Who would’ve guessed that men doing housework could help determine your child’s success?
Alyssa Croft, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Psychology, conducted a study whose results will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science. The findings? Girls who see their fathers pitching in on house chores — i.e. washing the dishes — are more likely to aspire to non-traditional careers like scientists or business leaders.
The researchers interviewed parents asking about their beliefs in gender roles and how they divided chores around the house. They also spoke with daughters about gender roles and what careers they could see themselves having in the future.
Croft found that the mothers’ and fathers’ ideas about gender roles did influence their daughters’ beliefs, but that a stronger predictor of what the girls wanted to be as adults was the division of domestic labor at home.
The daughters responded according to the dads’ actions, not their words. Girls with fathers who didn’t help with household chores were more likely to want traditional female careers such as stay-at-home-moms, teachers, nurses, or librarians. Those who saw their fathers helping clean, cook, and watch the kids dreamed of a broader set of jobs that were often higher-paying than those in woman-dominated fields.
“It’s very important for fathers to not only talk the talk about gender roles, but also to walk the walk, because their daughters seem to be watching.” Croft says in a YouTube video explaining the study.
“Despite our best efforts to try to create workplace equality, women remain severely under-represented in leadership and management positions,” Croft told the Association for Psychological Science. “This study is important because it suggests that achieving gender equality at home may be one way to inspire young women to set their sights on careers from which they have traditionally been excluded.”
So moms, let the dads clear the table tonight. Your daughter will thank you for it in the future.
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Category: Moving America Forward
From Homelessness to Stanford: How This Hardworking Student Overcame All Odds
Tiara Gaillard is only 17-years-old, but the young woman from Kalamazoo, Michigan has been through her fair share of struggles.
As Michigan Live reports, Tiara, her single mother and her five older siblings shuffled from living in a tent, to a rehabilitated crack house. She and her sister even had a short stint in foster care. Now, the family lives with Tiara’s grandmother.
Despite these difficult circumstances, the graduating senior from Kalamazoo Central High School will be attending Stanford University in the fall.
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Due to her mother’s low-income, Stanford will be paying for Tiara’s tuition, room and board. (The private university covers costs for families that make less than $65,000). She plans to major in public policy.
Hailing from one of Michigan’s poorest neighborhoods, Tiara’s academic scorecard certainly made her stand out — she has a GPA of 4.2 and an ACT score that ranks in the 95th percentile.
To the Gaillard family’s credit, Tiara appears to be following in the footsteps of her high-achieving siblings, all of which have succeeded academically, despite their family’s financial instability.
“My family is incredibly close, and I don’t think any one of us would have accomplished what we’ve accomplished without that closeness,” Tiara, who is the youngest of six, said. “All of us were on the honor roll in high school and all of my brothers and sisters have gone on to college.”
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Tiara’s story is proof that you can accomplish anything through hard work and perseverance.
“Maybe what people can learn from me is that a situation that many people would look at as a disadvantage can be flipped around and turned into an advantage,” she said. “It can make you stronger.”
How Your Food Porn Can Provide a Brown Bag Lunch for a Hungry Child
The reasons that some people abstain from social media? It’s a time suck; it jeopardizes your privacy; it’s filled with superficial flotsam (such as people posting pictures of what they’re eating for dinner).
But the new mobile app Feedie, which was developed by the nonprofit The Lunchbox Fund, is turning an activity that might be considered frivolous into a new way to spread generosity. How so?
Every time a user takes a photo of a meal at a participating restaurant and shares it with his or her social network through the app, Feedie donates 25 cents to The Lunchbox Fund, which provides a daily meal for orphaned and disadvantaged school children in South Africa.
The Lunchbox Fund founder Topaz Page-Green explained the level of poverty in South Africa to Patrica Dao of Take Part: “There were children sitting away from the other kids at break under some trees,” she said, “and when I asked why children sat separately from the others during break, the teacher mentioned they had nothing to eat and didn’t want to see the kids who had food eating.”
Restaurants across the United States have signed on to participate — from Los Angeles to San Antonio and Miami Beach to Atlantic City. The app lets users know how many meals have been shared at each location; so far more than 12 million meals have been shared using it.
