DR. WALLACE: I'm a single mother of two teenagers, the eldest being my 17-year-old daughter. Both are good kids, so I'm quite lucky in this regard, but my daughter has been trying my patience quite a bit lately.

It revolves around her insisting that she's allowed to go on every single shopping trip with me whenever I have to go to the market to buy food, groceries and ingredients for the meals we prepare at home. She has this idea in her head that she's going to become a nutritionist and that her client roster is going to include several famous people — she'll be known as the nutritionist to the stars!

Every single shopping trip these days involves her trying to create the "perfect salad." She tells me that she's trying to get the exact correct blend of salad ingredients, vegetables, nuts and proteins to create her own "signature salad that will become famous and loved by everyone who samples it.

So far, I've indulged her whims a bit, but I have drawn the line on a few ingredients that I deemed both too expensive and a bit over the top in terms of what makes sense for us as a family.

I'm enduring her fad pretty well so far, but I'm not sure if I should tell her at some point to cool her jets on this idea a little bit, as she's still a high school student. I do think it's good that she's interested in healthy food and nutrition, but she's taking this whole idea so far and has built it up so high in her mind that I'm wondering if it's becoming unhealthy for her to pursue any further. Not only this, but I've grown tired of watching her prance through every grocery store like she owns it! — Mother of a 'Salad Artiste,' via email

MOTHER OF A 'SALAD ARTISTE': I'd like to start by letting you know that I've been in touch with literally thousands of other parents over the years, either in person or via communications regarding the column, who would have loved to trade places with you. By this I mean that if this is the major issue you have with your teenage daughter, consider yourself tremendously fortunate.

I feel you deserve credit, along with your daughter, for her not having any other major issues, but if she wants to get involved in this particular activity, my advice would be to encourage her. Take an interest in it and even use it as a vehicle to discuss things together and hopefully bond over.

From there, you can be mildly encouraging of your daughter without overly inflating her chances of succeeding with her dream as perfectly as she has it in her mind's eye at the present. But it's also important to encourage and nurture dreams without snuffing them out just because at a particular moment you feel it's too unrealistic. As long as the activity is ethical and wholesome, which this one I believe definitely is, encouragement and nurturing would be the best path for you to pursue from here.

MY SON IS RECITING LINES FROM OLD MOVIES TO GIRLS!

DR. WALLACE: My son is 16 years old and already he's girl crazy, as all he seems to think about most of the time are what he calls "the cute girls" at his high school.

On Saturdays, he will literally sit down and watch a boatload of movies, starting in the morning until I finally call him for dinner after 5 p.m. He will literally sit and watch these movies end-to-end consecutively, and I've noticed that he has a notebook he keeps by his side in which he writes down various snippets of dialogue that he likes from these movies.

My curiosity finally got the better of me, and I asked him why he was writing things down in the notebook. He told me that he wanted to brush up on his dialogue strategies whenever he was meeting new girls or talking to girls that he already knew somewhat from previous conversations at his school.

He indicated that he was successfully able to use various lines from these movies during his conversations, and he said a high percentage of them worked out really well. Do you think this is healthy or not? My first reaction is that he should be learning how to think and talk on his own to girls in real time, not simply coming into conversations with canned lines he's memorized from old movies!

I haven't said anything to him about watching fewer movies or stopping to take notes in the manner that he does, but I am considering intervening and putting an end to this at some point. — He's All About Meeting Girls, via email

HE'S ALL ABOUT MEETING GIRLS: What a creative young man your son is! I've never heard of such an interesting way of coming up with dialogue to use in pursuit of a potential date or future potential relationship partners.

Even though your son is using a lot of canned lines that he has absorbed from these movies, don't forget that he can only use that line once — then he has to respond in real time to whatever the girls says back to him. He still has to think on his feet, be good at the art of conversation and be able to carry himself in a manner that can sustain both conversations and potential friendships.

To me, he simply found a creative starting point and something that perhaps gives him more confidence to begin a conversation with. I commend him for his creativity and don't feel intervention is needed at this point. You can certainly monitor him, talk to him and ask him how things are going from time to time, but if you're not getting any negative reports regarding anything he's saying to these girls, I think things are fine just the way they are.

Dr. Robert Wallace welcomes questions from readers. Although he is unable to reply to all of them individually, he will answer as many as possible in this column. Email him at [email protected]. To find out more about Dr. Robert Wallace and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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