Living with the in-laws: are you a LOSER?

Living with the in-laws: are you a LOSER? He never imagined it would happen to him, but Ed West and his family have joined the ranks of the LOSERs – London Overpriced, Scrounging off Elder Relatives

It’s a sobering statistic: the number of adults living with their parents has risen by 20 per cent in 15 years and – with the crash accelerating the trend towards “boomerang kids” – many older people are bracing themselves for the return of their adult children.

But what about those returning with children of their own? This, too, is on the increase. It’s also the basis for a new Sky One sitcom called Parents, starring Tom Conti, whose daughter (played by Sally Phillips) moves in with her two children after she loses her job. Billed as a “credit crunch comedy”, the programme reflects a rapidly growing trend.

 

Playing house: Ed and Emma West with their children Kitty (3-and-a-half) and Eleanor (2) and Emma's parents Valerie and Trevor Grove

In Parents, the couple’s plight is a source of shame. But is there anything wrong with raising children with the grandparents? Thousands of British Asians have been doing it for decades. And now, so do I, aged 34, with my wife, Emma, and family; we have lived with my wife’s parents for more than a year, bringing up our two children in an extended family. There are huge advantages.

Emma, 32, grew up in Crouch End, north London, which is now one of those medialand areas people talk about when they want to caricature the “liberal elite”, but was in her youth unfashionable. Her parents, Trevor and Valerie, bought their large Edwardian house in the early Eighties and raised four children there, and had expected eventually to downsize after their offspring left home (or so they hoped).

We were already living nearby, and part of that cliché – me in journalism and Emma in publishing – when Emma fell pregnant, first with Kitty (now three years old) and then, 17 months later, with Elfie (Eleanor Sophie). We were helped financially by her parents and mine. I’ve always wanted to be at the forefront of a new social demographic acronym, such as DINKY (double income no kids yet) or GLAM (greying, leisured, affluent, married). But I fear our acronym would be LOSERs: London Overpriced, Scrounging off Elder Relatives. We would have struggled to afford the most modest property in the borough, were it not for the Bank of Mum and Dad – the last well-respected bank in Britain.

But we took this to its logical conclusion when work began on extending the flat we were in, making it uninhabitable for at least a few months. In fact it’s been well over 12 months.

There have been difficult times. A family is a microculture, and integrating can be a shock. The laundry in particular has been the source of most conflict, the amount of washing a modern nuclear family has to undertake is unfathomable to my mother-in-law, and the washing machine being the Jerusalem of our shared house, the fault line over which all sides lose their tempers.

My father-in-law was the original New Man, one of the first Englishmen to cook, dance and spend time with his children. (He’s peculiar that way – he doesn’t even like football. If this were a war I’d suspect him of being a spy.) But since both Trevor and Emma are magnificent chefs, the rivalry in the kitchen can be intense.

And there is only one shower. I don’t think anyone, after spending 40 years working and looking forward to retirement and tennis, wants some weird man (me) hanging around their bathroom. That’s got to be a violation of some human right. But my in-laws are tolerant people, even if in the early days the passive-aggressive notes did escalate from one to two exclamation marks.

This is especially remarkable when one considers that Valerie is also caring most of the time for her 91-year-old mother, who is in independent living quarters and may have to be moved in, making her one of that rare demographic, the supersize sandwich generation.

But back to the benefits, and not just financial ones. Raising children is hard, and after the second one the pressure becomes intense; it feels like the scene in Das Boot when the submarine plunges so deep that the rivets began popping out. “It takes a village to raise a child,” is a corny phrase, but it is true.

Until recently, among working-class Britons at least, it was common for a married couple to spend time with one or other of their parents, until a property could be found in the neighbourhood. The British staple of the mother-in-law joke still reflects the tension this caused.

And in the broader scheme of things, nuclear families are unusual. Their development in medieval north-west Europe had huge effects on society. The system emerged in Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, societies that also produced the jury system, capitalism and liberal democracy. Weaker ties within families meant fewer boundaries between them: less energy dissipated by warring clans meant more stable societies.

Some anthropologists argue that this influenced Anglo-Saxon liberalism and gave us a love of independence, the pinnacle being home ownership (which is, by grim extension, partly how we got into this house-price credit-crunch mess. But that’s another story).

