Author: Anna Cherry

Sweat

Do They Work? Here's The Truth About 7 Gender Prediction Tests

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date June 8, 2017

Pseudoscience, folklore, and old wives’ tales abound regarding how to predict or control important life events.

Guess how many children you’ll have by swinging a necklace in front of your face! Make someone propose to you by eating a hard-boiled egg filled with salt! Predict whether you’ll live in a mansion, an apartment, a shack, or a house by scribbling spirals on your paper tablecloth at a steakhouse chain with peanut shells on the floor!

You know, typical ancient wisdom.

Some of the most popular rituals are to test or influence babies’ genders, and boy are there some weird ideas about that. But is there proof that any of these is effective? Read on to learn eight ways to predict or control your baby’s gender, and whether they stand a scientific chance.

Peeing Into Stuff

Peeing into stuff, theory one: If a pregnant woman pees into Drano, the color will determine whether she’s having a boy or a girl. (There are multiple combinations of which colors supposedly correlate to which sex.)

Peeing into stuff, theory two: If a pregnant woman pees into baking soda and it fizzes like soda it means the baby’s a boy, and if it’s flat it means the baby’s a girl.

Peeing into stuff, theory three: If a pregnant woman pees into the water drained off of boiled, chopped-up red cabbage, the color determines an unborn baby’s sex. (Red or pink means boy; violet means girl.)

Does it work? We’ll quote here the fact-checking site Snopes regarding the Drano Test, and we feel confident it applies to the others as well: “Mixing Drano with urine will not predict the sex of an unborn child any better than will hanging a dead chicken from the flagpole and watching to see which way the wind riffles it.”

How It Gets Done

Some believe that the way you conceive can determine the baby’s sex, and this notion goes back pretty far.

The ancient Greeks thought a man who was lying on his right side during the deed would increase their chances of having a male baby. Similarly, it was believed that if a pregnant woman’s right side of her chest swelled, it meant she was carrying a boy. And so on and so forth with the “right means boy” and “left means girl” anatomical preoccupations.

(This makes sense because the Greeks attributed symbolic significance to right and left, with right being superior; they weren’t really known for their high opinions of women.)

More recent iterations of this idea, according to health writer Jeremy Laurance in The Independent, are based on the theory that “male” sperm die sooner and are “small and fragile but quick” and “female” sperm live longer and are “larger and tougher but slow.”

So, conceiving in certain positions will bring you a girl because because the sperm will be farther from the cervix, meaning that it will have to tough it out through acidic secretions to get to the womb. On the other hand, baby making in other positions will bring you a boy because the agile male sperm will be more adept at swimming against gravity.

The theory was apparently popularized by Dr. Landrum B. Shettles in the 1960s, who published his findings in medical journals and in the book How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby .

Does it work? Nah. As Drs. Yvonne Bohn, Allison Hill, and Alane Park, authors of The Mommy Docs’ Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy and Birth tell NPR, “There is no [position] that will guarantee a desired gender. The gender of the baby is determined by […] either an X chromosome, producing a girl — or a Y chromosome, producing a boy.”

Anyway, cue the unsettling opening credits of Look Who’s Talking that will remain seared into our memory forever.

The Mother’s Diet

Plenty of theories make claims about a mother’s diet and the gender of baby she will produce or is carrying. For example, a woman who craves sweets is having a boy and a woman who craves sour foods is having a girl. Or a woman who eats a lot of spicy foods is carrying a boy.

Laurance in The Independent writes about the Victorians’ suggestion “that would-be parents who wanted boys should go on a strict diet because the male was the ‘starved sex.'” And today there are websites devoted to altering your diet to influence your child’s gender.

Does it work? Surprisingly, it can—but not in the ways we’ve imagined. According to research from the University of Oxford and the University of Exeter published in 2008, women who don’t skip breakfast and who consume more calories around the time of conception, particularly bananas and breakfast cereal, are more likely to have boys.

This may be because, as Tara Parker-Pope points out in The New York Times, “male embryos are less viable in women who regularly limit food intake, such as skipping breakfast, which is known to depress glucose levels,” and “low glucose level may be interpreted by the body as indicating poor environmental conditions and low food availability.”

Position Of The Baby Bump

You know the deal! If you’re “carrying low” you’re having a boy, and if you’re “carrying high” you’re having a girl. Or is it the other way around?

Many swear that if a woman carries her baby high in the uterus and her stomach has a round appearance, the chances are excellent she is expecting a girl, Snopes reports. “Likewise, a boy is carried low and relatively more sideways. However, many swear by the exact opposite and believe boys are always carried high. Go figure.”

Does it work? Nope. Professor Steve Robson, Vice President of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, tells The Huffington Post:

“It’s clear to say that a child’s genitals has nothing to do with how the woman’s body looks when she is pregnant. The way a woman carries a baby has more to do with the size of the baby — then the belly tends to pivot forward. If the baby is smaller, it is more likely to be lower in the pelvis. So a baby that is larger than average is more likely to be higher, a smaller baby will be lower. It has nothing to do with their genitals and everything to do with the way the baby is lying in the uterus.”

Numbers Games

Two popular ways to try and guess your baby’s gender involve crunching numbers. According to one method, using the Chinese Lunar Calendar, the baby’s sex is determined by the mother’s age at the time of conception and the month she conceived.

Another method is based on the Mayan (Maya?) system. It says that, if you take the age of the mother at the time of conception and the number representing the month of conception and both numbers are even, or if both numbers are odd, the baby is a girl; if one number is odd and the other is even, the baby is a boy.

Does it work? There’s a 50 percent chance. (Hint: there’s a 50 percent chance with all the others too, though.) As far as we know, no major scientific studies have evaluated the likelihood that either of these methods will predict the correct sex every time, but we’re going to go out on a limb and say that it’s not any more effective than peeing into Drano.

(That said, the whole using-your-fingers thing to determine multiples of nine absolutely blows our mind, so anything’s possible, right? Right?)

Weight Gain During Pregnancy

Some people claim that women who gain the least weight during pregnancy are more likely to have a girl.

Does it work? As a correlation, not a cause.

By our analysis (we aren’t scientists), this theory would seem to fall in line with the research out of the University of Oxford and the University of Exeter, suggesting that women who consume high-calorie diets around the time of conception are more likely to give birth to boys.

However, it doesn’t seem to take into consideration that eating more calories around the time of conception doesn’t mean they continued to eat more calories throughout the remainder of the pregnancy. (Besides, eating more calories doesn’t necessarily mean weight gain, since different women have different basal metabolic rates.)

Cosmopolitan reports:

In a massive new [2014] observational study published in PLOS ONE that accounts for more than 68 million births over 23 years, researchers found that women who gained the least weight during pregnancy were more likely to give birth to girls. Fifty-one percent of babies born to moms who gained less than 20 pounds during pregnancy ended up being girls. … Researchers still can’t entirely explain the relationship between your weight gain and the likelihood that you’ll give birth to a boy or girl. But they did find that mothers who gained low amounts of weight and miscarried were more likely to lose a male fetus than a female fetus.”

Morning Sickness Means Girl

Another well-worn idea is that women who have morning sickness are having a girl, and women who have no morning sickness are having a boy. One different version is that all moms-to-be have morning sickness, but moms-to-be carrying a girl have worse morning sickness than those carrying a boy.

And another says that only morning sickness during the first trimester is a determinant, with bad morning sickness indicating “girl” and no morning sickness indicating “boy.”

Does it work? Probably not…but maybe? “Morning sickness has nothing to do with gender. It just means some people are very prone to morning sickness the same way some people are prone to motion sickness,” Professor Robson tells The Huffington Post. “Also, morning sickness can be worse in one pregnancy than in another. But, again, it has no relationship to the gender of the baby and everything to do with hormones in pregnancy. Sometimes different hormone levels promote different levels of morning sickness.”

However, some studies have shown a connection between moms who suffer from a severe form of morning sickness called hyperemesis gravidarum and female births. Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, reportedly suffered from the condition during both of pregnancies—her first child a boy, George, but her second is a girl, Charlotte.

Dangling Metal Things Over Pregnant Women

This is a fun one. If you’re a woman, you’ve likely been instructed at some point in your life to loop a ring through with a piece of your hair or a necklace chain, and then dangle the ring over your stomach to determine the number of children you will one day have and their genders (because of course you will have children).

Another version is specifically for women who are already with child. They’re instructed to use their wedding rings (because of course they are married) and, if the suspended ring rotates counterclockwise, the baby is a boy, while a clockwise rotation indicates that the baby’s a girl.

Then there’s this one, described in Snopes : “A pin or needle affixed to a piece of thread is dangled over the expectant woman’s wrist. If the pin swings back and forth, it’s a boy. If it twirls in circles, it’s a girl. Some suggest using a nail instead of a pin. Some say the pin or nail should dangle over the mother’s stomach instead of her wrist.”

Does it work? We can’t imagine a reason why it would…unless, like, magnetic fields? But yeah, common sense points to “clearly not.”

Tags 50018031, body, hemingway

Wellbeing

Everything You've Learned About Mental Illness From Hollywood Is All Wrong

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date June 2, 2017

This just in, y’all: TV and Hollywood films are not the best place to get facts about mental illness (or probably anything?) Whether you’re basing the entirety of your perception of eating disorders on a Lifetime series or you think you know everything there is to know about schizophrenia because you’ve seen A Beautiful Mind three times, you should be aware that you do not have the full picture.

Stereotypes being perpetuated through popular media is nothing new. Edify yourself, and read on for eight psychological “facts” about mental illness we’ve been fed by television and movies:

People with Tourette’s syndrome cuss all the time.

When you hear Tourette’s syndrome, you probably think of one particular feature for which it’s become famous: letting out strings of extremely offensive curse words, usually at inopportune times. For an example, you could watch this YouTube clip of this dude in a courtroom from a 1989 episode of the television series LA Law.

Contrary to popular belief, though, swearing isn’t always a feature of the neurological disorder. “[T]his only occurs in about 1 in 10 children with Tourette’s syndrome,” according to Patient. (The condition develops in people between ages 2 and 14, typically around age 7.)

As Patient also notes, “it must be emphasised that if this occurs, the child cannot help swearing. It is not a reflection on their moral character or upbringing.”

Other tics include eye blinking, touching or smelling objects, head jerking, repeating observed movements, shoulder shrugging, stepping in a certain pattern, eye darting, obscene gesturing, nose twitching, bending or twisting, mouth movements, or hopping.

You can talk yourself out of schizophrenia.

A Beautiful Mind is a moving depiction of an incredibly gifted mathematician, John Nash, whose life is altered indelibly by schizophrenia. Although the biopic’s plot does in some ways work against the stereotype of schizophrenics as always violent and erratic, it’s still not the whole story for most people who suffer from the illness.

