Should you love your children unconditionally or should you dole out love only when they behave? Do your children become better adults if you are selective about your approvals - like many of the new parenting advice books say?
Author Alfie Kohn wrote an interesting article for The New York Times wrote about some interesting studies on conditional parenting:
In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear.
It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.
In a companion study, Dr. Assor and his colleagues interviewed mothers of grown children. With this generation, too, conditional parenting proved damaging. Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.
Our pal Asylum blog has a fantastic article about how some of the world's most bizarre riots got started. Like this one in New Delhi, India in 2007, that was caused by ... monkeys!
In New Delhi, where monkeys are a touch more revered and tolerated than they would be in most countries, rhesus macaques, numbering over 20,000 in the city, have a history of biting people. They've also been known to break into hospitals to pull out I.V. feeding tubes and drink the liquid themselves (because monkeys are diabolical like that). Somewhat more impressive is that the monkeys have a political agenda and actually killed the deputy mayor of New Delhi by pushing him off a balcony.
Unlike most riots, this one was fought the old-fashioned way, with more monkeys. Langurs, which are just bigger monkeys, have been brought into the city and strategically placed around important buildings to scare off the nuisance monkeys. Never has a more awesome solution to a problem been devised.
What did you do when you "became a man"? -
No, I don't mean losing your virginity, though in many cultures, coming
of age is intricately linked to sexual maturity. Did you celebrate by
buying a Lotto ticket? Drink a yard glass full of beer? Become a Bar Mitsvah?
Well, weaklings, be thankful that you didn't grow up as an aborigine
in Australia, in the Satere Mawé tribe in the Amazon, or in the
Sepik River tribe of Papua New Guinea. As you can see below, some cultures
take the rites of manhood very, very seriously.
Let's take a look at six of the Strangest Coming of Age Rituals in the
World:
Walkabout
In the walkabout, adolescent Aborigine boys are sent to live in the wilderness
for as long as six months. It's not just about camping - they go on a
spiritual journey to trace their ancestor's songlines, which include navigation
instructions and other ancient wisdoms encoded in songs.
To become men in Amazon's Satere Mawé tribe, boys as young as
twelve have to first wear ceremonial gloves filled with stinging bullet
ants. They're called not bullet ants without a very good reason: being
stung by these suckers feels very much like getting shot. Each ant packs
neurotoxins that cause pain 30 times more agonizing than the sting of
a common wasp.
And if you think that's bad enough, wearing the gloves once just doesn't
cut it - you have to wear it for 10 minutes 20 times to become a man ...
Steve Backshall went through the ritual and described it in The
Sunday Times:
I had suffered several hundred stings, and all of a sudden I went
beyond pain. The sensations are not describable using simple words or
metaphors, so I’ll just try to describe how I reacted.
First, I started wailing, then, once that had passed, the floodgates
opened — deep, guttural sobbing, uncontrollable shaking, writhing,
convulsing. You could see the neurotoxin kicking in, my muscles starting
to palpitate, my eyelids becoming heavy and drooping, my lips going
numb. I started to drool, and suddenly I wasn’t responding to
anything at all. My legs wouldn’t hold me up, and our doctor was
shouting at me to keep moving and not to give in to the urge to lie
down and let it take me.
If there’d been a machete to hand, I’d have chopped
off my arms to escape the pain. The other boys were in a similar state,
but, interestingly, my host, who had been through the ritual before,
seemed far more in control.
It took three hours for the pain to ease a little, and shortly
after that I was back playing footie with the kids — though with
a hand clasped in each armpit and a pause every few minutes to scream
a bit. Twelve hours later, my hands were swollen up like inflated washing-up
gloves. If I pressed a thumb into them, it took two minutes for the
impression to disappear from the fluid-swollen flesh.
You don't have to go to remote corners of the world to find this next
ritual. Circumcision, the cutting of the foreskin of the penis, is practiced
(or forced upon, depending on your perspective) by as many as 1 in 3 males
in the world.
There is a lot of controversy about circumcising a male infant right
after birth, but at least the baby is too young to remember the painful
ordeal. Nay, as a coming of age ritual in Turkey (amongst other cultures),
circumcision is practiced on adolescent boys.
The origin of circumcision is lost in time. The most commonly accepted
version is that circumcision came from ancient Egyptians, who noticed
that a snake is reborn after it sheds its skin. And what part of the male
anatomy is closest to a snake? You got the general idea ...
British zoologist Desmond Morris noted in the documentary "The Human
Sexes" (clip above) that "I can't help feeling that if male
circumcision didn't exist today and someone tried to introduce it, they'd
be arrested for child abuse. But it's traditional role as a major rite
of passage is too entrenched to bow to common sense or objective medical
opinion."
