Author: Nick Horn

"Invisible Mothers" And Other Bizarre Parenting Trends From The Past

Post author By Nick Horn
Post date January 12, 2018

Parenting just isn’t what it used to be.
For better or worse, raising a kid today looks a whole lot different than it once did. Things that were perfectly acceptable just a generation ago seem downright unthinkable today. Putting juice in your baby’s bottle? No way. Letting your preschooler play with fireworks? Are you crazy?
“Forget sippy cups, our parents didn’t even use car seats or bike helmets!” Ilana Wiles, creator of the parenting blog Mommy Shorts, told HuffPost.

As strange as it may seem now to look back at the parenting norms in the ’70s and ’80s, the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than you could ever imagine. These bizarre parenting trends of the past will give you a whole new level of respect for how your parents raised you.
But before you start blaming generations past, we thought we’d provide a little contemporary context on the general weirdness of parenting. We spoke to Fran Walfish, PsyD, author of The Self-Aware Parent, to get a professional take on the changing nature of parenting.
According to Walfish, some things haven’t changed at all from the days of the Invisible Mothers (more on that later). Other things are night and day.

“Overprotective mothers, as well as harshly punitive fathers, have existed for centuries. They still do,” Walfish tells HealthyWay. “However, some things have changed. We now have a Child Protective Services reporting system in place that monitors and investigates suspected cases of child abuse.”
If that agency existed at the time of the following parenting trends, we’re pretty sure they would have locked a few of these parents up.

Now You (Don’t) See Me

In the Victorian era, family photo day led to the creation of “invisible mothers.”
Babies are naturally photogenic. Whether they’re smiling, sleeping, or crying, they’re impossibly adorable bundles of dimples and peach fuzz. These days, taking a photo of your kids is as simple as picking up your phone, but it wasn’t always so easy. Long before our phones had cameras—back when even the telephone itself was on the cutting edge of technology—getting a photograph at all was an ordeal; trying to get a photo of a squirming infant was a Sisyphean task.

That’s because back in the 19th century, the technology of photography was still in its early stages. Only professional photographers owned cameras and knew how to use them, and even the newly-developed wet-collodion process required exposure times of up to a half-minute or so.
Because photography was such a specialized skill, it also wasn’t exactly cheap, so it was important that the subject stay perfectly still for a clear image. For photographs of adults, photographers would have the subject sit in a chair with a head clamp (sort of like an electric chair but without the electric parts) to keep them still for the necessary amount of time. But what about babies?
That’s where the invisible—or hidden—mothers, as they’re called in Linda Fregni Nagler’s collection of photographs, The Hidden Mother, come in. In order to keep infant subjects calm and still for a crisp image, mothers would hold their child. But because they wanted the child to be the focus of the picture, they’d hide themselves by shrouding themselves in dark fabric, hiding behind the chair their child was sitting in—or even going so far as to impersonate furniture.

In contrast to the 19th century’s “invisible mothers”—an example of hands-on parenting in the most literal sense—another trend from the early 20th century was very much hands-off.

Here’s the mail, it never fails.

For a brief time, American parents could—and did—send their children in the mail.
No, you didn’t read that wrong. Yes, it actually happened.
These days, being able to send large packages via the postal service is something we take for granted, but before the early 20th century, Americans could only send items that weighed four pounds or less in the mail. That all changed on Jan. 1, 1913, when the U.S. Postal Service launched the parcel post service, allowing packages up to 11 pounds. Within months, the limit was increased to 20 pounds, then 50.

And of course, some people just had to take it too far.
The same year, a Glen Este, Ohio, man named Jesse Beauge and his wife decided to mail their infant son to his grandmother’s house about a mile away, becoming the first Americans in history to send a child in the mail, National Postal Museum historian Nancy Pope told The Washington Post. Luckily for the Beauges, their son weighed in at 10 pounds—just under the weight limit for parcels at the time. The postage only cost them 15 cents, but they spent an additional $50 on insurance. You know, just in case.
Some children, however, traveled much, much greater distances. The following year, 6-year-old Edna Neff was mailed from her mother’s home in Pensacola, Florida, to her father’s house in Christiansburg, Virginia—720 miles away.

Perhaps the most famous instance of a child being transported via mail, though, was that of 5-year-old May Pierstorff, commemorated in the children’s book Mailing May, published in 2000. Pierstorff’s parents had made the decision to send their daughter for a visit to her grandparents but were hesitant to pay the hefty train fare.
Being the savvy spenders they were, the Pierstorffs looked over the parcel post regulations and found that there was no prohibition on sending children—or any humans—through the postal service, so long as they didn’t exceed the 50-pound weight limit. Fortunately for them, May weighed in at 45 and a half pounds.