With the market for food-sharing being as huge as it is — Dao notes that “on Instagram alone, more than 20 million photos are hashtagged #foodporn” — converting virtual sharing into giving is bound to make a huge difference in the lives of those with empty stomachs.
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This Traveling Wagon Delivers Free Healthcare
The sight of a Winnebago is most profoundly associated with cross-country travel — sometimes invoking the dream of selling one’s possessions and heading off into the horizon, perhaps as Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Springs” blares on the stereo. But that’s a glossy, romantic version of mobile home travel, especially compared to what Teresa Gardner and Paula Meade are doing.
These two nurse practitioners, exasperated by the number of residents in Central Appalachia without access to basic healthcare, started a mobile medical clinic in a beat-up Winnebago and travel around, serving the most isolated and neediest patients.
The Health Wagon provides a wide range of healthcare services, including acute and chronic disease management, laboratory and diagnostic services, dental and eye care, immunization, diabetes management, and cancer screenings.
Established in 1980, the Health Wagon has been providing access to health care for most marginalized rural population of Central Appalachia (which does not enjoy similar living conditions and economic means as the rest of the nation) ever since. The region’s industries — including mining, manufacturing, textiles, and paper and wood products — are in significant decline to due to global outsourcing. Additionally, the area struggles with extreme poverty, unemployment, poor health, and acute educational inequalities. During periods of recession, it’s particularly vulnerable to both high rates of unemployment and structural economic changes.
According to a 2009 case study, 61 percent of the patients seen by the Health Wagon did not have healthcare, while an additional 10 percent did have health insurance but hadn’t sought treatment because they were unable to afford the co-payments required. Many residents who utilize services from the Health Wagon make too much income to qualify for Medicaid, but simply cannot afford to purchase insurance on health care exchanges.
However, it is not simply the treatment of the physical ailments that makes the duo of Gardner and Meade a powerful force of hopefulness for those not used to expecting much. 60 Minutes producer Henry Schuster attempted to describe their intangible goodwill: “There’s a feel when you’re in the Health Wagon that it took me a long time to put my finger on, and it’s the feel of a country doctor,” Schuster says. “They don’t just rush ’em in and out, they talk to them. It’s old-fashioned medicine in a lot of ways. You get a feel there that they’re treating the patient and not just the symptoms.”
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This Blind Football Player Proves That You Don’t Need Sight to Accomplish Your Dreams
Close one eye and make a fist with a hole the size of a dime and put it over your opened eye. That’s how much (or rather, how little) football player Aaron Golub can see out of his left eye, according to his private coach Chris Rubio. And out of his right eye? Nothing.
Despite being legally blind, the graduating senior from Newton South High School (NSHS) in Massachusetts will be part of Tulane’s Division I football program this fall as their preferred walk-on long snapper.
“Aaron is a tremendous young man who has not let adversity overcome his desire to fulfill his dreams of playing college football,” Tulane head coach Curtis Johnson said in a statement.
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It’s no surprise that Golub made his dream come true. CBS Boston reports that for the past two years the young man worked very hard — practicing long-snapping every morning before school and on weekends. He became so good at the difficult act that NSHS’s football coach Ted Dalicandro remarked to CBS that Golub is “the best” long snapper he’s seen at the high school level.
His determination and skill has certainly paid off.
“If you set your mind to it, then you can do it,” Golub said. “There’s nothing that you can’t accomplish if you really want to do it.”
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States Are Working to Keep Seniors on Their Feet
$67.7 billion.
That’s the anticipated cost of medical bills due to falls among the elderly by 2020, estimated by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Falls aren’t just catastrophic for seniors because of the expense. According to the American Recall Center, one in every 200 falls in people ages 65 to 69 and one in 10 falls in people over the age of 85 causes a hip fracture. Of those with broken bones, 25 percent die within six months. As a result, elderly people are often so afraid of falling that they cease engaging in activities that were once important to them.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, as a variety of programs across the country are focusing on fall prevention.
