A study of thousands of mothers of children aged five and under found depression rates to be far higher in those aged 40 to 44 than among those who were younger.

Though the cause was unclear, anxiety in pregnancy could be a large factor, according to the researcher behind the study.

Older mothers and their babies are at a risk of a host of health problems and anxiety in pregnancy is known to raise the odds of depression afterwards.

Giulia Muraca, a PhD student at Canada’s University of British Columbia, studied almost 8,000 women who had given birth in the previous five years.

They were asked if they had been depressed over the past 12 months.

The group of women who gave birth while in their late 30s and early 40s were five times as likely to have been depressed than the mothers with similar lifestyles who were five years younger when they had their baby.

Miss Muraca also looked at women who hadn’t had babies in the past five years and found that age appeared to cut their odds of depression.

This may be because age tends to bring with it more stability in both finances and relationships.

But for women who have children when they are aged 35-plus, these benefits may be cancelled out by health fears, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference heard.

Older mothers run a greater risk of problem pregnancies, miscarriage and stillbirths.

Deterioration of their eggs with time also leaves them at greater risk of having babies with Down’s syndrome and other genetic disorders.

And their age makes them more prone to arthritis, depression, cancer and heart attacks as they bring up their children.

Postponing motherhood also affects partners – men’s sperm counts deteriorate gradually each year and children of older men have an increased risk of schizophrenia.

Doctors say the optimum age for giving birth starts at 20 and ends at 35.

Despite the risks, though, more and more women are delaying motherhood.

The number of babies born to women aged 35 to 39 in England and Wales more than doubled between 1990 and 2010, to 115,841 a year.

Births to women aged 40 to 44 almost trebled, official statistics show.

Miss Muraca stressed that her work is preliminary and the psychological risks of late motherhood need more research, but added: ‘There is a lot of rhetoric talking about all the biological risk and that is really discomforting for women.’

Older mothers may also suffer from loneliness and a lack of support, if most of their friends had their children years earlier.

The researcher said that another possibility is that women who have spent years building their career may struggle to cope with giving up their job, or find the adjustment of returning to work after having their baby hard to take.

Miss Muraca added that if her findings are confirmed by other studies, it could lead to older mothers being monitored for signs of depression to catch any problems earlier.

By Fiona Macrae

Source: Mail on Sunday – http://goo.gl/AViTq

The flip side is that even as the content in many of these blogs has changed and the writers’ influence has exploded, the label has stuck. 

I asked a group of female Washington writers about the term last week. 

“It’s demeaning,” said Shannon Frankel, who chronicles her stay-at-home life after working in a law firm on her blog, But I Do Have a Law Degree. 

“’Mommy’ is the name only your children have the right to call you. When someone other than your child calls you that, it’s an intrusion, a trespass,” said Valerie Young, who writes the public policy blog Your (Wo)Man in Washington. 

Monica Gallagher Sakala, who writes for Wired Momma and the Huffington Post, has a different view: “It’s a label that exists. Why do we have to label it as negative? Why can’t we own it and make it what we want?” 

Sakala e-mailed me to add, “If we as women and mothers buy into this idea that mommy blogging is shrill and a negative label, then how can we expect anyone else to take us seriously?” 

Bamberger told me that when it comes to politics, female bloggers have made little impact in the public policy sphere. Take the issues that are of importance to many of these writers, such as paid leave, subsidized child care and reliable health care: Is any candidate talking seriously about these issues? 

Put another way by Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak: “The problem is that anything that’s written in a mommy blog is not being read by men. The issues are going to be marginalized.”

By Janice D’Arcy

Source: SILive.com – http://goo.gl/cxyOC

“You let him eat that?” she asked. When I nodded yes she continued, “We don’t let our children have any sugar.”

It’s not as though I’m a junk-food fanatic, but during the terrible twos, cookies did tend to be my go-to reward.

And while I breastfed both of my children for months, I have to admit, when I later found out she was still nursing her 3-year-old I realized we weren’t destined to become best friends.

