Hidden tattoos

I don’t like tattoos– never have, never will.  And neither does “Dear Prudence” advise columnist Emily Yoffe.  Anyway, she had a question about tattoos in an on-line chat today and it inspired me to wonder just what percentage of the public has a tattoo.  Fortunately, NCSU has a subscription to Roper Ipoll so I could easily look up the data and found it in a 2010 Pew Survey.  They give a number of demographic breakdowns as options, but surprisingly, not age.  Anyway, the overall figure is 24% and here’s the PID breakdown:

Now, what actually surprised me most, is the fact that there’s way more tattood people out there than you realize– unless you have x-ray vision, that is.  Check this out:

Anyway, some day when I’ve really got nothing better to do (so much to grade!) I’m going to download this dataset and run some models with this variable.

 

 

Apologize already

I really enjoyed this Shankar Vedantam segment on NPR about the great difficulty people have with apologies:

In a recent paper, researchers Tyler G. Okimoto, Michael Wenzel and Kyli Hedrick reported on what they’ve found happens in people’s minds when they refuse to apologize. They find that parents who tell their kids that saying sorry will make them feel better have been telling kids the truth — but not the whole truth.

“We do find that apologies do make apologizers feel better, but the interesting thing is that refusals to apologize also make people feel better and, in fact, in some cases it makes them feel better than an apology would have,” Okimoto said in an interview…

“When you refuse to apologize, it actually makes you feel more empowered,” he said. “That power and control seems to translate into greater feelings of self-worth.”

Ironically, Okimoto said, people who refused to apologize ended up with boosted feelings of integrity…

Okimoto believes the research, in fact, may provide a clue on how best to get people to apologize. Our conventional approach, especially with kids, is to force people to apologize. But if people are reluctant to apologize because apologies make them feel threatened, coercion is unlikely to help — that is, if a sincere apology is hoped for.

Support and love, by contrast, may be a more effective way to counter the feelings of threat involved in an apology.

In short, it seems to me you have to be confident in yourself to apologize and place yourself in a position of relative weakness.  A failure to apologize when one is clearly in order strikes me as a failure of confidence in oneself to be able to admit you were wrong.  As for myself, like most people, I used to have a lot of trouble apologizing and admitting I was wrong.  Not so much, anymore.  I would posit that as I’ve become more mature (and, yes, self confident), that it has made it much easier for me to apologize when I get things wrong.  And I do feel the better for it.  Only hinted at here, is that, for the most part, one is way better off admitting fault and accepting responsibility and moving on.  Seems to me that there’s few things most of us hate interpersonally than a non-apology (“sorry if you were offended”) apology.

I’ll leave the final word to Kurt Cobain.

Relationships vs. ambition

I think a lot about the topic of ambition, especially when I was recently at a political science conference.  In looking around those I know in the discipline, easily the biggest difference between those who publish the most and are at the most prestigious universities versus those in a more humble position (I’ll put myself somewhere in the middle) is not intellect, but ambition.  I had a great serendipitous discussion while there with an OSU professor I used to work for and he reflected on the fact that he really had accomplished quite a lot, but that his current family situation was not the greatest and perhaps the two were related.  As for me, I’ve always felt that NCSU is a perfect place because it is a solid program where I have good students and plenty of respect in and out of the profession, but allows for a much more reasonable work-life balance, i.e., lots more time with those four crazy kids, than if I were just a few miles down the road at Duke or UNC.  Anyway, very interesting piece in the Atlantic recently about the trade-offs between ambition and relationships:

The conflict between career ambition and relationships lies at the heart of many of our current cultural debates, including the ones sparked by high-powered women like Sheryl Sandberg and Anne Marie Slaughter. Ambition drives people forward; relationships and community, by imposing limits, hold people back. Which is more important? Just the other week, Slate ran a symposium that addressed this question, asking, “Does an Early Marriage Kill Your Potential To Achieve More in Life?” Ambition is deeply entrenched into the American personae, as Yale’s William Casey King argues in Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue­ – but what are its costs? …

When I asked about the connection between ambition and personal relationships, Kammeyer-Mueller said that while the more ambitious appeared to be happier, that their happiness could come at the expense of personal relationships. “Do these ambitious people have worse relationships? Are they ethical and nice to the people around them? What would they do to get ahead? These are the questions the future research needs to answer.”