So, the Pierstorffs attached the necessary 53 cents of postage stamps on their daughter’s coat and sent her on her way. May was transported from her parents’ home in Grangeville, Idaho, to her grandmother’s home in Lewiston, approximately 75 miles away.
Later in 1914, news of May Pierstorff’s travels began to spread nationally, causing then-Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson to prohibit the shipping of human parcels. That brought to an end the brief and bizarre trend of parents sending their children in the mail.
While sending your child in the mail probably isn’t the greatest parenting idea in history, it’s also probably not the worst.

Despite all their age, they’re still just a babe in a cage.

Another serious contender for that title is the practice of putting babies in cages, which were then suspended outside apartment windows—sometimes several stories above the street below.

You see, in the late 18th century, doctors started suggesting that urban-dwelling parents increase their children’s exposure to fresh air, a practice referred to by renowned pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt as “airing.” In his 1894 book, The Care and Feeding of Children, Holt wrote that, “Fresh air is required to renew and purify the blood, and this is just as necessary for health and growth as proper food.”
As you might expect—as with the case of the postal service above—some people just had to take it too far. While Holt recommended an infant be “placed in its crib or carriage which should stand a few feet from the window,” some parents took it a step further, purchasing or building wire cages to be hung outside of windows.

Even Eleanor Roosevelt, long before she became the first lady of the United States, got in on the “baby cage” trend. In 1906, Roosevelt purchased a chicken wire cage to hang out the window of her New York townhouse. In that cage, her first daughter, Anna, napped high above East 36th Street—until a neighbor threatened to call the authorities, that is.
Emma Read of Spokane, Washington, was the first to file a commercial patent for a baby cage in 1922, which read in part:
“It is well known that a great many difficulties rise in raising and properly housing babies and small children in crowded cities, that is to say from the health viewpoint. With these facts in view it is the purpose of the present invention to provide an article of manufacture for babies and young children, to be suspended upon the exterior of a building adjacent an open window, wherein the baby or young child may be placed.”

Read’s patent was granted on March 13 of the following year; by the 1930s, the cages had become popular, especially among the apartment-dwelling parents of densely-populated London. In stark contrast to the reception of Roosevelt’s baby cage in New York, Londoners embraced the idea, with municipal bodies like the East Poplar Borough council proposing permanently installing the cages outside some buildings.
Eventually, the popularity of the “baby cage” began to wane. While there’s no definitive record of exactly when and why the trend fell out of vogue, growing concerns about child safety in the next few decades (as evidenced by the invention and popularization of car seats and bicycle helmets) may have had something to do with it.

Modern Airborne Parenting Mistakes

Getting back to the present, the term “helicopter parent” has been spreading throughout the zeitgeist since its 1969 appearance in Haim Ginott’s parenting manual, Between Parent and Teenager. The helicopter parent is reluctant to give their children freedom to fail; they constantly hover over the child, overseeing homework, calling teachers, and generally trying to ensure success in all their child’s endeavors.

Recent studies have shown that modern parents spend nearly one-third more time caring for their offspring today than they did in the 1960s. Does anyone hear rotors in the sky?
While more parent-child bonding time is probably a good thing, helicopter parenting has been associated with increases in anxiety and reduced independence as the child ages.

A 2017 study out of New Zealand seems to back up this assertion. It found that a group of 11- to 13-year-olds only tended to travel about a third of a mile from their homes, mostly just to go to school, a friend’s house, or a food outlet. Tim Chambers, the lead researcher, later told The Guardian that his study suggests that modern kids aren’t as independent or as physically active as their parents were as children.
But like the bizarre parenting trends of the past, we can consign helicopter parenting—and other detrimental habits—to the dustbin of history, says Walfish.

“Change is possible,” she says. “Much has been speculated and written about what is required in order to make change. One thing I know for sure: Motivation and determination are prerequisites, and pain is usually the greatest motivator for change.”

Tags 50038156, Commerce, hemingway, parenting

Wellbeing

#HusbandNotDad: What Experts Say About Relationships With Large Age Gaps

Post author By Nick Horn
Post date November 17, 2017

Courtney and Vann Thornton started out as friends.
“We wrote music. More importantly, we connected over music,” Courtney wrote about their early days. Gradually, though, the two became more than just friends making music.
[pullquote align=”center”]There was something a little unusual about Courtney and Vann’s friendship-turned-relationship-turned-marriage[/pullquote]
“He is very handsome and I became increasingly aware of that as we bonded and laughed,” Courtney wrote. “I enjoyed his company and found myself happier than I had been in a long time.”
After several months, as the pair’s friendship blossomed, and they began dating. Pretty soon, they decided to tie the knot.
While that all may sound pretty normal (if not idyllic), there was something a little unusual about Courtney and Vann’s friendship-turned-relationship-turned-marriage: Courtney was 25. Vann was 50.