Playdates with new mom friends can seem a lot like dating; both the excitement that comes from starting a friendship and the dread from knowing something can go horribly wrong. When parenting styles clash, a cool mom we met at the park can suddenly seem like a mother from another planet.

It’s one thing to hang out with friends who make different choices from our own, but when someone else questions our parenting skills, the mommy-defense mechanism springs into action.

Susan Newman, Ph.D., a social psychologist and author of more than a dozen books about parenting, explains it like this: “There’s a part of us that thinks that maybe our friend is right. It brings up a lot of questions and possibly guilt.”

Did I feel guilty about offering cookies as bribes? Perhaps. But while we may bristle when another mom disciplines our child or critiques our parenting, speaking out immediately is definitely not the way to go.

I found that out the hard way when the 3-year-old son of a close friend hit another child with a plastic shovel on the playground. When my friend didn’t intervene, I took the shovel away and reprimanded her child. A heated argument began about whether we should meddle in each other’s affairs.

When someone gives us unsolicited advice, Newman advises saying something like, “I never thought of handling the situation that way” or “I’ll consider that.” After the fact you might say, “If my child is misbehaving, why don’t you let me handle that?” It can go a long way in diffusing the tension, Newman says.

While my friend and I were able to mend the friendship, sometimes it’s easier to spend time with our mom friends alone and leave the children at home.

“Anytime we do anything with our kids it turns into a complete nightmare,” one mom recently told me about a former close friend.

She realized they’d be better off hanging out without the kids when her friend’s daughter used crayons to deface the patio of a restaurant where they were eating. The girl’s mother said, “Well, kids will be kids.”

It nearly ended the friendship, but conflicts don’t need to.

“An overriding rule,” according to Newman, “is to evaluate the friendship and decide how important it is. If it’s very important we should handle the situation very carefully.”

How have you handled parenting-style clashes with your friends?

By Kim Brown Reiner, a New York City mom who tries not to speak to her 5-year-old daughter or 3-year-old son in the morning until she drinks coffee. In addition to freelance writing, she works as an educational consultant.

Source: msnbc.com – http://goo.gl/fHpSA

Take for example our recent findings of a study that looked at over 3,000 preschoolers in the state ofFlorida. We found that preschoolers’ early writing skills – their ability to copy letters, shapes, and numbers – significantly predicted both their grades and standardized test scores in second grade reading and math. As a researcher, this finding was important! Public schools all over the country are dropping handwriting from their curriculum and technology has taken over the need to write anything with pencil and paper. And while newspapers and media outlets highlight this work, parents all over the country are wondering, “Is this one more thing I have to work on with my child?”

As a parent of three young children, I get it. Parents spend time reading, counting, playing outside, doing puzzles, doing extracurricular activities, and finishing homework – now the handwriting too? Do our findings mean that kids with poor writing skills in preschool are doomed to fail? Of course not! In fact, every time I talk about these results, someone inevitably says, “I had horrible handwriting when I was a kid and I did really well in school.” At this point, our study has prompted fewer answers and more questions. Do the findings overwhelmingly demonstrate that teaching handwriting in preschool will result in an improvement in academic skills in the later years? I’m not so sure, just yet. I am comfortable with the notion that early writing skills can serve at least as an indicator of later achievement.

So as researchers work to uncover the underlying mechanisms that link early writing skills to later academic achievement, should you work with your child (or students) on their writing? Sure! It’s important to note that occupational therapists who design handwriting curricula would argue that teaching handwriting is a very specific process. I’ll leave that to the experts for now. As parents, I suggest we provide children with as many opportunities to engage with writing tools as possible. Don’t deny them writing experiences because: (a) you think your electronic device is more “fun” and/or educational or (b) you will have to invest in wall and carpet cleaner.

Here are some quick tips to provide kids with opportunities to write:

Make sure you have a lot of writing materials around your home.

Markers, pencils, pens, and crayons should be made easily accessible to your children, as well as coloring books, paper, composition books, journals, and/or notebooks. There are plenty of books out there that encourage children to draw, make shapes, and trace letters and numbers. Have a few of them available for them to use at their leisure.  Easels, with both dry erase markers and chalk, are often low cost purchases that encourage children to draw, write, and play (more on that below). Going outside? Take sidewalk chalk with you and draw some family pictures while practicing writing the names of each family member. Going to the zoo? Help your child make a list of the animals you think you’ll see and have them check them off as you go along. Keep in mind that spelling accuracy is not important here. It’s the act of “writing” that is the target.