Existing research by psychologist Tim Kasser can help address this issue. Kasser, the author of The High Price of Materialism, has shown that the pursuit of materialistic values like money, possessions, and social status-the fruits of career successes-leads to lower well-being and more distress in individuals. It is also damaging to relationships: “My colleagues and I have found,” Kasser writes, “that when people believe materialistic values are important, they…have poorer interpersonal relationships [and] contribute less to the community.” Such people are also more likely to objectify others, using them as means to achieve their own goals.

So if the pursuit of career success comes at the expense of social bonds, then an individual’s well-being could suffer. That’s because community is strongly connected to well-being.

In a similar vein, I also really enjoyed this take on Sheryl Sandberg from journalist Elsa Walsh.  Here’s what I think is the key bit:

And third, I have to wonder if Sandberg does not realize that she is going to die someday. There is so little life and pleasure in her book outside of work. Even sex is framed as something that men will get more of if they pitch in and help their working wives.

Success, particularly the kind Sandberg calls for, requires ever more time at the office, ever more travel. It requires always being available, always a click away. Sandberg is almost giddy when she describes getting up at 5 a.m. to answer e-mails before her children wake up and getting back on her computer once they are asleep.

“Facebook is available 24/7 and for the most part, so am I,” she writes. “The days when I even think of unplugging for a weekend or a vacation are long gone.”

Imagine what that life looks like to a child. Imagine what it looks like to yourself when you are 80.

That is not how I want my daughter to live, and it is not how I want to live.

Boom.  Now, I don’t want to judge Sandberg, because if she is happy with her life, than more power to her.  But I think Walsh’s idea of balance sound more like happiness to your typical human being.  I’m pretty sure I could be a Harvard Professor instead of an NC State professor if I had truly dedicated myself to that goal.  But I have no desire to be up two hours before my kids are so I can answer emails.  Nor to simply see way less of them.  I’ll take the trade.

The ethics of choosing to reproduce

Interesting (if a bit long) piece in the times about the ethics involved in choosing whether to have children or not.  Y’all know my views on this and I did find this first part a bit annoying:

In fact, people are still expected to provide reasons not to have children, but no reasons are required to have them. It’s assumed that if individuals do not have children it is because they are infertile, too selfish or have just not yet gotten around to it. In any case, they owe their interlocutor an explanation. On the other hand, no one says to the proud parents of a newborn, Why did you choose to have that child? What are your reasons? The choice to procreate is not regarded as needing any thought or justification.

One word: biology.  Yes, humans are super-duper evolved animals who have the ability to overcome our biological legacy in myriad ways, but let’s not pretend we’re not animals when you get down to it.  And we all know the single greatest imperative of pretty much organism– passing on its genes.  Nonetheless, I did find this essay quite interesting.  I thought this was the key portion:

The burden of proof — or at least the burden of justification — should therefore rest primarily on those who choose to have children, not on those who choose to be childless. The choice to have children calls for more careful justification and thought than the choice not to have children because procreation creates a dependent, needy, and vulnerable human being whose future may be at risk. The individual who chooses childlessness takes the ethically less risky path. After all, nonexistent people can’t suffer from not being created. They do not have an entitlement to come into existence, and we do not owe it to them to bring them into existence. But once children do exist, we incur serious responsibilities to them.

Because children are dependent, needy and vulnerable, prospective parents should consider how well they can love and care for the offspring they create, and the kind of relationship they can have with them. The genuinely unselfish life plan may at least sometimes be the choice not to have children, especially in the case of individuals who would otherwise procreate merely to adhere to tradition, to please others, to conform to gender conventions, or to benefit themselves out of the inappropriate expectation that children will fix their problems. Children are neither human pets nor little therapists.

