【推荐1】These days, if you hear about the birth of an Olivia or a Liam, you might feel sympathy—the poor child has been cursed (诅咒) with the most popular name of their time and might be at risk of sharing it with a kindergarten classmate. “The name Mary for instance, was the most popular girls name from 1880 to 1961.” said Laura Wattenberg, the founder of the naming-trends site Namerology.

In the past 60 or so years, American parents’ approach to naming their kids has undergone a deep shift. Today, many parents seek out less popular names to help their kids stand out. But in the past, parents typically picked common names, consciously or not, so that their kids would fit in.

In 1880, the percentage of babies who got a top-10 most popular name was in the neighborhood of 32 percent, according to Wattenberg’s calculations. In 1950, it was about 28 percent. And in 2020, it had fallen to an all-time low of 7 percent. “We are deep in an era of naming individuality, where parents assume that having a name sound distinctive and unique is a virtue,” Wattenberg said.

There came a turn toward novelty and distinctiveness in the 1960s. It was driven by many broader shifts in daily life. As family sizes shrunk and kids stopped doing labor, Americans “started to focus on the uniqueness of each child,” as the sociologist Philip Cohen has written, and “individuality emerged as a project—starting with naming of creating an identity.”

Another crucial change is that in the 1960s, parents started gaining access to data on baby naming trends, according to Evans, a professor in Bellevue University. Books informed parents which names were popular—and, by extension, which overexposed names they might want to avoid. As this information became more widely available, Evans argues, parents felt more social pressure not to pick the same name as everyone else for fear of not following the latest fashions.

【推荐2】Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy recently declared children’s mental health is a national crisis.

In December 2021,Dr.Murthy issued a report to highlight the additional pressures the COVID- 19 pandemic(流行病)had put on the country’s youth, and the urgent need to address this. The impact of this crisis is far-reaching, and new research shows that it’s affecting parents’well-being, plus their ability to succeed at work and provide for their families.

“On Our Sleeves, a national movement that aims to break shame around children’s mental health, surveyed more than 3,000 working parents across the US and found that eight in 10 parents are very concerned about their child’s mental health and development or behavior in the past two years. Children’s mental health concerns have been hiding in plain sight for many years, surrounded by confusion and shame,”says Marti Bledsoe Post, the director of On Our Sleeves.

The survey found that 53% of working parents have missed work at least once per month to deal with their children’s mental health. And 71% of parents said issues with their child’s mental or emotional well-being made the stresses of work much more difficult to cope with.

“Employers need to know that many of their employees are struggling and it impinging their work as a result,”says Bledsoe Post.“Our mission with On Our Sleeves is to provide every family in America access to free, evidence-based educational resources. We see this study as incredibly important in starting the conversation and providing solutions for working families.”

As Morin points out, for some parents, taking a child to weekly treating appointments, attending and meetings at school consumes a lot of time. These parents should be helped, but how?

【推荐3】It is no surprise that every country tends to accept its own way of life as being the normal one and to praise or criticize others, as they are similar to or different from it. And unfortunately, our picture of the people and the ways of life of other countries is often a distorted(扭曲的)one.

Here is a great argument in favour of foreign travel and learning foreign languages. It is only by travelling in a country and getting to know its inhabitants and their language that one can find out what a country and its people are really like. And how different the knowledge one gains this way frequently turns out to be from the second-hand information gathered from other sources! How often we find that the foreigners whom we thought to be such different people from ourselves are not very different at all!

Differences between peoples do, of course, exist and, one hopes, will always continue to do so. The world will be a dull place indeed when all the different nationalities behave exactly alike, and some people might say that we are rapidly approaching this state of affairs. With the much greater rapidity and ease of travel, there might seem to be some truth in this at least as far as Europe is concerned. However this may be, at least the greater ease of travel today has revealed so to more people than ever before that the Englishman or Frenchman or German is not some different kind of people from themselves.