“Is he in his own room yet?” is a question new parents often field once they emerge from the haze of life with a newborn. But sleeping apart from our babies is a relatively recent development – and not one that extends around the globe. In other cultures sharing a room, and sometimes a bed, with your baby is the norm.
This isn’t the only aspect of new parenthood that Westerners do differently. From napping on a schedule and sleep training to pushing our children around in strollers, what we might think of as standard parenting practices are often anything but.
Parents in the US and UK are advised to have their babies sleep in the same room as them for at least the first six months, but many view this as a brief stopover on their way to a dedicated nursery.
In most other societies around the world, babies stick with their parents longer. A 2016 review that looked at research on children sharing not just a room but a bed with one or more of their parents found a high prevalence in many Asian countries: over 70% in India and Indonesia, for example, and over 80% in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Research on bedsharing rates in countries across Africa is patchy, but where it does exist suggests the practice is near-universal.
Want to raise successful kids? Make them do chores. The science backs you up, and it’s the kind of technique I cover in my free e-book How to Raise Successful Kids, which you can download here.
Now, it turns out there’s a fairly simple way to get them to cooperate. This new technique (well, new to a lot of us, anyway) makes so much sense, you’ll wonder why we all haven’t been doing it already.
Here’s the specific, two-part strategy, according to Michaeleen Doucleff, author of Hunt, Gather, Parent, along with why it’s so beneficial both for you and for their later success in life.
On February 18, 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover, the most complex scientific robot to ever journey to Mars, finally landed. A suite of experiments onboard are fine-tuned to discover new secrets, confirm theories, and set up a future mission to return precious Martian soil to Earth.
But one of these experiments, buried in the cornucopia of science taking place on the SUV-sized rover, stems from a decades-long effort to record the sonic landscape on another planet. NASA is sending two microphones, the Entry Descent and Landing Microphone and the SuperCam microphone, to Mars. For the first time, we will be able to listen to the sounds of Percy’s Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) sequence—the most gut-wrenching seven minutes of any Mars mission—and if all goes according to plan, the whistling winds of the Martian landscape itself.
I chatted with the two engineers who’ve made it their mission to record the sounds of the Red Planet. You can listen to an edited version of our conversations and the story behind Percy’s microphones in the audio player below, or read the following transcript.
NASA’s Perseverance rover is ready to make its debut on the Red Planet. The intrepid spacecraft is designed to search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, collect geologic samples for return to Earth and send the first helicopter into the skies of another world. That’s just the beginning.
For the first time ever, two microphones aboard the spacecraft—the Entry Descent and Landing Cam microphone and the SuperCam Microphone—will sample Mars’ sonic landscape. It could reshape our understanding of the Red Planet. It’s a project that has been decades in the making. One that traces its origins back to the mid-90s and the Mars Polar Lander Mission.
It all started years ago when I first learned my wife and I were going to be parents: I began collecting science-based parenting advice, both here on Inc.com and in my continuously updated (free) e-book, How to Raise Successful Kids, now in its 7th edition.
Shown are seven of the most interesting and useful studies.
My ex-wife and I divorced three years ago because of irreconcilable differences. We are fairly amicable, but we don’t talk unless it’s related to the kids. Before COVID I had weekends and holidays, and she had weekdays. My mom has cancer and lives with me, so once the pandemic started we agreed that the kids would stay at their mom’s house for the immediate future and my mom and I would have Zoom calls with them every day.
Now, for some context, my ex has been overweight for pretty much her entire life, even as a young child. Her parents were overweight, and they passed down their habits to her, as it so often goes. By the time we met, she was 250 pounds. Throughout our relationship, I encouraged her to take steps towards a healthier lifestyle, but she never wanted to. Our kids (7 and 10 years old) were on the heavy side of an average weight while my ex and I were still married. When we were together, I did most of the cooking and did my best to make sure that my kids ate nutrient-dense, healthy food, and that junk food was kept as an occasional treat. As we have been separated, though, my kids have slowly gotten more and more overweight.
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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus.
In recent weeks, Dr. Kali Cyrus has struggled with periods of exhaustion.
“I am taking a nap in between patients,” says Cyrus, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University. “I’m going to bed earlier. It’s hard to even just get out of bed. I don’t feel like being active again.”
Exhaustion is also one of the top complaints she hears from her patients these days. They say things like, “It’s just so hard to get out of bed” or “I’ve been misplacing things more often,” she says.
Some patients tell Cyrus they’ve been making mistakes at work. Some tell her they can “barely turn on the TV. ‘All I want to do is stare at the ceiling.’ ” Others say they are more irritable.
While some people who have had COVID-19 report brain fog and fatigue as lingering symptoms of their infection — what’s known as long COVID — mental health care providers around the U.S. are hearing similar complaints from people who weren’t infected by the virus. And many providers, like Cyrus, are feeling it themselves.
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Feelings of exhaustion, irritability, and mental fogginess are our bodies’ normal response to an abnormal year of pandemic life.
There are many simplistic but entertaining binaries by which to classify the types of people in the world, but one I find to be instructive is whether you believe in therapy. On the one hand, there are people like me, who exist in a somewhat constant state of telling people that they ought to at least consider seeing someone professionally. (I’ve personally found it so worthwhile that I don’t even think my friends need to have “real” problems to try it.) On the other hand are people like my mother, who just last week asked me, “Are you still seeing your … person? Aren’t you healed by now?” This may (doubly) explain why I am such a susceptible audience for Lori Gottlieb’s 2019 book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. The subtitle—A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed—makes clear that this book will attempt to invert our normal perception of therapists by putting its subject on the couch.
Gottlieb became a therapist relatively late in the game. As she chronicles in the more memoir-y sections of the book, she had several previous careers, including a false start in medical school and a long period as a journalist, before she decided to go back to school to become a clinical psychologist. Today, she combines journalism and therapy, most notably in her “Dear Therapist” advice column for the Atlantic, which itself somewhat makes the argument for therapy based on the fact that the questions are often far too complicated ever to be answered in the span of one response, though Gottlieb does her best. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone counters this particular issue by following a small handful of Gottlieb’s patients’ therapeutic journeys alongside her own journey as a therapist and as a patient.
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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by KatarzynaBialasiewicz/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
James' World 2 