In typical millennial style, Courtney shared tons selfies of herself with her beau on social media. After their marriage, the two even began adding the winking hashtag #HusbandNotDad, referencing the relational confusion caused by the pair’s age gap, to the captions of their photos together.
As you’d probably expect, Twitter had opinions—lots of them.
[pullquote align=”center”]“You can’t help who you fall for; you love who you love.”
—Courtney Thornton[/pullquote]
The responses to the hashtag and the posts it accompanied ranged from supportive to skeptical, disparaging, mocking, and even occasionally threatening and abusive. Courtney’s managing to brush it off, and she’s encouraging everyone to do the same.
“Don’t be swayed by the opinions of others and don’t be discouraged by their disapproval,” she wrote.

Still, the response to the Thorntons’ social media presence—not to mention the controversy surrounding 39-year-old French President Emmanuel Macron’s marriage to his 64-year-old wife, Brigitte—make clear that romantic relationships with a large age gap are a charged issue for many. At the very least, they’re treated as something of an oddity.

Which brings us to the question—how common are age gap relationships?

Turns out, they’re more common than you might think, and they become even more common when you’re looking at those who have married more than once.
The majority of heterosexual Americans (about 80 percent) opt for a partner within five years of their own age when they first marry, according to the Pew Research Center. That number, however, drops to 57 percent for the men surveyed and 62 percent for the women in subsequent marriages.

Unfortunately, because the analysis used data collected in the 2013 American Community Survey and same-sex marriage didn’t become legal in the U.S. until 2015, we don’t yet know what these numbers look like for homosexual couples.
Additionally, in keeping with the stereotype of the older man remarrying a younger woman, approximately 20 percent of remarried men chose a spouse who was more than 10 years their junior, with another 18 percent men surveyed marrying someone six to nine years younger.
In contrast, only 5 percent of women remarried someone 10 or more years younger, while 6 percent chose a subsequent partner six to nine years younger.

Put more simply, about one in five married Americans surveyed had a spouse more than five years older or younger than themselves.

While those numbers may seem to lend credence to the old cliche that “age is just a number,” other research suggests it’s not quite that simple.

Research out of the University of Colorado at Boulder found that both men and women reported greater relationship satisfaction with younger spouses, specifically in the early years of the marriage.

The study, published in August 2017 in the Journal of Population Economics, looked at data collected from thousands of Australian households by the Household, Income, and Labor Dynamics in Australia Survey between 2001 and 2014.
And while, at a glance, this may seem like an argument in favor of marriages with large age gaps, it’s important to consider that this higher level of satisfaction only benefits one of the parties in the relationship.
Men who marry younger wives tend to show more satisfaction in their marriages, the research found. Meanwhile, the men who marry women who are older than they are show less satisfaction.
Considering how many marriages there are between younger women and older men, that’s not especially surprising. What might come as a surprise to some, though, was that women also seemed to prefer younger spouses. As the authors of the study noted, women also report more satisfaction with younger husbands compared to older ones.

The research also told a different story as time passed. Despite the higher level of satisfaction reported by those with a younger spouse early-on in the relationship, the study found that the initial boost wears off quickly—generally within the first six to 10 years of a relationship.

A study by researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, published in 2014, suggests another important implication of the previous work in the field.

The study, which recorded and analyzed a variety of data from 3,000 individuals who had been married at least once in their lives, centered on the relationship between the amount of money spent on a marriage and that longevity of the marriage. Throughout the course of the study, though, another interesting trend emerged: a correlation between age differences and marriages ending in divorce.

According to the data published in the study, couples with ages within one year of each other had only a 3 percent chance of splitting up. Those with a five-year difference in ages were 18 percent more likely to to split up. As the gap widened, the likelihood of a split continued to increase. Couples with a 10-year gap had a 39 percent chance of splitting up, and the chance of splitting for couples with a 20-year gap was a whopping 95 percent.
While the connection is by no means definitive, it seems possible that the rapid decline in marital satisfaction relative to similarly aged couples observed in the University of Colorado study may lead to an increased likelihood that marriages with large age differences will end in divorce.

Neither study, however, was able to ascertain the reasons why large age gap relationships correlated to initially high but rapidly declining satisfaction and eventual divorce.

Jonathan Bennett, however, has a few ideas why. Bennett is a certified counselor and a relationship coach; he also runs The Popular Man, a website he says is “dedicated to helping men make friends, find love, succeed at work, and live a happy, free, and fulfilling life.”

This is one of my favorite pictures of us because it describes the silliness in our relationship. When this was snapped, we were standing in the line at a @train show. The security guard thought you were my dad and his head exploded when I kissed you right smack on the lips. We laughed about his facial expression for the rest of the night. That’s what I remember most from backstage. I’ve never loved anyone like you!

