• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Parenting

Science Fact of the Day: Pregnancy and Strength Training

January 9, 2019 by Geoff Leave a Comment

When I was a personal trainer I had always hypothesized that strength training would lead to positive outcomes for pregnant women and the child, particularly if they had been training prior to the conception of their child.

Since I’m not a research center and such training could be high risk, I just wouldn’t train a pregnant woman. The wisdom in the early 2000s was, “don’t engage in strength training if you’re pregnant.” Among trainers the wisdom was, “that doesn’t make any sense, but don’t do it to avoid a lawsuit.”

Recently (2015) the American College of Obstetrians and Gynecologists said that it was safe to initiate/continue strength training during uncomplicated pregnancies.*

Anyway, strength training is getting closer and closer to being a scientifically verified panacea. In the case of pregnancy, strength training:

  1. Does not increase the risk of pre-term birth.
  2. May improve fetal heart function (circuit style training)
  3. Improves maternal energy levels
  4. Decreases risk of preeclampsia.
  5. Lowers risk of unhealthy weight gain (this one should have been obvious)
  6. Lowers risk of gestational diabetes
  7. Decreases incontinence by strengthening pelvic floor musculature
  8. Potentially decreases risk factors to the child caused by the mother being overweight
  9. Makes the mother feel healthier
  10. Decreases risk for post birth depression (exercise in general)
  11. Decreased back pain

Now, I’m no doctor and I’m not making any recommendations. But hopefully this information helps you do some of your own research.

*American College of Obstetrians and Gynecologists. Physical activity and exercise during pregnancy and the postpartum period. Committee Opinion Number 650 2015.

Share:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Exercise, Health, Parenting Tagged With: Exercise, pregnancy, sciencefactoftheday

The Four Ps of Manliness

January 7, 2019 by Geoff 1 Comment

Brett Mckay over at The Art of Manliness wrote a post a few years back about the three Ps of manliness (a part of a very good series):

  1. Procreate
  2. Provide
  3. Protect

But I think there’s a fourth P that has to go along with each of these. I’m not sure what word to use, maybe Progress, Paradigm, or Personify (to make it a verb).

The idea is that being a man includes the production of ideals and then their pursuit or an ideal following it’s implementation. To be a man is to pursue or make progress toward an ideal, it is also, if the man is a father or leader, to personify that ideal as far as is possible.

Share:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Culture, Parenting

Taylor Swift: Great American Philosopher

December 28, 2017 by Geoff Leave a Comment

I read a great quote in a meme. So I decided to find its source. It had a philosopher’s touch:

Live your life like you’re 80 looking back on your teenage years. You know if your dad calls you at eight in the morning and asks if you want to go to breakfast? As a teenager you’re like no, I want to sleep. As an 80 year old looking back, you have that breakfast with your dad. It’s just little things like that that helped me when I was a teenager in terms of making the choices you won’t regret later.

Anyway, as it turns out it was Taylor Swift. And while I don’t like her music, it is true that she receives a lot of hate from the political left (the last time I was on Twitter there must have been hundreds of articles about how evil she is). She in fact deserves credit for these remarks. They are, in fact, similar to Jonathan Edwards’ resolution 17:

Resolved, that I will live so, as I shall wish I had done when I come to die.

Then there is resolution 52:

I frequently hear persons in old age say how they would live, if they were to live their lives over again: Resolved, That I will live just so as I can think I shall wish I had done, supposing I live to old age. July 8, 1723.

Share:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Music, Culture, Parenting, Philosophy, Politics Tagged With: advice, philosophy, Jonathan Edwards, Taylor Swift, mind blown, Resolutions

Youth Science Projects and American Aspirations

June 24, 2017 by Geoff Leave a Comment

I came across an archived usenet post linked on social media:

How come the heros of our movies are no longer Micky Rooney or Spencer Tracy playing Thomas Edison, or Paul Muni playing Erlich or Pasteur, instead Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison and Woody Harrelson playing Larry Flint? And movies whose heros are lawyers.

 

Paperwork and lawyering. Fixing and improving and advancing society by talk-talk, not building. A lawyer president and his lawyer wife. Crises of power that don’t involve spy planes and sputniks, but incredibly complicated and desceptive word defintions and complicated tax frauds. You think we’re not preparing to go to Mars because SF is too optimistic? Sure. But it was optimistic about whether or not the can-do engineering of the 40’s and 50’s, done by the kids who’d grown up playing with radios and mechanics in the 20’s, was going to continue. Needless to say, it didn’t. I’ve seen a late 1950’s book of science fair projects for teenagers that include things like building your own X-ray machine and cyclotron (no, I’m not kidding– it can be done). There are rockets in there, and cloud chambers, and all kinds of wonderful electronics stuff. But we didn’t go that way. Instead, we turned our children into little Clintons, and our society into a bunch of people sitting at PCs, entering data about social  engineering, not mechanical engineering. So instead of going to Mars, we went instead to beaurocratic Hell. Enjoy, everybody. It really could have been different. Nature didn’t stop us– WE stopped us.