The nuclear family is not ideal and not, in any longer evolutionary sense, “natural”. Across Europe and Asia people still live in extended families and for many British Asians this allows the parents to work or socialise while the grandparents do some of the child-rearing. The psychological benefits to children are well established.

Our children love it. After rising at 6am, sometimes 5.30am, and bounding into our bed, the children run downstairs to see Baggy and Pappy, as they call their grandparents. (I’m not sure about the etymology of the former, although it was originally “granny-bags”.) The early morning kitchen is often chaotic, with Humphrys and Naughtie competing for attention with shouting adults and children.

When Emma takes Kitty swimming Trevor will usually look after Elfie, and the in-laws will do the occasional bedtime, as well as spending afternoons doing puzzles or taking the children shopping.

We are also in direct contact with an older pool of wisdom, and teaching methods, although the human mind does erase a lot of the memory of child rearing, probably because otherwise no one would do it again. Our children have a fairly large circle of adults whom they see as direct family, too, including Emma’s sister Victoria, my mother, who stays once a week, and the American lodger, Sarah, who often cares for the children. And not forgetting the in-laws’ sweet, protective and rather dim dalmatian Jasper, and their sinister Egyptian cat Bosie – which, I suspect rather like my in-laws, treat our extended stay with a degree of suspicion.

All being well, we’ll be moving back in the autumn. We’ll have a kitchen and shower to ourselves and the in-laws will finally have an empty nest. But the children will miss out – on a garden, a large house, a dog and cat, but most of all their grandparents. Or, as we call them, the free mildminders. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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The baby who helped her paralyzed dad walk and talk again

The baby who helped her paralyzed dad walk and talk again - A British man was left trapped inside his own body by a stroke. His newborn daughter helped set him free

After suffering a stroke at age 22, Mark Ellis was left unable to move. He could communicate only by rolling his eyes or blinking. The British man's wife, Amy, had just given birth to their daughter, Lola-Rose. "It was a dream turned into a nightmare," Amy Ellis says. Then, Ellis started mimicking his baby as she learned her first words and took her first steps, and, defying doctors' predictions, he started re-learning how to walk and talk, too. Here, a guide to this miraculous story:

Usually, it's the dad who helps the baby walk, but the case was reversed for one paralyzed father who mimicked his daughter's first steps and miraculously walked again. Photo: Thinkstock/Pixland

What happened to Ellis?

Two weeks after Lola-Rose was born, Ellis started complaining of severe migraines. Then he suffered a severe stroke, and doctors put him into an induced coma and told Amy it was unlikely he would survive. He awoke a week later with a condition known as locked-in syndrome. Essentially, he was trapped in his body. Mentally he was alert, but he was unable to move anything but his eyes — rolling his eyes up for "yes," down for "no."

Was he expected to recover?

No. Doctors said the severe blood clot that he had suffered in his brain stem made it unlikely that he would ever walk or talk again. Ellis started undergoing speech and physical therapy. Several months into his hospital stay, his newborn daughter was starting to babble and learning to move across the floor. Ellis' therapist encouraged him to watch the baby, and copy her.

How well did it work?

Mark Ellis quickly started copying little Lola-Rose. "He started to make the same sounds," Amy Ellis says, "and then the words came too." A week or two after Lola-Rose took her first steps, her dad did, too. By March 2011, eight months after the stroke, Ellis was able to walk out of the hospital using a walker, and go home. Since then, he has continued making progress right along with Lola-Rose. "They use toys, books, games, and the iPad together," his wife says, "to learn how to do things and communicate."

What do doctors have to say about the case?

That it's exceedingly rare for a patient with locked-in syndrome to make such a recovery, although doctors have found that tapping into emotions to stimulate patients does sometimes seem to help. Most locked-in sufferers who do make gains still have to use a wheelchair and need assistance eating, says Dr. Srivas Chennu, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University. "The fact [that Ellis] has recovered to the extent he can walk home and has recovered his speech is quite remarkable," Chennu says, and he probably has his daughter to thank for it. ( theweek.com )

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8 Things You Should Never Say to a Mom

8 Things You Should Never Say to a Mom - Parents are careful about what they say to their kids. They even pay attention to questions they might pose to their childfree friends. But sometimes, when comfort levels are high around mom friends -- or people forget to think before they speak -- folks can get careless with their comments. A simple remark by a well-meaning friend to a new mom could hurt her self-confidence. Or a casual comment to a mom with a "spirited child" may do more harm than you'd imagine.

