A Wise Way to Make Families Rules

All groups, of whatever size or nature, need standard operating procedures. Without them, groups may very well fall into confusion, chaos and conflict. The functions that rules can serve are indispensable. When it comes to parenting, making rules can make a big difference in our family as well. Actually, the issue is not whether our families need rules. We do need them. The real issue is how to motivate all family members to comply with (遵守) them.

At some time in our lives we all have felt unmotivated to comply with some rule or policy that we had no voice in making. Denied the opportunity to participate in establishing a rule, most people feel imposed upon and resentful of the new rule. But when people actively participate in setting a rule or making a decision that will affect them, they are more highly motivated to comply with it. We call this the Principle of Participation, and it has proven its effectiveness in families as well.

When children are given the opportunity to participate in setting rules or making decisions that will affect them, several good things happen. Children feel better about themselves — having more self-esteem (自尊心) and self-confidence. Such a good effect is due to their feeling that they have gained more “fate control” over their own lives. They also feel they are equal members of the family with an equal voice in making decisions and establishing rules — they’re part of a team, not second-class citizens. This means that families that function collaboratively and democratically will have closer and warmer relationships than those in which the adults act as bosses or authorities expecting the children to obey the rules made for them.

Another important reason for encouraging the full participation of family members in decision making is that it often produces higher-quality solutions to problems. Two heads (or three, or four) are better than one. Shared decisions will be based not only on the knowledge and experience of the adults but also on those of the children. The admonition (告诫) that father knows best should be challenged now.

Vertical Farms: Is the sky really the limit?

At a hyper-controlled indoor farm in industrial South San Francisco, four robots carefully transfer seeds from barcoded trays into 4.5-meter towers that then are hung vertically (垂直地) inside a 445 sq metre grow room. Workers in branded jumpsuits     1     (inspect) the greens for imperfect produce, but there is almost     2    . Then the pesticide-free product is packaged and put on a truck     3     (deliver) to a local market where the customer becomes the first person to touch it. With the world’s population expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, most of     4     will be living in cities, experts say a 70% increase from current levels of global food production will be needed. But agricultural land is     5     short supply thanks to the climate crisis and urbanization.

Indoor farming raised more than $1 bn in 2021, exceeding the combined funding in 2018 and 2019. But critics say the massive energy costs     6    (need) to run vertical farms and greenhouses make the practice far less eco-friendly than their branding suggests.

Designed to produce yields hundreds of times larger than traditional outdoor farming, vertical farms occupy spaces such as buildings or shipping containers while using 70 to 95% less water     7     they can recapture and recycle rather than waste it due to poor irrigation (灌溉) or evaporation. Products are fully traceable from seed to shelf, stay fresher longer and there’s little risk of bacteria, infected animal faces (粪便) or     8    (have) to transport them long distances in trucks and planes.

Entrepreneurs like Irving Fain, CEO and founder of Manhattan-based Bowery Farming, say that they’re gathering knowledge about plant growth and agronomy (农学) that     9     take traditional farmers outdoors hundreds of years to accumulate. The possibilities raised by vertical farms have also captured the imagination of a number of large venture capitalists and private equality funds. “While it is still too early to tell     10     these high-tech, high-rise growing machines will become a real estate asset class in their own right, some investors are starting to take a serious look at vertical farming as a possible new asset category.” said Fain.

6 . If you are experiencing physical symptoms that could indicate burnout, consider seeing your primary care doctor or a mental health professional to determine whether they are driven by stress or rooted in other physical condition, Dr. Dyrbye said. Don’t just take no notice of the symptoms and assume they are _________.

“It’s really easy to _________ your own symptom, especially in our culture, where we are taught to work hard,” Dr. Gold said.

If it is burnout, then the best solution is to _________ the root of the problem. Burnout is typically recognised when it is job-driven, but chronic stress can have a variety of _________ — financial problems, relationship difficulties, and caregiving burdens, among other things. “Think about the pebbles in your shoe all the time that you have to _________,” Dr. Maslach said, “and brainstorm ways to _________ some of them, at least some of the time. Perhaps you can ask your partner to help more with your toddler’s bedtime routine, or get takeout when you’re especially busy so you don’t have to plan dinner, too.”

Despite popular culture coverage of the issue, burnout can’t be “fixed” with better self-care, Dr. Maslach said — in fact, this _________ only worsens the problem, because it lays the blame and responsibility on those with burnout and implies that they should do more to feel better, which is not the case, she said. However, some lifestyle _________ can make burnout less likely. Social support, for instance, can help, Dr. Gold said. This could include talking to a therapist or meeting with friends (even if over Zoom). It may also help to _________ mental health or exercise benefits offered by your employer. Sleeping more can help too — so if you’re __________ from a lack of sleep, talk to a doctor about possible treatments, Dr. Bennett suggested.

When burnout __________ job-related difficulties, it may help to request better working conditions. Dr. Maslach suggested brainstorming with co-workers and presenting your __________ with ideas that would help — like providing quiet areas for breaks and personal phone calls, creating “no meeting” days so that employees can have more time to __________, or ensuring that there’s always coffee in the break room. Even small changes like these can reduce the risk for burnout if they fix a problem people __________ at work every day. “It’s the lasting job stressors that make people really __________ after a while. They don’t have the right equipment, they don’t have the things they need, they don’t have enough people to do the work,” Dr. Maslach said.