Use writing in play

Imaginary play also provides opportunities for children to write. Be creative!  Notice that doctors write in your medical file and write prescriptions (albeit with horrible penmanship?).  If your child is playing doctor with her dolls, give her a “file” to write on and a pad to write “prescriptions.” Waitresses take orders and you sign a bill every time you go to a restaurant. Serving breakfast? Have your children order from their “menu” that they wrote and sign their “bill.” Finally, what do kids like more than playing teacher? That easel you purchased is going to come in handy now!

Be a role model for your child

Do you write on paper anymore? Do you take all your notes, type up your grocery list, and send emails on your electronic device. Of course you do! Don’t think your four-year-old isn’t noticing. In fact, chances are he is picking up your old, battery-less cell phone (that has now become his toy) and is pretending to type up his grocery list as you head out the door. Be a role model – leave written notes around the house and write a recipe on an index card together. Write out your grocery list next week rather than typing it into your phone.  See if your four-year-old wants to make a list of his own just like you do.

And don’t force them. Kids have different levels of interest and ability.  They’ll come around.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Laura Dinehart.

Editor’s Note: Laura Dinehart is an assistant professor of early childhood education at Florida International University. Her research focuses on the development and early academic outcomes of children from birth to 5 years of age.

Source: CNN – http://goo.gl/TjhFh

Since the start of the school year, the 29 children have posted short messages of 140 characters or less about a daily activity to a joint Twitter feed, which has 88 followers, most of them parents.

”We gathered snow to see how it turns into water,” reads one tweet from the five-year-old students of the Albert-Camus kindergarten in Talence, in south-west France.

Another tweet references the cake they baked – the ”galette des rois” – which in France is traditionally made in January around the Epiphany holiday.

The children’s teacher came up with the idea to teach them to recognise the alphabet in different formats – cursive, keyboard, screen – and to learn to move from oral to written word.

Each day the process is the same: the children propose topics and vote on a winner. All pupils then try their hand at writing a tweet, before the teacher combines them into a final post that two children type into the computer.

”We love writing on the computer like grown-ups,” said five-year-old Emma.

Teacher Philippe Guillem said the goal was not just to teach the children but parents as well. About 80 per cent of the parents have agreed to follow the class Twitter account, where at the start of the year only one had subscribed to the service and only a handful had Facebook profiles.

Source: The Canberra Times – http://goo.gl/B319u

In the week just past the FTC came out with a series of statements expressing concern over children’s privacy from app developers who are collecting their data. This has resulted in a swift response from children’s app collective Moms with Apps who have developed a privacy disclosure program to share with parents about all the things their members’ apps don’t do in relation to privacy.

And, after my article on the curation of children’s content I have had many emails from people who are sharing with me their tools for curating children’s content, which are all about keeping children safe.

Our obsession with online safety for children is excessive. It is driven by group-think and fear, generated by media and interested parties who often ignore any rigorous evidence-based approach to the issues, or even bother to explore a simple risk analysis. Back in 2007 I wrote a book called Idolising Children, wherein I argued that we have an unhealthy obsession with children and youth culture. An obsession that sees adults trying to preserve an idea of childhood and youth that doesn’t actually exist while simultaneous trying to act out their own youthful fantasies and cling to idealized concepts of youth. It is all about lotions, potions and younger looking skin. It is about what we as adults want childhood to be – innocent and stress free. Rather than recognizing it for what it is – the process of learning, of taking risks and making mistakes on the way to becoming a capable and confident adult.

When it comes to issues of online safety and children why do we never ask the questions: what are the real risks to children online relevant to their ages and stages of development? And, why are so few people questioning whether those risks are actually real and whether our concern is warranted?

One person who is doing the work is researcher and youth advocate, danah boyd. You may know her as  @zephoria on Twitter. With over a decade of research and data-driven evidence to back her up, danah is challenging the myths and assumptions we are making about children and young people online.