In the tiny South Pacific island of Pentecost, boys as young as five
years old engage in a tradition that can be best described as the ancient
precursor to modern day's bungee jumping.
In Naghol (N'gol) or the land diving ritual, suicidally brave men jump
from makeshift rickety towers as high as 100 feet up in the air with vines
tied around their ankles. Land diving is kind of a multipurpose ritual:
a rite of passage, a way to appease the gods to ensure a good yam harvest,
and now, a tourist attraction.
So it's like bungee jumping - big deal, you think. Well, actually it's
a little bit more complicated than that. The whole point of land diving
is that the jumper's head touch the ground. But obviously if you're the
jumper, you'd want that to be as briefly done as possible: if your head
doesn't touch the ground, then it'll be a bad yam harvest. If your head
touch too much ground, the yam will be blessed but you'll die. The difference
between a good jump and a fatal one is about 4 inches of vine. It's no
surprise then, that a jumper is allowed to say anything he wants to anyone
before the jump and not be held responsible for his words (Source).
In the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the Matausa tribesmen believe that
in order for timid boys to become brave men and attract women, they have
to expel the contaminating female blood that they got from their mothers
during childbirth. In order to do that, they undergo a brutal bloodletting
rituals that involve shoving canes down their throats, sharp reeds up
their nostrils and plunging sharp arrows repeatedly into their tongues.
If you think that the initiation rites above are bad, this one is downright
horrifying: the crocodile scarification of the Sepik River tribe of Papua
New Guinea (what is up with Papua New Guinea?!)
I'll leave the National Geographic video clip above to fill you in on
the details (warning: it's TERRIFYING!), but suffice it to say it involves
getting hundreds of razor cuts on their bodies to get that fashionable
"crocodile skin" look.
______
Obviously, the article above only covered coming of age rituals for men.
This doesn't mean that women don't have it rough - many coming of age
rituals for girls are very physically demanding, like Na'ii'ees or the
Apache Sunrise Ceremony, or the downright horrible ones like the Sunna
circumcision or female genital mutilation practiced in many parts of Africa.
I'd be the first to admit that the article is woefully incomplete (Cracked
also has an article
on this - I've taken steps not to repeat many of theirs) - if you know
of any other strange coming of age rituals, please add them to the comment.
Ah, it's been a sad few days. Two days ago, Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug - who some say is the most important man of the twentieth century (his discoveries led to much improved crop yields, thus saving a lot of the world's population) - died at the age of 95.
More about Borlaug: The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives
Patrick Swayze, the hunky actor who danced his way into moviegoers' hearts with "Dirty Dancing" and then broke them with "Ghost," died Monday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57.
"Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months," said a statement released Monday evening by his publicist, Annett Wolf. Swayze died in Los Angeles, Wolf said, but declined to give further details.
Granted, Borlaug and Swazye are of different leagues, but both are giants in their respective fields. RIP. (Photo: Alan Light [Flickr])
If you look at his paintings, Bill Guffey may seem like the well-traveled artist. There are paintings of the landscape of Saint Martin la Plaine in France, houses in Anchorage, Alaska, and other far away places - but Bill have never set foot in any of them. Instead, he simply fired up his trusty Google Street View to find vistas to paint!
Ki Mae Heussner of ABC News Technology & Science has the story of how Google offered views of the world to a Kentucky artist:
To reach the closest Wal-Mart, Guffey said he needs at least 30 minutes in the car. But with 30 seconds on his computer, he can fly around the world with Google Street View and paint any place his cursor lands.
Not only does the mapping tool give Guffey and other users a street-level window to many places in the world, it lets them navigate 360-degree horizontal and 290-degree vertical unbroken panoramas.
"I live in a very rural area," the 45-year-old said of the Burkesville, Ky. home he shares with his wife and two daughters. "Here, I can go out and I can paint cows all day, barns all day … With Street View, I can find things I normally wouldn't see here."
Sofia Atrill's cat Humphrey is the real life version of the cat comic character Garfield: he eats only lasagna!
Just like the character Garfield, Humphrey the cat refuses to eat anything else and consumes three portions of the pasta dish a day.
The bizarre obsession started when Humphrey was a kitten and stumbled across a plate of lasagne.
His owner, Sofia Atrill, from North London, says: “In the beginning I tried to alter the recipe and make it with cat food instead of the British beef mince my husband and I enjoy but of course he noticed.”