Back in 2011, the CDC gave the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health a $1.5 million grant to study the effectiveness of fall prevention programs. They found that two programs sponsored by the Pennsylvania Department of Aging — Healthy Steps for Older Adults, a four-hour workshop, and Healthy Steps in Motion, an eight-week exercise class — reduced falls by 17 percent.
Another such program is the one offered by Wichita State University in Kansas. There, researchers assembled the Falling Less in Kansas toolkit, a free downloadable guide that allows seniors to assess their risk of falls and make necessary changes to prevent them.
The state of Ohio is also trying to prevent falls among seniors with an online program called Steady U. The website advises people how to arrange their houses to prevent falls — including tips such as keeping stairways clear, rugs securely attached to the floor, and adding night lights.
“We know that falls are the leading cause of injuries, ER visits and death,” John Ratliff, the Ohio Department of Aging’s Assistant Chief of Communications and Government Outreach told Hilary Young of the Huffington Post. “Coupled with the fact that our population is rapidly aging, it’s our responsibility to try new, innovative approaches to education about fall prevention to help our elders.”
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To Help Young Girls, This MIT Student Brings Together Two Unlikely Disciplines
The words “don’t” and “can’t” mean two drastically different things.
Yet, when Kirin Sinha, a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), tutored younger students, she noticed that boys often used one word, while girls used another in the same scenario.
Boys said that they don’t understand fractions, whereas the girls said they can’t.
That subtle discernment combined with Sinha’s love for dance led to an idea that’s rethinking the way in which we approach STEM (that’s science, technology, engineering, and math to the uninitiated) learning among females. About a year and a half ago, the theoretical math and computer science and electrical engineering major founded SHINE, an eight-week-long after-school program for middle school girls combining dance classes with a tailored math curriculum.
Sinha, who began taking tap, ballet, and jazz at age three, realized that her self-confidence and discipline came not from her love of math — but from her years of dance training.
“You’re taught to work really hard and work through the sheer sweat and grit,” Sinha, now also a professional dancer, told the Boston Globe. “That stuck with me through math.”
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Struck by the thought that perhaps it was dancing that built certain skills that were left out of math curriculums, she launched the after-school program in hopes to encourage more young females to be confident and interested in math.
The Boston and Cambridge-area program begins with dance class followed by time spent solving math problems. Sinha also designed the program to convey math through games — using movement and dancing to work out a problem that typically is reasoned in silence in the classroom.
“And when they go upstairs and they have a mental block about — ‘I don’t understand how to solve this equation,’ we can say, ‘Well, think about what you did at the dance studio downstairs,'” Sinha told CBS.
For example, the girls solve algebra problems by assigning dance moves to different parts of an equation or play a game of Simon Says to formulate a geometric shape.
The program, which is slated to expand to a selection of New York public schools next year, has not only encouraged more young females to be comfortable doing math but also to feel confident. Sinha has tested some of her students at the beginning and the end of the program to measure gains and has found up to a 273 percent improvement, CBS reports.
This summer Sinha is working toward expanding the program nationally and plans to attend the University of Cambridge in the fall on a Marshall scholarship, where she hopes to launch an international version.
While she’s aiming to attract more female STEM students, Sinha’s hope is to teach young women that they shouldn’t feel boxed in by a stereotype.
“What we really want to teach these girls is that those boxes that they feel they might be in are completely imaginary,” she added.
From Seed to Harvest, These Green Thumbs Nourish Chicago School Gardens
Gardens are a good thing. Period. But in an inner-city school, they’re wonderful. They provide hands-on lessons on how plants grow and encourage kids to eat nutritiously. Plus, the green space beautifies the school.
But starting a school garden and maintaining it turns out to be more complicated than some might think. That’s because everyone is excited to plant one initially, but if teachers are solely responsible for their upkeep, they can become too busy with classroom duties and might not be around over the summer when the plants need tending.
Fortunately, that’s where the nonprofit Gardeneers comes in. It offers a program to plant gardens at Chicago schools and maintain them while also providing lesson plans and a weekly visiting teacher.
Teach for America alumni May Tsupros and Adam Zmick, who founded the Gardeneers, explain on a crowd fundraising website that their model for becoming rotating garden specialists is based on the idea of a visiting speech pathologist, who rotates to a different school each day of the week. The Gardeneers rotate among schools, teaching lessons during school related to the curriculum in such subjects as chemistry, biology, and nutrition, and then enlist the kids’ help to tend the plants in the after school garden clubs.