“Regardless of the biographical exclusions, John Nash, in reality and in the movie, is unlike other schizophrenic patients,” Roberto Gil writes for In Vivo: News from Columbia Health Sciences. “He has a superior intellectual capacity, while most schizophrenic patients suffer from impaired cognition.”

Additionally, Nash is depicted as eschewing medication and instead reasoning his way out of his hallucinations. Gil notes:

“Deprived of medications and treatment, many schizophrenics lose, if they ever had them, jobs, family, friends, financial stability, and homes. It is not just a coincidence that homelessness is so common among schizophrenics. The real and fictional Dr. Nash kept ties with professionals, family, and friends because they were very tolerant of his symptoms.”

Treatment is evil.

The conversation about overmedicating is one certainly worth having, specifically in a culture that pathologizes the natural complexity of human emotion, often in gendered ways. But there remains a major dearth of misinformation about mental illness and its treatments, which results in many people who would greatly benefit from medication never receiving help.

One of the more damaging misconceptions is that medication is only for the weak. On par with this is the idea that medication fundamentally changes who you are. As Angelica Jade Bastién writes in Vulture:

“Out of all the tropes on this list, this is the most dangerous. Treatment varies from person to person, of course, but the idea that medication robs you of your personality is odious. Contrary to what’s often shown on TV, psychiatrists and mental-health professionals aren’t manipulative villains or incompetent caregivers.

“These claims contribute to the fear that prevents people from finding the right treatment. In recent decades, TV shows like Monk, Pretty Little Liars, Ally McBeal, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have all contributed to this trend.”

OCD sufferers are all terrified of germs.

Obsessive compulsive disord
er (OCD), for those who don’t actually know someone with the disorder (and perhaps some who do), is synonymous with a fear of germs, an obsession with order and cleanliness, and a propensity for counting.

Although these traits certainly do show up in some OCD sufferers, this is only a very superficial understanding of the condition, which is defined by unfounded anxieties that can attach themselves to any topic and resultant attempts to quell that anxiety through irrational compulsive behaviors or rituals.

There’s nothing off-limits to OCD. Often, fears will be related to ideas that fundamentally threaten an individual’s sense of identity—for example, the fear of killing someone you love, the fear of molesting a child, or the fear of having a sexual orientation that runs counter to who you’ve always believed yourself to be.

Depictions of characters such as the protagonist of the award-winning show Monk, whose fears include germs, needles, milk, death, snakes, mushrooms, heights, crowds, and elevators—focus more on external behaviors without taking a deep dive into the OCD sufferer’s inner world. Plus, as Dr. Suck Won Kim, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, tells the Chicago Tribune regarding Monk’s fears:

“Those are phobic disorders. They’re not related to OCD at all. Many of them are forms of agoraphobia. I’ve seen over 2,000 patients with OCD, and none of them has complained of having trouble going on an airplane.”

Sociopaths eat brains.

Speaking of tropes that perpetuate negative views of mental health professionals, Hannibal Lecter is a cannibalistic psychiatrist—fun! The protagonist of The Silence of the Lambs is perhaps our favorite psychopath. Er, sociopath?

(There is debate about the distinction between a sociopath and a psychopath, but according to one person on the internet, there’s no diagnostic difference. We’re certainly not mental health professionals, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just use the term interchangeably in this section.)

But is Lecter even really a psychopath? According to health, science, and tech reporter Rachel Feltman, no.

On top of that, despite what years of ingesting way too many MSNBC specials would suggest, doing something completely heinous like eating brains isn’t even a prerequisite for being a psychopath. As Feltman points out in Quartz:

“Sometimes, a psychopath can look a lot like your friendly neighborhood neuroscientist; James Fallon made headlines when he accidentally diagnosed his own brain scan as showing psychopathic features. After further research and self-evaluation, Fallon categorized himself as a ‘pro-social psychopath’—one who can keep his behavior within socially-acceptable bounds, despite not feeling true empathy for others. …At the end of the day, though, he’d ‘rather beat someone in an argument than beat them up.'”

Dissociative personality disorder is just like “Fight Club.”

Apparently, there’s a whole lot of confusion about this illness, which is used to be called multiple personality disorder but is now referred to as dissociative disorder. Even the professionals are a bit unsure. As psychiatrist Jason Hunziker tells University of Utah health sciences radio The Scope:

“There is so much controversy, even in the mental health industry about dissociative identity disorder. There are those that swear by almost the Hollywood version of what this looks like. And then there are others who say people clearly use dissociation to help protect themselves, and that’s kind of where I fall in line. I think that people use that mechanism to get out of a stressful situation, and they then have a different personality style that interacts with you during those moments that [their] real self is not present.”

According to one Cracked contributor, Fight Club doesn’t get it right, either. “Those with [dissociative] identity disorder don’t just wake up and realize they’ve been living as another person,” they write. “They always know about the other personalities, and don’t black out and live as another person. Amnesia and fugue states do happen, but what you see in movies is writers combining them to suit their narrative.”

Mentally Ill = Violent

Speaking of Fight Club, let’s talk about the other popular myth surrounding mentally ill people: They’re all violent. It just ain’t true.

“It will surprise most people—and disappoint Hollywood—but the fact is that the mentally ill are rarely violent and contribute very little to overall violence in the United [States],” Richard A. Friedman writes in Alternet. “It is estimated that only 3 percent to 5 percent of all violence in the country can be attributed to mental illness.”

Those who are much more likely than mentally ill folks to be violent are people who misuse drugs or alcohol. “The fact is that you have far more to fear from an intoxicated businessman in a suit than from a homeless schizophrenic man muttering on the street corner,” Friedman writes.

“People with no mental disorder who abuse alcohol or drugs are nearly seven times as likely as those without substance abuse to be violent, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.” (Then again, wouldn’t drug and alcohol abuse imply addiction, and isn’t addiction a mental illness?)

You can get over an eating disorder in a few days.

We can all agree that ‘90s television and culture have taught us a lot—like, for example, how to wear a denim hat every day for an entire summer with few or no social repercussions. (Mom, how did you let this happen?) What it did not teach us was how to recognize or treat an eating disorder.

Many have called into question the depiction of disordered eating in D.J. Tanner from Full House. In season four, D.J. begins starving herself to try and look thinner for an upcoming pool party, and then, within just a handful of episodes, the problem magically disappears. One viewer summarizes the nearly instantaneous resolution to the problem, which comes—surprise—during one of Full House‘s famous heart-to-hearts:

“…Danny tells D.J. that people come in all shapes and sizes, and that he himself struggled with body image issues growing up because he was so tall and skinny. Oh yeah, Danny, being a tall thin white man is a real hill to climb! Poor Danny! So anyway, Danny tells D.J. that it’s what’s inside that counts and that her friends shouldn’t judge her for looking terrible in a bathing suit and I guess that if more dads gave that same brief, ill-conceived speech then anorexia wouldn’t be such a problem.”

What Full House misses is that an eating disorder is a deadly mental illness that sufferers often struggle with for life, even with professional help. Heart-to-hearts are kind of beside the point.

Tags 50023526, hemingway, mind

Wellbeing

Some People With This Rare Condition Remember Every Detail Of Their Lives From Days After Being Born

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date May 12, 2017

Having memories is pretty central to being human, but there are a few that most of us are happy to forget. The pain of heartbreak, the shame of an embarrassing moment, or the fear experienced during a traumatic event are all memories that come to mind as the kind we would prefer to leave in the past.

For one very small segment of society, however, the luxury of forgetting is not an option. Read on for eight things you probably didn’t know about the people affected by highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), a rare condition discovered in the early 2000s that makes those who have it remember nearly every detail of their lives, in some cases starting as early as 12 days after birth.

There are very few of them.

It’s kind of weird to think of all the undiscovered conditions out there offering people abilities that sound as if they’re straight out of an X-Men film.

It’s likely that until someone came forward saying they were experiencing some phenomenon and that phenomenon was then confirmed by scientists, it would never occur to most of us that these conditions were actually possible.

But we’re learning new things every day, and what we’re learning is unbelievable…until it is believable.

Somewhere around 60 to 80 people worldwide are known to have HSAM, although exact numbers are still a little murky. As Mental Floss reports: “At this time, there are only a handful of individuals in the world who have ever been diagnosed with hyperthymesia, and scientists still don’t know exactly how it works.

“Some studies have found that hyperthymesiacs [a term for those with the condition] might have variations in the structure of their brains, while others argue that it might have behavioral components. However, since so few people are diagnosed with HSAM, it’s difficult to study the condition.”

They feel things more intensely than others.

It’s possible that one of the causes for this hyperawareness of detail, specifically of internal worlds, is the predisposition to being highly sensitive.

“The other HSAMers I have met seem to share similar traits: the need for approval, seeking attention, putting themselves out there a little bit, maybe being a little sensitive to criticism and having issues with depression and closure,” hyperthymesiac Joey DeGrandis told New York magazine in an interview about his own life and his experiences with others like him.

“They are all contributing members of society and it doesn’t seem like any of us are so hindered that we’ve ceased to function like a normal person, but there is a commonality in that we seem to be a little more sensitive and we sometimes have trouble with our emotions and we can be more prone to depression and it must be related to the fact that we remember in the way we do.”

They have rich fantasy lives.

Part of the HSAM package is the intensity of experience, not only in the sense of being deeply emotionally affected by events, but also of being keenly attuned to sensory impressions.

“I’m extremely sensitive to sounds, smells and visual detail,” Nicole Donohue, an HSAMer who has taken part in many studies about the condition, tells the BBC. “I definitely feel things more strongly than the average person.”

Indeed, researcher Dr. Lawrence Patihis, who works in the psychology department of the University of Southern Mississippi studying memory of past emotions, memory of long-term relationships, memory malleability, trauma and memory, dissociation, eyewitness memory, and long-term episodic memory, found after profiling 20 people with HSAM that they scored especially high on “fantasy proneness” and “absorption.”

Even the woman they’re writing about, Rebecca Sharrock—whose memories go back jaw-droppingly far—does not remember every single day of her life since birth. (She does, however, remember everything from 12 days after birth, which is, in our opinion, equally impressive.)

Many with HSAM didn’t get it until years into their lives. For example, artist Nima Veiseh didn’t begin remembering everything until one very moving experience, after which he says he could tell you anything.

The moment was “15 December 2000, when he met his first girlfriend at his best friend’s 16th birthday party,” the BBC reports. “He had always had a good memory, but the thrill of young love seems to have shifted a gear in his mind: from now on, he would start recording his whole life in detail.”

Breakups can be extra hard for them.

You know that saying about time healing all wounds? I keep a gratitude journal, and most mornings I list three things I’m thankful for. During one period following the end of a relationship, the word “forgetting” appeared several times. Imagine, though, trying to get over a breakup if you had HSAM.