A post shared by Courtlyb Photography (@courtlyb) on Nov 21, 2016 at 5:51am PST

Bennett believes that the initial high levels of satisfaction among those with younger partners may owe, at least in part, to an “us against the world” sort of mentality caused by social disapproval. According to Bennett, “Forbidden or frowned upon relationships provide a greater meaning and purpose to love. The relationship becomes about standing up to others, even entire institutions and systems.”
As time passes, though, that disapproval may grow wearisome.
“The negative social pressure from age-gap marriages can take its toll,” he tells HealthyWay, a sentiment supported by a 2006 study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. “Over time, that judgment can get tiresome and cause one or both partners to want to end the relationship.”
Bennett also tells us that, “age gaps don’t always age well.” Large age differences can also mean that a couple find themselves in significantly disparate stages of life.

“A woman might like a guy who is much older and it is fun and exciting when he’s in his forties. However, when he’s reached his seventies and is less mobile and energetic, the difference in age becomes much more apparent,” he says. “She might be healthy and active and feel weighed down by his health issues.

Ultimately, though, while age may be an important consideration when entering a relationship, it’s far from the only factor.

For anyone considering initiating a relationship with someone of a significantly different age, it’s important to ask yourself a few questions.

First, how much do you actually have in common? The saying goes that “opposites attract,” but a 2005 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships suggests that perceived similarity is highly indicative of a highly committed, long-term relationship’s longevity.
Next, are your social circles supportive? As both Bennet and the 2006 study referenced above mention, general and ongoing disapproval of a relationship can lead to fatigue and a reduced commitment to resolving tensions that arise between yourself and your spouse.

Excited for a life with you. Photo by: @themilla

A post shared by Courtlyb Photography (@courtlyb) on Jul 26, 2016 at 3:14pm PDT

Finally, are you financially prepared to deal with a long-term relationship with someone much older or younger? According to McKennish, couples with a large age gap “tend to have a much larger decline in marital satisfaction when faced with an economic shock than couples that have a very small age difference.” Additionally, age-gap relationships can present difficulties in retirement planning.

Courtney Thornton, however, has a more romantic take on the matter.

“Love is a rare thing and it is worth fighting for,” she says. “Because at the end of the day, you can’t help who you fall for; you love who you love.”

Tags 50037081, hemingway, mind

Motherhood

Kids And Gender Stereotypes: When Are They Set In Stone?

Post author By Nick Horn
Post date November 16, 2017

Baby boys wear blue; baby girls wear pink.

Here are some more: As toddlers, girls love dolls and boys play with fire trucks. As they reach school age, boys are more adventurous, while girls are more sensitive.
While these gender stereotypes might seem a little-old fashioned, we can’t deny the power they still have. As parents, we start establishing our kids’ genders as soon as they’re born—often earlier, whether we’re choosing nursery paint or launching balloons at a gender reveal party.

But from a scientific perspective, parents are likely much more concerned about gender than their kids are. In fact, gender takes a while to set in, and the way that we raise our kids has everything to do with how gender roles are established. How we as parents interact with our children—the toys we give them, the rules we make them follow, even the words we use to describe them—can have far-reaching consequences on the way kids see themselves and the adults they grow up to be.
This is, of course, a touchy subject, and it’s easy to misstep. To discuss it accurately, we reached out to Robert W. Blum, MD, professor and director of the Urban Health Institute at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of a recent six-year study focusing on gender expectations and their effect on adolescents all over the world. He spoke with us about what the latest science says about gender and childhood development.

Before we go any further, though, there’s an important distinction to be made. Those already privy to it, bear with us.

Sex isn’t the same thing as gender. The two terms are frequently confused, but in order to understand gender, we need to differentiate it from biological sex. According Vanessa LoBue, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers University, sex is a matter of biology.

“Each cell in our body has 46 chromosomes. A father’s sperm and a mother’s egg each has only half – 23 each. At conception, the chromosomes of the [mother and father] match up into 22 identical pairs, with the 23rd pair being the sex chromosome,” LoBue wrote in The Conversation. A chromosome can either be an X or a Y, she explains, and “in most cases, XX chromosomes will become female and XY chromosomes will become male,” though as many as 1 in every 50 children are born with a reproductive anatomy that doesn’t fit with the typical definitions of female or male.
While sex is about a person’s chromosomal makeup and physical characteristics, gender has more to do with how we relate to ourselves and those around us.

“Gender is what actually gets expressed – how we look, how we act and how we feel,” LoBue wrote. “While sex is determined by what is written into the chromosomes or what is dictated by our biology, known as genotype, it is the interaction between the genes … and the environment that determines gender.”
In other words, both biology and environment play a role in determining a person’s gender—and parents are one of the biggest and most consequential elements of a developing child’s environment. Whether or not we realize it, we’re communicating certain sex-based assumptions and expectations to our children, and those can have profound consequences on their development.

In a sense, gender is a factor from birth—at least as far as parents are concerned.

