Tag: parenting
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The Rise of Cooking Shows, the Fall of Cooking (and Happiness)
I almost ignored this bit-too-long piece on the rise of the TV cooking show and the simultaneous fall of the home cooked meal (via @borrodell). That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them…
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Fostering Innovative Thinking
By interviewing and surveying 3,500 visionary entrepreneurs over a six-year period, a pair of professors believe they have identified the five habits and skills common to ‘creative executives’ that distinguish them from the rest: Associating: the skill of connecting seemingly unrelated questions, problems and ideas. Questioning, especially “questions that challenge the status quo and open…
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Richard Dawkins on the Labelling of Children
Richard Dawkins on a video for the BBC’s Daily Politics discusses the religious and political labelling of children. I feel very strongly that it’s wrong to label children with the opinions of their parents. Nobody minds labelling a child an English child, or a French child, or a Dutch child. But you’d think I was…
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Financial Equivalents of Life Events
Willingness to pay to prevent traumatic life events is “the relevant standard” for measuring the hurt they inflict upon a person. This is according to Robin Hanson, responding to comments in an earlier article of his (previously) where he suggested that as cuckoldry “is a bigger reproductive harm than rape, so we should expect a…
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Incidence and Prevention of ‘Non-Paternity Events’
A non-paternity event is a situation whereby the biological father of a child is “someone other than who it is presumed to be”. Typically this involves some form of paternity fraud. In one of the most gut-wrenching articles I’ve read in months (due to the many human interest stories in the article, no doubt), the surprising incidence…
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Rewards Corrupt Altruistic Tendencies
It has been known for decades that infants up to 14 months old will act on altruistic impulses without reward. Recent research, following on from a similar 1973 study, is starting to show that rewards could be responsible for the inhibition of this natural desire to help others—an innate altruism. 48 German toddlers averaging 20…
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Marriage, Children, and Surnames
In most countries around the world it is convention that the wife take the husband’s surname at marriage. It is equally conventional for a child to then also take this same name. Evolutionary psychology is the reason behind this phenomenon, as discussed briefly in the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. One of the…
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To Breastfeed or Not
In governmental and popular literature breastfeeding is praised as being the optimum solution to infant feeding. The Wikipedia article, for instance, is extensive and well-cited suggesting the following benefits to infants: superior nutrition, greater immune health, higher intelligence… the list goes on. For the mother, many long- and short-term health benefits are also cited. In what…
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Self-Esteem vs Self-Discipline in Children
Self-esteem, we are told, is a great virtue to foster in a child, hence the many school programs to instill it in young children and the self-help experts extolling its benefits to all who will listen. This is folly, says psychologist Angela Duckworth in this interview where she discusses the futility of attempting to enhance…
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The Parental Limit
Birth order and parental influence matter much less than a child’s peer group when it comes to determining behaviour, according to Judith Rich Harris‘ polarising book, The Nurture Assumption. In the ten years since the book’s publication her ideas have gained support from prominent developmental psychologists (notably, Steven Pinker), and now Jonah Lehrer interviews Harris,…