As DeGrandis tells New York magazine:

“…[I]f it’s a bad breakup or unrequited love then the memories of that linger and hurt when I think about them—especially if there’s no closure. I’m thinking, What did I do? I’m forced to pick back through it. I can remember the last time I saw the person. I can remember where we were.

“I can remember a funny face they made or a thought or a feeling however fleeting or however lasting it was; I can remember those things. Even if the person ended up doing something wrong or ditches me, the initial positive memory is so strong it’s hard for me to separate: ‘How can you be this way now, when I remember you so vividly as something different?'”

Their memories often relate to their passions, but they can also cause depression.

There are certain consistencies with how folks with HSAM tend to remember the details of their lives—namely, that there is a quality of “emotionality” attached to them, as opposed to just factual details. But when it comes to which factual details they’ll remember, they’re often dependent on the personal preferences of the individual with HSAM.

In his interview with New York magazine, DeGrandis talked about something he picked up on during his first meeting with other HSAMers, for a 60 Minutes special:

“We noticed that some of us are better at remembering certain things and it aligns with passions. Marilu Henner is into fashion, so she can remember when she bought all the pairs of shoes she owns. Another was a big football fan so he remembered scores.”

There was another commonality. “The thing we all agreed on was the fact that at some point in our lives we had gone through depression, or had some form of it,” DeGrandis says. “It wasn’t so much like ‘Oh, we’re severely depressed.’ It was more that we have struggled with, or currently struggle with, feeling depressed and feeling weighed down and we believe it may be because of certain memories we are unable to let go of.”

They are typically really good with dates.

Some hyperthymesiacs’ exceptional ability to recall information about specific dates—including w
hat day of the week it was in a given year—has led many to draw comparisons to people with autism, but researchers have found no connection.

HSAMer Jill Price “can label what day of the week virtually any calendar date fell on,” reports Mental Floss. “Given a specific date, like ‘March 19, 2003,’ a 20-year-old hyperthymesiac called HK can remember that it was a Wednesday, what the weather was like, and what he did that day from getting up to going to bed.”

DeGrandis explains his superpower thusly:

“There is an algorithm you can use to figure out the day of a week, but I don’t know it and I still don’t know how to use it. It’s just a calculation that my mind does and I don’t even understand how.

“It’s very hard to explain how I get there but it’s almost like I’m standing over the year, actually looking at the whole year and then I home in on a day and sometimes I link it up to another year when that date was the same day of the week.”

They can still have false memories.

False memories are relatively common among people without HSAM. “I would even go as far as saying that memory is largely an illusion,” Julia Shaw writes in Scientific American.

“This is because our perception of the world is deeply imperfect, our brains only bother to remember a tiny piece of what we actually experience, and every time we remember something we have the potential to change the memory we are accessing.”

But, surprisingly, even having a condition defined by “highly superior” memory does not make you immune to remembering things that didn’t actually happen. The Guardian, describing the HSAM study by Dr. Patihis, writes:

“HSAM subjects were equally likely as the control group to claim words that had not appeared on a list had appeared, they showed a higher overall propensity to form false memories of a photographic slideshow, and they were equally likely to mistakenly report that they had seen non-existent video footage of the United 93 plane crash on 9/11.”

Some of the subjects with HSAM were not too happy to hear this, because “having accurate memories is central to their identities.”

Tags 50022221, hemingway, mind

Motherhood

The U.S. Still Hasn't Adopted These 8 Global Parenting Habits That May Make Your Jaw Drop

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date May 11, 2017

Often the experience of traveling to different places has the effect of reminding us just how similar we all are. You get to know people of other countries and cultures and think: Yes, our shared humanity connects us.

But if there’s anything that can cause swift division among groups and individuals, it’s the loaded issue of child-rearing. This is understandable: How we choose to raise the small humans we are wired to love more than any others in the world is touchy, not only because of that all-consuming love, but also because it means so much about who we are, how we have been shaped by our own parents, and who we want to be.

Bringing a human into the world entails certain responsibilities and sacrifices many people don’t seem to consider ahead of time. At the same time, there seems to be a uniquely American parenting ethos—one that says the world should be childproofed rather than the child be raised to live in the world, and that parents’ personhood (or at least mothers’) should be sacrificed at the altar of Perfect Parenting™.

America’s brand of Perfect Parenting™ is often not only an impossible standard for parents to achieve (mere human beings, after all), but also one that isn’t particularly healthy for children, who will come to find (some in more jarring ways than others) that the world is not childproof at all.

Still, we are all products of our culture—not to mention our own upbringing—so it takes some effort not to dismiss parenting that runs counter to these impulses as weird, negligent, or even kind of monstrous.

It’s a fun and useful exercise to examine your gut reactions to new pieces of information that don’t fit in your already established framework of How Things Are or Should Be. Give it a try! Read on for eight global parenting customs that may make you feel things.

Leaving Your Child on the Sidewalk While Dining and Shopping

If you saw that viral footage of a 4-year-old girl being snatched up in a Philadelphia store while standing a few feet away from her mother, it probably seems like a given to you that no mentally sound adult would leave their most precious cargo unattended on the sidewalk.

Yet that’s exactly what parents do in Sweden and Denmark: leave their children curbside while they go shopping or eat in a restaurant.

This doesn’t sit well with American folks, even (especially?) on the East Coast. One couple from Denmark was held for a weekend in police custody after leaving their 14-month-old alone in a stroller outside an East Village restaurant in New York City, and a Swedish woman in Amherst, Massachusetts, was reported after leaving her 1-year-old unattended outside for about 10 minutes while she ordered food inside a restaurant.

Scandinavian parents didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, since (we guess) Northern Europe is like a weird utopia. As the New York Times reports:

“In Copenhagen, a city of 1.3 million with a low crime rate and few child kidnappings, parents were astonished at Ms. Sorensen’s arrest. ‘Come on, we do this all the time,’ Line Vang told the Associated Press as she sat in a cafe while her 7-month-old son, Mathias, dozed out of reach. ‘We go in for a cup of coffee, sit so we can see the stroller, go out and check once in a while and that’s it.'”

Putting Your Babe Down for a Nap Outside in Subzero Temperatures

Lol, WHAT? Literally, what? Okay, Scandinavia, we’ve got our eye on you. We can maybe forgive some cultural lost-in-translations like misguidedly assuming that the city that inspired Gotham City is anything like an idyllic Northern European capital, but sub-zero naps? How? Why?

As Helena Lee reports for BBC News, “The theory behind outdoor napping is that children exposed to fresh air, whether in summer or the depths of winter, are less likely to catch coughs and colds—and that spending a whole day in one room with 30 other children does them no good at all.”

Naps outside typically last between one-and-a-half and three hours, according to Finnish researcher Marjo Tourula. Tourula says that –5 degrees C (23 degrees F) is considered the ideal temp for outdoor snoozing, though some parents reportedly put their children out at –30 degrees C (–22 degrees F).

“Martin Jarnstrom, head of one of the Ur och Skur group of pre-schools, is another big advocate of outdoor naps, though he emphasises that while the weather may be cold, the child must be warm,” Lee writes.

Jarnstrom highly recommends t
hat children wear wool close to the body and that they be wrapped in warm clothing as well as a warm sleeping bag.

Leaving Your Newborn for a Month

When you think of a newborn baby and a mother, you probably think of lots of sweet moments involving cuddling, sink baths, and staring into each other’s eyes. Also there’s that whole thing, typically, about being desperately in love with a new human and terrified that something bad could happen to them, which can make parting ways for the first time incredibly difficult (or so we’ve heard).

That’s why the Chinese practice zuo yuezi, intended to allow new mothers to recuperate after giving birth, may seem counterintuitive to some, because it can entail mother–baby separation of a month or longer.

As Cracked explains:

“[T]oday’s [Chinese mom] has a few more options, like checking into a resort that pampers you for weeks on end while your baby is tucked away safely out of sight. The moms who patronize these new confinement facilities can chill out, watch TV, enjoy the spa, and eat specially prescribed food from a cart brought to their rooms, all while their brand-new babies are cared for by nurses down the hall.”

Avoiding Eye Contact With Your Infant

Oh yeah, about that whole “staring into each other’s eyes” thing? Not everyone is into it—for example, Kisii, or Gusii, moms in Kenya, who avert their gaze from their children to assert their power over them. As Emily Lodish writes for NPR:

“It’s likely to sound harsh to a Western sensibility, but within the context of Kisii culture, it makes more sense. Eye contact is an act bestowed with a lot of power. It’s like saying, ‘You’re in charge,’ which isn’t the message parents want to send their kids. Researchers say Kisii kids are less attention-seeking as a result.”

Although it’s true that it sounds harsh, it does make sense, especially when put into context. “In the Western world, avoiding eye contact looks like guilt or shyness [but] [i]n the Gusii world, eye contact has power, and there are very strict rules about who you look at,” Cracked points out. “For Gusii moms, their babies are already demanding their time, their attention, and their [breasts], which is a lot of energy in a culture that needs the mom’s labor.”

Letting Babies Babysit Your Baby

Okay, so maybe “babies” is a bit of an exaggeration—but not much. According to Mei-Ling Hopgood, author of How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm: And Other Adventures in Parenting (from Argentina to Tanzania and Everywhere in Between), once children learn how to walk in Polynesia, they are handed over to other children to care for.

“Preschool-aged children learned to calm babies and toddlers became self-reliant because they were taught that that was the only way they could hang out with the big kids,” Hopgood writes.

Husband-and-wife anthropology team Jane and James Ritchie, who studied similar practices in New Zealand and the Polynesian islands, believe that the tradition wouldn’t sit well in other parts of the world.

“Indeed in Western societies, the degree of child caretaking that seems to apply in most of Polynesia would probably be regarded as child neglect and viewed with some horror,” they write in their book Growing up in Polynesia.

Sending Your Kidlet to the Subway Alone

In a place like New York City, the idea of sending out 7-year-olds to ride the subway by themselves sounds absolutely bonkers.

For parents living in Japan, however, it’s a normal occurrence to give children—even kids as young as 4—this kind of freedom. (Yes, 4-year-olds are riding subways alone in Japan.)

As NPR reports:

“Christine Gross-Loh, author of Parenting Without Borders, lives in Japan for part of each year, and when she’s there she lets her kids run errands without her, taking the subway and wandering around town as they may.”

Gross-Loh says, though, that she wouldn’t do the same in the U.S., since allowing her children to go solo subwaying in the States at such a young age would mean getting child protective services called on her. She’s probably correct.

Lenore Skenazy, for example, wrote a 2015 piece for The Washington Post headlined, “I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone. I got labeled the ‘world’s worst mom.'”

Forcing Bébé to Like Foie Gras

If you’ve been following the parenting trends, you’ve probably already learned that French parents do literally everything better than parents from…anywhere else. (Go ahead, give it a Google. A search of “French parents better” will yield such articles as “Why French Parents Are Superior” in The Wall Street Journal and “Why French Parents Are Better Than American Parents” in Business Insider.)