In the 1970s, cheap sonosheets (phonograph records printed on thin, flexible sheets of vinyl) became quite the rage in Japan. Like all fads, these recordings have largely disappeared - but you can still gawk at the fantastic cover art over at Pink Tentacle:
Widely available from a variety of publishers, the most popular sonosheets featured theme music from TV anime, manga and tokusatsu, and they often came packaged inside booklets featuring colorful artwork. The sonosheet boom was short-lived, though — many companies went under as the market became flooded in the 1970s, and the phenomenon all but disappeared by the 1980s. Here is a small sample of the vast array of sonosheet cover art from that era.
In the Follydock IFCR festival in 2007, artists, designers, and architects came together in an abandoned part of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to design "follies" or strange and playful structures that defy traditional architectural wisdom (not to mention common sense).
This one above, the Temple of Trash, was made by the SALZIG Design Team. It's composed of 100 tonnes of plastic bottles compressed into bales of garbage.
Space time continuum may be the stuff of Star Trek, but it's not mere fiction to Holly Branigan. The Edinburgh University psychologist can actually "see" time:
"I thought everyone thought like I did, says Holly Branigan, also a scientist at Edinburgh University, and someone with time-space synaesthesia.
"I found out when I attended a talk in the department that Julia was giving. She said that some synaesthetes can see time. And I thought, 'Oh my god, that means I've got synaesthesia'."
So what exactly does she see?
"For me it's a bit like a running track," she says.
"The track is organised around the academic year. The short ends are the summer and Christmas holidays - the summer holiday is slightly longer.
"It's as if I'm in the centre and I'm turning around slowly as the year goes by. If I think ahead to the future, my perspective will shift."
BBC News science reporter Victoria Gill has the story: Link
Branch Bangle by Anthony Roussel, Photo: Rob Popper
Artist and designer Anthony Roussel creates intricate jewelry from materials not usually associated with adornments - wood! This one above is a birch wood bangle - you can see more at his website: http://www.anthonyroussel.co.uk/html/designs1648.html - via a+.29
Congressman
Joe Wilson - you know, the guy who skyrocketed to fame for yelling "You
lie" during a speech by President Obama - is technically correct.
Kind of.
According to this new "study" by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.
It finds that men lie an average of six times a day - twice as much as
women:
Researchers found the average man tells six fibs a day to their
partner, boss and work colleagues - a total of 42 each week.
That amounts to 2,184 a year or a staggering 126,672 over the average
lifetime.
Top ten lies men tell:
1. Nothing's wrong, I'm fine
2. This will be my last pint
3. No, your bum doesn't look big in that
4. I had no signal
5. My battery died
6. Sorry, I missed your call
7. I didn't have that much to drink
8. I'm on my way
9. It wasn't that expensive
10. I'm stuck in traffic
Go to Daily Mail to read the story and find out the top 10 lies women
tell: Link
It all started out as a joke for Mario Frapolla, owner of Mario's Cafe Bar in Westhoughton, UK, but when his customers took him up on it, the Big Breakfast Challenge became a serious challenge:
For £10.95, willing victims can “enjoy” 10 eggs, 10 sausages, 10 rashers of bacon, 10 slices of toast, five black pudding slices, tomatoes, mushrooms and baked beans.
Owner and head chef Mario Frappola gives customers just 20 minutes to wolf down his calorie-packed meal and does not even allow them a cup of tea.
The breakfast packs in 5,000 calories — nearly twice the recommended daily intake for an average man.
Steven Thompson of The Bolton News took the challenge ... and lost spectacularly. He recounts the experience here: Link - via about:blank
If you plan to visit the Knowsley Safari Park near Liverpool, England, beware of monkeys. Bad, bad monkeys:
The cheeky monkeys - who are known for tearing off the odd wiper or wing mirror - have been targeting cars carrying the roof boxes before pouncing on the unsuspecting visitors, who are forced to watch helplessly as their things disappear. [...]
'Their technique involves the largest baboons jumping up and down on the box, flexing it until the lock bursts open, then the rest of the baboons pile in to see what they can find,' Mr Ross said.
'Obviously, we're well used to them helping themselves to the odd wing mirror or wiper blade, but this has taken things to a whole new level.
'Let's face it, nobody wants to see a baboon running up a tree with their underwear.'
The Daily Mail has the story and pics: Link (Photo: Cavendish Press) - via Asylum
XP3 Ultra Clock, a "persistence of vision" clock - $59.95
This one's a classic, but it's still pretty nifty. Here's a clock that uses an oscillating wand with LEDs and the concept of the persistence of vision to tell time and display messages. You can even program your own messages. Over at the Neatorama Shop: http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?XP3-Ultra-message-persistence-vision-clock-pid557.html
Love, love, love this Illusion side table by designer John Brauer of Essey - the table is handmade from acrylic to look like a draped tablecloth! Design Year Book has more pics: Link - via FreshBump