During the summer, the nonprofit organizes neighborhood volunteers to help keep the plants thriving. The Gardeneers make sure the garden’s produce reaches the children’s lunch plates, coordinating with cafeteria staff to ensure everybody gets to taste the bounty.
According to Cortney Ahem of Food Tank, the Gardeneers offer their services throughout the growing season to schools for a maximum of $10,000, compared to the $35,000 some companies charge for garden installations alone.
Three Chicago schools have jumped at the chance to work with the Gardeneers this growing season, and Zmick and Tsupros hope to expand that to 50 schools during the next five years. They plan to focus on schools where 90 percent or more of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch.
Zmick told Ahem, “School gardens are incredibly important from an educational perspective. There’s so much data about how these gardens can improve academic outcomes, reduce discipline problems, develop job skills, and strengthen the local community.”
Tsupros thinks gardens can be the key to national renewal. “I believe with all my heart that food, nutrition, and community are the foundations on which we need to build and focus our attention regarding education in Chicago and all the United States. One small seed can grow a bountiful harvest, and I hope that Gardeneers can be that seed.”
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Big Bets: How Teaching Entrepreneurship Can Keep Kids in School
The Bay Area is known as a thriving startup community. But Suzanne McKechnie Klahr was struck by the inequality she saw there while working as a pro-bono lawyer in East Palo Alto. She wanted to make it easier for those with disadvantaged backgrounds to both get a good education and to find support for their small businesses. So in 1999 she founded BUILD, a nonprofit which gives entrepreneurial support and funding to disconnected high-schoolers with small business ideas.
BUILD now serves more than 930 students in three cities across the country, providing small business classes and start-up funding to the kids most likely to drop out of high school. “We are looking for students who were truant and had low test scores in middle school,” McKechnie Klahr says. “We want to engage them as soon as they get into 9th grade because disengagement in 9th grade is highly predictive of dropping out of high school.” Such intervention has already been successful. According to the folks at BUILD, 99 percent of seniors in the program have graduated from high school and 95 percent have been accepted to college.
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A Jacket That Should Be in Every Cancer Patient’s Hospital Bag
Simply put, being a cancer patient in the hospital stinks. Not only are you sick, but hospitals are cold, sterile places, and doctors and nurses are routinely jabbing sharp objects into your skin.
Pennsylvania-based cancer survivor Greg Hamilton knows exactly what it’s like to be in that position. As Yahoo! Finance reports, during his chemotherapy treatments, nurses would require him to partially disrobe in order to gain access the infusion sites on his chest and forearms — leaving him cold and uncomfortable.
“Not only was this humiliating,” he said, but “it also added to the pre-existing anxiety related to battling cancer.”
He and his wife, Ellen, searched for clothing that would be more comfortable for chemo, but found nothing.
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That’s when they decided to create their own jacket: The Chemo Cozy.
“Running, biking, hiking. Every activity has got clothing or apparel…just for that activity to make their experience better,” Greg says in the video below. “Why not people fighting for their lives? They should have something.”
What’s great about the jacket is that it looks like a completely normal piece of clothing — but it’s got so much more up its sleeve, including zippers that open up so medical personnel can access IV and PICC lines.
“We have something that works for people going through some of the worst times of their life,” Greg adds in the video. “And if we can do something just to make them feel a little bit better, and a little more special, and a little more normal then that’s our goal.”
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Looks like they’re much closer to making that goal a reality. Last October, the couple completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising nearly $10,000 more than their original $20,000 goal. They also recently stopped by CNBC’s Power Pitch to solicit interest their product. (Spoiler-alert: They successfully caught host Mandy Drury’s.)
The jackets, which cost $54 each, can be purchased at chemocozy.com and in select medical boutiques. To make the article of clothing even more affordable, the Hamiltons are going through the application process with Medicare and Medicaid to make it eligible for reimbursement as a non-medical device. They also plan to add more products to their brand, including clothing for children and for dialysis patients.
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