“We know that young people are exposed to gender roles, gender norms, and gender messages starting in infancy,” Blum tells us. Research going as far back as 1974 shows that parents have different opinions and expectations of newborns based on their sex within 24 hours of birth, even when controlling for weight, length, and Apgar score (a rating of how healthy the newborn is). According to one study’s abstract, “Daughters were significantly more likely than sons to be described as little, beautiful, pretty, and cute, and as resembling their mothers.”

The emphasis on girls’ physical beauty doesn’t end there, though; for girls across cultures, it becomes a significant psychological burden. According to Kristin Mmari, DrPH, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who co-authored the study with Blum, “In New Dehli, the girls talked about their bodies as a big risk that needs to be covered up, while in Baltimore girls told us their primary asset was their bodies and they need to look appealing—but not too appealing.”
More recently, a 2016 study showed that unfamiliar adults presented with recordings of babies’ cries made assumptions of a given child’s sex based on the idea that adult women’s voices are higher than men’s. Babies with higher-pitched cries were assumed to be female and babies with lower-pitched cries were assumed to be male.

The same study showed that there is no significant difference between the cries of both sexes—the adults were making assumptions.
More importantly, these assumptions affected the adults’ perception of the infants’ gender attributes. The participants rated the higher-pitched cries as “expressing more discomfort” than the cries from the lower-pitched babies. Interestingly, in both studies, the judgements of the adult men were more heavily based in gender stereotypes than those of the adult women.
These assumptions about the connections between sex, gender, and pain, also continue to manifest themselves later in life. While the connections between the three are enormously complex, a growing body of work indicates that observed differences between males’ and females’ dealing with pain are likely influenced by assumptions and expectations connected to gender.

According to a recent review of clinical and experimental findings on the subject, “Gender roles have been associated with pain response, with the masculine gender norm dictating increased tolerance of pain among males, whereas feminine gender norms accept pain as a normal part of life and are more permissive of pain expression.”

For children, reactions to gender messages and expectations seem to come in waves.

“As children, we start out thinking more flexibly about gender than we end up,” LoBue wrote. Infants can use gender labels early in their development (25 percent use gender labels in 17 months, while 68 percent use labels by 21 months), but at a very rudimentary level. Children typically don’t develop an awareness of their own “selves” until they’re around 18 months old.

Though many parents’ treatment of their children is affected by gender stereotypes almost from the moment of birth, LoBue says, “In my own research, I’ve found that children don’t begin to notice and adopt gender-stereotyped behaviors (e.g., preferring colors like pink or blue) until the age of two or three.”
According to LoBue’s research, children don’t believe in gender permanence prior to age 5. Preschoolers will frequently ask their mothers whether they were little boys when they were younger, for example, or a young girl might say that she’ll grow up to be a daddy.

A 1989 study by psychologist Sandra Lipsitz Bem illustrates that point quite effectively. Bem showed preschool-aged children three photographs of two toddlers: one male and one female. The first photo showed the toddler without clothes, while the second showed the same toddler in stereotypically-gendered clothing corresponding to their sex. The third photo showed the toddler dressed in stereotypically-gendered clothing corresponding to the opposite sex.
Initially, Bem showed the preschoolers the first photo alongside the second and asked them whether the toddler was a boy or girl. The results were obvious; the children’s responses matched both the biological sex and stereotypically-gendered clothing. However, when Bem presented the preschoolers with the third photo alongside the first, the majority changed their response—if their first answer was “boy,” they said the toddler was now a girl. Only the preschoolers who believed that genitalia is the essence of boy-ness or girl-ness correctly identified the toddlers, while the rest seemed to focus on the clothing one wears as a more important element of what it is to be a boy or girl.

The study indicates that children have a fluid concept of gender around that age; they believed that the same toddler had changed from a boy to a girl (or vice versa) based on the clothing in which the toddler was dressed. Between ages 3 and 5 (when children begin to see gender as permanent), however, they begin to prefer playing with gendered toys (trucks as opposed to dolls, for instance) and with children of the same gender, according to a 1999 study cited by LoBue.
But gender can also become more fluid around ages 7 to 9, then solidify again when kids are in classrooms on a regular basis. Their environment likely plays a role; teachers, for instance, often segregate children based on gender for classroom activities. Children learn to self segregate—for instance, the boys begin to sit separately from girls during lunchtime—and kids who cross these boundaries risk being teased.

So, are genders fairly set in stone by middle childhood? Not quite.

When it comes to gender, puberty is enormously important.

“These gender norms tend to become more solidified—they become hard to change around the age of 14 or 15,” Blum tells us. “Around puberty, as children transition from looking like children to looking like teenagers or adults, they get messages from everyone around them about what is appropriate for a girl to do and a boy to do.”

Boys fight more, they drink more … [Girls’] social worlds shrink—literally shrink.

