Wonders will never cease! The New York Times has published an article pointing out the risks of cohabitation. Here we were, thinking that there was no downside to contemporary coupling when all the time a slippery slope was opening up.

The popular belief that moving in together before marriage is a good way to avoid divorce is simply not borne out by the facts, warns psychologist Meg Jay.

Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages -- and more likely to divorce -- than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.

Haven’t we all seen it? Dr Jay cites the case of a client, Jennifer, who lived with her boyfriend for four years and then married. Less than a year later she was looking for a divorce lawyer,… click here to read whole article and make comments

A couple of weeks ago a retired Greek pharmacist shot himself outside the country’s parliament in protest at austerity measures that include major cuts to pensions. But alongside this story of despairing protest comes news of youths who are adapting to their country’s plight by getting back to basics.

Applications to the American Farm School near Thessaloniki trebled last year and are expected to double this year. Many young Greeks have a patch of land inherited from an elderly parent or grandparent and it seems that they are looking to at least provide themselves with food.

Historically, the farm school's applicants had been children of farmers from the surrounding countryside, but now more and more city kids are expressing an interest: a sign that the tables are turning for this formerly unpopular career.

"To be honest, it was not my first choice," admitted Thanos Bizbiroulas, who… click here to read whole article and make comments

Australian doctors are calling for an inquiry into what has been labelled the “premature sexualisation of children in marketing and advertising”, with the Australian Medical Association arguing the practice is detrimental to child health and development.

Melinda Tankard Reist, author of a 2009 book on the sexualisation of girls, hopes that the doctors' voice will achieve what years of advocacy from other professionals has failed to do: get effective government regulation of advertising. She says that in Britain and France, these industries are under considerable pressure to change their ways following parliamentary inquiries into the sexualisation of children.

AMA president Dr Steve Hambleton says the proliferation of advertising images depicting images of young children along with messages that “were disturbing and sexually exploitative” are clear evidence that self-regulation by the advertising industry have failed.

Every day parents experience the huge attraction of social networks for children, and we are swamped by advice about what to do and what to avoid in this medium. Most of this advice ends by urging us to “bridge the digital generation gap” by familiarizing ourselves with the kids’ virtual world; witnessing the attitudes and values they develop while surfing, and by getting to know their digital friends, habits and preferences…

In the end, though, many of us are left with the question, Why? Why are social networks so attractive to the youngsters?

In her thesis "Adolescents in media planning: segmentation and knowledge of the target", Elena Izco of the University of Navarra has addressed this question systematically and has come up with five main reasons, each with potential opportunities and risks. Here they are:

Interactivity: Social networking develops many tasks simultaneously. Space and time are no longer barriers. Thanks to 2.0,… click here to read whole article and make comments

Is puberty before the age of 10 a “new normal” for girls? asks a long article in the New York Times magazine. The phenomenon of early breast budding and growth of pubic hair in girls as young as six has been studied since at least the late 1980s. Now, US researchers seem to be agreed that breast development is starting earlier. They are just not sure what it means, since the age of menarche (first period) has dropped only slightly -- from 12.8 years to 12.5.

There’s “early” and then there’s “very early” breast development -- the latter often distressing for parents, and for the little girls as they become aware that they are different. In extreme cases doctors will prescribe hormone shots to stop the process, but otherwise they are reluctant because this treatment carries a risk of osteoporosis and also reinforces to the child that there is something “wrong” with… click here to read whole article and make comments

New York magazine asked 27-year-old food lover Diane Chang to photograph everything she ate for a month. (Illustrations by Gluekit. Photographs courtesy of Diane Chang.)

As a recovering glutton—the word “foodie” is a tad too innocuous—I could hardly resist posting on this story by Michael Idov in New York magazine. It’s probably a good sign that I found it alternately boring and horrifying instead of entertaining. The lengthy (by internet standards) four-page essay on New York foodie—er… glutton -- culture begins:

On the Tuesday before we meet, Diane Chang sends me a list of places where she wants to eat in the coming week.

Then follows, in alphabetical order, a list of twenty restaurants. Yes, twenty. In a week. I don’t go out that often in a year. But clearly I am neither in Diane’s disposable income nor her disposable time brackets. I’ve never spent three hours eating… click here to read whole article and make comments

 

As debt threatens the security of nations and individuals, the rediscovery of thrift becomes urgent. The Institute for American Values is running a thrift project (the Centre for Thrift and Generosity) in conjunction with the John Templeton Foundation and last year staged the first national Thrift Week since the 1960s. The launch, seen in the video above, was hosted by the City of Philadelphia.

A study released by the IAV in January this year -- fifty months after the Great Recession began--shows that Americans have become somewhat thriftier but still have a long way to go.

The first ever U.S. Thrift Index measures six separate components of thrift: valuing hard work over luck; entrepreneurship; personal savings; avoiding credit card debt; municipal recycling; and charitable giving. For each one, it assigns a score from 0 to 100. The average of these scores is the overall thrift score.

In 2010, Americans scored 40.1 out of 100.… click here to read whole article and make comments

Remember the riots in UK cities last August? A panel appointed by the government to study the causes published a report today places a lot of the blame on lack of work opportunities for young adults, creating a sense that they have no “stake in society”. It also fingers poor parenting, school policies (about expulsion, for example), failure of the justice system to rehabilitate offenders (most of those prosecuted so far had a previous conviction), materialism, and suspicion of the police.

No surprises in that list, really, but it does raise questions about how those things are to be remedied. The government already has a Troubled Families Programme for the 120,000 families “bumping along at the bottom” of society, as the report describes them, but it seems most of the rioters didn’t come from those families.

Inevitably schools loom large in the report, which is concerned that kids are… click here to read whole article and make comments

Okay, here’s something positive about brain research. In fact, this piece from the New York Times Opinionator blog waxes lyrical on the subject, with good reason since it describes the brain’s response to love (and the withdrawal of it) throughout our lives. The information comes from the science of interpersonal neurobiology.

It starts -- or at least begins in a new way -- at birth, reports Diane Ackerman, in the intimate bond between the infant and mother.

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can’t show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn’t matter whose body is whose. Wordlessly, relying on the heart’s semaphores, the mother says all an infant needs to hear, communicating through eyes, face and voice. Thanks to advances in neuroimaging, we now have evidence that a… click here to read whole article and make comments

Research in psychology, human behavior, and sociology has yielded many a fascinating and sometimes hotly-disputed theory over the decades. So you can almost be forgiven for thinking you’re being hoodwinked when you read stuff like the following, especially on sites with names like Science Daily: 

A new study suggests that age-associated improvements in the ability to consider the preferences of others are linked with maturation of a brain region involved in self control.

You have to give top marks for obfuscation, at any rate. Translation: children tend to be selfish because they (specifically their brains) are immature. Wonders may never cease, but it occurred to me that this fact did not need scientific investigation, on account of its being (begging pardon) a no-brainer.

The findings, published by Cell Press in the March 8 issue of the journal Neuron, may help to explain why young children often… click here to read whole article and make comments