Apparently, another reason they’re better is that they can create children who are not picky eaters. As Lodish writes in NPR:

“Set mealtimes; no snacking whatsoever; the expectation that if you try something enough times, you’ll like it. These are among the ‘food rules’ in France that are taken as given. The result is French kids who eat what adults eat, from foie gras to stinky cheese. Tell that to my nephew.”

American Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, tells NPR, “We [Americans] assume…a little more that kids have inherent likes and dislikes, whereas the French view on food is the parent must educate their child and that appreciation for different food is something you cultivate over time.”

Training Your Little One Like Pavlov’s Dogs

Here’s something bizarre: You can train an infant to pee on command. Some Vietnamese moms begin training their newborn babies by making a whistling sound every time they urinate, so that the child comes to associate the sound of the whistle with urination.

As Cracked describes:

“By the age of 3 months, the moms hold their kids over toilets, give a little whistle, and their kids urinate on command, like magic. By 9 months, they’re done with diapers altogether, like some kind of…pee prodigies. By contrast, it takes American kids two and a half years or longer to shake the diaper habit.”

We could get on board with this. To me, this parenting habit makes the most sense of any of them. Then again, what do I know?

A friend and I recently got into a disagreement over parenting rules. Yeah, neither of us has kids.

Tags 50023086, hemingway, parenting

Lifestyle

How Women Ended Up Removing Hair From Their Entire Bodies: A History

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date May 11, 2017

Hair removal is annoying. It’s tedious, painful, and unnecessary—we’d do just fine if we kept our body hair intact.
Still, if you’re a woman, there’s a good chance that hair removal is an essential part of your routine, despite the fact that it’s clearly unnatural. Evolution gave us hair, right? Why do we immediately want to get rid of it? And what explains the rising and falling trends of women’s body hair throughout the centuries?
Well, there’s no simple answer, but the history of hair removal is pretty fascinating. For starters…

Hair removal has been around for a long time—probably longer than you’d expect.

We don’t know why people started removing their hair, although we can hazard a few guesses. Hair can hold in freezing water and parasites, and it’s a major disadvantage in a fight. The (wonderfully titled) Encyclopedia of Hair notes that beards were particularly dangerous in battle, so naturally, men began looking for alternatives.

Archaeologists have discovered cave paintings that show prehistoric people shaving, although they didn’t exactly have Gillette Mach 3 technology; they used clamshells, shark teeth, sharpened volcanic glass, and simple flint knives to accomplish the task.
Humans have been shaving since at least 6000 B.C., although razors didn’t really catch on until the Bronze Age (around 3000 B.C.). That’s when humans started using razors made of—wait for it—bronze.

Different cultures had markedly different expectations for body hair.

Ancient Egyptians would shave their entire bodies, according to History Undressed. The reason? Well, the desert is hot (shocker, we know), and Egyptians saw body hair as “uncivilized.” While they’d leave their eyebrows in place, upper-class people would get rid of just about everything else.

They had basic depilatory creams made with quicklime, although in a pinch, they could also grind the hair down with pumice stones (ouch). Meanwhile, in certain Middle Eastern countries, a bride’s attendants removed all of her hair the night before the wedding, except for her eyebrows and the hair on her head.
In ancient Greece, people generally left the hair on their heads intact, but sometimes cut the hair on their bodies and faces. Not only was “manscaping” common, it was frequently referenced in Greek art, including the Aristophanes play Thesmophoriazusae, which contains a humorous (though very crude) scene about the practice.
We know from Greek art that complete hair removal was more common for women than men, and men who went completely hairless were seen as effeminate.

Ancient Romans also valued hairless women, according to the poetry of Ovid, who wrote these remarkably romantic lines:
How near I was to warning you, no rankness of the wild goat under your armpits, no legs bristling with harsh hair!
We’re swooning. In any case, other ancient Roman art depicts women with hairless bodies (while Roman artists didn’t really shy away from showing body hair on men), so we know that hair removal was somewhat gendered by this point.
So, what did people use to remove their hair at this point? They’d sometimes singe it off—try not to think about how ancient Rome must have smelled—or pluck out the hairs one at a time with seashells or other implements. Shaving was common, but not exactly comfortable, since sharp blades were expensive.

Modern hair removal practices might have Darwin to blame.

Yes, that Darwin. According to author Rebecca Herzig’s Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man inspired a scientific obsession with “racial differences,” including differences in hair growth. (Nevermind the fact that, from a genetic standpoint, race doesn’t exist in humans.)

The idea quickly spread, and the public latched onto the idea that body hair could show the genetic superiority—or inferiority—of a person.
As Herzig writes, 19th-century scientists thought that thick hair was “linked to criminal violence … and exceptional ‘animal vigor.'” Suddenly, hairlessness was en vogue for Western women.
That’s about the time that advertisers got involved.

Fashion and advertising spread shaving.

Despite the Darwinian influence, leg and underarm hair wasn’t much of a concern for women in the early 1900s.
“Clothes were so concealing that it was rare to see bare legs or underarms, so removing hair there wasn’t an issue,” Phil Edwards writes for Vox. “Before the 1910s, depilatories for those areas were used primarily by actresses or dancers, or for surgery.”

But in 1915, Harper’s Bazaar began running ads for underarm hairlessness among women wearing the popular fashions of the time, like Greek- and Roman-style sleeveless dresses, and presumably, it was ads like these that got into people’s heads as the fashions changed (which is somewhat ironic, given the history of hair removal in ancient Greece).
As dresses began to shrink, women began discovering more unseemly hair. Advertisements played on insecurities, and in 1915, Gillette introduced the Milady Decollete, “the first razor designed and marketed specifically for women, and was billed in the extensive national advertising campaign as the ‘safest and most sanitary method of acquiring a smooth underarm,'” per author Russell B. Adams Jr.

We should note that not everyone agrees with the idea that shortening skirts caused body hair trends to change. “It is not clear when women began shaving their legs,” The Economist insists. “One idea, almost certainly wrong, is that the fashion began in the 1920s when western women’s skirts became shorter.”
The magazine stops short of providing an alternate explanation, however, so we’ll suggest one: Throughout the early 20th century, spending power increased, and many American women spent their extra money on magazines like Ladies Home Journal and Harper’s Bazaar. Advertisers quickly zeroed in on this captive audience, and beauty product manufacturers encouraged women to think of their body hair as undesirable.
Razor manufacturer Schick notes that World War II may have accelerated the trend. “During World War II there was a shortage of silk stockings causing many women to shave their legs and to use leg makeup to give the appearance of stockings,” the company’s website claims.
While that makes for an interesting story, we couldn’t find many credible sources to back up Schick’s claims that the nylon shortage popularized women shaving their legs. We did find images of women painting on nylons during the second World War. It’s possible that nylon shortages compelled some women to shave, however, so we’ll give Schick the benefit of the doubt.

In any case, women were dying to be hairless—literally.

For whatever reason, in the early 20th century, body hair was suddenly undesirable, and women had no shortage of options for hair removal. Unfortunately, many of those options were dangerous.
As Nadine Ajaka wrote for The Atlantic:

In the 1920s and ’30s, women used pumice stones or sandpaper to depilate, which caused irritation and scabbing. Some tried modified shoemaker’s waxes. Thousands were killed or permanently disabled by Koremlu, a cream made from the rat poison thallium acetate. It was successful in eliminating hair, and also in causing muscular atrophy, blindness, limb damage, and death.

By 1931, researchers had identified thallium—the active ingredient in Koremlu and some other depilatory creams—as a dangerous substance.
“A warning should be broadcast in regard to the dangers of the use of depilatories containing thallium,” Thomas P. Waring in a case study from 1931.
But that wasn’t the only hazardous hair removal technology, nor was it the most troubling. In the 1920s, beauticians began offering X-ray hair removal, which, while effective, was exceedingly dangerous.

Unfortunately, the priority of hair removal was firmly in place. “Around the same time, X-ray hair removal emerged as another treatment option,” Ajaka writes. “Women would sit for three or four minutes in front of the invisible rays of a boxed X-ray machine, and the radiation would do its work.”
“Women would sit for three or four minutes in front of the invisible rays of a boxed X-ray machine, and the radiation would do its work,” Ajaka writes.
An enterprising doctor named Albert C. Geyser quickly founded the Tricho Institute, which leased X-ray machines to beauticians after they’d completed a two-week training course. Advertisements for the Tricho System claimed that the “harmless” X-rays helped patients free themselves from “futile, dangerous and injurious means of removing disfiguring superfluous hair.”

That was, of course, untrue. Thousands of women ended up severely injured or disfigured by the devices, and x-ray hair removal was eventually outlawed.
Women had to wait decades for a more practical—and less dangerous—alternative. In 1998, a group at Massachusetts General Hospital published an article describing laser hair removal. It quickly caught on, as did a related technology called intense pulsed light (IPL) hair removal (which technically doesn’t involve a laser).

Today, these technologies make up a $508 million market. That’s peanuts compared to the shaving industry, though, which brings in about $1 billion per year from American women alone.

In recent years, we’ve seen a feminist pushback against hair removal.

Who can forget the dyed armpit hair trend of 2015?
In that tongue-in-cheek movement, women like Destiny Moreno purposefully drew attention to their neon-colored armpits. It seemed to really bother people on social media—and that was the point.

“Nobody questions when a guy wearing a tank top does a selfie that shows his armpit hair,” Moreno told The New York Times. “But if I happen to show my armpit hair in a selfie, it’s like, ‘Whoa, feminist witch asking for attention.'”
In 2016, a survey showed that about 77 percent of women between the ages of 16 and 24 remove the hair from their underarms. That’s down from 95 percent in 2013.
Love it or hate it, female body hair is coming back.

Beauty ideals change constantly, and we may see hair removal norms shift over the next decade to a more body-positive place. In any case, we’ve at least come a long way from the days of thallium depilatories—even if we’re not quite living in the hairy utopia of our dreams.

Tags 50022706, body, Commerce, hemingway

Motherhood

Mixed Emotions: Public Breastfeeding In Eight Places

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date May 3, 2017

For as long as there have been bodies, we have fretted over them. (Yada yada Genesis yada yada Adam and Eve yada yada original sin, shame, etcetera.) We have been especially obsessed with female bodies, which throughout time have been regarded with varying degrees of fetishization, confusion, and revulsion.

It’s no wonder, then, that public breastfeeding has been a point of contention—not only in places that view an exposed female body as tantamount to treason, but also in places that just have weird puritan roots and a resulting ambivalence about nudity.

Fortunately, people are really coming around to the idea that women’s bodies have purposes other than being objects for male consumption or corruption. Some have even begun to make it easier for nursing mothers to breastfeed in public spaces. (Some.)