“The messages they receive are variations on a theme known as the Hegemonic Myth: the myth that boys are strong, girls are weak; boys are competent, girls are incompetent,” Blum says. “There are a whole set of associated messages. Girls get the message, every place they look, that they now are sexual beings … Girls when they start going into puberty are seen as the physical manifestation of … sensuality.”

On the other hand, Blum says that boys don’t get the same treatment. Instead, they’re taught that they have the right to exert their “power” and “dominance” over others.
“Boys don’t get that message,” he says. “Boys get the message that they’re strong and … powerful.”
Parents often reinforce these stereotypes in a variety of ways—daughters tend to have earlier curfews than sons, and are less likely to get permission to use the family car; they’re also more likely to be given chores at home, while their male counterparts are given chores away from home.

These “gender-discriminatory beliefs,” he says, “have profound health consequences.” The result?
“Boys fight more, they drink more … ,” Blum says, “[and they perish] more due to interpersonal violence and this physical assertiveness.” “[Girls’] social worlds shrink—literally shrink,” he continues. “They don’t go out, they don’t have as broad a social network. [Gender roles] limit girls’ education, they lead to early marriage [and contribute to] gender-based violence and early pregnancy.”

So what should parents do to encourage healthier development?

Blum says he sees the solution as simple—though not necessarily easy.

We have come a long way in 50 years, so I see what’s possible.

“We teach—in our schools, in our churches, in our homes—that personal respect is the core expectation of how people relate,” he says of the solution. “We teach tolerance, and we teach respect, and we simply don’t allow the language of disparity or gender discrimination or the behaviors of it.”
In other words, empathy is key. Parents, and society, should respect how gender develops, rather than force kids into strict categories that they might not fit into.
More concretely, parents should make sure that they aren’t projecting gender-based assumptions and expectations on their children. “Never stereotype children’s traits such as boys are loud and noisy, girls are calm and sweet, and call out relatives and teachers who do so,” said child and adolescent therapist Katie Hurley to CNN. “Monitor your own interactions with boys and girls, and comfort a boy as you would a girl if they are sad or unhappy.”

Hurley also emphasized that parents must take every opportunity to cultivate their child’s awareness of restrictive gender messages, discussing and correcting gender-based assumptions they encounter, saying, “Let’s break apart the media. Let’s poke the holes. Let’s say princesses aren’t real.”
Breaking down restrictive gender stereotypes won’t be easy, but Blum remains optimistic, pointing to increases in awareness surrounding things like child abuse, spousal abuse, and bullying.
“We have come a long way in 50 years, so I see what’s possible,” he says. “I see these changes as very feasible.”

Tags 50036366, hemingway, parenting

Nosh

This Baby Has Never Eaten Sugar In Her Life

Post author By Nick Horn
Post date December 20, 2016

When you hear the words “baby food,” what comes to mind is probably something along the lines of a small glass jar of pureed sweet potatoes or carrots purchased from a grocery store shelf. Or, maybe you’re thinking of a slice of toast with the crusts cut off.

You almost certainly aren’t envisioning a quarter of an avocado, a scoop of sauerkraut, eggs fried in coconut oil, and a small serving of steamed vegetables…but that’s exactly the sort of breakfast that Brisbane, Australia, mother Shan Cooper serves her infant daughter on an average morning.

Eating Like a Caveman

Grace, Shan Cooper’s daughter, has eaten according to the paleo diet since birth. The controversial diet, originally created in the 1970s, but more recently popularized in Australia by celebrity chef Pete Evans, centers around eating the sorts of foods that “cavemen could scavenge for,” as Cooper tells the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail.

The idea behind the diet is that human genetics haven’t yet caught up to the changes in our diet caused by agriculture and industry. So, according to Evans’ logic, humans should eschew the foods that have come about as the result of these technological advances.

Foods to avoid include those such as cereal grains, dairy, refined sugars, legumes, refined vegetable oils, and salt—basically anything that couldn’t have been hunted or scavenged by our ancient ancestors. Instead, Evans’ diet tells us, we should consume only foods that were available during the Paleolithic era (the prehistoric era of history which lasted from the first use of stone tools by humans roughly 2.6 million years ago, until the dawn of the Mesolithic Era, about 12,000 years ago). This includes foods such as grass-fed meats, fish and other seafood, fruits and vegetables, eggs, nuts and seeds, and a small set of non-refined oils like olive and coconut oil.

Proponents of the diet claim that it presents a slew of advantages to those who follow it, including weight loss, reduced the risk of disease, increased energy levels, reduced sensitivity to allergies, and and even improved brain functioning, among a variety of other boons.

Critics of the diet point to factors including increased grocery bills, negative effects on energy resulting from lack of grains and dairy, and the diet’s lack of protein sources for vegetarians. Cooper has decided to press on.

A Day in the Life of a Baby Caveman

Considering the fact that an infant’s teeth can’t exactly handle a regular diet of raw vegetables and steak, you may be wondering to yourself, you may be wondering exactly what Grace does eat. So what does the paleo lifestyle look like for a 13-month-old child?

