Welcome to Take It or Leave It, an advice-ish podcast for parents brought to you by Grove Collaborative.
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Parenting Crap
Parents Are Using Fake Social Media Accounts To Monitor Their Kids
Section Intro: during a recent interview with former New York Yankees short stop Alex Rodriguez, he let it slip that he uses a “burner” Instagram account to keep an eye on his daughters. While interviewed on the podcast, he mentioned that his daughters wouldn’t let him follow them or see what they post, so this is his work around.
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Well since this story ended up being discussed on mainstream media, I’m pretty sure the cat’s out of the bag and his daughters have brought this up with him at the dinner table. But outside of Alex Rodriguez’s home life, his confession to using a fake Instagram account does raise some interesting questions, such as, how many parents are actually doing this?
One mother had this to say about why she has a fake social media account to monitor her children, and I do admit, looking back on my own teen years, I can’t help but feel she has some good points: “Yes. Because I remember being a teen and I made major decisions that I now wish my parents would have caught me and stopped me. I also know a few addicts who also wish their parents would have been more up their booty. Our job isn’t to make our kids happy all the time. Sometimes, we have to piss them off.”
On the whole though, according to this small sampling, it seems lots of parents wouldn’t monitor their children with a fake account. What they do, however, is regularly search their child’s phone. Some said they did it nightly. They insist on passwords to all social media accounts.
One mother even said: “If I want to see her social media I get on her phone and look at it. No need to sneak around.”
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Trending Parenting New
A report says young people are growing horns on their skulls. Critics don’t buy it
Section Intro: Technology has the power to completely shape our lives, but it could also alter our bodies in unexpected ways. Recent research suggested small, hornlike spikes could grow on our skulls, and smartphones could be the culprit behind this change.
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But don’t panic yet.
One critic of the research says it “doesn’t hold water,” while another says that the paper’s hypothesis is only speculative.
Researchers David Shahar and Mark Sayers from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, first published their findings in 2016, and they followed it with a paper earlier this year in the journal Scientific Reports. The study has found a second life after the BBC published an article, “How modern life is transforming the human skeleton,” that cited their work.
In their research, Shahar and Sayers said young people may be developing tiny hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls, possibly caused by the shift in the weight of our heads from the spine to the muscles at the back of our head and neck. This anatomical feature is called an external occipital protuberance, or EOP.
The possible cause of this shift in weight? You probably guessed it. The researchers hypothesize that it is due to poor posture from people craning their heads forward more because of phone and mobile device usage.
However, just don’t call it a horn.
“We have not called the enthesophytes growing out of the occipital bone horns,” Sayers said in an email. “They are not horns — this is a term used by the media.”
For their first study, the two researchers set a threshold of 5 millimeters to record an EOP, and considered it an enlarged EOP if it exceeded 10 millimeters in length. They discovered that 41% of the participants, ages 18 to 30 years old, had an enlarged EOP in their skulls.
These types of bone spurs are more commonly found in the elderly, and are assumed to be a normal part of the aging process. However, Shahar and Sayers believe that the advance of technology has changed the timeline for this type of bone growth.
Their second paper studied a larger sample size of 1,200 X-rays for subjects 18 to 86 years old. Thirty-three percent of the subjects were found to have the bone growth, but oddly enough, the growth was found to have decreased with age.
“I have been a clinician for 20 years, and only in the last decade, increasingly I have been discovering that my patients have this growth on the skull,” Shahar told the BBC.
But not everybody agrees with the researchers’ ideas.
John Hawks, the Vilas-Borghesi distinguished achievement professor for the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said “this study doesn’t hold water.”
This chart, which Hawks believes contradicts the text, shows the prevalence of an enlarged EOP in both sexes across different age groups.
Hawks noted that the study lacked a results table that would have offered more detail about their findings, and there are contradictions between the text and charts in the study.
Hawks believes the data presented is not being consistently measured.
“We have no data linking phone use with EEOP,” Sayers tells CNN. “We have, however, suggested that EEOP is linked with excessive FHP (forward head posture) and sustained cervical flexion. The confusion with our analysis seems to stem from misinterpretation of one of our graphs, which shows the percentage of EEOP within each sex. These are not overall or absolute data.”