Read on to learn about eight places where women are breastfeeding and what the reception has been like:

Target

As you may have already heard, Target is getting a lot of good press about its decision to provide “feeding stations” at some of its store locations. Back in 2015, Today ran a piece called “Moms get pumped about Target’s breastfeeding policy.” As it reads in the store’s employee handbook:

“Guests may openly breastfeed in our stores or ask where they can go to breastfeed their child. When this happens, remember these points:

“Target’s policy supports breastfeeding in any area of our stores, including our fitting rooms, even if others are waiting

“If you see a guest breastfeeding in our stores, do not approach her

“If she approaches and asks you for a location to breastfeed, offer the fitting room (do not offer the restroom as an option)”

Target was positioning itself in a different light than it had been in 2011, when mothers arranged a “nurse-in” at its stores nationwide to protest the treatment of a breastfeeding woman in a Texas Target who was asked by staff to cover up.

Now, continuing on its path of showing support to parents, specifically mothers, and normalizing public breastfeeding, Target is testing “feeding stations” where parents can sit down to feed their children. As Wendy Wisner points out in Babble:

“Even though the post was shared on a breastfeeding-specific page, commenters were happy that Target had specifically called it a ‘feeding station,’ making it more inclusive, and celebrating all the ways that mothers feed their babies.”

Airports

This listicle from MomAboard names 28 airports with areas specifically designated for nursing and pumping mothers. As Jennifer Chen comments, “PHL Minute Suites gives pumping moms 30 minutes of free time in one of their private rooms for pumping! Such a wonderful thing for them to do”—and herein lies the problem.

She says this with no trace of irony. The fact that the company does this just means that they’re fulfilling some of the most basic standards of human decency. Unfortunately, because women have been taught to ask for and expect so little, these things seem like special feats.

Let us be clear: Demanding that the people who actively facilitate the continuation of the human species have clean, comfortable, and available spaces to feed young humans is not a favor or something that is so nice to do.

(Jennifer, we’re not mad at you, we’re just heated. We could go on a whole related rant about the U.S.’s abysmal, absurd paid parental leave policies, but we’re trying to have a good day.)

Public places should be required to provide these spaces to the vast swaths of our population who are growing human beings inside their bodies and then keeping them alive, often by feeding them with their own bodies.

Despite a number of airports that do provide these spaces, many do not. As U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth wrote in 2016 for the Chicago Sun Times:

“Finding a clean and private space to breastfeed or pump breast milk in an airport can be burdensome and stressful, if not impossible. It’s not uncommon for moms to be directed to a bathroom. We would never ask our fellow travelers to eat their meals in bathrooms stalls, yet we ask new mothers to feed their children while sitting on a toilet seat.”

Court

“No matter what they’re doing or where they are, breastfeeding mothers need to express milk every few hours,” Duckworth points out in her op-ed. “Missing even one needed pumping session can have several undesirable consequences, including discomfort, leaking, inflammation and infection, decreased milk supply, and ultimately, breastfeeding cessation.”

And yet, in 2013, nursing Missouri mother Laura Trickle was held in contempt of court for bringing her then 5-month-old baby with her when called for jury duty. Trickle had told court officials that she was still breastfeeding her son; they told her to come to court anyway, either arranging for childcare elsewhere or bringing someone with her to court who could care for her baby.

When Trickle arrived to court with her son and no caretaker, she said the judge gave her two options. “I would be able to pump on breaks. Unfortunately, Axel doesn’t take a bottle, so that was not an option for us,” she told ABC News. “The other option was to have someone stay with me all day and then be able to nurse on breaks. But since I’m a stay-at-home mom, we don’t have child care.”

Trickle then received a court order at home, charging that she “willfully and contemptuously appeared for jury service with her child and no one to care for the child.” As of 2013, ABC News reported that Missouri was one of 39 states where breastfeeding women weren’t exempt from jury duty.

A Pool in Wyoming

Amber Hinds had recently moved to Wyoming when she was asked—for the first time in her life—to stop breastfeeding in public. Oddly enough, it was at a public pool, by a teenage lifeguard. She wrote about the experience for The Huffington Post:

“For an instant, I completely disconnected from everything around me. All I saw was this girl standing before me in her white t-shirt, her dirty blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, obviously so far from motherhood and without any understanding of the implications of what she had just said. For a second, I wondered if that could really just have happened.

“Could this girl have actually thought that me feeding my baby was something that shouldn’t be done in a space that was built for families? I took a deep breath and with it, the chaos of the noisy pool deck returned. I sat up straighter, looked her square in the eyes, and said, ‘State law says I can breastfeed wherever I am legally allowed to be.'”

The girl’s face got red, she apologized, and she walked away, but the afternoon had been “soured.” (Discrimination/public shaming has a way of doing that.) Hinds wrote that she was lucky that this was not her first nursing rodeo and that she had developed a certain degree of confidence in her right to breastfeed publicly.

“However, the more [my husband] Chris and I discussed what had happened, the more I became concerned about how such an experience might impact a new mom, who may already be struggling with nursing or feeling self-conscious,” Hinds wrote. “Being told that she can’t nurse somewhere could be the thing that makes someone stop breastfeeding.”

Work

On March 23, 2010, the federal law Break Time for Nursing Mothers came into effect, requiring companies with at least 50 employees to give new mothers the time and private space—bathrooms don’t count—to pump milk until the baby is a year old.

In January 2017, folks were starting to get nervous about how the new administration’s plans for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, popularly known as Obamacare) would affect working mothers who are producing milk, because the law protecting their right to time and space to pump in the workplace was part of the ACA.

As Claire Zillman wrote for Fortune:

“The problem that the breastfeeding provision sought to solve is uniquely American. Since the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world without paid maternity leave, many new mothers are forced to return to work shortly after giving birth. In fact, 59% of first-time mothers return to paid work in the first three months postpartum.

“At the same time, the American Academy of Pediatrics urges them to exclusively breastfeed their newborns for six months, since breastfeeding is shown to benefit the health of both babies and new moms. That leaves many women with an agonizing choice: Stop breastfeeding, take unpaid time off work, or figure out a way to nurse or pump milk on-the-job.”

Fortunately, for now, Obamacare continues—and so do protections for nursing mothers.

Resource Centers

Some places are exclusively devoted to facilitating healthy relationships with breastfeeding, such as the Pump Station & Nurtury in California, with store locations in Hollywood and Santa Monica.

The center, which describes itself as “a breastfeeding support and new parent resource center that educates, guides and encourages new parents in a soothing environment as they learn to care for their newborns,” provides programs including prenatal breastfeeding and baby care classes as well as International Board Certified Lactation Consultant–licensed assistance for nursing moms.

In 2012, The New York Times ran a fun piece that opened with the anecdote that launched the business idea:

“Twenty-five or so years ago, Wendy Haldeman, a nurse and lactation consultant, was standing in a Toys ‘R’ Us parking lot when a female acquaintance ran up, yanked up her shirt and cried out, in reference to one of her exposed breasts: ‘What is this on my nipple?'”

Isn’t transparency liberating?

At Least 40 Places in New York City

Ah, New York City—sometimes an overpriced, vicious, foul-smelling minefield; sometimes a beacon of creativity and progressive values and ideas. In 2010, a blogger for Mommy Poppins enumerated places around New York City where mothers could breastfeed without being harassed.

“In New York State, legally, you can nurse in public anywhere you want, but knowing you’re protected under the law doesn’t always make it easy,” she wrote. She came up with a list of 40 safe spots (some of which appear to have now closed, unfortunately).

One entry reads:

“Word has it that at the Ciao for Now Cafe in the East Village the owner sometimes nurses while serving customers (you go girl!) Described as “super kid-friendly,” they have a children’s menu and other toothsome offerings. This tip was for the 12th Street location but they do have two other downtown locations under same ownership.”

Looks like Ciao for Now Cafe is still open. Go forth, sweet milkful mothers, and breastfeed!

Restaurants

Women breastfeeding in restaurants have brought no small amount of ire. In 2015, Ashley Kaidel posted a photo of herself breastfeeding in a restaurant while staring down a woman trying to publicly shame her for d
oing so. The social media post was shared more than 125,000 times. She wrote:

“I don’t mean to say ‘Everyone should breast feed without a cover. Show the world your boobs!’ If a mother is more comfortable covering herself because SHE feels better doing so, then I totally support that.

“With that being said, the reason I post these types pictures is for the mother that tried breastfeeding uncovered once and she got shamed, she got stared and pointed at, she got nasty comments, she got asked to leave the room, she got asked to cover up.”

Amen, Ashley! The sad reality, as evidenced by the comments, is that many people are incapable of holding multiple things in their minds at once. If your gut reaction when seeing an exposed breast in public is to find it jarring or to sexualize it—well, we’d say that’s pretty normal, given our repressed culture’s weird aversion to and simultaneous fetishization of nudity.

But if you’re incapable of then examining that gut reaction and asking whether it deserves to be brandished as a moral code, or as the only viable perception, then we have some serious problems.

You are a human being, capable of rational thought that can modify knee-jerk reactions. Be respectful. She is not there for you to shame or to ogle. She is not for your consumption.

Breastfeeding a child is a beautiful, natural act. Let’s support moms who are keeping their babies fed by making it as easy as possible for them to do so.

Tags 50022061, hemingway, parenting

Nosh

8 Countries' School Lunches, Explored

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date April 11, 2017

We’re all for Americans not screaming about their inherent superiority, but equally misguided are wide-eyed speculations that Not Americans do everything better, and if only we could do things their way, we might finally lead perfect lives full of bliss.

What it amounts to is the cultural equivalent of benevolent sexism, “myths of the noble poor generated by the middle class,” or Philip Larkin’s notion that the pill [link to birth control pill article] was the end-all, be-all of sexual liberation—that is, ideas that are appealing, but ultimately false. No people are perfect. No place is Utopia.

Still, the idealizing continues, all while glossing over certain facts that don’t fit the appropriate narratives. One recent example of this came a couple of years ago, when pictures that were supposed to depict school lunches from around the world went viral, setting social media alight with criticism for the United States’ comparatively blah fare. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story—it never is—so here are lunches from eight different countries, explored:

Greece

“Children in Greece have baked chicken with orzo, stuffed grape leaves, cucumber and tomato salad, yoghurt with pomegranate seeds and oranges,” gushes a 2015 Daily Mail article shared nearly 9,000 times, dramatically (how else?) titled, “The school lunches that shame America: Photos reveal just how meager US students’ meals are compared to even the most cash-strapped of nations.”

When I visited debt-riddled Greece in April 2012, there were marchers protesting austerity cuts, and a retired pharmacist, in a state of economic desperation, took his own life outside the Greek parliament in Athens.

As food policy and children’s advocate Bettina Elias Siegel points out in a post titled “Why I’m Fed Up With Those Photos of ‘School Lunches Around the World'” that appears on her blog, The Lunch Tray: “According to a 2013 New York Times piece—notably entitled ‘More Children in Greece Are Going Hungry’—Greek schools actually ‘do not offer subsidized cafeteria lunches. Students bring their own food or buy items from a canteen. The cost has become insurmountable for some families with little or no income.’