Team Mom asked the experts about the impact that eight comments could have on a mom. Here's what they had to say:

"You're so dressed up!"

Your mom friend is wearing casual clothes or a little makeup instead of the yoga gear and ponytail you may normally see her sporting. Psychologist and mom of two, Elizabeth Lombardo, Ph.D., tells Team Mom on Shine that the mom could interpret your statement as: "You always look like a slob. Nice of you to finally put some makeup on. What is wrong with you?" Lombardo, author of "A Happy You: Your Ultimate Prescription for Happiness," recommends that if you want her to know she looks pretty, say so: "You look great!" And if you just want to know her plans, then ask "So, what are you up to tonight?" or "Doing anything fun today?"

"You look so tired."

Whether you're talking to a new mom or a mom with older kids, telling her she looks tired is just another way of saying you notice she's not at her best. But she may have other reasons for her tired appearance. "Looking or feeling tired can, unfortunately, stem from a number of different issues ranging from lack of sleep or quality sleep, to poor nutrient status due to inadequate nutrient intake or absorption, to side effects of medications or chronic health conditions," says Nancy Steely, a naturopathic physician. If you're really concerned about how your mom friend is doing, ask her: "How's everything going?"

"You must really want a girl."

Moms of boys hear this question all the time. Amy Williams, a mom of two boys and founder of BoyMom Designs, says the second she was pregnant with her second child and announced she was having another son, the responses also included, "I'm so sorry!" and "Oh no! Two boys!" Sometimes people would make these comments in front of her other son. "It was awful and so negative," says Williams. "It hasn't been an 'oh-no' experience. It's been a blast." Her advice is to focus on the fact that a woman is having a baby, which is wonderful on its own. She wishes her friends would have said, "Congratulations, two boys!" or simply, "You're having a baby...that's terrific."

"My son/daughter would love to have a play date with your child. When can I bring him/her over?"

We love play dates, but this request sounds like veiled attempt to get free babysitting. Erika Myers, a licensed therapist and a mom, says it can lead to "one parent feeling responsible for hosting--and sitting for--another child." Myers recommends offering a trade. "If it works well, you can set up a regular system of alternating play dates giving each of you a much needed break." Other alternatives include meeting at a park or a kid-friendly location. "If your kids get along, chances are there may be many play dates in their --and your--future. Why not spend some time getting to know the mom of your son's new BFF. Down the line she may become a source of support and possibly a very good friend," Myers tells Team Mom at Shine.

"When did you get so gray?"

We seriously don't know why women ever say this to their friends...but they do. Are you trying to tell your friend you notice that she looks different? Or are you worried about her? Tell her. Because the mom hears something totally different, says Dr. Lombardo: "You look terrible; you really let yourself go. She thinks 'I used to take care of myself before the kids. Now I have no time. I am just a mess. And I can't even control these kids. I am worthless.'"

"When are you due?"

Before you ever ask any woman when she's due, ask yourself if she's actually told you that she's pregnant. "Asking a non-pregnant woman if she is expecting can trigger feelings of insecurity, guilt, and tap into body image issues," says Myers. If the mom is not pregnant, you've just reminded her that she hasn't lost her baby weight from a previous pregnancy. Or what if she's gained weight because of health issues that you weren't aware of? Try this: Don't say anything.

"When are you going back to work?

The implied statement under this question is that being at home with the kids isn't work, and strikes at the heart of mommy wars. "It's one of the worst questions. It causes huge guilt," says Diane Lang, a counseling educators who leads workshop for moms on creating balance and re-entering the workforces. "All we're doing to moms is making them re-question their choices and causing mom guilt and unreal expectations. There is no win-win. You're setting up a mom for failure for failure." If you're really just interested in finding out what your mom friend is up to, focus less on her employment situation and more on her, as a person (e.g., "What have you been up to?").

"I remember that stage. He/she will grow out of it."

