people in my family thought that my birthday was important enough to have a party for. These days I'm not really much of a birthday person, and I'd really prefer not to be the center of attention, but there's still something cool about being wished a happy birthday, or even checking Facebook the day after.

So when I think about some of the reasons why an eleven year old kid might not know her/his birthday, it makes me sad. I just really hope that at least one day every year, somebody makes each of these kids feel cool and important the way that birthday parties made me feel cool and important when I was younger.