Hasta La Gadget!

When it comes to Christmas, I believe we must get back to basics, and that starts with respecting children.

Children are a marketer’s dream during Christmas season, and they are at the receiving end of countless multimedia messages and carefully crafted advertising campaigns designed to manipulate and direct their desires towards particular brands and products with which to fill their letters to Santa. Combine this with the fact that Christmas is now starting as soon as the Halloween pumpkins are carved, and our children face two long months of bright lights, repetitive seasonal songs and consumer market-driven hyper-stimulation that they are not developmentally able to process.

Children do not have the emotional language or cognition to express this verbally in terms of, “Mum/Dad I am feeling overwhelmed and perturbed,” so they will show us the only way they can, which is behaviorally and the overwrought parents of the overwhelmed children will be pushed to the point of… threatening to tell Santa that the child has been naughty so they may not get any gifts!

It’s a threat that has been a part of many of our childhoods, but I would like to look a little closer at it and the impact it has on children. Christmas is about children, it is about magic, it is about imagination and it is about kindness, or at least it ought to be. I’m not a fan of threatening to tell Santa when a child has been naughty or threatening that Santa won’t bring gifts, because it simply isn’t true. No matter how naughty and challenging your child’s behavior might be, Santa is going to come to them and as such, you are undermining yourself by issuing empty threats that further arouse your child with anxiety when they hear it.

Let’s try thinking about it from your child’s perspective. Christmas is a time of magic, when Santa and his elves work together to ensure that every boy and girl gets a gift that they want for Christmas. Then, all in one night, Santa magically ensures all those gifts arrive in every home before your child awakes. And all your child has to do is behave well and do kind things, so let’s focus on finding ways to reinforce this kind behavior, invest in magical thinking and access their imaginations to try to stretch the ever-narrowing window of childhood out a little further.

I have been running parenting courses, classes and talks for a number of years now, and the three most common complaints that parent’s share with me are their anxiety over disruptive and bad behavior, the stress and worry they feel over not being able to spend more time with their children (especially in the evenings) and their ongoing frustration with their children playing with electronics all the time. Christmas is a time when all of these stresses heighten, and I believe that parents must focus on the positive behaviors they want to see from children as opposed to repeating back to them what they do not want to see through a series of empty threats.

Using imagination enables children to develop on their impulse controls, reasoning skills, patience and the importance of emotional self-regulation. I believe that parents can utilize the magic of Christmas to invest in their child’s development of these life skills and at the same time, reinforce and encourage good behavior rather than threatening to report back on bad behavior. This would allow families the opportunity to invest in the nice and not the naughty while building up crucial life skills in their children. Bonus: It also helps you to regulate the long over-stimulated Christmas build up!

Children do not need something/someone looking over them supervising their actions, ready to report back to Santa when they have misbehaved or made a mistake. This concept will only serve to send them into a state of anticipatory arousal whereby they become hyper-vigilant for signs that they are right to be worried and anxious, even if it means inadvertently self-sabotaging to bring about a release from this state. When you let a child know you are looking for the bad in their behavior, they will not let you down. Wouldn’t it be far better for them (and you) if you invite them to identify a positive, happy moment from their day for you to relay to Santa as well as something they wish they could change and do over differently? This helps them identify the good in themselves while taking a solution-focused approach to something that didn’t go so well, so that they can learn from it.

You can help your child to access their good and kind behaviors to feedback to Santa this year through 15 minutes of positive parent-child communication and connection each day. Make this year a year when there is only a nice list to think about.

Joanna Fortune is a psychotherapist and attachment specialist working with children/adolescents/parents for more than 12 years. She developed www.santaslittlebuddy.com as a practical parenting tool-kit to support parents to support children over the Christmas season. She is founder of Solamh Parent Child Relationship Clinic in Dublin, Ireland. Read more about her and her work on www.joannafortune.com She tweets @solamh

On the eighth episode of Too Long; Didn’t Listen, comedians Todd Barry and Big Jay Oakerson discuss their full-length crowd work sets in what plays out as a master class in comedian-audience interaction. In addition to dissecting their vastly different approaches to keeping people laughing without pre-written material, they share stories from the road, insight on how they choose audience members to talk to, and even come up with a potential name for Jay’s next special: “Why Do You Hate Me?”

Todd’s seven city tour of crowd work shows resulted in his documentary/special, “The Crowd Work Tour,” available on Louis C.K.’s website. Jay’s new album from Comedy Central Records, “The Crowd Work Sessions: What’s Your F@!?#ng Deal?!” features an hour of unwritten material recorded at The Stand in New York City, and is available on iTunes. Also be sure to check out their podcasts, The Todd Barry Podcast and Legion Of Skanks (I’ll let you guess whose is whose).

Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe to HuffPost Comedy’s “Too Long; Didn’t Listen” on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher

A lot has changed in the last 20 years since then-Federal Reserve Vice-Chairman Alan Blinder had the audacity to suggest, in a speech, that the Fed could use interest-rate policy to help reduce unemployment in the short term. It was real blasphemy back then, and despite the fact that the Fed had by law a dual mandate to maintain both “price stability” and full employment, his remarks ignited a firestorm of controversy.