It's nice to feel like you're not a rookie parent anymore and can offer guidance to another mom friend. Or maybe you're just trying to comfort a mom who is struggling. But perhaps the outburst you're witnessing isn't something a child will "grow out of" because unbeknownst to you, he or she has behavioral issues. Say Myers: "Unfortunately, it can come across as patronizing and dismissive. When a child is going through a difficult phase, or potentially has significant behavioral issues, parents can feel overwhelmed, inadequate, and defeated." Sometimes you just need to be a good listener. And if you feel the need to comment, Myers recommends trying something like "We went through something similar when was that age. It was really tough." ( shine )

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Five Facts about Fracking Every Family Needs to Know

Five Facts about Fracking Every Family Needs to Know — More and more science is starting to call out the practice of natural gas fracking for what it is—dirty, and a threat to everybody's health — Fracking may not be a household word yet, but we've been talking about this form of natural gas drilling—and its potential effects on your family's health—for some time. Now it seems more voices are about to join the conversation.

On Saturday, a ranking congressman on the House Committee on Natural Resources questioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's competence in protecting Americans from toxic exposures, after a New York Times exposé on hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a fracking, uncovered major threats to human health.

As previously reported on Rodale.com, fracking releases uranium and other radioactive material and brings them to the surface in wastewater laced with carcinogenic industrial chemicals, heavy salts, and other contaminants. Because this toxic wastewater is often trucked to other municipalities for treatment, fracking affects not just families in the immediate drilling zones, but in surrounding states, too. Inadequately treated water from fracking often contains dangerous levels of radioactive materials and other hazardous waste, and is routinely released into rivers that supply drinking water to people, according to the NYT article.

"These disturbing revelations raise the prospect that natural gas production has turned our rivers and streams into this generation’s Love Canals," Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement. "The natural gas industry has repeatedly claimed that fracking can be done safely. We now know we need a full investigation into exactly how fracking is done and what it does to our drinking water and our environment."

Other unpleasant consequences of drilling for natural gas in shale formations around the country are front and center in the documentary Gasland, a documentary that was nominated for top honors in Sunday's Academy Awards (but didn't win). According to recent reports, including one on Salon.com, the natural gas industry actually urged the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to withdraw its nomination of Gasland.

While the film is full of compelling, but mostly anecdotal, evidence of families falling ill and animals dying after the big drilling rigs, chemical cocktails, and compressor stations move into town, it's important to note that a growing body of scientific evidence is finding that yes, fracking is harmful to not just the environment, but to us, too. Don't live near a fracking site? Keep reading anyway: This still concerns you.

Here are five important natural gas facts to share with your friends and family.

Gulp. Pollutants from natural gas fracking could end up in your drinking water, even if you don't live near a fracking site.

1. Natural gas is not clean.

Natural gas burns more cleanly than other fossil fuels, but in the course of its entire life cycle, it's actually worse than coal, long touted as the dirtiest of our fossil fuels. Because fracking involves mixing millions of gallons of water laced with chemicals into the ground at high pressure, it creates fissures in the shale that release the natural gas. Life cycle analysis expert Robert Howarth, PhD, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, discovered that anywhere from 3.6 to nearly 8 percent of the methane from shale gas drilling escapes through venting and leaks. Methane is a greenhouse gas about 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Howarth's latest life cycle calculations updated in January 2011 find that when considering the burning of natural gas, and the methane leaks that fracking creates, shale gas produces 1.20- to 2.1-fold more greenhouse gas emissions when compared to coal during a 20-year time period. Methane leaks are worse during the actual fracking process, but they continue to slowly seep over long periods of time. When considering this, natural gas is on par with coal when looking at greenhouse gas production over a 100-year period, the Cornell research shows.

2. Fracking chemicals are extremely dangerous.

Since most natural gas drilling companies will not disclose all of the products they use in the drilling process, Theo Colborn, PhD, founder and president of The Endocrine Disruption Exchange, set out to figure out what's in the chemical cocktails used to drill wells and frack. She and her team found 649 different chemicals, more than half of which are known to disrupt the endocrine system. Exposure to these types of chemicals has been linked to certain cancers, diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome (the name for a group of risk factors that occur together and increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes). Fifty-five percent of the chemicals cause brain and nervous system damage, and many are linked to cancer and organ damage. The threat of exposure to these chemicals occurs via contaminated air, water, and soil. "They're getting away with absolute murder; it's criminal, the things they're doing," says award-winning scientist Colborn. "If you destroy an aquifer, you've lost it. You've destroyed your drinking water supply."

