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Laura Rowley Money & Happiness

Why I Canned the Cable
by Laura Rowley
Posted on Wednesday, August 19, 2009, 12:00AM
This week I went cold turkey and eliminated our cable television service entirely -- even the basic channels.

Despite our family's participation in the library summer reading program, educational camp activities (including the dissection of a sheep's eyeball), trips to museums, daily swim team practice and the new trampoline in the backyard, my kids still zoomed back to the big screen whenever they had a second of downtime -- a 48-inch, high def, Pied Piper living in the basement.

The breaking point came when my 6-year-old, Holly, got $5 from the tooth fairy and offered some of her stash to my 9-year-old, Charlotte. Charlotte said, "That's okay Holly, you should save your money." Holly literally glazed over and responded: "Save money. Live better. Wal-Mart."

My decision to ditch Comcast was fortified by a recent interview with researcher Angela Lee Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating from Harvard, Duckworth taught high school, and found a number of students were reading far below grade level despite high IQ. A lack of self-control was the problem.

She returned for her Ph.D. at Penn to study something she calls "grit" -- a combination of courage, focus, the ability to delay gratification and persevere over the long-term -- that leads to success. (It's something I talk about in my values class at Seton Hall University, but we call it fortitude, one of the cardinal virtues of Western philosophy -- along with prudence, justice and temperance.)

Duckworth has conducted a range of studies with students, from middle school, to Ivy League undergrads, to West Point cadets, testing both their ability to delay gratification and their intelligence. "The basic findings are that we could predict grades much better from self-control scores than from IQ scores," Duckworth says. For example, a study of eighth graders she conducted with Penn's Martin Seligman found self-control was twice as predictive as IQ in academic success.

Learning Self-Control

Duckworth's research builds on the work of Walter Mischel, who pioneered self-regulation psychology. He conducted a series of experiments in the 1960s with four-year-olds, offering them a marshmallow treat and then testing their ability to resist. He continued to follow the participants and found that the pre-schoolers who could delay gratification had better outcomes as adults in a variety of areas. The child who could wait 15 minutes had an SAT score that was 210 points higher than one who could wait only 30 seconds. The more impulsive children also had a higher body-mass index as adults and were more likely to have had problems with drugs.

What does all this have to do with our cable service? Self-control is not just a genetic blessing, but something that can be taught and enhanced with practice. Duckworth and Mischel have both found that one key is simply eliminating distractions that hijack focus and attention. (Although we don't allow the kids to watch TV during the school week, the stations were constantly churning out new inane junk I had to ban on weekends and holidays. Ever seen "Total Drama Island" on Cartoon Network? Or frankly, most of the programming on Cartoon Network?)

Another technique that boosts grit is goal-setting and planning. "It's good to have a specific goal that's challenging as opposed to just a vague inclination: 'I'm going to do great in school this year' is not a good goal because there's no clear feedback," says Duckworth. "A better goal would be 'I'm going to turn in homework five days out of five in math class, which I'm always struggling with' because when the week comes along and it's four out of five, you have clear feedback."

Researchers also favor basic parenting rituals that encourage kids to wait and make waiting worthwhile -- whether it's not eating snacks before dinner or requiring them to do chores or practice piano before they play on the computer. If a kid asks for an iPod or other expensive item, offer to match the funds they save up. It was amazing to watch my oldest get entrepreneurial and save up $75 for her half of the Nano. Don't abandon your expectations in the face of tantrums or sulking.

Another key to self-control is managing the background cues. Researchers Andrew Ward of Swarthmore College and Traci Mann of the University of Minnesota have conducted a series of studies on what people pay attention to and how that affects their self-control.

For instance, in a study of smokers who expressed an interest in quitting, participants were exposed to cues encouraging them to quit (including an ad for the annual "Kick Butts Day"). When their attention was unconstrained -- that is, they weren't focused on any task in particular -- participants exposed to the "quit smoking" cues tended to rebel against the messages and smoke excessively. But when their attention was narrowed with a cognitive task, participants exposed to the background antismoking message substantially reduced their smoking.