Great points.  I love being a parent so damn much and it seems so natural to me that it’s sometimes a little hard for me not to judge people who choose to remain childless.  But I’m getting there.

Don’t worry; be happy

Very cool piece from Derek Thompson that summarizes recent findings on relationships between economics and happiness.  There’s 10 items, but here’s a couple of my favorites (there’s also a really nice chart looking at per capita GDP vs. happiness):

7) Working more hours makes you happier … until it makes you miserable. As workers move from part-time work to full-time work, they’re happier. But as they move from full-time work to Jesus-when-will-this-day-finally-end work, the joy of labor subsides. There seems to be an “inverse U-shaped relationship” between hours worked and self-reported well-being, although the precise figures differ across countries. Fascinatingly, one study found that, although working long regular hours correlates negatively with well-being, “working overtime has a positive effect on job satisfaction.” Go figure.

Definitely sure I’m on the correct side of the U.  Pretty interesting, though.

8) Commuters are less happy. The studies here are really interesting. Health scientists say that commuting can make you sick and die – not conducive to happiness. Daniel Kahneman’s research on female happiness found that while commuting, women experienced the “lowest ratio of positive to negative emotions during the day.” One study pegged the magic number at 22: If your commute is more than 22 minutes, there is an appreciable decline in reported well-being. Yet another study found that for every 10 minutes of additional commuting, community involvement falls by 10 percent.

I’ve been quoting this fact to people for years because it’s amazing how many people just don’t get this.  There’s no “a bigger house will make you happier” on this list, because it won’t.  Yet, millions of people trade away happiness by driving long commute times to their big houses in the suburbs and exburbs.  I’ve never had a commute longer than 15 minutes (except on a short-term basis) and I plan on keeping it that way.  Granite counter-tops and a few hundred more square feet just aren’t worth the extra time in your car every day.

9) Self-employed people are happier. When workers think they’re good at their job and that their bosses like them, they’re more satisfied. So it makes sense that when they are their own boss, they’re happier to work. A famous OECD study found that the self-employed “typically report higher levels of overall job satisfaction than the employed.” But another study suggests that only rich self-employed people are happier to be self-employed.

Now, technically I’m not self-employed, but if you are talking about the sense of “being your own boss” being a college professor is great for that.   (And here’s an earlier post I wrote on the matter).

Now, this is all just the economic stuff and doesn’t include the most important– our relationships– but it’s a pretty interesting list– check out the whole thing.

Breastfeeding myths (or not)

The Post’s latest 5 myths series was on breastfeeding.  Often, they really stretch things to end up with five myths, but in this case the author even starts out myth 4, ‘most American women breastfeed their babies” with, “Statistically, this is true.”  Hmmmm.  Seems to me you’ve already lost the “myth” bit there.  I found myth #2  interesting because it shows the difficulty in doing research on something like breastfeeding’s health benefits when there are so many other co-variates:

2. Formula is just as healthy as breast milk.

Infant-care experts made this claim throughout the 20th century. Some midcentury doctors even touted alternatives — made of cow’s milk whey or soy, along with oils, vitamins and minerals — as more nutritious than breast milk.It is not a coincidence that these alternatives are known as “formula,” a term that connotes scientific sophistication.

We now know that breast milk, with its unique balance of proteins, fats, vitamins and carbohydrates, confers a range of health benefits, including lessening the chances of ear infections, asthma, gastrointestinal ailments, diabetes, allergies, obesity and sudden infant death syndrome. But it is not clear that breast-feeding makes a substantial difference for children in developed countries. (There is no doubt about its advantages in places that lack access to clean water and adequate health care.)

Since scientists can’t assign women to randomized groups of breast-feeders and formula-feeders, they are forced to work backward from data, making it difficult to firmly establish whether breast-feeding improves a child’s health. For example, mothers who breast-feed are also more likely to adopt other wholesome behaviors: They eat less junk food, they’re less likely to smoke, and they see doctors. So studies have trouble determining whether children who were breast-fed are less likely to be obese because they received breast milk — or because their mothers cooked healthier foods.  [emphasis mine]

Now, I’m pretty sure that statistical control, regression models, etc., can tell us with some confidence that there are real health benefits to breast feeding, but this final paragraph certainly makes a good point.  Also, breast feeding mothers are more likely to come from higher socio-economic backgrounds which surely correlates with all sorts of good health benefits.  In the anecdotal category (i.e., worthless for conclusions but still fun to share), the latter two of my four children breastfed significantly longer and definitely had the healthier infancies than the first two.

