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Archive for the 'Parenting' Category


To reach young readers, use parents (Duh!)

Posted by Charles Batchelor on January 18, 2008

A new study about teenagers’ attitude regarding the news reminds me of when, several years ago, I got deep into the massive amount of research done on how to keep children from starting smoking and how to convince kids who had started to smoke to quit. Everyone wanted to discover the major influences on pre-teen and teenage children’s behavior.

Northwestern University’s “If It Catches My Eye” report released this month offered the same thing I learned, time and again, from my readings what influenced teen smoking: Reaching parents is about the best way to influence their kids. Believe it or not, kids do listen to (and watch) their parents.

WuduPlz is a web service for the parents of pre-teen and teenage children. While using the online service regularly, WuduPlz is designed to deliver advertising messages from local newspapers. We are also, however, strongly recommending that our newspaper partners place linked appropriate news headlines on WuduPlz’s concluding pages to attract parents into their online newspaper.

Having more eyeballs of active parents has value to many marketers, but don’t discount the long-term value of also attracting more family leaders into the habit of reading the news which, the research shows, is a habit they will pass on to their children.

Download the report here: If It Catches My Eye (pdf)

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What did you mean by THAT?!? (WuduPlz calm down)

Posted by Charles Batchelor on January 15, 2008

According to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we only have a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study, reporting on in The New York Times, also showed people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mail messages they receive 90 percent of the time.

This is email messages, not text messages, which have to be shorter and are often done on the fly. And this report covers all people, not parents communicating with their pre-teen and teenage children. My conclusion: Yikes!

People (not just kids) reading messages unconsciously interpret them based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations, the study said. Despite this, the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages nine out of 10 times,  psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago told the Times.

The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren’t that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person’s perspective.

WuduPlz should help with this problem, at least in terms of communicating household tasks. First, the message is identified as a WuduPlz.com message. (Some people have told us that saying “WuduPlz” takes the edge off. Some, however, have said it sounds sarcastic, which backs up Dr. Epley’s research.)  Coming from the WuduPlz website, it should be more difficult to assume one can read “mood” into the message. Second, we have crafted our messages to be polite and clear. Our checklist should be a help.

“People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they ‘hear’ the tone they intend in their head as they write,” Epley explained to the Times.

WuduPlz should help parents be more clear. Maybe, at times, a bit kinder and more helpful even. After all, your kids really, really, really, really did mean to take out the trash like you asked, but–like children everywhere– they “forget.” Because they’re kids. (We don’t have any research to explain this, but then you don’t need any.)

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Shopping for a worthwhile idea on parenting? Here’s one

Posted by Charles Batchelor on January 15, 2008

Last week YPulse’s Anastasia Goodstein made a remark in her blog that voiced what I think about often. The savvy observer of modern parenting noted that “we all want five easy tips or simple rules you can use.” Parenting isn’t that easy. (What is?) Setting guidelines “depends on you, your values, your kid, what they’re doing online, its value, its effect on your kid, etc.”

onionmagazine_archive_76a_01.jpg

The Onion developed this fake magazine cover for laughs, but I fear too many of us are looking for simple answers we can buy.

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The benefits of getting the kids organized

Posted by Charles Batchelor on January 4, 2008

It’s now three days old, but the article in the New Year’s Day issue of The New York Times about tutors helping boys do better in school remains at the top of the list as the most popular.

The thrust of the article is very simple: Boys seem generally to have more difficulty getting organized and multitasking than girls.

“The guys just don’t seem to develop the skills that involve organization as early,” Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska and founder of the Boys Project, a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys’ problems, said in the article.

The answer is, according to the article, is giving boys more attention and following up in a positive way about being organized.

It’s our hope WuduPlz.com might be seen as a simple but clever tool that parents can use to help their boys and girls be more organized and responsible. Even the name of the service “Would you please” is a good start.

WuduPlz helps the adults in the household be a bit more organized, using the power of the list. By sending a short, timely list regularly to young family members, kids see how adults handle the world in a responsible way.

WuduPlz, used thoughtfully, can be a great teaching tool. And, it can get the trash taken out or the dishwasher loaded, too.

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Better managing “extreme complexity” useful to parents?

Posted by Charles Batchelor on December 17, 2007

“Intensive-care medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered,” Atul Gawande explains in his article about Peter Pronovost’s simple but powerful idea.

For many families, “managing extreme complexity” might also describe parenting in the 21st Century. Can what Peter Pronovost is using to save lives in hospitals help parents? Or, as Gawande’s December 10 article in The New Yorker asks in its sub-head, “If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?”

Pronovost’s simple idea is a checklist. “If a new drug were as effective at saving lives as Peter Pronovost’s checklist, there would be a nationwide marketing campaign urging doctors to use it,” says Gawande in his article. (Gawande is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston and an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. In 2006, he received the MacArthur Award for his research and writing.)

Gawande explains that the puzzle of intensive care is “you have to make sure that a hundred and seventy-eight daily tasks are done right—despite some monitor’s alarm going off for God knows what reason, despite the patient in the next bed crashing, despite a nurse poking his head around the curtain to ask whether someone could help “get this lady’s chest open.” So how do you actually manage all this complexity?”

