by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. For the last decade or so, I’ve increasingly felt glimmerings of a consciousness raising in the United States, a growing movement of people dissatisfied with materialism as their sole or primary life goal.  They seem to be  aware of the ‘Easterlin Effect,’ the oft-repeated finding that above a certain relatively modest income level, more money, more stuff, doesn’t mean more happiness.  The recession has complicated this movement, making it at the same time more and less relevant to our immediate lives.   But the signs are around us, in the ‘mindfulness’ movement, in environmentalism, in the increasingly common discourse about work-life balance. And then today I picked up Time Magazine and read an article about Bhutan, a tiny little country in the Himalayas whose government has recently transitioned from monarchy to budding democracy and is trying to achieve ‘sustainable development,’ i.e., economic growth that doesn’t devastate the culture and environment and lead to inequality and loss of quality of life. And how is Bhutan doing this?  Among other things, they are actually attempting to measure happiness, or rather they are trying to include life quality as an official economic indicator. The Bhutanese are not using Gross Domestic… Read more »

By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. I read an article this week about Karoshi, ‘death by overwork,’ a phenomenon that has been common in Japan since the early 90’s. At that time, many Japanese, who have the longest average work week in the world, starting dropping dead of heart attacks and strokes attributed to their ridiculously long hours – an average of 60 hours a week, every week per year.  In the last few years, the nature of Karoshi has changed, as has Japan’s economic picture.  Increasingly, younger people feel fortunate to get jobs as ‘salarymen,’ i.e., permanent salaried jobs. Japanese economy is driven more and more by temporary workers who get no job benefits and no guarantees of job permanency. Those who are ‘salarymen’ feel unable to turn down requests to work crazy hours for fear of losing their positions and plunging into poverty.  Depression and suicide have become epidemic, with the police estimating that one third of suicides in Japan are triggered by work stress. Clearly, it is possible to work yourself to death. On the heels of reading about Karoshi, I read research showing that unemployment leads to upsurges in depression rates.  So which is true? Is it ‘overwork’… Read more »

By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. This is another post about parenting, but from a different perspective.  A while ago I wrote about how parenting styles don’t matter. This is about something that does.  We know through research that kids who are ‘different’ can be shielded from the effects of a judgmental world through the efforts of their parents. This piece  started out as a blog about this terrific article, “My 7-Year Old Son Wants a ‘Likes Boys’ T-Shirt, and Here is Why He’s Going to Get It.” These parents are raising a boy who already identifies as gay and has crushes on other boys, and they are doing it in a way that both affirms and protects him. They are buying him the t-shirt he wants, a copy of one worn by Blaine on ‘Glee,’ that says ‘Likes Boys.’  They are monitoring under what circumstances he can wear it, so that he will not risk being an object of hate.   And it struck me that my partner Nancy and I used the same strategy raising our son, born in 1983. Cory was one of the first wave of ‘turkey baster babies,’ Kids born through donor insemination (often self-insemination, hence the name)… Read more »

by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Nope, not advice from me.  Advice from Sheldon Kopp, a psychotherapist who lived from 1929 to 1999.  Kopp believed that people find their way in life by living fully and by facing reality squarely, without illusion.  The title of his book – “If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him”- reflects his belief that there is no higher authority than you when it comes to figuring out your own truth.  These 43 statements are pretty deep, Imo.  Kopp wasn’t a romantic – check out #10, one of my faves, which basically says life is unfair, bad things happen to good people and nobody ‘makes up’ for your losses.  Or #4 – we’re dying already and we’ll be dead a long time. Or #12, the world is random. And yet Kopp is anything but a pessimist.  He’s an old school Existentialist.  He’s big on taking personal responsibility for  your own life, on facing the irrationality of the world and on finding a way of accepting it.  And he believes that we bring our own meaning to life.  This is a scary idea – we can’t rely on religion, leaders, or gurus to tell us how… Read more »

by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Two articles about gender differences and childcare have been on my mind lately.  The first is an article by Tara Parker-Pope published early in 2012 in the Times Sunday Magazine.  She reports on research showing the predictable gender differences in child-care activities, even when both parents work, but also showing that mothers enjoy child care more.  The lead author of the study speculates that biology may be at work in the form of testosterone, citing, for example, studies showing that women with high levels of testosterone often show less interest in babies. The second is a more recent article on a study showing that testosterone levels DROP in men when they are involved in doing a significant amount of childcare. The tone of this article was much more cautious, lots more ambivalence about the results.  The lead sentence: “This is probably not the news fathers want to hear.”  The worry, of course, is that men will interpret this result to mean that dads who take care of their kids become wimps.  The study investigators, however, put a much more positive spin on the data, saying “…  this should be viewed as, ‘Oh it’s great, women aren’t the only… Read more »