In other words, once attention is focused on a specific task, supportive background cues can boost someone's ability to accomplish a goal. "Try to arrange (the) environment such that the most prominent cues aid self-control efforts," Ward wrote in an email. "So, for example, try keeping salient reminders around that help one stick to a (task)."

Setting Specific Goals

For short-term tasks like homework, that might mean prominently posting the assignments for the night, time limits and a possible reward for finishing everything on time. Have kids write out longer-term goals and deadlines for the month or semester and post them in their study space. Minimize distractions such as television, cell phones, iPods and the like.

The same concept works for parents trying to reach a financial goal, Ward says, because the wrong background cues can actually undermine discipline. Certain distractions "can sabotage attempts at self-control, such as when someone sees an enticing ad on TV for an attractive product and ends up impulsively purchasing it," Ward notes. "Remove from that environment those stimuli that try to undermine your efforts; turn off the TV, especially when distracted or fatigued -- times when we might be most susceptible to the influence of advertising."

Another strategy: Put a piece of masking tape on your credit card with a reminder of your larger goal ("college," "retirement" or "home down payment") to thwart short-term temptations.

One of my biggest goals as a parent is consciously guiding my kids toward the things in life that are worth paying attention to (and away from Total Drama Island).

"Deciding what to pay attention to for this hour, day, week or year, much less a lifetime, is a peculiarly human predicament, and your quality of life depends largely on how you handle it," writes Winifred Gallagher in her recent book "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life." "We must deliberately select targets, from activities to relationships, that are worthy of our finite supplies of time and attention."

Self-control psychology is enormously important in personal finance, as well. Over the years I've found the biggest financial blunders are not made by investing in the wrong stock or launching an ill-conceived business, but by failing to pay attention, by earning and spending unconsciously and by ignoring the basics. The people who focus on identifying their values, set specific goals with crystal-clear dollar amounts and timeframes, and show enough discipline to monitor their progress, typically succeed, even when life throws them curveballs -- or marshmallows.

For other techniques that boost academic achievement and finances, see my blog.

Two Cows

Two Cows

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank,
then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and
produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called ‘Cowkimon’ and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the crap out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.

Baby Charlotte

How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable

A Republican and a Democrat walk into a bar — a coffee bar, that is.

That's the plan, anyway.

But, as Republican Mark DeMoss and Democrat Lanny Davis will tell you, a civil conversation can take place anywhere.

They are behind The Civility Project, which launched in January. Their goal is simple but lofty: To get Americans to agree to disagree without being disagreeable.

DeMoss and Davis are calling on liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans and people of all faiths to take the "pledge," which reads:

I will be civil in my public discourse and behavior.
I will be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them.
I will stand against incivility when I see it.

To take the pledge, enter your first and last name and country at www.civilityproject.org.

DeMoss, president of his own public-relations firm — The DeMoss Group — said the project took shape during last year's election season.

"I had spent about two years volunteering for Mitt Romney, and I saw a lot of ugly rhetoric and behavior aimed at Mormons and then at me," he said. "And then the results of the Proposition 8 vote in California contributed to my thinking — when you saw gay activists responding to the (marriage-amendment) vote by vandalizing churches and temples.

"I decided to launch a project where I would talk not about unity, not about tolerance, not about getting along, not about compromise, but just about civility."

DeMoss' unlikely partner in the project is Lanny Davis, a longtime adviser to the Clintons who has served three terms on the Democratic National Committee.

Their paths crossed last year, as Davis was immersed in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. DeMoss was so impressed with Davis' civil tone that he wrote him a letter.

"I suspect that politically you and I may have nothing in common," he wrote. "But as I've watched you conduct yourself in the public arena, I've always appreciated how you handled yourself, how you handle your adversaries, how you show respect for those who disagree with you, and for modeling civility in an increasingly uncivil town."

Davis is used to getting mail — but not this kind.

"I'm getting all this hate mail, and I get this amazing letter from a perfect stranger who identifies himself as an evangelical Christian," Davis said. "I always try to give deference to somebody who disagrees with me. That is the point Mark made in his letter, that he noticed that about me, that I always try to be respectful of people who are of a different opinion.

"The letter was so beautifully written and moved me so greatly. It's now framed on my bookcase."