“So I’m not sure who’s getting the lunch above, replete with fresh pomegranate seeds and just-picked citrus. But I do know that while Greek school kids were reportedly going hungry in 2013, over 20 million economically distressed kids in this country were being fed nutritious, federally subsidized meals every single school day.”

Spain

Indeed, when I taught English in a Madrid elementary school, students weren’t eating school lunches. They only had midday snacks (usually small things like cookies, juice, or fruit, but sometimes a more substantial bocadillo) brought from home that would tide them over until la comida, most Spaniards’ largest meal, which they’d have with family after the school day had finished.

But, according to the Daily Mail’s article: “Children in Spain start their meal with cold tomato soup, gazpacho, served with shrimp and brown rice. This is served with a seeded roll, peppers with red cabbage and half an orange for dessert.”

Really, Daily Mail? All of them? Are you sure about that? Last I checked, Spain was in a pretty deep economic crisis as well, which was exactly why people like me were being recruited there to teach English and help Spanish citizens become more marketable in other parts of the world. And in 2012, The Telegraph reported that Spanish parents were being charged a three-euro fee for sending their kids with packed lunches (a charge they deemed, understandably, “barbaric”).

But sure, who knows? Maybe five years later, all of the schoolchildren are being served shrimp for lunch on the government’s tab.

France

Is there anyone Americans love to romanticize more than the French? Specifically, we love to fetishize French women and then spin that fetish into a book, like Bringing up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.

We love consuming French wisdom almost as much as French butter! Like, for example, that of internationally best-selling author Mireille Guiliano, who brought us “French Women Don’t Get Fat.” Unfortunately, these narratives can gloss over some of the more sinister implications of uniformly thin women and perfectly behaved little ones, such as women shamed into stricter eating habits and abusive parenting tactics.

But if there’s one stereotype that is difficult to argue—and whose merit seems unequivocally intact—it’s the superiority of French food, both in taste and quality. Although students may not be eating exactly what’s described in Daily Mail as the typical French school lunch (“a juicy steak and a hunk of brie”), they are almost certainly eating better than American students.

“French school meals are superior to ours–quelle suprise!,” writes Siegel. “According to [one] report, the amount spent on the food in French school meals can exceed two dollars—twice what American districts are left with after overhead.”

Then again, even French kids aren’t above the occasional lunch of chicken nuggets.

U.S.A.

Ah, dear, shamed Land of Liberty, home of freedom and fries. Our eating habits are the source of much derision from Americans and non-Americans alike, and with continued health concerns over increasing obesity despite our best efforts to stop putting on pounds, some concern is in order.

Perhaps, counterintuitively, our last hope is the fat acceptance movement, like the unexpected answer to a riddle? As Fran Hayden writes in The Independent, “Negativity begets negativity. …Fat acceptance does not encourage people to be unhealthy: fat acceptance gives people the opportunity to cast off those constant negative jibes. It offers a space where fat people are allowed to be comfortable with their bodies, and to work from there–whether that means maintaining the same shape or changing it.”

One thing is clear: The kidlets have not been pleased with former FLOTUS Michelle Obama’s efforts to put our country on the healthy track. As BuzzFeed News reports, “The USDA guidelines implemented over the last few years include limits on calories, fat, sugar, and sodium for all food and drinks sold during the school day for 100,000 schools across the country.”

The result? Some students went to social media to express their distaste, posting photos of their lunches with the hashtag #thanksMichelleObama.

Had a very #healthylunch today. The apple definitely made up for the “mystery mush” #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/RWCnQRCxJK

— Hunter Whitney (@huntwhitney4) November 13, 2014

It was this phenomenon that provided the perfect frame for the Daily Mail and all the other outlets who recycled the narrative that American school lunches were exceptionally grim. But of course, not all American school lunches are drab and terrible. As with all the other countries, what’s served varies from school to school.

South Korea

The company responsible for the international-school-lunches photo essay that went viral is Sweetgreen, a chain of mostly East Coast health-food eateries. And as Mother Jones confirms, “those sumptuous photos don’t depict actual meals being served in actual schools—but, rather, staged shots that oversimplify a complex topic. As it turns out, Sweetgreen…produced the photos, but didn’t make that clear on its Tumblr.”

That said, it looks like their depiction of South Korea’s lunches was pretty spot on.
The produced lunch features milky fish soup, stir fried rice with tofu, broccoli, peppers, and kimchi.

Travel blogger Natasha Gabrielle wrote last year about her experiences with school lunches while teaching in South Korea. She tells the Huffington Post: “There are a few things about Korean school lunches that tend to stay the same—there is usually a soup and rice served with each meal. In addition to this, there is quite a variety with the types of foods that are served. In many Korean meals, banchan, or side dishes, are served. This may be kimchi, radishes, or a mixture of vegetables.”

Finland

You can sign me up for the Finnish model of school-lunch noms. Sweetgreen’s interpretation of their school lunch is bright and beautiful—a veggie-rich display including pea soup, carrots, beetroot salad, a crusty roll, and a crepe topped with berries—and seems to hit the mark.

Finland earned the No. 1 spot on Tabelog’s list of “Best 10 School Lunches From Around The World.” The article, published in 2016, says:

“According to regulation, school meals must be ‘tasty, colorful, and well-balanced.’ Serving portions are also specified, with vegetables covering ½ of each child’s plate, protein taking up one ¼ of the plate, and starch filling up the last ¼ of the plate. Meals are provided free of cost to all children, regardless of family income or status.”

One 2017 Food Republic article even raises the question of whether the country’s school lunches might be partially responsible for its students’ testing abilities, which are among the best in the world.

Brazil

Sweetgreen’s staged Brazilian lunch contains rice and black beans, baked plantain, pork with peppers and cilantro, green salad, and a seeded roll. While we’re not sure how close this gets to the majority of Brazilian lunches, the country does appear to have their school-lunch s*** together.

Apparently, Brazil’s school meal program is also serving to help the country’s small farmers. In 2009, a law was passed that required cities to spend at least 30 percent of their school meal budget on local farmers’ produce.

The country comes in at No. 7 on Tabelog’s “Best 10 School Lunches From Around The World” list. Tabelog reports:

“Meals are considered to be compulsory for all students, and lunch times are treated as part of the student’s curriculum. While meals are not usually complicated or fancy, they are generally healthy and well planned. Staples are largely composed of rice and beans, cooked in many different ways. Fresh vegetables are always served alongside. Meat is locally sourced, but not offered at every meal.”

United Kingdom

This might come as a surprise to those used to ingesting the stereotypes about flavorless, unimaginative, and pallid English food—or anyone who associates the U.K. with boiled potatoes and sausages—but the United Kingdom earned the No. 10 spot on Tabelog’s “Best 10 School Lunches From Around The World” list.

Sweetgreen doesn’t offer their version of U.K. school-lunch fare, but Daily Mail offers up a picture of a kid holding a tray “sadly lacking in fresh vegetables, featuring a baked potato, sausage and beans from a tin, and a half corn on the cob with a melon slice to follow.”

But that may be an unfair representation. According to Tabelog:

“The push for healthier school lunch in the UK really began in earnest after celebrity chef Jamie Oliver decided to create a television program he called Jamie’s School Dinners. At the time most food served in UK school was deep fried and rather unhealthy. Items such as pizza, chicken nuggets, and deep fried chips were common. The TV show brought the issue to the forefront of the public mind, and families began to push for healthier options. The push continues, and schools are working hard to provide their students with high quality meals.”

Nutty as it sounds, maybe what Americans need to remedy their fraught relationship with food is another reality television show. But that’s probably not the answer.

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Healthy Relationships Wellbeing

Here's How The Pill Might Be Affecting Your Romantic Life

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date April 10, 2017

What you know, you don’t really know. It’s a central plotline in many horror movies, psychological thrillers, and The Matrix: The identity of someone you’re close to—or your own identity—suddenly changes or is revealed to have been an illusion all along.

Imagine thinking you’ve found the person you want to spend your life with, only to stop swallowing an aspirin-sized collection of hormones at noon every day and bam! he’s a dud. Almost worse than Rosemary’s Baby, right?

That’s probably not an accurate representation of what happens when most women get off oral contraception, but there are a number of studies suggesting that being on birth control pills, or going off of them, can affect women’s preferences in love—and that’s kind of disturbing. Read on to learn eight ways the pill may be affecting your romantic life:

1. Going off the pill may make you less attracted to your beau.

It’s bizarre to think that going off the pill could change the way you feel about your honey bear, but that’s exactly what one 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found. The study followed 118 couples who’d met while the women were taking oral contraceptives, and the results showed that women’s attraction often changed once she got off the pill.

Here’s the superficial kicker: This was determined largely by how conventionally attractive the dude was.

As the Florida State grad student and lead author on the study, Michelle Russell, tells Time: “Women who choose a partner when they’re on hormonal contraceptives and then stop taking them will prioritize their husband’s attractiveness more than they would if they were still on it. The effect that it would have on her marital satisfaction would carry more weight.”

But why? One possibility, according to Russell, is fluctuating estrogen levels.

2. Going off the pill may cause you to crave an alpha male.

You’ve never really been into those frat-bro, slightly-funky-smelling, ostentatiously carnivorous types who frequent your gym. But suddenly you’re off the pill and you can’t stop a certain inner-growly feeling when they grunt and drop their weights from too high like the lunkheads that they are. Even as your brain thinks they’re ridiculous, your lady region has been ignited. What on earth is going on?

According to Oakland University psychologist Lisa Welling, going off the pill may give you a strong hankering to bed an alpha male that you haven’t experienced before, because women are often attracted to uber-masculine guys during peak fertility, which, of course, isn’t experienced when taking hormonal contraceptives.

“Some really interesting research has found that women’s mate preferences change across their menstrual cycles,” Welling tells Shape. “This suggests that the hormonal contraceptive pill may alter, at least to a small extent, what traits women find appealing in a partner.”

3. Being on the pill may affect your ability to sniff out Mr. Right.

Ever heard of genetic dating sites, the ones that supposedly help you match with your perfect partner by studying your spit? It’s basically an attempt to get down to a science what women have been doing intuitively since they’ve been reproducing: sniffing out compatible mates.

As Melinda Wenner writes for Scientific American< /em>: “Hidden in a man’s smell are clues about his major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, which play an important role in immune system surveillance.

“Studies suggest that females prefer the scent of males whose MHC genes differ from their own, a preference that has probably evolved because it helps offspring survive: Couples with different MHC genes are less likely to be related to each other than couples with similar genes are, and their children are born with more varied MHC profiles and thus more robust immune systems.”