I recently heard danah give a lecture on young people and privacy and her overall message is very clear. Essentially she says that the internet is simply a mirror of our society that due to its hyperconnectivity is amplified. This means our concerns about online bullying, online sexual predators and our children stumbling across inappropriate content on the world wide web are simply heightened concerns that have always existed in the world – real and virtual.

In her talk at Melbourne’s RMIT University she gave some clear examples from her research. For example, bullying has been an issue for children for decades, one we have largely ignored. The evidence base suggests that there has not been a dramatic increase in bullying because of the internet, but there has been a significant increase in the visibility of bullying because of the internet. As bullying is more visible we are hearing more stories and reports about it in the media. And, because we hear more stories and reports about it, we begin to worry about it more.

Most striking was Danah’s admission that her literature review of all the studies on online sexual predators that she completed a few years ago was ignored by leading legal and policy makers. She sums up the findings in a recent article in the New York Times:

“The most deadly misconception about American youth has been the sexual predator panic,” she said. “The model we have of the online sexual predator is this lurking man who reaches out on the Internet and grabs a kid. And there is no data that support that. The vast majority of sex crimes against kids involve someone that kid trusts, and it’s overwhelmingly family members.”

This point of view is not new. It is the same argument that British sociologist Frank Furedi put forward in his book Paranoid Parenting.  (He is also the author of the excellent book, Culture of Fear.) Furedi has long pointed to the disconnect between how we want the best for our children, but unwittingly limit their development and their ability to learn and engage with the world because of an unrealistic and unfounded fear for their safety. The fear that we can buy into as parents means we are less likely to support our children taking appropriate and measured risks from everything to playing on play equipment to their first trip into the city in their early teens. He has been saying this for 10 years. In that ten years things have only got worse and like so many parts of our lives we have taken those unfounded fears online.

And, for intelligent and engaged parents, that is the core issue: the impact our need to control, interject and govern our children’s lives is having on their ability to learn and develop into capable and thriving adults.

What do I mean?

Well, Richard Louv, author and journalist, has pointed out in his ongoing work that started with Last Child in the Woods that children are spending far less time outside, far less time in the environment and in places out of the gaze of adults. While they are the generation facing the greatest environmental challenges of modern times, they have a greater disconnect with the outdoors and the environment than any generation previous.

Limiting our children’s ability to explore online worlds is the same. Children who develop media literacy and information literacy skills by being allowed to explore and engage with online environments from an early age, in ways appropriate to their development, will be at a greater advantage because of the skills and knowledge they will attain through doing that. Children supported to explore and search for information online will actually be better equipped to manage and avoid inappropriate content. Of course, there will be those who claim that these children will have the skills to find content that parents would prefer them not to see – and perhaps they will. But, if they are respected and supported in their development and approach, if parents and teachers support the development of responsible digital citizens, then the values these young people take into the online environment may look very different from the comment walls of YouTube. Children, in most cases, do not act in the ways we imagine they will act. Our assumptions and our desire to think the worst of the worst are usually wrong in most instances.

We don’t need a Safer Internet Day. We need investment in other days. We need to change the language to address the fact we are introducing children to online environments through a len of fear. We need:

- A Digital Media Literacy Day that celebrates and educates the need for parents and teachers to facilitate children’s ability to deconstruct advertising, to create their own media and stories, to understand the digital environments and how to best navigate them.

- A Parent-Child Internet Day that encourages and supports parents and children to find spaces online and activities that allow them to collaborate and work together using digital media that is useful and beneficial and meaningful to building better relationships and a healthier view of what the online world is about.

- A Danah Boyd Day where governments and companies have to listen and consider the research and work of this researcher, rather than ignore it because public opinion would prefer that they turned the internet into a walled garden for children and young people with limited equipment and places to play.

We need, as parents, to help our children develop the values and the resilience and the capacity to engage with the online world unassisted. This is a complex process that we will never get exactly right, but we need to work with each other to try to share positive stories of our successes, to combat the amplified stories of fear the media share.