3. Natural gas drilling turns clean country air to smog.

Even if drilling and the fracking process run completely according to plan with no leaks, no methane migration into drinking water wells, no explosions, and no issues dealing with wastewater, air pollution from fracking is inevitable. It's part of the process, as huge condensate tanks and compressor stations release toxic hydrocarbons like benzene, toluene, xylenes, and ethylbenzene (BTEX) into surrounding communities. At high levels, exposure to BTEX vapors may cause irreversible damage. That, paired with chemicals used in the initial drilling process, make it very harmful to live in the vicinity of a drilling operation, Colborn says. Her study in the International Journal of Human and Ecological Risk Assessment found that 36 percent of the identifiable chemicals used are volatile, meaning they become airborne. Among those, 93 percent have been shown to harm the eyes, skin, sensory organs, respiratory tract, gastrointestinal tract, or liver.

4. Fracking releases uranium.

That's right, the radioactive stuff. The 2005 Energy Act included what is known as the Halliburton Loophole, which exempts the natural gas drilling industry from many safeguards, such as the Clean Water Act, intended to protect citizens from industrial corporate activities that pollute. While the chemical cocktail used in fracking has been of much concern, new research is pointing to another fact: Contaminants and dangerous substances trapped deep underground become mobilized when fracking creates mini-earthquake-like explosions underground. A 2010 study out of the University of Buffalo found that natural gas drilling using the fracking method could potentially contaminate water supplies with uranium.

5. Fracking affects everyone.

A natural gas survey released in December 2010 found that regardless of political leanings, most people are concerned about fracking. Even if you don't live atop a major shale deposit, the pollution generated in fracking could affect you. Conrad Dan Volz, DrPH, MPH, director of the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities and the GSPH Environmental Health Risk Assessment Certificate Program at the University of Pittsburgh, notes that as more wells are installed in various states, there's more toxic wastewater to deal with. Wastewater from fracking operations is often sent to municipal treatment plants that are not properly equipped to handle contamination by more than 600 chemicals, and possibly radioactive material. This wastewater is often shipped to locations where fracking isn't even taking place, threatening rivers and drinking water supplies in those towns.

Aside from the toxic wastewater issue, fracking could also blemish your nature vacation. Drilling is allowed on public lands, and it's particularly on display in the now not-so-picturesque parks of Colorado and Wyoming. Just last week, Pennsylvania's new governor, John Corbett, revoked a ban on new drilling in the state's parks (PA residents may not have noticed, since the move was announced on a Saturday). ( rodale.com )

READ MORE - Five Facts about Fracking Every Family Needs to Know

Do Tight Times Make Close Marriages?

Do Tight Times Make Close Marriages? - Most partnerships, business or personal, are easy when money is easy. The lucre seems to take the sting out of any disagreements, and, frankly, the cost of disharmony is too high. But according to a new report from the National Marriage Project, the Great Recession hasn't necessarily been thinning out the ranks of the married.

The survey of 1,197 married Americans aged 18–45 found that about a third of people reported that the economic downturn had been hard on their marriages. For an almost equal number of people, however, the financial strain had brought them closer. And according to the report, adorably titled "The Survey of Marital Generosity," about 38% had put the brakes on the divorce they were considering before the thin times hit.

This may be due to some old-fashioned shoulder-to-the-wheel, pull-together, family-comes-first, stick-to-it-iveness on the part of the married couple. Or it may simply be that divorce and life after divorce are huge financial hits. Several august oracles (including, maybe) predicted that the recession would increase divorce. But so far, that hasn't been true.

Meanwhile in China, which has been undergoing a sustained economic boom, divorces have shot up. Mind you, money isn't the only influence in a marriage's demise. The divorce laws in China have been loosening up and women have been gaining more economic freedom than they had been accustomed to, two factors that usually lead to more splits.

As a measure of national well-being, the divorce rate is a double-headed beast. A high rate of divorce can lead to a lot of economic and family instability, especially in countries or communities where women have little access to education or wealth. On the other hand, an extremely low level of divorce can mean that people are stuck in abusive marriages, especially — you guessed it — in countries where women have little access to education or wealth.