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Okay, cool. Now, here’s the creepy (?) part: Although when you’re off the pill, you may be more likely to sniff out someone who’s genetically dissimilar with complementary immunities, according to several studies, when you’re on the pill you may prefer men who have familiar immunity genes. Yikes!

All of this said, you shouldn’t go dumping all your pills just yet; the research is inconclusive because of so many mixed results.

4. Yo-yo consumption of the pill may lower your relationship satisfaction.

Yo-yo dieting. Yo-yo dating. Yo-yo master. It seems that almost as a rule, putting “yo-yo” as a descriptor before anything makes that thing less impressive and maybe even kind of negative. And hormonal contraception is no exception.

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This is pretty much common sense, but taking your body through a hormonal roller coaster by going on and off the pill is not a very good idea.

We aren’t doctors, but it doesn’t seem like your emotional state or your physiology would fare well with such ups and down. According to one 2014 study published in Psychological Science, it’s not a great plan for your romantic relationship either.

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As Charlotte Alter writes in Time: “[The] study of 365 couples…found that women who went on or off the pill during a relationship were less sexually satisfied than women who were consistently on the pill or who had never been on it.”

5. Being on the pill may squash your, ahem…drive.

The complex cocktail of hormones, emotions, and attitudes that make you want to get freaky can be hard to pin down, whether these things are shaped by Mother Nature or artificially by the birth control pill.

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“The pill’s relationship with sexual desire is complex,” Vanessa Marin points out in Lifehacker. “It’s also, unfortunately, one of the least-researched aspects of potential side effects.” (We’d love to see a side-by-side comparison of the money spent researching erectile dysfunction.)

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In addition to the possible hormonal changes that could create a decrease in desire, the pill can affect a woman’s ability to produce natural lubricant. In addition to potentially making the act “uncomfortable or even painful,” since “[s]ome women associate getting wet with being turned on…dryness can be interpreted as a psychological signal that she’s not aroused.”

6. Being on the pill may increase your drive.

On the other hand, being on the pill offers some degree of assurance about one particularly important outcome—namely not getting pregnant—that can provide many women with a psychological security conducive to lovin’.

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In addition, birth control pills can allow you to skip periods. If you’re not into romantic interludes during your period, or if your significant other isn’t into “riding the crimson tide” (eye roll), skipping menstruation can mean more viable days for getting it on.

Also, if you take the pill to lessen your amount of cramping, you’d probably agree that you’re more willing to seek out frisky times when you don’t feel like your insides are being slowly crumpled and twisted like a Stretch Armstrong doll.

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Finally, some women take the pill for taming acne, specifically hormonal breakouts. When your face is clear, your confidence is higher, which may lead to more amorous feelings and activities. Ooh la la!

7. Being on the pill may make you more jealous.

So, what if your college relationship was sort of defined by a gnawing jealousy that eventually turned the union into a toxic landfill that inspired you to stay single for the next decade or so? Was it all because you were a fresh-faced 19-year-old in your first serious relationship? Maybe not! It could have been influenced, at least in part, by your birth control.

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The green-eyed monster comes out with the highest-estrogen birth control pills, according to the findings of the University of Stirling’s Dr. Craig Roberts, who partnered with Dutch psychologists to survey 275 women about their attitudes in romantic relationships.

As the Daily Mail reports: “Comparing the brands used with the women’s answers revealed a clear link between the drug and envy. And the higher the dose of oestrogen in the contraceptive, the more likely a woman was to be jealous. Progesterone, however, was not implicated in jealousy, suggesting that progesterone-only versions of the pill play less havoc with women’s emotions.”

8. Being on the pill may have no discernible effect on your romantic behavior, because you’re a complex human being not entirely ruled by hormonal whims.

It’s also entirely possible that the hormonal changes brought on by taking oral contraceptives would be more or less insignificant in determining how you conduct yourself in a romantic relationship. Contrary to popular belief, women are not strange woodland creatures who behave as if under some mysterious spell. (The spell is our hormones! Get it?)

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Perhaps a bigger risk of being on the pill is hearing stuff like this and letting it influence you to view your own mind and perceptions as unreliable—something women have been encouraged to do for a lot longer than birth control pills have been around.

Maybe women going off the pill are more likely to be under psychological or relationship distress in the first place. For example, a woman goes off the pill because she’s no longer interested in being intimate with her partner—which may have more to do with the quality of the relationship than the effect of hormonal contraception—in the hopes that it will fix things, but in the end, it doesn’t, so they break up. Or maybe going off the pill made the possibility of becoming pregnant by her partner more immediate, which led to a more honest appraisal of the relationship.

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Whether you’re on or off the pill, don’t gaslight yourself. And don’t pathologize your emotions—they can provide you with invaluable information.

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Categories
Wellbeing

Hospitals Aren't Telling Patients These Important Secrets

Post author By Anna Cherry

Post date March 24, 2017

A hospital isn’t somewhere you typically want to go, but if you’re going to be there, it’s best to be in the know. In the know about what, though? The fallibility of hospitals and everyone within them.
You may have already had this realization, particularly if you’re around the age when the peers you went to high school with have started to become doctors and nurses—but medical professionals are human beings, not gods, and they do make mistakes. Sometimes big ones. Hospitals, of course, won’t go out of their way to advertise this fact to you, a patient. Read on for eight secrets hospitals aren’t telling you, but that you should nevertheless be aware of.

You still need to sanitize everything.

We tend to place a lot of faith in the benevolence, authority, and effectiveness of institutions, but the frightening reality is that they’re just as prone to mistakes as individual people. Like the entirety of the human population, hospitals vary in their propensity for making mistakes. Some have consistently great surgeons. Some have high incidences of surgeries gone awry. Undoubtedly, though, all of them have germs, and you shouldn’t assume that the routine cleaning performed in hospitals is all you need to protect yourself.

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As Karen Curtiss, author of Safe & Sound in the Hospital: Must-Have Checklists and Tools for Your Loved One’s Care, tells Reader’s Digest:

Superbugs live everywhere, and they can travel. Even if your doctor washed his hands, that sparkling white coat brushing against your bed can easily transfer a dangerous germ from someone else’s room. Ask for bleach and alcohol wipes to clean bed rails, remotes, doorknobs, phones, call buttons, and toilet flush levers. Wash your hands before you eat.

Your doctors may be practicing on you.

Would it be cool with you if, say, you had to have a spinal tap and you learned that a fresh-faced doctor would be performing the procedure on you for the first time, and in fact they had just come from watching—wait for it—a YouTube video about how to do it?

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Yeah, we wouldn’t be cool with that either. But apparently, there isn’t much choice, according to an anonymous ER doctor who tells Cracked that this exact series of events happens with frequency. She says:
“It might be a nurse doing an IV, a physical therapist getting you out of bed, or it might be your doctor. In the good old days, medical students got more of this hands-on training before they graduated, but due to changes in medical education, brand-new doctors often have to learn on the job.

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“As a senior resident, I’ve walked interns through everything from a pelvic exam to a lumbar puncture to a central line placement (that last one might not sound too bad, until you realize a ‘central line’ is a large IV usually inserted directly into your jugular).”

Know your meds.

Some hospitals have nurses who consistently give the appropriate dosages. Others have nurses who are more prone to making mistakes. Certainly, there are both kinds of nurse in every hospital, but the right organizational habits can help guard against the more serious flubs.

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Whatever the case is in the hospital you’re visiting, it’s always smart to educate yourself as much as possible about the medicines you’re supposed to take and the proper way for taking them. How much? When? Why? And another important one that many forget to ask: What should I take it with?
As Evan Levine, MD, a cardiologist and the author of What Your Doctor Can’t (or Won’t) Tell You, says in Reader’s Digest:

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“Don’t assume the food is what you should be eating. There’s no communication between dietary and pharmacy, and that can be a problem when you’re on certain meds. I’ve had patients on drugs for hypertension or heart failure (which raises potassium levels), and the hospital is delivering (potassium-rich) bananas and orange juice. Then their potassium goes sky high, and I have to stop the meds. Ask your doctor whether there are foods you should avoid.”

Hospitals see their fair share of violence.

We don’t just mean people coming in after being attacked, either. As hospital security consultant John M. White tells Reader’s Digest:

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“There is more violence than ever before. Nurses have been attacked, bitten, spit on, and choked. It’s partly because hospitals are no longer prescribing pain meds to addicts, and addicts can get very aggressive. It’s also because our mental health system is broken, so some of those people are coming into the hospital and acting out.”
But sometimes the physical aggression happens among the medical professionals themselves. RN Ricky Lake (not to be confused with Ricki Lake) at Parallon Nurses Network tells author Missy Wilkinson that the high tension between staff members can get violent:

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“My charge nurse warned me about one of the surgeons who actually physically assaulted a nurse once. Grabbed her by her scrub top, in front of the patient and family, and dragged her out of the room because he was upset about some replacement potassium being administered through a peripheral line instead of a central line (which is still OK as long as the concentration and rate are adjusted appropriately). They aren’t all like that, of course. But I do not socialize much with [people] that I work with.”

Hospital rooms aren’t like hotel rooms for a reason, but that may be changing.

If being in your barren hospital room reminds you of your freshman year in your college dorm room that you never bothered to decorate (because what was the point of anything?), that’s not just because hospitals want to remind you of the most depressing semester of your life.

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A New Orleans nurse tells Wilkinson, “The bare-bones decor of rooms is so it’s easier to clean and thereby sterilize. It’s cold for a reason—to kill bacteria. It can’t survive in cold temperatures.” (Really though, about the bacteria? Seems more like it’d just be harder for it to grow.)
However, all of this may be subject to change. Healthcare IT consultant Bill Balderaz tells Reader’s Digest:

Courtesy of Florida Hospital Celebration Health

“Hospitals worry about losing revenue to retail clinics, urgent-care centers, and private surgery centers. To attract patients, they try to appear like hotels. They have waterfalls, pianos, and big windows. Instead of hiring people with backgrounds in health care, they’re bringing in people with experience in retail and five-star hotels.”
We’ll take the folks with backgrounds in healthcare. Thanks!

Give your nurses a break—it could save your life.

This may not come as a surprise to anyone who personally knows a nurse, but: nurses are overworked. “Hospitals are understaffed,” the New Orleans nurse tells Wilkinson. “I have yet to see a hospital that wasn’t.”

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Deborah Burger, RN and co-president of National Nurses United, tells Reader’s Digest:
“Hospitals often force nurses to handle more patients than they should—even though studies show if your nurse is responsible for fewer patients, they have better outcomes. California is the only state with hospital-wide minimum nurse-patient staffing ratios. Researcher Linda Aiken at the University of Pennsylvania found that each extra patient a nurse has above an established nurse-patient ratio made it 7 percent more likely that one of those patients would die.”

