Target marketing to Pregnant Women

That's a double entendre - here's an excerpt from an NPR article about habits

Routines are made up of a three-part "habit loop": a cue, a behavior and a reward. Understanding and interrupting that loop is key to breaking a habit, says journalist Charles Duhigg, author of "The Power of Habit."

"The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child," says Duhigg , "because all of your old routines go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new things."

Companies can also figure out how to get consumers to change their own habits and form new ones associated with their products or stores. The megastore Target, for example, tries to target pregnant women, says Duhigg, in order to capture their buying habits for the next few years.

"The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child," he says, "because all of your old routines go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new things."

Analysts at Target collect "terabytes of information" on its shoppers. They have figured out that women who buy certain products — vitamins, unscented lotions, washcloths — might be pregnant and then can use that information to jump-start their marketing campaign.

This can get tricky: One father was upset after receiving coupons for baby products in the mail from Target addressed to his teenage daughter.

"He went in and said, 'My daughter is 16 years old. Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?' and the manager apologizes," Duhigg says. "The manager calls a couple of days later ... and the father says, 'I need to apologize. ... I had a conversation with my daughter, and it turns out there's some things going on in my house that I wasn't aware of. She's due in August.' So Target figured it out before her dad did."

The nitty gritty:

"Neuroscientists have traced our habit-making behaviors to a part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which also plays a key role in the development of emotions, memories and pattern recognition. Decisions, meanwhile, are made in a different part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. But as soon as a behavior becomes automatic, the decision-making part of your brain goes into a sleep mode of sorts. In fact, the brain starts working less and less," says Duhigg. "The brain can almost completely shut down. ..."

Bottom line - stay awake and make your decisions consciously!

read the whole article here:

Habits: How They Form And How To Break Them

Kids play changes, kids change =The Importance of Child's Play

An important article over on NPR by Alix Spiegel. A brief summary:

Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University recently published a history of child's play. He says that for most of human history what children did when they played was roam in packs large or small, more or less unsupervised, and engage in freewheeling imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and action heroes. Basically, says Chudacoff, they spent most of their time doing what looked like nothing much at all.

Then along came the Mickey Mouse Club, Mattel, etc. "It's interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys," says Chudacoff. "Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object."

But during the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff argues, play changed radically. Instead of spending their time in autonomous shifting make-believe, children were supplied with ever more specific toys for play and predetermined scripts. Essentially, instead of playing pirate with a tree branch they played Star Wars with a toy light saber. Chudacoff calls this the commercialization and co-optation of child's play — a trend which begins to shrink the size of children's imaginative space.

Now we are beginning to understand that all the time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.

A lot of this boils down to the diminished capacity for children to self-regulate. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, "Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain."

According to Berk, one reason make-believe is such a powerful tool for building self-discipline is because during make-believe, children engage in what's called private speech: They talk to themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.

"In fact, if we compare preschoolers' activities and the amount of private speech that occurs across them, we find that this self-regulating language is highest during make-believe play," Berk says. "And this type of self-regulating language... has been shown in many studies to be predictive of executive functions."

Unfortunately, the more structured the play, the more children's private speech declines. Essentially, because children's play is so focused on lessons and leagues, and because kids' toys increasingly inhibit imaginative play, kids aren't getting a chance to practice policing themselves. When they have that opportunity, says Berk, the results are clear: Self-regulation improves.

BOTTOM LINE: "It seems that in the rush to give children every advantage — to protect them, to stimulate them, to enrich them — our culture has unwittingly compromised one of the activities that helped children most. All that wasted time was not such a waste after all."

Read the article here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19212514

Lollipop Moments

Lollipop Moments are what Drew Dudley defines as those moments where you do something you may not even remember later you have done that truly impacts someone else's life. And that we need to acknowledge these and honor them. This is a 3 minute talk that will stay with you for days.
Have a listen, and explore the TED site.

The TED website, tag line: "Ideas worth spreding" doesn't focus on pregnancy at all - yet in a larger sense it is about parenting: ourselves, our kids, the world. It is where I go for inspiration, for a pick me up, reminders about hope, compassion, curiosity, unity.

You can listen to talks, many less than 10 minutes, from artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, social transformers - people who are making a difference.

Exercising for Two

When you exercise during pregnancy, your baby is not, as most of us would have thought, a passive, floating passenger (and ballast on the bladder). Instead, he or she may be actively joining in the workout, with the fetal cardiac system growing stronger and healthier as a result of the workouts.

Gretchen Reynolds, in this NYT article, refers to a study that came out last April. "For the study, which was presented on Sunday at the Experimental Biology 2011 meeting in Washington, researchers from the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences revisited a group of 61 healthy women, ages 20 to 35, who’d been part of a pilot study of exercise, pregnancy and fetal heart health. About half of the women had exercised regularly during their pregnancies, jogging, power-walking or otherwise working out at a moderate pace at least three times a week. Some also had lifted light weights or practiced yoga. But their primary activity had been aerobic. The other half of the mothers-to-be “were normally active but did not engage in formal exercise,” said Linda E. May, an exercise physiologist who led the study. "

The study found that unborn children had a response to their mom's workouts! Dr. May examined the fetal cardiac readings and found that "fetuses whose mothers had exercised showed lower heart rates and greater heart-rate variability than those whose mothers had not worked out."

Dr. May told Reynolds "Dr. May reported at the Experimental Biology meeting. The babies born to exercising mothers continued to have lower heart rates and greater heart-rate variability four weeks after delivery than the babies born to the other women. The effect was especially robust in the children whose mothers had exercised the most, Dr. May said; they had the slowest heart rates and presumably the strongest hearts."

Bottom line: stay healthy and work out, for you and your baby's healthy future

Read the entire article here:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/exercising-for-two/

There’s No Place Like Home … To Give Birth

A great article by Emily Willingham over on Slate.com After a traumatic hospital experience with the birth of her first child, she chose to birth at home the next time. Professionally she is a developmental biologist and is not one "given to unscientific leaps or to detours away from evidence-based medicine."

Some talking points:

- The CDC (Center for Disease Control) has identified a 29 percent increase in home-birth rates from 2004 to 2009 in the United States

- A large study she sites found that births among first-time mothers were as safe in a midwifery unit as in an obstetric unit

- The same studied said that home births or births in a midwifery unit (the U.K. equivalent of a birthing center) were just as safe as a hospital delivery for women who’d already had a child

- 2010 analysis of 12 studies from six industrialized countries found that planned homebirths with healthy and low-risk mothers carried a 0.2 percent risk of newborn death versus a 0.09 percent risk for in-hospital births, a greater than two-fold increase

- Advocates for gentle births such as Harriet Hall, an OB, call for integrating a “kinder, gentler, less-interventionist midwife approach into a home-like hospital birthing facility” would increase patient satisfaction without sacrificing safety.

- Bottom line "The obvious solution to the controversy is to offer choices that reduce perinatal stress, minimize interventions, and personalize birth—the great appeal of home birth and midwives—while ensuring a safe outcome with well-trained attendants and access to emergency facilities. The absence of options in the United States leaves this solution elusive, especially where hospitals lack a homey, low-stress environment and local midwifery care fails to meet the gold standard. Strange, isn’t it, that our nation, in the 21st century, can’t offer more uniformly safe choices for a low-risk pregnant woman seeking a healthy, low-stress birth for her child … and herself?"


Read the whole article here -
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