Similarly, divorces that are delayed for financial reasons can be good or bad news. If people find a way back to happiness by sitting through the hard times together, so much the better for them, their wealth and their children. But if economic strains are making an untenable domestic situation even more perilous, and even harder to escape from, this can have very serious — even tragic — consequences. ( time.com )

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Why Powerful Men Compulsively Cheat

Why Powerful Men Compulsively Cheat - Human males have never been thought of as models of sexual restraint — and with good reason. From the moment the adolescent libido begins to boot up, boys seem to enter an ongoing state of emotional — if not literal — priapism, from which they never fully emerge.

As far as nature is concerned, this is just fine. The goal of any organism, after all, is to ensure the survival and propagation of its genes, and males — far more so than females — are eminently equipped to do that. Even the world's most reproductively prolific mothers rarely produce more than eight or nine children in a lifetime. Males can conceive everyday, even multiple times a day, and come emotionally hardwired to do just that.

Part of the reason they don't, apart from the impracticality of trying to raise a brood of 200 children, is that they just don't get that many mating opportunities. Sex requires a willing partner, and females, with so much more on the line in terms of the time, effort and energy that pregnancy and child-rearing involve, can be extremely selective in choosing mates. That requires males to develop a whole suite of emotional muscles — self-denial, self-restraint, a facility for delayed gratification — that will help them cope with an appetite that at some levels will never be fully satisfied. And that, in turn, is a central pillar of monogamy and fidelity.

But what happens when the lid comes off? What happens when the opportunities are unlimited? In some cases, not much. Males either continue to practice self-control or, after a brief period of happy debauchery — think rock stars or leading men who are always seen stepping out with a new piece of arm candy — finally settle down into stable monogamy.

In some cases, though, the stability never happens; in some cases, unlimited opportunity simply leads to unlimited appetites. Emperors and despots may be best known for this kind of behavior. The 18th-century Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail is said to have fathered 888 children with his 500 concubines. Genghis Khan makes Ismail look practically barren. A 2003 analysis of the Y chromosome of 2,123 men now living across the former Mongol empire showed that there are 16 million males living today whose line stretches back to the great conqueror — or one out of every 200 males now on the planet. But modern-day men of power — Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, John Ensign, JFK, FDR, and most recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn — with their serial wives or serial philandering, can behave just as badly, if less prolifically.

"When men have more opportunity they tend to act on that opportunity," says psychologist Mark Held, a private practitioner in the Denver area who specializes in male sexuality and the problems of overachievers. "The challenge becomes developing ways to control the impulses so you don't get yourself into self-defeating situations."

There are a lot of things that distinguish pampered and powerful men who behave themselves sexually from those who don't. Part of it is simply underlying temperament. Bill Clinton and Harry Truman were decidedly different people in the rectitude department, even if both of them were once the most powerful person in the world. There's no saying with certainty what led to Clinton's sometimes frantic need to be liked and his maddening lack of any internal governor — his broken home, his abusive stepfather, his admitted issues with low self-esteem that came from being seen as the chubby kid from the school band — but other leaders have hard-knock pasts too and not all of them become lotharios.

"It's sometimes framed as a case of character, but it can also be someone's sexual makeup," says Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the sexual disorders clinic at Johns Hopkins University. "There's a basic biological factor at play. Sex is a powerful force and some people just have to struggle more to control it than others."

Narcissists are clearly part of the poor-control camp. One of the things that made John Edwards a hard electoral sell well before his affair was revealed was the visceral sense people got that he was simply too much of a self-adoring preener. There would be no level of public adoration he could achieve that would reach the level he felt for himself. But in some cases, narcissism is not the only thing going on.

"There's a fairly new measure we use that's called 'the dark side,'" says Larry Josephs, a professor of psychology at Adelphi University. "It's a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy." Garden variety cads like Edwards clearly aren't psychopathic, but world-class monsters like Caligula — whose sexual appetites were legend — just as clearly were. All three features of the dark side personality can exist in people in different combinations and different degrees, but the more severe any one of them is, the greater the risk for sexual acting out. "Men who are low on these traits are less likely to cheat even when the opportunity presents itself," says Josephs.

Also in play is the point in life at which unusual privilege was first conferred. Members of royal families are born into a world of indulgence and entitlement, and the princelings who grow up that way may never have to develop the emotional musculature that will allow them to show self-restraint. Athletes often start life at the opposite end of the wealth and prestige spectrum, but as soon as they exhibit an unusual talent for swinging a bat or sinking a free-throw they may find that the rules have been suspended for them. They are waved through school and into the pros, and incidents of bad behavior are overlooked or covered up. Any skills they may have been developing for self-control or self-denial quickly wither.