And, as you know, I’m a big fan of all learning about bacteria and I recently heard about some research that found that breast milk actually contains an ingredient not actually digestible by humans, but rather my the bacteria that colonize our gut.  Thus, it is providing the ideal medium for the healthy bacteria that make our digestion work well.

Kindergarten awards

Ever since I read Nurtureshock, I’ve been a big fan of actually letting kids win things and not telling everybody they are a winner.  The truth is that kids know when you are just feeding them a line.  Not everybody is a winner.  Now, we should  be sensitive to kids feelings and certainly try and recognize and praise the accomplishments of all children, but let’s not pretend everybody is good at everything.  Thus, I was quite pleasantly surprised to learn that this year’s Kingswood Elementary awards were not for everybody.  They even let some kids win multiple awards!  Pure meritocracy– how about that?!  Of course, easy for me to be happy, Evan took home the (expected) math award and the completely unexpected PE award.  Still, I was all prepared with a “learning experience” pep talk if he had not won anything. This, in an era when field day is all fun and games and no ribbons (I was as proud of anything as winning the 100 yard dash in 6th grade as I was one of the slower kids earlier in elementary school).  I do feel bad for the kids who didn’t win an award, but I don’t think kindergarten is too early for life lessons.

Best Birthday Ever?

No, not mine, my oldest son, David, turned 12 yesterday.  Things like that make me feel old much more so than the fact that I’ll soon be 40.  November 2, 1999 was the only election day (Cuyahoga County municipal for me in that particular case) that I didn’t vote.  Given that Kim’s labor was 36 hours, I was actually going to slip out for 15 minutes and do so, but at that point it was finally time to push.  Anyway, thanks to a friend with season tickets, I was able to take David to a Duke basketball game on his birthday.  Just an exhibition against, Shaw, but the timing (and the mid-court seats) couldn’t have been better.   Given that it followed a birthday meal at David’s favorite restaurant by far– Cici’s pizza– just maybe the best birthday ever.

Parenthood in one handy chart

Regular readers know my love for being a parent (and I’d have to be insane to have four kids if I didn’t love it).  Came across this great chart via FB that pretty much sums up parenting as I see it:

That one percent makes all the difference.

 

The Diet Post

You know what’s really annoying?  Skinny people bragging about losing weight.  Sorry, but I’m pretty proud of myself for losing 18 pounds– about 10% of my body weight.  In fact, before the diet, I was technically overweight according to the BMI (185 pounds and 6 feet tall).  Actually, I would often point to myself being categorized as overweight as implicitly demonstrating the flaws in the BMI.  That said, there was a little more around the middle than I like and I was starting to get in danger of crossing the line I’m determined never to cross– waist size larger than inseam (34 x 34 feeling tight when I started; I’m now wearing 32 inch waist shorts).  So, inspired by what I’d been reading in diet studies and the very strong recommendation of a fellow social scientist, I started Weight Watchers 12 weeks ago.

Wow, do I love Weight Watchers!!  It was not exactly easy, but so much less hard than I expected.  Basically, Weight Watchers has taken everything I’ve read about in nutrition science and everything I’ve read about with the psychology of eating and incorporated it into their plan.  You get a certain number of “points plus” to eat per day, plus a bonus 49 to use over the week as you see fit.  Follow that, and you will lose weight.  In my case, tracking the points of every single thing I ate was hugely enlightening.  I realized I had been totally doing myself in my mindless snacking (mostly cereal, nuts, and the various partially eaten snack portions of chips, etc., the kids always leave sitting around).   I also loved that there was nothing this diet made you give up.  By tracking points, it simply meant that an indulgence one place meant more self discipline somewhere else.  Thus, I still lost all this weight while having pizza for lunch 3-4 times per week over the whole time.