In fact, for me that is what GeekDad does. We are point where a community of engaged and interested parents come to share the best of technology, digital media and parenting. We celebrate amazing stories and share a wide range of great parenting tools (digital and analogue), we think intelligently about our decisions and responses and advocate for better content for children on a daily basis on this site. All this in our own geeky, whimsical and fun ways.

Let us all keep doing that. That is probably the best thing to do.

By Daniel Donahoo

Source: Wired – http://goo.gl/xhEsU

Instead, she has spent the past six weeks trying to get 20 3- to 5-year-olds in her Head Start classroom at a Worcester preschool to ponder the properties of water. Leaning over water tables, they find out which blocks float and why paper boats sink. And they get a bit wet along the way.

On the surface, the switch in topics may not seem significant. But what Nelson is doing represents the beginning of a change in preschool education as more schools introduce science, technology, engineering, and math – the so-called STEM subjects – to students so young that many don’t even read yet.

Will her efforts turn out the next Bill Gates? That she doesn’t know. But Nelson does want her students to be better prepared to compete when they enter the workforce.

“Any kind of job is going to involve a lot more STEM,’’ she said.

Preschools have long followed the practice of elementary education and dabbled with bits and pieces of science-based teaching in their everyday learning: Playing with blocks, for example, learning numbers, and coloring are all aspects of engineering, math, and science.

But what is happening now is that such lessons are becoming formalized within a preschool curriculum. And within the early childhood development community there is a greater emphasis on training teachers to turn simple play into lessons that encourage critical thinking.

The push to focus on science, technology, engineering, and math in preschools follows decades of advocacy by education experts, policy makers, and politicians who have long complained about the poor state of science and math education in American classrooms.

Many corporations promote the STEM subjects as a way to boost the number of scientists, computer programmers, engineers, and mathematicians coming out of American universities.

The percent of college graduates with science and engineering degrees has declined modestly over the past 45 years, but more importantly, the United States is lagging far behind globally. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks the nation 24th among 31 of its member countries in terms of employed 25- to 34-year-olds with degrees in science, math, or related fields.

The Obama administration is attempting to change that.

In the president’s budget plan, presented to Congress Feb. 13, he asked for $80 million to train 100,000 math and science teachers in hopes the effort will result in 1 million more college graduates with degrees in those subjects.

Many specialists say the preschool focus is an extension of the greater emphasis on math and science education that has become a matter of national policy to keep the United States competitive in a technology-driven global marketplace.

In Massachusetts, the state issued new goals in 2010 to improve science and math education from the preschool level through high school, to improve test scores in those subjects, and to encourage more college-bound students to pursue them as majors.

“The focus on STEM in early education is new, but it’s part of an effort to keep the focus on engineering so that we graduate more people in engineering,’’ said Cathleen Finn, International Business Machines Corp.’s New England manager for corporate affairs. “That sets the stage for awareness as kids go through school.’’

But education experts stress that preschools need to strike the right balance between play and instruction. And, many say, unstructured time on the playground is an important part of early education.

Even so, a growing body of research suggests young children are hungry for such knowledge. The 2009 report “Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood,’’ from the National Research Council in Washington, said that “well before first grade, children can learn the ideas and skills that support later, more complex mathematics understanding.’’

Children at this age are “naturally, instinctively, motivated to try to figure out how the world works,’’ said Karen Worth, who teaches early-childhood education at Wheelock College. “So it’s an area in which kids are interested, curious, and therefore likely to push the cognitive processes that will help them.’’

While she supports increasing science-related teaching at the preschool level, Worth said it should not be done in service of turning out more engineers.

She said such teaching helps young minds develop so they can pursue any number of subjects and improve their vocabulary and literacy skills.

“It is the field in which we can create the most cognitively challenging work that promotes the child’s most basic abilities,’’ Worth added.

The growing focus on science is most apparent in Head Start, a federally funded program for low-income children, since those programs adhere to government guidelines that emphasize math and science. What’s more, there has been an increase in grant money available to promote STEM in low-income communities.