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For this reason, you should be extra-vigilant about your care, and speak up to ask questions or make clarifications. Unless, that is, your nurse is right in the middle of certain important tasks.
Don’t interrupt the nurse when he’s preparing your medications, Sally Rafie, a hospital pharmacist with the UC San Diego Health System, advises in Reader’s Digest. “One study found that the more times you distract him, the greater the likelihood of error.”

Schedule your surgery for early in the week…and at a teaching hospital.

According to Roy Benaroch, MD, a pediatrician and the author of A Guide to Getting the Best Healthcare for Your Child, you can count on better surgical procedures at certain times of the week. He tells Reader’s Digest:

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“On weekends and holidays, hospitals typically have lighter staffing and less experienced doctors and nurses. Some lab tests and other diagnostic services may be unavailable. If you’re having a major elective surgery, try to schedule it for early in the week so you won’t be in the hospital over the weekend.”
Oh also, you may want to opt for that surgery at a teaching hospital. Dr. Levine says, “For complex surgical procedures, you’re generally better off at teaching hospitals, which usually stay at the forefront of health research. Medical students and residents ask questions, providing more eyes and ears to pay attention and prevent errors. Teaching hospitals have lower complication rates and better outcomes.”

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It sounds counterintuitive, but when you consider that an atmosphere of more transparency and less fear around asking questions is usually a better one for virtually everything, it makes sense.

Yeah, the healthcare system is broken.

You know how literally everyone is like, “Our healthcare system is broken”? That’s because it is. There’s a lot of inefficiency going on, for example, in emergency rooms.

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One ER nurse in New Orleans tells Wilkinson, “It shocks me sometimes the things people go to ER for. Basic medication refills, people bringing in elders with dementia who have no change in condition, back and tooth pain, chronic but stable conditions, ‘I felt bad and had a sore throat, but I feel better now’—things urgent care can handle without the outrageous bill.”
And then there are the addicts that doctors have to deal with, as the anonymous ER doctor tells Cracked: “They’ll claim, ‘I’m allergic to everything but one [… ]it starts with a D?’ That’s the […] painkiller Dilaudid, and they damn well know the real name. But every […]seeker seems to follow the same script: they’ll come in claiming some legitimate, recurring problem, and then act as if the name of the only pain [medicine] that works for them (which just happens to be a[n opiate], every time) is some half-remembered riddle.”
Of course, some of this would be mitigated if there were healthcare for all, including mental health and substance abuse rehabilitation programs.

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Lake says: “The reason people go to the ER with vague, non-urgent symptoms is usually because they are uninsured and do not have a primary healthcare provider. I’m currently in the ER and, yes, that can be exasperating. But you have to look at the systemic reasons that it’s happening. One reason: lack of access to care. And we just lost the fight in Louisiana that would have allowed more nurse practitioners to be able to practice without the overly burdening collaborative practice agreements in place with physicians. There is a shortage of primary care providers across the country.”

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Categories
Wellbeing

Daydreaming And 7 Other Habits That Prove You're Smarter Than Everyone Else

Post author By Anna Cherry

Post date March 21, 2017

Have you ever hoped that your serial procrastination, your ability to lose hours of time to sitting idly as your mind travels great distances, your inability to concentrate except in total silence, and your tendency to become overwhelmed by small everyday tasks like doing laundry or keeping your workspace clutter-free were, rather than handicaps, indicative of some kind of wacky creative genius?

Well, congrats! Your hopes may be more than just self-serving delusions that allow you to continue erratic, self-sabotaging behavior. They may actually be because your mind is a superior machine. (Take that, ex-boss who called you a special snowflake for being unable to write with the constant chatter in an open office!) Read on to learn what some research has told us about the quirks of the exceptionally intelligent…

They have different “sensory gating.”

You know your friend who has to plug his ears while trying to write on deadline in a coffee shop, and your other friend who could probably miss the natural disaster going on around her as long as she was concentrated on a specific task? These friends and others like them may have higher intelligence or creativity, according to some research.

Getty Images News / Sean Gallup

One study from Northwestern University, “Creativity and sensory gating indexed by the P50: Selective versus leaky sensory gating in divergent thinkers and creative achievers,” found that a lower ability to filter out “irrelevant” sensory information may be an indicator of greater creativity, as measured by “real-world creative achievements.” It’s possible that their “leaky sensory gating” led to more surprising connections.

Divergent thinking—also known as lateral thinking—is, on the other hand, correlated with “selective sensory gating,” or more ability to filter out extraneous sensory information. That may explain why there is some research suggesting that those with high intelligence find it difficult to concentrate, and other research suggesting just the opposite, that high intelligence means greater capacity for singular focus.

(Of course, there’s some debate about the relationship between increased creativity and high intelligence, and one doesn’t necessarily imply the other, but that’s an article in itself.)

They understand that they don’t understand.

I know that I know nothing is a phrase attributed to Socrates, who broadcasted his ignorance, despite being one of the most influential thinkers in Western philosophy. (See also: Socratic paradox. Socratic ignorance.)

He was famous—and eventually put to death—for exposing know-it-alls, who he characterized as being doubly ignorant for both their ignorance and their lack of awareness of their ignorance.

A 1999 Cornell study authored by social psychologist David Dunning and his student Justin Kruger would call this double ignorance the Dunning-Kruger effect—a phenomenon that’s gained fresh popularity in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency. The study, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” says:

“People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.” Ouch.

The summary points out that, “[p]aradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.”

Their minds wander.

Did you ever panic during class because a teacher called on you and you had absolutely no idea what they were talking about? Are you frequently called an airhead? Do people tell you you have your head in the clouds? (Replace “airhead” and “head in the clouds” with the 2017 equivalents, since these strike us as insults from the 1990s and, like, a Humphrey Bogart movie, respectively.)

If so, you may be a daydreamer, and you’re probably used to these subtle jabs at your intelligence/competence.

While there is evidence that a wandering mind can take a toll on your performance in certain tasks inv
olving reading comprehension and model building, and tests that measure working memory and intelligence, research from recent years suggests that mind-wandering is functional and, in fact, may even be indicative of a better working memory, which has been linked to higher IQ.

Joseph Stromberg, for Smithsonian, reported on a 2012 study published in Psychological Science by researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science. Stromberg, paraphrasing one of the study’s authors, writes that their findings suggest that “daydreamers’ minds wander because they have too much extra capacity to merely concentrate on the task at hand.”

They’re messy.

Some people work at desks where all of the pencils are in the containers where pencils are supposed to go, papers are in orderly stacks and color-coded, and there’s not a wad of trash in sight.

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Other people work at desks where the pencils are in containers mixed in with a bunch of other stuff, like paper clips and dried-out markers and three Lisa Frank erasers from 1992, and the top of the workspace is littered with little scraps of paper and receipts from Dunkin’ Donuts. Different strokes for different folks, right?

That’s right, according to studies conducted by psychological scientist Kathleen Vohs and co-researchers Joseph Redden and Ryan Rahinel at the University of Minnesota published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Vohs says:

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“Prior work has found that a clean setting leads people to do good things: Not engage in crime, not litter, and show more generosity. We found, however, that you can get really valuable outcomes from being in a messy setting. … Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights. Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe.”

They talk to themselves.

People may look at you funny on the streets and move to the other side of the subway car if you’re talking to yourself. (Or they may just assume you’re having an impassioned phone conversation while wearing earbuds.) But talking aloud to yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you’re mentally unwell; in fact, some research shows that it may help you think better.

According to a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Pennsylvania, talking to yourself can aid in memory recall and focus. The study, “Self-directed speech affects visual search performance,” asked participants to remember and find objects. One experiment had volunteers look at pictures of various objects before being asked to find a specific item, like a banana. Some were told to repeatedly say the name of the item as they looked, and some were told to remain silent during their searches.

Those who talked to themselves were able to find the objects about 50 to 100 milliseconds faster than those who did not.

The study was apparently inspired by the personal experiences of one of the researchers, cognitive psychologist Gary Lupyan, who said, “I’ll often mutter to myself when searching for something in the refrigerator or supermarket shelves.”

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We’re not exactly sure when and how the entire internet decided to use this study as evidence of an explicit correlation between high intelligence and talking to yourself, and we are giving major side eye to those who have used it to perpetuate the even bolder claim that people who talk to themselves are “actually geniuses.” (Where are these people’s sources?)

It seems plausible, though, that those with high intelligence might intuitively gravitate toward behavioral adaptations that improve thought and performance—like saying “banana, banana, banana” while looking for a banana.

They curse more.

Just because your square fourth-grade English teacher whose husband was probably a Baptist preacher told you that only unintelligent people cussed often doesn’t make it so.

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In fact, you can tell Mrs. Brown that her didactic tirades were a reductive load of s***, at least according to a study by psychologists Kristin Jay of Marist College and Timothy Jay of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts published in the journal Language Sciences in 2015. As the study’s abstract reads:

“A folk assumption about colloquial speech is that taboo words are used because speakers cannot find better words with which to express themselves: because speakers lack vocabulary.

A competing possibility is that fluency is fluency regardless of subject matter—that there is no reason to propose a difference in lexicon size and ease of access for taboo as opposed to emotionally-neutral words. … Overall the findings suggest that … the ability to generate taboo language is not an index of overall language poverty.”

They stay up late.

As one report published in 2009 from the London School of Economics argues, daytime schedules are conventional and, since those with high intelligence are increasingly likely to bypass tradition, night owls probably possess more intelligence, among other beneficial traits.

AFP / ALAIN JOCARD

It’s also possible that the staying up late is less about personal taste and more about the desperate attempt to work around other quirks often found in highly intelligent and creative folks, like the trouble some of them encounter with concentrating in the face of distractions. (Remember our first section that talked about “leaky sensory gating”?)

In his book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey describes the working habits of Franz Kafka, author of the short story “The Metamorphosis.” Currey writes that Kafka “felt stymied … living with his family in a cramped apartment, where he could muster the concentration to write only late at night, when everyone else was asleep.”

As Kafka wrote in a letter in 1912, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.”

Their moms had morning sickness.

Also in 2009, Reuters reported on a small study linking high IQ children and mothers who suffered from morning sickness while pregnant with them. The study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, looked at 121 Canadian children between the ages of 3 and 7.

Researchers found that the mothers who had suffered from morning sickness scored higher, on average, on certain tests measuring IQ, memory, and language skills.

AFP / TIMOTHY A. CLARY

As Amy Norton wrote: “Nausea and vomiting during pregnancy is very common, particularly in the first trimester. Because it is related to changes in particular hormones that are needed for the placenta’s development, one theory is that morning sickness is a sign of a healthy pregnancy. Past studies have linked morning sickness to lower rates of miscarriage, stillbirth and preterm delivery. Whether it is related to any long-term benefits had been unclear.”

Getty Images News / Alexandra Beier

Most people don’t actively enjoy throwing up—but we bet they would be willing to toss up a few meals for the sake of their children’s intelligence. Moms really are the best.

Tags 50018571, hemingway, mind

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