Now, thanks to the Great Recession, and Ben Bernanke’s willingness to use zero interest rates and venture into uncharted territory with quantitative easing, the “dual mandate” is widely accepted. Both Bernanke and current Fed Chair Janet Yellen also spoke out in favor using fiscal policy (i.e. deficit spending) to increase employment, something that U.S. Fed chairs didn’t say in the past. In a recent speech, Yellen noted that “the lack of fiscal support for demand in recent years also helps account for the weakness of this recovery compared with past recoveries.”

These are important institutional advances, even if other branches of government – most importantly the Congress – are not smart enough to take advantage of free money to create some of the millions of jobs that are so desperately needed. But today’s Fed could still be a threat to full employment if it proceeds too early with the “normalization” of interest rates that even Ms. Yellen is talking about. And everyone is talking about some time next year, and that is too early.

To “normalize” interest rates – i.e. begin to raise short-term rates – we would want to see at the very least a “normalized” labor market. Unemployment at 5.8 percent might look like it is getting somewhat close to “normal” but other statistics show that it is not. We can look at the percentage of prime-age workers (25-54 years old) who are working, and it has not recovered even half of its loss since the peak before the Great Recession. Since these are prime-age workers, this cannot be attributed to demographics; it is due to people dropping out of the labor force and therefore not being counted as unemployed.

As my colleague Dean Baker has pointed out, it would take another 7-8 million jobs to get us back to pre-recession levels of employment. Another measure of the economy’s current weakness is lost output: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we are 4 percentage points below our potential GDP, or about $2,000 per person lost.

The percentage of long-term unemployed (out of work for at least 6 months) is also still highly elevated at about twice its pre-recession level; and these people can become permanently unemployed if they are without work for too long. African-Americans have about twice the unemployment rate as do white workers. And then there are wages, which have barely risen more than inflation in more than 5 years of recovery.

Some analysts think that the Fed should hold off on raising interest rates, but only until real (inflation-adjusted) wages begin to rise. But this would only perpetuate the intolerable increase in inequality that the majority of this country has suffered for more than three decades. Wages can safely rise faster than inflation not only because productivity (output per worker) increases annually, but also because profits are extraordinarily high. There is a lot of catching up to do, and the Fed shouldn’t cut it off early.

With inflation still running at 1.7 percent and downside risks such as the slowing world economy, there’s no excuse for the Fed to be throwing people out of work by raising interest rates. Let’s hope that public pressure and an improved debate over Fed policy can keep this country moving toward full employment.

This article was distributed by McClatchy Tribune Information Services on December 4, 2014 and published by the Austin American Statesman and other newspapers.

With December upon us, media outlets have begun to release their “Best of” lists, magazine covers and other articles that showcase the most popular of the year. While these lists can cover everything from sports to baby names, it is specifically popular in the entertainment industry. Editors (with sometimes input from the general public) look at who had a stand-out or “breakthrough” year in all avenues of the entertainment world as well as the releases (like albums/movies) and moments that helped shape the year.

Looking specifically at individual entertainers or groups, it is usually pretty apparent who has had a banner year in their career. Did they have a career resurgence or major-change? Did they have a breakout performance that attributed to awards and other accolades? Did they go from “virtual unknowns” to on the tip of everyone’s tongues? These factors (along with others) all come into play.

When it comes to deciding the “Best of” (album releases, movies and so-on), it is typically based either on opinion or performance. It is common for some to disagree with what the critics/editors consider to be the “best of the year” (if it is based on opinion). If it is based purely on performance (sales, box office etc.), then it is harder to dispute. Regardless, all this could be changed if a “December Surprise” occurs.

This event occurs at the end of the year (usually December), after the many covers have been shot, articles have been written, and lists have been formed. The actual surprise is sometimes based on performance. The date of an album or movie release was already known, but how well it did either critically or sales-wise went well above expectations.

Other times it is a complete surprise to everyone and sends the entertainment world into a tailspin. One major example of this was Beyoncé’s surprise album in 2013. The self-titled album caught many in-and-out of the industry completely off guard and with only a few weeks left in the year, was a massive success. In a nutshell, it most likely messed up a few lists.

While I enjoy many of the end-of-the-year articles, it is fun to see these entertainment events occur at the last minute. It keeps things interesting as the year comes to an end. While I understand there are deadlines (especially in the publishing world), I began to see these articles pop-up even earlier this year with the first one occurring towards the end of October. Considering in the ever-changing viral world we live in (where things change in a matter of seconds), this is too early.

The “December Surprise” is also a reminder that the year is not over yet. Yes, in a few weeks, the ball will drop and 2014 will officially come to a close. However until then, the final chapter of the year is still being written. There is still time to make an impact or accomplish ones 2014 goals (whatever those may be). Even if the goals aren’t completely accomplished, it hopefully helps end 2014 on a good note and start 2015 off strong.

Microsoft has a smartphone called the Nokia Lumia 520, one that they now have available to buy for $29. This is the Nokia Lumia 520, a device that we’ve reviewed more than once – once as the 520 and another time as the T-Mobile version (basically the same device) as the 521. Back then, it was cheap. Now it’s staggeringly … Continue reading