7 . Crazy Laws

It seems that the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, was right when he said, “Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.”     1     Some of them were strange right from the start!

Did you know, for example, that London taxis (officially called Hackney carriages) are still legally required to carry hay and oats for their horses to eat? And in England, it is illegal to stand within 100 yards (91 metres) of the queen, without wearing socks?

If you live in Scotland, however, it’s important to know that if someone knocks at the door of your house, and needs to use your toilet, you are legally required to let him in.     2     There, it is perfectly legal to shoot a Scotsman with a bow and arrow, unless it is a Sunday!

    3     In France, you cannot call your pig Napoleon, and in Italy, a man can be arrested for wearing a skirt. That’s not all. In Alaska, US, while it’s legal to shoot bears, waking a sleeping bear to take its photo is prohibited. Still in Alaska, it is considered an offence to push a live moose out of an aeroplane.

Lots of the craziest laws seem to involve animals.     4     And in Florida, if an elephant is left tied to a parking meter, the parking fine must be paid, just as it would for a vehicle.

Last, children are forbidden from going to school with their breath smelling of wild onions in West Virginia. And in Arkansas, teachers who have a certain hairc ut (a bob) will not be given a pay-rise. In Florida, a woman can be fined for falling asleep under the hair-dryer and unmarried women must not parachute on a Sunday. If they do, they might be arrested, receive a fine or be put in jail.

8 . When Carolina Escudero was severely depressed, going to a therapist’s office became hard to face. So she joined BetterHelp, a popular therapy app. She paid $65 each week but spent most of her time waiting for her assigned counsellor to respond. She got two responses in a month.“It was like texting an acquaintance who has no idea how to deal with mental illness,” she says. BetterHelp says its service does not claim to operate around the clock, all its therapists have advanced degrees and “thousands of hours of hands-on clinical work”, and users are able easily to switch them if scheduling is hard.

Helping people to deal with mental problems has rarely been more urgent. The incidence of depression and anxiety has soared in the pandemic by more than 25% globally in 2020, according to the Lancet, a medical journal. That, combined with more people using online services, has led to a boom in mental-health apps. The American Psychological Association reckons 10,000-20,000 are available for download.

Underneath, though, a trauma lies in some corners of the industry. In October 2020 hackers who had breached Vastaamo, a popular Finnish startup, began blackmailing some of its users. Vastaamo required therapists to back up patient notes online but reportedly did not anonymize (匿名) them. Threatening to share private information on the dark web, the hackers reportedly demanded money from some 30,000 patients.

Other cases may arise. No universal standards for storing “emotional data” exist. John Torous of Harvard Medical School, who has reviewed 650 mental- health apps, describes their privacy policies as terrible. Some share information with advertisers. “When I first joined BetterHelp, I started to see targeted ads with words that I had used on the app to describe my personal experiences,” reports one user.

As for effectiveness, the apps’ methods are exceedingly difficult to evaluate. Woebot, for instance, is a chat robot which uses artificial intelligence to reproduce the experience of cognitive behavioural therapy. The product is marketed as clinically validated based in part on a scientific study which concluded that humans can form meaningful bonds with robots. But the study was written by people with financial links to Woebot.

Mental-health apps were designed to be used in addition to clinical care, not in the place of them. With that in mind, the European Commission is reviewing the field. It is getting ready to promote a new standard that will apply to all health apps. A letter-based scale will rank safety, user friendliness and data security. Liz Ashall-Payne, founder of ORCHA, a British startup that has reviewed thousands of apps, says that 68% did not meet the firm’s quality criteria. Time to head back to the couch?

Economics survive by continually responding to the world around them. This means employing new technologies or exploiting new international markets when     1     growth. Today, these global shifts — dramatic shocks to economies — occur more frequently, are more     2     and, in knowledge-based economies are more dependent on talent than ever. In countries where a workforce lacks the skills that are suddenly in     3    , we see a skills gap emerge. This leads to higher unemployment rates while vacancies increase and productivity and growth decline.

So how can economies     4    ? By adapting. However, unlike the macro-strategies of the last century, people — not just policy — must drive today’s adaptability. Employers and policymakers have long     5     the importance of a flexible workforce, but until now it has been difficult to isolate the human element — the willingness and ability of employees to seek out and find opportunities across multiple employers, locations and industries. Our new ability to measure it and analyse talent adaptability — and to start to understand what drives it — are crucial steps forward.

The     6     of a market to match supply and demand efficiently depends on the ability and willingness of employers and employees to adapt to changing circumstances and align (使一致) skills with available opportunities. If this alignment is less than perfect, a mismatch     7     and optimum productivity can’t be reached.

Adapt to Survive for the first time brings together the two most comprehensive sources of talent data in the world: the real-time behaviours drawn from LinkedIn’s 277 million members and employer information from PwC’s Saratoga database of people and performance metrics (指标) which covers more than 2,600 employers across the globe. This report sets a new benchmark for     8     a country’s ability to match talent with opportunity and the movement of people between industries — the Talent Adaptability Score. This score is given to 11 countries. For each country, we evaluate how the Score     9     economic performance. Our recommendations are organised around four groups:

● Individuals — Prove your adaptability.

● Employers — Seek out, nurture and reward talents who can adapt.

● Educators — Offer courses and job training that produce     10     people.

● Governments — Create a climate of adaptability.