DeMoss invited Davis to join The Civility Project late last year.

"When Mark called me about the project, the concept was exactly what I had written about in my book in 2006," Davis said. "It was like two parallel roads could cross. He was using exactly the vocabulary, the values, the approach to political debate and disagreement that I had been using already. It was almost as if we were brothers who had never met.

"Apart from everything else, we liked each other and respected each other," he said. "Mark understands that words matter, the way you express yourself matters, and the way you talk about people matters."

Davis said he is liberal on "every issue" and believes DeMoss is "wrong about almost everything."

Yet, they like each other.

Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family, has repeatedly suggested that his staff invite those who disagree with them to share a cup of coffee — his own civility project.

"I use that coffee expression as a real-world way of saying, 'Let's have a conversation, face-to-face, get to know each other and what informs our worldviews,' " he said. "And when we hit a subject on which we don't share the same values, let's talk about those issues with boldness and passion, yes, but with mutual respect, too."

Daly said it's important for Christians to remember that we are called not only to stand up for our convictions, but to love our neighbor, as well.

"Those are not mutually exclusive exhortations," he said. "Every human being deserves dignity and respect. The Civility Project, from the perspective of those of us who are Christians, calls us to remember that we are followers of Christ first, members of a political party or ideology second."

DeMoss said there are plenty of options for civil discourse.

"Writing is a terrific way to argue and debate," he said. "And that's one of the positive things about the information age — anybody can be a writer. Sit down and write a reasoned argument. Submit an opinion piece to a newspaper. Publish a blog. And if you're in a face-to-face debate, just be respectful. Make your case. And know what you're talking about."

Davis said America needs more people who believe in civility politics to speak out.

The first step, he said, is to "take on people of your own ideology." Next, "we need members of Congress and others in the political arena to sign on to these principles."

Those who sign the civility pledge will not receive e-mails or fundraising requests. DeMoss said he hasn't even counted the signatures.

"I decided — and this runs counter to modern-day marketing principles—I was not trying to build a mailing list," he said. "I'm not trying to raise money. I've not sent a single e-mail to people that have taken this pledge."

Early Adoption of Language

Unraveling how children become bilingual so easily
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard, Ap Medical Writer
Tue Jul 21, 3:08 am ET

WASHINGTON – The best time to learn a foreign language: Between birth and age 7. Missed that window?

New research is showing just how children's brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier.

"We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology.

Each language uses a unique set of sounds. Scientists now know babies are born with the ability to distinguish all of them, but that ability starts weakening even before they start talking, by the first birthday.

Kuhl offers an example: Japanese doesn't distinguish between the "L" and "R" sounds of English — "rake" and "lake" would sound the same. Her team proved that a 7-month-old in Tokyo and a 7-month-old in Seattle respond equally well to those different sounds. But by 11 months, the Japanese infant had lost a lot of that ability.

Time out — how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there's a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.

Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl's research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don't fit.

"You're building a brain architecture that's a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French," whatever is native, Kuhl explains — or, if you're a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two languages.

It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.

Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.

The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns — nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time — like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba — while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies.

While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty.

"We're seeing the brain as more plastic and ready to create new circuits before than after puberty," Kuhl says. As an adult, "it's a totally different process. You won't learn it in the same way. You won't become (as good as) a native speaker."

Yet a soon-to-be-released survey from the Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit organization that researches language issues, shows U.S. elementary schools cut back on foreign language instruction over the last decade. About a quarter of public elementary schools were teaching foreign languages in 1997, but just 15 percent last year, say preliminary results posted on the center's Web site.

What might help people who missed their childhood window? Baby brains need personal interaction to soak in a new language — TV or CDs alone don't work. So researchers are improving the technology that adults tend to use for language learning, to make it more social and possibly tap brain circuitry that tots would use.

Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.

Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.

"It's our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal," says Kuhl.

But she'd rather see parents follow biology and expose youngsters early. If you speak a second language, speak it at home. Or find a play group or caregiver where your child can hear another language regularly.

"You'll be surprised," Kuhl says. "They do seem to pick it up like sponges."

Cash Crops to the Rescue