The medical industry’s response has been to create a “super-specialist” for ICU care.

Peter Pronovost says, instead, a simple, better, management technique is what is needed in hospitals. Gawande tells the story of how using “a checklist” instead of depending on better training is what made it possible for pilots to fly complex, modern airplanes. Would a checklist work in ICUs?

In 2001 a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try. “He didn’t attempt to make the checklist cover everything; he designed it to tackle just one problem, the one that nearly killed Anthony DeFilippo: line infections. On a sheet of plain paper, he plotted out the steps to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line in. Doctors are supposed to (1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in. Check, check, check, check, check,” reports Gawande.

“These steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years. So it seemed silly to make a checklist just for them. Still, Pronovost asked the nurses in his I.C.U. to observe the doctors for a month as they put lines into patients, and record how often they completed each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one.”

Gawande says that Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them.

Why did it work?

“The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events….

“A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes.”

You can read Gawande’s 7,800 word article (well-worth the time) online here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande

WuduPlz’s presents a checklist of household tasks with a means to easily and simply communicate to family members what needs to be done, when it needs to be done. If this kind of management can work well for doctors in a hospital and pilots in fighter jets, perhaps it should be tried in homes as well.

Family life–which is suppose to be loving and caring–may not sound to some like a place that could be better served with a checklist. It doesn’t sound “natural.” But, then, it doesn’t sound like doctoring to some people, either.

Using a checklist “pushes against the traditional culture of medicine,” explains Gawande. Some families who try using checklists are sure to feel the same or get some push-back from others.

“It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation,” he concludes. “Good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.” I suggest that the same could be said of running a household.

Therefore, I’ll attempt to answering the question the New Yorker headline asked (“If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?”) and point families to WuduPlz.

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The facts about household chores-over 2 hours a day

Posted by Charles Batchelor on December 8, 2007

The U. S. Census Bureau interviewed of about 21,000 individuals beginning in January 2003. Respondents were interviewed only once and reported their activities for the 24-hour period from 4 a.m. on the day before the interview until 4 a.m. on the day of the interview–their “diary day.” If respondents reported doing more than one activity at a time, they were asked to identify which activity was primary. Activities were then grouped into categories for analysis.
Here is some of what they learned about household activities:

On an average day in 2003, 84 percent of women and 63 percent of men spent some time doing household activities, such as housework, cooking, lawn care, or financial and other household management.

Twenty percent of men reported doing housework–such as cleaning or doing laundry–compared with 55 percent of women. About 35 percent of men did food preparation or cleanup versus 66 percent of women.

Women who reported doing household activities on the diary day spent about 2.8 hours on such activities while men spent 2.1 hours.

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Kids need real praise

Posted by Charles Batchelor on December 8, 2007

WuduPlz offer parents a way to easier interact with their kids. Not only does it assign chores, but it offers positive messages as well. The chores, however, might be the wiser starting point, according to some research.

New York University professor of psychiatry Judith Brook said in a Feburary 11 issue of New York magazine parents often do not know how to praise their child. The issue for parents is one of credibility. “Praise is important, but not vacuous praise,” she says. “It has to be based on a real thing—some skill or talent they have.” Once children hear praise they interpret as meritless, they discount not just the insincere praise, but sincere praise as well.

According to the article by Po Bronson:
When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.

But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

The article is in the February 11, 2007 issue of New York.
http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/?imw=Y

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How many parents buy their preteen kids a cellphone? 35%

Posted by Charles Batchelor on December 7, 2007

WuduPlz’s market is expanding. More parents are buying phones for their young children.

Texting isn’t just for teenagers, according to this December 2007 report from Nielsen Mobile. Younger kids are getting into texting as well. (The pdf of the release is attached here.) Preteens using cellphone: Nielsen report

The report estimates that:

  • 35% of tweens own a mobile phone.
  • 20% of tweens have used text messaging.
  • 21% of tweens have used ring & answer tones.

“Tweens use their mobile phones, and media in general, in very unique and important ways,” Jeff Herrmann, VP of Mobile Media for Nielsen Mobile was quoted as saying in a press release. “Marketers and media executives need to understand these ‘digital natives’ as they mature and reshape the way we all think about new and traditional media.”

Regarding cross media behavior of tweens, Nielsen reports that tweens spend less time surfing
the Internet than their teen counterparts. In this report, 48% of U.S.
tweens said they spend less than one hour per day online. When they
are online, 70% of tweens use the Internet for gaming. Comparatively,
81% of U.S. teens say they spend one hour or more per day online, with
e-mail being the most pervasive online activity for this age group.

“In addition to the differences between adult and youth media consumers,
there’s an important gap between the media behaviors of teens and
tweens,” said Herrmann. “This report, which includes insights from
more than 5,500 teens and tweens, dissects how these demographic
segments are engaging with mobile and traditional media.”

The report, “Kids on the Go: Mobile Usage by U.S. Teens and Tweens,” was
conducted by Nielsen Mobile and BASES, two services of Nielsen. It
also provides insights on teen and tween use of specific content
brands, genre preferences, overall use of leisure time and demographic
profiles. The full report will be released on December 14.

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