Cooper says that when it comes to feeding Grace, she does deviate from the usual paleo diet restrictions in one small, but enormously important way: She violates the restrictive diet’s strict prohibition on dairy consumption by breastfeeding Grace twice daily. Aside from breastmilk, Cooper gave the Daily Mail an example of what Grace’s meals might consist of on an average day.

Cooper says that breakfast usually starts with a couple of eggs cooked in coconut oil (generally fried, scrambled, or poached). Alongside the eggs, Cooper serves Grace leftover vegetables from the previous evening’s dinner—this might include roasted sweet potatoes, carrots, potatoes, and steamed broccoli. On Thursdays, Cooper supplements the eggs and roasted vegetables with a small scoop of sauerkraut and quarter of an avocado.

For lunch, Cooper says she feeds Grace organic roasted chicken, and more leftover vegetables from the previous night’s dinner.

When it comes to the daily afternoon snack, Cooper feeds Grace a small serving of fresh fruit. While she says she aims for variety, Cooper admits that Grace’s favorites are strawberries and bananas.

For dinner, Cooper says she feeds Grace spaghetti Bolognese prepared with organic beef. Zucchini noodles take the place of traditional grain pasta noodles, and the tomato sauce is all organic.

In case you were wondering about dessert, Cooper says that Grace generally doesn’t eat dessert, though Cooper did make her a strawberry panna cotta with coconut cream for her first birthday.

Staying Healthy

Cooper, who has a degree in agricultural science, has written an e-book of healthy recipes—in addition to maintaining her popular healthy-eating website, “My Food Religion.” She claims that the diet she serves her daughter has strengthened Grace’s immune system and prevented her from getting sick as frequently as other children whose parents feed them a more conventional diet. According to Cooper, Grace has only been sick once in her life, and that even then, it was a minor cold that passed quickly.

In an interview with Daily Mail Australia, Cooper is quoted as saying of Grace, “She spends a lot of time around other kids who are sick all the time—who have snotty noses, coughs, colds—but she just doesn’t pick it up.”

She continues, “It’s certainly not because I’m shielding her from any of that stuff. I absolutely think a nutrient-dense diet is giving her a strong immune system.”

Cooper, while she’s always been health-conscious, didn’t adopt the paleo diet herself until around five years ago, when she read a book on the subject. She had been suffered ongoing problems with food allergies for years and, as a result, had already imposed many of the paleo diet’s primary restrictions on her diet, including avoidance of dairy, gluten, and eventually all processed foods.

“I just got sick of not feeling great,” Cooper says of her decision to go paleo. “That had been my normal and (I decided) that wasn’t going to be normal anymore.”

When Grace was born a few years later, Cooper felt that it only made sense to not only continue to eat according to the paleo diet, but also to extend her paleo lifestyle to her newly born child.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

While more than the first year of Grace’s dietary life has been spent either breastfeeding exclusively or abiding by the strict meal plan her mother has set up for her, the prospect of friends’ birthday parties filled with cakes, candy, and sugared-up soft drinks looms just over the horizon for the Coopers. In spite of the fact that preparing the diet she feeds both herself and her young daughter takes a ton of time and effort, Cooper says that she’s not too worried about the inevitable day when Grace is exposed to non-paleo foods.

Questioned on the subject, Cooper says, “I’m not going to not let her go to kids’ parties,” according to Daily Mail Australia. “I’m never going to go to Grace, ‘You can’t eat anything at this party—but I packed you some Kale. Here you go.’”

All jokes aside, Cooper seems surprisingly laid-back about Grace’s diet in the future, considering the tightly regimented meal plan by which the two currently abide at home.

“(What she eats now) is not anything strange, that normal people wouldn’t eat. She loves it,” Cooper tells Daily Mail Australia. “I don’t feed her toast or cereal or anything like that. Again I think, ‘Sure that stuff is not going to kill her.’”

Cooper says that by the time Grace is old enough to go to parties, “She’ll be old enough to know she can choose whatever she wants to eat,” continuing, “She’ll probably come home all jacked up on sugar and cake and say, ‘Mum I don’t feel very well.’” Cooper continues, “And next time instead of eating 12 cupcakes she might only eat three.”

A Philosophy of Food

Cooper has her own distinct way of thinking about how humans learn to interact with food. Her reasoning is that kids are purely intuitive eaters, eating the things that make them feel good physically and avoiding the things that don’t, since they haven’t yet had the opportunity to develop emotional associations attached to food. Cooper also believes that humans begin to eat more emotionally as they reach adulthood, consuming foods that make them feel a certain way emotionally, rather than physically.

When you consider ubiquitous childhood experiences like receiving a lollipop as a reward for a doctor visit or being rewarded with ice cream for good grades, the idea does begin to make some sense. Cooper says she hopes to teach her children what foods to eat to make themselves feel good by both providing a positive example and setting up positive habits early on.

