Children – Page 4 – Impact Lab

Children, Healthcare, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

This 61-year-old woman just gave birth to her own granddaughter

April 8, 2019

Matthew Eledge and Elliot Dougherty of Omaha, Nebraska, needed a surrogate to carry their baby. They never expected she would turn out to be Matthew’s mother.

When Matthew Eledge and his husband, Elliot Dougherty, told Matthew’s mother, Cecile, that they were planning to start their family, Cecile thought fondly of her own parental journey. She’d loved being pregnant decades earlier with her three now-grown children.

“If you want me to be the gestational carrier,” she told Matthew, “I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Matthew, 32, and Elliot, 29, appreciated the gesture, but, they thought, let’s be real — it’s not like that would ever happen. A postmenopausal 61-year-old couldn’t possibly be equipped to carry and give birth to a baby. Right?

Continue reading… “This 61-year-old woman just gave birth to her own granddaughter”

Analysis, Children, Healthcare, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Study of 657,461 children finds no link between vaccines and autism

March 12, 2019

Danish researchers followed children born over a 10-year period and found no connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

It only hurts for a second.

The vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella doesn’t cause autism, according to a massive, new study.

It’s yet another study that unravels any tie between vaccines and the developmental disability. A link between autism and the MMR vaccine has long been erroneously suggested, due to a controversial paper published in prestigious journal The Lancet over 20 years ago.

Continue reading… “Study of 657,461 children finds no link between vaccines and autism”

Children, Crazy Stuff, Fashion, Parenting, Science & Technology News

Lipstick in kindergarten? South Korea’s K-beauty industry now targets those barely able to read.

February 23, 2019

PriPara Kids Cafe is one of the many beauty parlors in South Korea that cater to young girls. (Jean Chung/For The Washington Post)

Last year in kindergarten, Yang Hye-ji developed her morning routine. Uniform? Check. Homework? Check.

Makeup? Definitely.

“Makeup makes me look pretty,” the 7-year-old said on her second visit to the ShuShu & Sassy beauty spa in Seoul.

She was wrapped in a child-size pink robe and wearing a bunny hairband. Her face was gently touched up with a puff. Her lips got a swipe of pink gloss.

South Korea’s cosmetics industry, known as K-beauty, has become an Asian powerhouse and global phenomenon for its rigorous step-by-step regimens.

But exacting beauty norms also put enormous pressure on South Korean women, making the country one of the world’s centers for plastic surgery. And increasingly, the beauty industry is looking at younger and younger girls.

Continue reading… “Lipstick in kindergarten? South Korea’s K-beauty industry now targets those barely able to read.”

Analysis, Children, City Planning

Which U.S. cities have the most families with kids?

January 25, 2019

Spoiler alert: It’s simply not the case that families with kids have disappeared from urban America.

Look around a hip neighborhood in Lower Manhattan or downtown San Francisco, and you’ll see lots of young people, and Baby Boomers whose kids have left the nest. There are also some stylish moms (or nannies) pushing tots in strollers. But you won’t see many traditional nuclear families with school-age children.

There’s a growing consensus that our cities are becoming “childless.” This past October, Axios ran a story on the ”great family exodus,” showing data that the share of families with children under the age of 20 has fallen in 53 large cities across the country. As far as I can tell, the phrase “childless cities” was first advanced in 2013 by Joel Kotkin in an essay of that title for City Journal.

Several factors are said to be pushing families with kids out of cities: the expensiveness of city living; the lagging performance of urban versus suburban public schools; and the preference of immigrant families for the suburbs over urban locations. But just how childless are our cities, really?

Continue reading… “Which U.S. cities have the most families with kids?”

Big Problems, Children, Housing, Human Behavior

Special report: A widening world without a home

December 23, 2018

As of last year, more people have been forced by violence and conflict to flee their homes than live in the U.K. or France.

Why it matters:

That’s upwards of 60 million people — a global nation of refugees. If all of these asylum-seekers, internally displaced people and refugees were a country, they’d be the 21st most populous nation in the world, according to UNHCR estimates. More than half of refugees are under the age of 18.

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Children, Education, Employment, Future, Science & Technology News

These are the skills that your kids will need for the future (Hint: It’s not coding)

October 21, 2018

The jobs of the future will involve humans collaborating with other humans to design work for machines, and value will shift from cognitive to social skills.

An education is supposed to prepare you for the future. Traditionally, that meant learning certain facts and skills, like when Columbus discovered America or how to do multiplication and long division. Today, curriculums have shifted to focus on a more global and digital world, like cultural history, basic computer skills, and writing code.