That last point by Sayers is important, as a lot of the criticism levied against Shahar and Sayers stems from the lack of data and information presented in the study.
“There is no information about the duration or frequency of hand-held device usage in this study, so it is not possible to draw any correlation between the observations of enlarged EOPs and hand-held device usage,” Dr. Mariana Kersh, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Tissue Biomechanics Laboratory, tells CNN. “There is definitely no cause and effect demonstrated in this study.
“The hypothesis regarding the role of hand-held device usage is only speculative and not based on any data presented in this study.”
The study lacks a control group, and the X-rays are taken of patients that had to visit a chiropractor with severe enough neck issues to have X-rays taken, which may not offer the best picture of the overall population.
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Love and Marriage
Writer has a suggestion for moms with lazy husbands: Divorce them
[Tiffany] Section Intro:Zawn Villines says that if your husband isn’t pulling his weight with the kids, you should show him the door.
Section Notes [Do Not Read]
Zawn Villines wants moms to stop making excuses for their lazy husbands.
“On every page I follow, in every parent group I am in, I see the same thing: mothers talking about how exhausted they are, how hurt they are by the imbalance of work in their heterosexual relationships,” Villines began in a now viral Facebook post. “The problems are all some variation of, ‘I just gave birth/am up half the night breastfeeding. Why do I have to also make dinner and clean while my spouse watches TV?”
The 35-year-old writer from Atlanta finds the responses cringeworthy.
“The advice is always the same: ‘Be gentle with yourself. You can’t do it all. Parenthood is hard. Blah blah blah,’” Villines wrote. “I don’t know which of you needs to hear this, but I’ll give you some better advice: Divorce his ass.”
That’s right. Villines believes that men who don’t pull their weight, don’t deserve to have a wife
“Men are not innately incompetent or lazy or incapable of doing their fair share,” she explained. “Tell that jackass to get off the golf course, get his ass home, get up in the middle of the night with the baby, and start earning the right to stay married.”
Her message as been shared more than 20,000 times.
“I see women upholding this social norm and almost treating it like it’s funny,” Villines TODAY Parents. “But knowingly harming another person and causing them to suffer so that you can get more sleep or free time is pretty much the dictionary definition of abuse.”
She noted that in today’s society, a dad will work 50 hours a week, while the mother is always on call and working 168 hours a week. It doesn’t matter if she’s a stay-at-home or a brain surgeon, she’s expected to write the thank you cards, remember important dates and schedule appointments.
But that is not the case with Villines and her civil rights attorney husband Jeff Filipovits. The couple split all duties related to their 3-year-old daughter. Filipovits will come home after a long day litigating police shootings and make dinner.
Villines appreciates Filipovits and is glad he pushes back against social norms, but she doesn’t celebrate him like he’s some sort of hero.
As Villines wrote on Facebook, “Friends, you do not have to be grateful for a husband who does an equitable share any more than you have to be grateful for a husband who does not beat you. This should be the bare minimum in a society where women are viewed as full human beings.”
I absolutely loved this podcast!! You are absolutely right about kids not having to go to college. We need laborers, and farmers, and mechanics, and a host of other jobs. It doesnt mean that they failed, it just means that they chose a different path to their happiness. And also I agree with you about the social media. You are the parent and you should be active in their lives. The more you watch the less likely they are to do things that could be their downfall. The important thing about it is the conversation you have with your kids about their self worth and that being a good person is more important than likes, and therefore they will be less willing to do radical things on social media like tiffany said, showing their pecs because the face pic didn’t get enough likes.
Oh… 🙁 at the end when you say, you cant have a bunch of kids and just have one person who does all of the things, you cant, you can and it will crumble and fail….kind of a bummer to the single mom of 3 young children…huh
I absolutely love you ladies! I was searching to see if Tiffany had a podcast and found you both on one together!! BONUS!! I binged all the seasons and now I am caught up and on the edge of my seat for new ones!! You guys and your number one globally rated podcast are truly the best!! Love your faces!!
Love love love both of you!
This is the best thing I’ve found all year! I have a long commute for work and this has helped the time fly by and now I actually look forward to the drive ?
Keep it up ladies! ???
Tiffany, you should get a consultation with Dr Pimple Popper (Dr Sandra Lee) She removes cysts all the time and NEVER ONCE has she had to shave any part of anyone’s head!!