"People who come into fame or power later in life do seem to manage their circumstances more effectively," says Berlin. "They've learned a certain discipline and they've adapted to having to contain themselves."

Men, certainly, aren't the only people who abuse their power sexually. Women exhibit the dark-side triad too, and can become accustomed to power and its perks as easily as a man can. What's more, testosterone, a primal driver of dominance behavior, is not the exclusive province of men either. "Women produce testosterone just like men do, even if at different levels," says Josephs. "That means women have testosterone-driven tendencies as well, and that pays dividends. Dominant animals tend to be more reproductively successful whether they're male or female."

But if alpha men and women dominate both the world and the gene pool, that's not to say betas don't have ways to push back. Among all social animals, leaders are tolerated only until what they give back to the group in terms of stability and order is exceeded by what they take from it, in terms of material and mating resources. When the balance tips the wrong way, the group gets restless.

"We have what we call subordinate strategies, and we see that in chimps and bonobos too," says Josephs. "You don't want the leader dominating all of the mating opportunities, so you form coalitions and topple him."

That same phenomenon, Josephs believes, may explain the public outrage when sexual misbehavior of elites — particularly the kind that involves violence or assault — become public. "We don't want our leaders to be philanderers," he says. "In an egalitarian society, nobody should monopolize all of the females or sleep with our wives, or we're going to get even."

In the case of Edwards or Spitzer, that meant banishment to a political Elba. In the case of Strauss-Kahn, it may well mean jail. In the case of Caligula, it meant assassination. It's been said for millennia, but it bears repeating: just keep it zipped, boys, just keep it zipped. ( time.com )

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When Is Tweeting Cheating?

When Is Tweeting Cheating? - Apart from the eerie similarity to the opening plot point of the Matt Damon vehicle The Adjustment Bureau (handsome potential New York City mayor brought down by ill-advised photograph), the most striking thing about the spectacle of the slow-motion Weinermobile crash that took place on Monday is how it divides the sexes.

As my colleague James Poniewozik points out, right after the last surreal moments of New York Congressman Anthony Weiner's already bizarre press conference — during which he admitted that yes, it was he who accidentally posted a picture of his unders on Twitter, and oh yeah, he'd kind of used electronic communication with strangers to get his rocks off before — most of the news channels went straight to a bunch of guys to figure out what it all meant.

The men looked a bit puzzled, many of them arguing — especially if they were Democrats — that because Weiner hadn't broken the law, they weren't quite sure what the big deal was.

There was the sticky issue of the wife, the woman to whom barely a year ago he'd pledged eternal troth. But if Weiner didn't actually meet any of the several women he admitted to having flirty and sexually charged communication with, let alone sleep with them, then where was the harm? After all, the men noted, some of it even took place before Weiner was married. Until the inadvertently public tweet, it was private, consensual social-media contact between grown people.

In the game of Monogamy, the consensus among the blokes was: Weiner deserves the equivalent of being sent to jail. No passing Go, no collecting $200, but a few rolls of the die and he's back on the streets.

For many women, on the other hand, perhaps especially wives, the whole thing is galling. How could sending dirty e-mails — or in the case of Twitter and Facebook, direct messages — to other women possibly be the faithful and loving thing to do?

It's not a hard science, but if the spectrum of infidelity has the Full Arnold (secret child with another woman) and the Semi-Eliot (occasional use of prostitutes) at one end and saying something flirty to the person handing you a caffe latte at the other, then sending pictures of your congressional member to women you don't know is somewhere in the middle, a gray area.

Social media has vastly widened the borders of this misty territory, making it easy to find former flames on Facebook, admirers on Twitter and people you liked the look of from across the conference facility on LinkedIn. Once you've found them, it's up to you and your moral compass as to what you do with them. Because of the disembodied nature of electronic communication, people are often much less guarded about how they express themselves.

There's a concept that marriage therapists talk about, emotional infidelity, where a person doesn't actually sleep with another person, but they have a relationship that's intense and intimate in every other way. Sometimes these are gateway friendships to full-blown affairs, other times they blow over. Generally guys tend to dismiss these as no big deal, a technical foul at best.