Yet the challenges that our kids will face will be much different from those we faced growing up and many of the things a typical student learns in school today will no longer be relevant by the time he or she graduates college. In fact, a study at the University of Oxford found that 47 percent of today’s jobs will be eliminated over the next 20 years.

Continue reading… “These are the skills that your kids will need for the future (Hint: It’s not coding)”

Children, Human Behavior, Life Skills, Parenting, Science & Technology News

Your kids hate your smartphone addiction

October 12, 2018

From CNET Magazine: It isn’t easy balancing “me time” and parenting. I talked to experts to find out how.

I can’t stay off my phone. And I’m afraid it’s hurting my 2-year-old son.

Sometimes it’s a breaking news story that draws me in, other times it’s boredom. Whatever it is, this device in my hands — which gives me access to nearly all human knowledge plus all the cat videos I could ever want — is constantly calling for my attention.

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Analysis, Children, DNA

In the 23 and Me era, kids of sperm donors are finding each other

October 1, 2018

Imaging discovering you have a half-sibling you’ve never met—or dozens of them. Customers of genetic-information services are uncovering family secrets, and then using social networks to make connections..

When you use 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature, you get a message cautioning you that the information you’re about to see could be unexpected. For Danny-J Johnson, that couldn’t have been more of an understatement.

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Children, Health & Fitness, Human Behavior

Soulcycle of fertility sells egg-freezing and ’empowerment ‘ to 25-year-olds

September 17, 2018

There’s something eerily familiar about the Kindbody aesthetic.

How do you build a cult following for an egg-freezing clinic?

Gina Bartasi, CEO of Kindbody, a fertility startup that launched in New York City at the beginning of August, has a few ideas. For one, a bright yellow van stationed on a Friday in the middle of Manhattan and then on a Sunday in the Hamptons — offering free testing for the anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) associated with reserves of healthy eggs. For another, never announce anything too far in advance.

Kindbody has one brick-and-mortar location so far, two blocks from Trump Tower. It’ll be open to patients later this month, and they’ll spend the next six months building a bigger flagship on 16th Street. To find out where the next pop-up event will land, or where the next “boutique retail location” will open, you’ll have to follow the company on Instagram. When making these real estate decisions, Bartasi told The Verge she asks herself two questions: “Where is SoulCycle opening up? What is Drybar doing?”

Continue reading… “Soulcycle of fertility sells egg-freezing and ’empowerment ‘ to 25-year-olds”

Analysis, Children, communication, Human Behavior

Here is how much sexting among teens has increased

September 13, 2018

Guess what, people are more likely to sext or receive sexts if they have smartphones. Yes, somehow sexts aren’t quite the same with a rotary phone or semaphore flags. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics revealed that sexting (which is the electronic sharing of sexually explicit images, videos, or messages) has increased among teenagers since 2009. Oh, and the number of teenagers with smartphones has also increased since 2009. Coincidence?

The study found that about 1 in 7 (or 14.8%) of those between the ages of 12 and 17 had sent sexts and approximately 1 in 4 (27.4%) have received them. Hmm, sounds like not all sexting is being reciprocated. More on this later. These numbers are significantly higher than those from a 2009 Pew Research Center study that revealed that 4% and 15% of 12 to 17 year olds had sent and received sexts, respectively.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Children, Futurist, Robots, Science & Technology News

Kids will build ’emotional bonds’ with robots and ignore their parents, futurologist predicts

September 3, 2018

Children will soon have their own ‘cute’ artificial intelligence-equipped robot toys and will pay more attention to the machines’ advice than guidance issued by their parents.

That’s the warning from futurologist Ian Pearson, who was speaking at an event by the tech firm Beko held at the IFA 2018 conference in Berlin. He said robots would be commonplace in our homes within the next 15 years. But parents will be concerned to hear that he believes they will have a greater influence on ‘educating and training’ children than their own parents.

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Biotech, Children, Health & Fitness, Parenting

America’s hottest export? Sperm

August 18, 2018

Sperm from the US and Denmark dominate the market because those countries currently have the most supply, experts say.

Ella Rasmussen’s doctors started to prod her about children when she turned 30. She was single, suffered from endometriosis, and contemplated a hysterectomy. After several years, the nudges took hold. Because she wasn’t a good candidate to freeze only her eggs, she was advised to undergo IVF and freeze fertilized embryos.

Continue reading… “America’s hottest export? Sperm”