On a recent weekday morning at the ABCD Mattapan Head Start Center, Finn toured seven classrooms for 140 children from low-income families that had child-size computer stations IBM donated as part of its KidSmart Early Learning Program. Since 1998, IBM has spent $133 million to provide 60,000 computers to schools and nonprofit organizations in 60 countries.

In one room, 5-year-old Amaya Jones-DeJesus sat snugly next to her playmate, 4-year-old Jada Jean, on a blue bench in front of the computer – which is built into a colorful kid-proof encasement that could survive all the abuse a 4-year-old can deliver. They squirmed while working with Janessa Jackson .

Amaya moved the mouse and clicked on the words and pictures on the screen, and Jada poked the monitor. “It helps do science,’’ said Amaya, “and playing and rhyming.’’

But some educators, such as Worth of Wheelock College, oppose saturating preschools with computers. She believes the most effective way to teach young children about the sciences is to have teachers guide them as they experiment with the simplest objects, such as using blocks to construct a mountain.

As much as she supports it, Worth said there is no evidence that starting science, technology, engineering, and math in preschool, elementary school, or even middle school primes the pipeline for engineers.

Still, many technology companies are investing millions of dollars in the hopes it will.

John Stuart, senior vice president of education for PTC, a Needham software company, said it is essential to get children interested in the STEM subjects early, so they consider those subjects for future careers.

PTC focuses much of its outreach on elementary school students and has donated $1 million to expand an after-school program that includes a contest in which students use LEGO blocks to build robots. In the more than 20 years the software company has been involved in science education, Stuart said, company officials have increasingly targeted younger students.

“If you haven’t started to hook kids early on,’’ he said, “you could lose them.’’

By Michael B. Farrell

Source: Boston Globe – http://goo.gl/eKGZn

However, I’ve never considered destroying these items to further punish her for not doing her chores, for being disrespectful or for being ungrateful. But that’s what one father did. Tommy Jordan shot his daughter’s laptop — nine times — after he found a profanity-laced tirade she has written on her Facebook page. 

In her posting, Jordan’s daughter, Hannah, complained that she feels like a “slave” because she is asked to make coffee for her parents and perform various household chores. 

“We have a cleaning lady for a reason,” the daughter wrote. “Her name is Linda, not Hannah.” 

She went on to write: “I’m tired of picking up after you. You tell me at least once a day that I need to get a job. You could just pay me for all the (expletive) that I do around the house. … I have no idea how I have a life. I’m going to hate to see the day when you get too old to wipe your (expletive) and you call me, asking for help. I won’t be there.” 

In a video just over eight minutes posted on Facebook and YouTube, and occasionally peppered with some profanity, Jordan gave as good as he got from his 15-year-old daughter. His video has gone viral, and now experts and parents are taking sides on whether his action deserves a bravo or is an example of poor parenting.

“Pay you for chores? Are you out of your mind? You’re 15 going on 16 years old,” he says. “You want things for your laptop. You want a new battery. You want a new (power) cord. You want a new camera. You want a new phone. You want a new iPod, but you won’t get off your lazy (expletive) to get, to even look for a job. The only job that you have applied to is the one I made you apply to because I got the application for you.” 

Having a sense of entitlement might be a rite of passage for a child, but it’s up to parents to find constructive and instructive ways to teach them gratitude. I wouldn’t have destroyed the laptop (I’m too frugal for that), but I identify with Jordan’s frustration with a child who feels entitled. 

Many of our children are overindulged, even by the best of parents, says Jean Illsley Clarke, a parent educator and researcher who has studied the impact of overindulging children. She’s also the co-author of “How Much Is Enough?: Everything You Need to Know to Steer Clear of Overindulgence and Raise Likeable, Responsible and Respectful Children.” 

“Overindulging is ubiquitous,” Clarke said in an interview. 

Our culture bombards children with advertising messages that enough isn’t good enough. And because their brains aren’t fully developed, children have difficulty not giving in to the feeling that they need more, Clarke said. And parents compound the problem by overindulging. 

So how do you know if you are overindulging your children? 