Despite how strict the diet Cooper curates for herself and her daughter seems, she says that there is a certain level of flexibility. Cooper says, “I don’t think eating a piece of bread is going to kill me. When I go out to dinner with friends…I’m just going to eat what’s on the menu. I’m not going to be a jerk about it.”

Cooper also tells Daily Mail Australia, “I don’t want there to be any disordered eating around here,” continuing, “Females particularly have enough problems with eating disorders. I want Grace to eat what makes her feel good.”

When it comes to Grace’s dietary development Cooper says that, with the dietary foundation she’s provided, Grace will “also learn what makes her feel good and what doesn’t.”

“That’s the reason I eat this way,” she says.

What the Experts Say

While Cooper’s confident that her dietary decisions are the right choice for Grace, at least one dietician has some reservations about her feeding Grace according to the paleo diet.

Dr. Rosemary Stanton, a respected dietician says that she would offer a word of caution to other parents considering following Cooper’s lead, telling Daily Mail Australia, “It’s really not usually a good idea to put a child on such a restricted diet, particularly when there’s no grounds for it.”

Stanton goes on to say that she hopes Cooper “knows an awful lot about nutrition.”

Stanton says her greatest concern about Grace’s nutrition centers around two specific types of foods not included in the paleo diet: “Depriving her child of grains and legumes will make it much more difficult to achieve a balanced diet.”

Dr. Stanton does approve of Cooper’s choice to breastfeed her child despite the dairy restrictions of the paleo diet, saying that it “helps a lot.” Cooper also says that she may introduce other dairy into Grace’s diet further down the line.

While Stanton doesn’t outright denounce the dietary choices Cooper is making for Grace, she does have a few words for other parents thinking about doing the same for their your children, saying, “I’d certainly sound a note of caution [to other people considering following her].” Stanton emphasizes that parents looking to feed their children according to a diet as restrictive as the paleo diet should first consult with an accredited dietician.

In response to such criticism, Cooper reacts with a mixture of indignation and confusion. “(Why) eating real food is such a scandalous topic is just bizarre,” she says, questioning why those who feed their children fast food aren’t subject to the same criticism.

“If you want to feed your kid one of the most nutrient-void pieces of crap ever, knock your socks off.”

Another Controversy in Child Nutrition

While Shan and Grace Cooper provide an interesting example of tension between different ideologies when it comes to parents’ responsibilities regarding child nutrition, they’re far from the only difference of opinion about making sure that kids are getting all the nutrients they need for healthy development.

Back in the U.S., controversy about kids’ nutrition has even involved high-profile figures such as First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2012, in a move championed by the first lady, the USDA rolled out new requirements for school lunches which required students taking part in the federal lunch program to choose either a vegetable or a fruit alongside the rest of their meal.

Critics of the program anticipated that those students with pickier eating habits would just throw away the fruits and vegetables, contributing to greater waste. Supporters of the program, on the other hand had greater confidence in children, saying that opponents should give the kids more credit and that they believed children would make good dietary choices when presented with the opportunity and a gentle push in the right direction.

Unfortunately for the program’s supporters, a study completed and published by Public Health Reports in 2015 confirms the fears of the plan’s detractors. According to Sarah Amin, the study’s lead author, “The basic question we wanted to explore was: does requiring a child to select a fruit or vegetable actually correspond with consumption. The answer was clearly no.”

In fact, while children took nearly 30 percent more fruits and vegetables than before the program’s implementation, consumption of those same items actually went down by 13 percent. Perhaps even more worrisome was the fact that students were throwing away 56 percent more food than before.

A Problem With Unclear Answers

According to most studies on the subject, the prevalence of childhood obesity as measured by body mass index (BMI) has been steadily rising since 1999. The World Health Organization says that a minimum of 41 million children throughout the world are currently obese or overweight, approximately 10 million more than a quarter-century ago.

Experts also emphasize that there are numerous negative consequences of childhood obesity. In a recent statement, Sania Nishtar, co-chair of the Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity says, “Overweight and obesity impact a child’s quality of life, as they face a wide range of barriers, including physical, psychological, and health consequences,” going on, “We know that obesity can [have an] impact on educational attainment too and this, combined with the likelihood that they will remain obese into adulthood, poses major health and economic consequences for them, their families, and society as a whole.

There is some cause for optimism, though. While childhood obesity rates both in the United States and around the world continue to grow, some progress has been made on the small scale. According to one report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, some U.S. states and cities are displaying declines in overall childhood obesity rates. The study specifically cites the cities of New York and Philadelphia, along with the states of Mississippi and California as leaders in the downward trend.

The study also illustrated, however, that there are still significant disparities between racial and socioeconomic groups when it comes to progress on childhood obesity.

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