But to many women, for whom physical and emotional intimacy are kind of a package deal, these can be devastating. Why, these women like to know, is sharing intimacy with them not enough? While Weiner's biggest crime against the state seems to be subjecting it to a spectacle of ginormous cheesiness, his wife, the accomplished knockout Huma Abedin, has got to be weighing her future with a man who cannot call a moratorium on the sexy talk with strangers even in the first flush of wedded bliss.

In the end, what Weiner did was spectacularly stupid. It's forgivable to send a public tweet when you meant to send a private one (I say this as TIME magazine's reigning queen of the inadvertent "reply all"). But it's stupid to lie about it.

It's foolish, as even tweens know, to send risqué photos to people you haven't met. But it's witless to send them to the opposite sex if you're married or in a committed relationship. (How did Weiner think Abedin would feel?) It's imprudent to lie to the press, your family and supporters, and it's chowder-headed to do it if you know that you can be easily found out.

While we're at it, it's injudicious to organize a press conference so badly that there's nobody but yourself to cut off questions and let it be hijacked by a blogger and a shock-jock sidekick. And finally, it's not fair but it's true that it's particularly harebrained to do all this if you have a family name that is as memorable as Weiner.

Maybe elected Representatives don't have to be faithful or clever or honest to be decent leaders. But is a little wisdom too much to ask? ( time.com )

READ MORE - When Is Tweeting Cheating?

Will the Kids Get Their Parents to Marry?

Will the Kids Get Their Parents to Marry? - If a new interview in USA Today is to anything to go on, kids seem to have done what Jennifer Aniston couldn't: got Brad Pitt to settle down.

Pitt, whose six children with Angelina Jolie (that striking woman with big lips — maybe you've heard of her?) range in age from 2 to 9, is even reconsidering whether he will get married. He and Jolie had famously claimed they'd make it legal only when it was legal for gay people too. But he didn't reckon with his little persuaders.

"The kids ask about marriage," he tells USA Today. "It's meaning more and more to them. So it's something we've got to look at." Moreover, while he still has a passion for motorcycles, architecture and photography, he admits that a lot of his bandwith is taken up with less exotic pursuits. His kids' safety is a big issue for him, as is cooking. "You've got to make sure they've brushed their teeth and eaten a good breakfast. You want to be present if they wake up with a bad dream."

This is Brad Pitt. The Brad Pitt of secret, slightly perverse, midday maternal fantasies throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Talking about his kids' dental hygiene. Bit of a buzzkill, no?

Even a beast as iconoclastic as Brangelina, it seems, cannot resist the normalizing force of children. Remember when Bill Gates claimed he wasn't going to leave his children much money in his will? And then he actually had children, got to know them and changed his mind. A bit. Instead of a few hundred thousand, as he initially suggested, the Gateses are going with 10% of their wealth. So ... more like hundreds of millions.

It's not a huge surprise that the Jolie-Pitt brood want their parents to get married. Scratch any parent and you'll find a person whose child wishes that s/he was less weird, stood out less, just disappeared into the indistinguishable mass of humanity known as "grown-ups." That's why the suburbs, where the families live, end up seeming so vanilla. It's not what the neighbors are saying. It's the pressure from the damn conformist kids.

Yes, kids crave stability, but it's not stability that makes the Jolie-Pitt kids want their parents to be legally wed. It's that they want to blend in. (By the way, good luck with that, guys.) Or, more specifically, kids want to stand out in ways that they have agency over. They don't wish to have attention thrust upon them for things not of their choosing.

Pick up any memoir by a child of a celebrity and if you don't find them saying, "Cary Grant was just Dad to me," they're saying, "My mother, a.k.a. Joan Crawford, ruined my life." It's as if there's a rule: no matter what you do with your life, to your children you must appear normal. Right up until they accuse you of being stultifying old conformists.

The data is clear that long-term, monogamous, loving relationships between parents are very good for children. History also seems to suggest that these relationships are facilitated by the institution of marriage (though that may be changing). Brad and Angelina may have been too untamed once for anything as stuffy as a marriage license. But then they had children have already done their domesticating damage. And there are worse reasons to get married than because six small people who love you want you to.

Just, for the love of mercy, do it quietly. ( time.com )

READ MORE - Will the Kids Get Their Parents to Marry?