Another awesome feature– most fruits and vegetables are worth 0 points.  I have truly never been healthier in my life.  There was a time in my life when I hardly had any fruits or vegetables in my diet (in college I believe I literally would have had scurvy if not for vitamin supplements).   Now, in a typical day I snack on two apples, a handful of carrot sticks, have a salad before dinner, and fresh pineapple for desert.

The traditional weight watchers model involves meetings with other people on the diet for support.  I did the weight watchers on-line version and relied on Kim (who decided to start two days after me and is also doing well on the diet) for support.  It’s about $18/month for the on-line version.   Best money I’ve spent this year.

So, mostly, this post is just to say that Weight Watchers is really a terrific diet plan.  If you’ve got any weight to lose, I whole-heartedly endorse it.

Get a grip

Haven’t checked in on Free Range Kids in a while.  In addition to a 12-year old boy being escorted home because he was walking in downtown Toronto in broad daylight (I’ve been to Toronto– not a scary proposition), this was perhaps the most compelling case of paranoid parents:

Hi Readers — This just in! A creepy old guy was seen taking pix of some young boy in Idaho. The cops were called! The media alerted! Hearts pounded, rage burbled, all because…

Um, a grandpa was photographing his grandson.

He left when some crazy lady started yelling at him. Here’s the story.  – L

Now, I’m no expert on pedophilia, but I’m pretty sure most pedophiles don’t exactly draw attention to themselves by photographing kids in a public park.  If you see an adult taking pictures of kid, chances are pretty good it’s  a relative.  Hoofbeats = horses, not zebras.

Church nurseries and irrational fears

Every now and then I like to check in on the Free Range Kids blog to check out the irrational fears of parents.  This post about church nursery rules (a place I work one Sunday every couple of months) was quite disturbing.  Make sure you read the response from the blog author, it’s awesome:

Dear Free-Range Kids: With your recent posts about risk adversity, I wanted to tell you about a horrendous trend that is starting to appear in churches: husbands and wives are no longer allowed to work together in children’s ministry.

One would think that a husband/wife team would be exactly what a church would want in helping to nourish youth.  But it seems that insurance companies and risk-adversity have gotten the better of people’s common sense.  Basically, the idea is that since spouses can’t testify against each other, we need someone else in the room.

This happened to a church I used to go to.  It was medium-sized — small enough that we were fairly short on nursery and children’s volunteer staff.  In one of the nurseries, a retired couple had been watching the children for a long time, and everyone was happy with them, and they enjoyed the chance to be together with children.  But under the new policy, they couldn’t be together unless there was a *third* person to watch them.  So, they were told they couldn’t watch the nursery together anymore.  And so they just stopped working there.

Here’s a link to a “Safe Haven” policy that is not from the church I mention, but is an example of the anti-family, pro-paranoia policies that are creeping in everywhere. Here’s the really bad part of the policy:

All workers in nursery through three years old shall not be from the same family.

Teenage boys will not be permitted to work in the nursery or toddler areas.

Only adult women shall change diapers and help toddlers in the restroom. When taking children to the restroom, the door shall be partially open.

Thought you might be interested. – Jon

Jon, I am. I am interested to know that teenage boys are, as a group, not allowed to work with young kids. I guess thousands of years of older siblings looking after younger siblings matters not when “Worst First” thinking creeps in. The “worst” being: He’s male, he’s young, why would he want to have anything to do with a child unless, of course, he’s a pervert? Get him away!

Then there’s the idea of only women changing diapers. Sometimes it feels like the easiest way to roll back feminism is to insist, “We DO believe in equality. But think of the children!”

Actually, the last time I worked the nursery we had an all-dad crew for Mother’s day.  Except one of the mom’s insisted on staying.  I told her that three of us dads were more than enough to handle to handle the 10 or so toddlers and added, joking, “or don’t you trust us?”  She took just a beat too long to answer that.  And she stayed around the whole time.