Clarke says ask yourself if your spending on your children is taking up a disproportionate amount of family resources. Additionally, whose needs are really being met? Are you buying your child things to make up for what you felt you lacked as a child? 

Clarke said if she were mentoring Jordan, she would have asked him to think of other ways to communicate his disapproval over his daughter’s posting. Nonetheless, she applauded his actions. 

“Thank goodness a parent finally took a stand,” Clarke said. “Maybe this is what it took to get his daughter’s attention. What right do all these people have to criticize this father? 
Chances are many of them are overindulgent.” 

On Clarke’s website, www.overindulgence.info, you’ll find some interesting research and resource material to help you avoid overindulging your children. Clarke said research she’s conducting shows that children who were highly overindulgent grow up to have life goals focused on money, image and fame. They are not interested in making the world a better place or helping other people unless it directly helps them in some way. Jordan was scared for his daughter, she believes. 

“My take is it takes a really good dad to go to this extreme,” she said. “Think how much easier it would have been to look at what she did and to ignore it and say, ‘Ah she’s just 15.’” 

Perhaps Jordan should have kept his daughter’s punishment private. Maybe shooting the laptop was over the top. But at least he did something bold to reach a child who has lost perspective on how good she had it.

By Michelle Singletary

Source: Worcester Telegram – http://goo.gl/871ha

Take for instance the television set. Just the other day, my family and I were enjoying a good movie on our relatively new flat screen TV set when one of the kids said: “We need a bigger TV. I cannot see all the action.”

The thing was, we were all so excited when we bought this TV set not so long ago. Back then, the comments we heard were “Wow, this TV is so awesome!” and “I feel like I’m watching a movie in the cinema!”

We were simply awed by the sheer size of the screen. The actions came alive and we even had to watch from a greater distance so that our eyes did not get all watery from the flashing screen. It sure beat the small images we used to watch on the old TV set. It had grown on us!

And today, barely two years later, I agree that the new TV set seems smaller. Yes, it all sounds familiar. Before we bought the 29-inch TV set, we were happily enjoying the 21-inch and I could not imagine how we had put up with the 14-inch screen before that!

That is just one of  our human traits – to adapt to a situation quickly and seamlessly – either for the better or for the worse. In this case, it seems that the overwhelming size of the last TV screen has become the new standard.

This may not be a bad thing if we use it correctly as it will mean we’ll be driven to do better. However, it also can cause us to be permanently stuck in the race for satisfaction through the acquisition of bigger and newer things. People will work harder so that they will be able to afford bigger houses and more luxurious cars. But while the need for bigger and newer possessions grows, this is not so when it comes to happiness.

The price we pay: Less time with the family and even less satisfaction with ourselves.
Need for bigger things

Soon after we have acquired all those better things, the cycle repeats itself. We see a bigger screen TV set on sale at the local store and suddenly that TV set at home does not seem big enough anymore. And the old car feels sluggish and inadequate in all departments.

Successful companies are those that succeed at making us feel dissatisfied with what we already have.

We really need to get out of this endless cycle of chasing after material wealth and equating it with happiness.We all have families, friends, close relatives and neighbours. Have we ever stopped to think we can find happiness when we spend time getting to know them better or helping them out in times of need? This is, in fact, a very powerful strategy to find that elusive happiness.

Better returns

We get bigger returns when we invest in family and friends instead of gadgets. Talking to the neighbours, watching the kids at play or listening to them tell you about what had happened at school is entertainment that we don’t have to pay for.

We may even learn a few tips or tricks that you won’t see on TV, not even on the educational channel. There are many real life feelings and emotions that we can experience through interacting with people that we will never get from television, no matter how big the screen is.

The real thing

Movies, documentaries or even soap operas can provide some value to our lives but they are no match for the real thing. Bigger TV sets allow us to watch shows in more colours than we can ever imagine but they do not guarantee greater happiness. Only healthy relationships with our loved ones and the important people in our lives can do so.

Their numbers and, hopefully, sizes may not change much over the years, but the happiness that they give us will grow, year after year, without the need to replace them with “bigger or newer” models.

By Zaid Mohamad

Source: New Straits Times - http://goo.gl/uUVIf