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Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Do kids make you happy?
A whole host of studies say they don’t, so why do we keep having them?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Our Childfree By Choice friends are going to eat this up, but I feel it is my duty to share with you a recent story in Newsweek magazine examining whether children make parents happy. Here is the full story. Here are some highlights for the speed read:
Author Lorraine Ali reports in her story:
“In Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book ‘Stumbling on Happiness,’ the Harvard professor of psychology looks at several studies and concludes that marital satisfaction decreases dramatically after the birth of the first child—and increases only when the last child has left home. He also ascertains that parents are happier grocery shopping and even sleeping than spending time with their kids. Other data cited by 2008’s ‘Gross National Happiness’ author, Arthur C. Brooks, finds that parents are about 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless.”
“ ‘Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,’ says Florida State University’s Robin Simon, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. ‘In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.’ “
“In pre-industrial America, parents certainly loved their children, but their offspring also served a purpose—to work the farm, contribute to the household. Children were a necessity. Today, we have kids more for emotional reasons, but an increasingly complicated work and social environment has made finding satisfaction far more difficult.”
“The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a deteriorating education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated—it has become more expensive.”
The author concludes: “Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who’ve never had kids. And there are other rewarding aspects of parenting that are impossible to quantify. For example, I never thought it possible to love someone as deeply as I love my son.”
What do you think: Why would parents in study after study be less happy than their child-free peers? What aspects do parents gain that would make people continue to have kids if not happiness?
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Is washing veggies enough?
Are you buying expensive sprays or not eating fruits and veggies to avoid food-borne illness? Here’s what the experts are doing to protect their families.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Federal officials have officially declared fresh tomatoes safe to eat but they also say they still aren’t certain if it was was Mrs. Tomato in the kitchen or Col. Jalepeno in the backyard with the salmonella making so many people sick. (FDA officials confirmed Monday they have found a salmonella strain on some Mexican jalapeno peppers handled in Texas but that doesn’t exonerate the tomato.)
Since government officials haven’t completely nailed down the food-borne culprit, it makes you wonder what should you be doing to protect your family? Are you simply washing fruits and vegetables? Are you using fancy sprays that the grocery store is selling? Are you just not eating them?
Well I found a Newsweek story that explains how food scientists are protecting themselves. Here’s what they recommend:
“What do the food safety experts do? They wash their produce in running tap water—and eat up. For example, Al Bushway, professor of food science at the University of Maine, uses a spray nozzle on his kitchen faucet to clean lettuce and a vegetable brush to clean apples. He doesn’t use chlorine washes, since they give at best a ‘slight’ reduction in microbial load. (If you really want to use chlorine, mix a tablespoon of it with a gallon of water, then rinse it off afterward.)”
“To further reduce risk, the experts recommend washing not just the fruit you consume with the peel on, like apples, but also fruits and vegetables that are peelable or have inedible rinds, like bananas and melons. When you slice or handle produce, bacteria could be transferred from the peel or rind to your hands or to a knife and then to the fruit or vegetable you’re eating—as could chemical residues. Washing before you peel reduces that risk. With green leafies you can take the extra step of removing the outer layer of a head of lettuce, for example, and then washing, says Michael Doyle, director of the center for food safety at the University of Georgia. ‘The contamination largely occurs on the outside, whether it’s fruits or vegetables.’ Like Bushway, Doyle doesn’t spend money on commercial fruit and vegetable ‘washes.’ They do a good job of removing soil and trace chemical residues, say experts, but they don’t help much with bacteria.”
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