I’m not opposed to lawyers, we need them. I even that a few of them read this blog. But the idea that the aspirations of American culture were transformed by entertainment focusing on paperwork fields and the actual content of education are obvious. My wife and I intend to home school our children. And I suspect that we’ll be buying some of those old science books.

I think our young simply feel that the world handed to them is either good enough or impossible to bend toward their own success. So their aspirations end at “make enough money to chill.”

Share:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Economics, Film, Culture, Education, Parenting

Parenting doesn’t matter?

June 15, 2017 by Geoff 2 Comments

Over at Quillette, Brian Boutwell has written an article on the unappreciated genetic factors in personality development and life outcomes. In it he claims:

Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn’t appear that parenting—whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else—impacts development as much as we might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that I mentioned, studies examining identical twins separated at birth and reared apart have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same thing: these individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they should be utterly different (they have completely different environments, but the same genes). Alternatively, non-biologically related adopted children (who have no genetic commonalities) raised together are utterly dissimilar to each other—despite in many cases having decades of exposure to the same parents and home environments.

Now, my first instinct is to think of the article as Theodore Dalrymple thinks of ideas held by academics who don’t spend time with those who absorb these ideas at fifth hand through public school teachers, poorly written periodicals, or bad entertainment. He explains some of the deleterious results of this process in his book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview of the Underclass:

The idea that one is not an agent but the helpless victim of circumstances, or of large occult sociological or economic forces, does not come naturally, as an inevitable concomitant of experience. On the contrary, only in extreme circumstances is helplessness directly experienced in the way the blueness of the sky is experienced. Agency, by contrast, is the common experience of us all. We know our will’s free, and there’s an end on’t….

In fact most of the social pathology exhibited by the underclass has its origin in ideas that have filtered down from the intelligentsia. Of nothing is this more true than the system of sexual relations that now prevails in the underclass, with the result that 70 percent of the births in my hospital are now illegitimate (a figure that would approach 100 percent if it were not for the presence in the area of a large number of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent).

Dalrymple, Theodore. Life At The Bottom (Kindle Locations 169-172). Monday Books. Kindle Edition.

When I read an article like Boutwell’s that answers the question, “So why mount a frontal assault on parenting?” without denying that this is his intention, I’m easily unimpressed.

He’s written two similar articles here and here.

What’s funny is that I don’t doubt the science of genetic influences on behavior. But there’s a role for some epistemic humility. One cannot simply say, “We have reason to doubt correlational studies due to the absence of controlling for genetics, therefore parenting effects (being observational) are to be doubted and as a corollary, parenting efforts beyond basic care are pointless.” Well, one can say it, but one cannot simply say it and be correct. Here is one basic point, acknowledged by Boutwell in the article:

To put a finer point on what Harris argued, children do not transport the effects of parenting (whatever they might be) outside the home. The socialization of children certainly matters (remember, neither personality nor temperament is 100 percent heritable), but it is not the parents who are the primary “socializers”, that honor goes to the child’s peer group (a fascinating topic, but one that merits its own separate discussion).

Parents can, with reason absolutely on their side, choose to be the primary socializers of their children. I would guess that these studies do very little to look at the potential effects made by radical parenting differences: home schooling, unschooling, limiting access to the infinite peer group of the internet (this only matters for recent studies), etc. I think that due to the almost universal similarity in parenting styles reflected by sending your children to a school in which their main influencers will be other adolescents and at which they will have very few in depth conversations with other adults is too large an environmental similarity of overlook.

Insofar as one might say that genetics determine a great deal or even most of what people do, it’s a mistake to say that at such a nascent stage in the science, we can dispense with parenting advice.

Any worldview that becomes deterministic tends toward metaphysical boredom and by necessity squelches aspirational values and encourages nihilism.

 

Share:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Culture, Parenting

Philosophy, Psychology, and Parenting

April 30, 2017 by Geoff 1 Comment

To anybody who approaches parenting reflectively, the knowledge of personal imperfection should be obvious.

That being said, on ye olde Internet, many people become very offended by the parenting efforts, advice, or suggestions of others. I think I understand why.

We all know that we fall short as parents, but we desperately want to believe that we’re doing the best than can be done. Indeed, while it may or may not be true that our parenting is the best we can do, we certainly want to project as a fact (even to ourselves) that we’re doing the best that anybody could do. In other words, our own parenting is the ideal. Thus, we feign offense at any suggestion that we are not, as destrablizing our ideal implies that our very method of parenting and therefore our children are being attacked. It’s weird. I’ll try not to do it. My wife and I talked about the upcoming advice barrage. We’ll aim to learn what we can and ignore the rest. Being angry and resentful all the time is no way to live, parent, or enjoy yourself.

Share:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Culture, Education, Mindset, Parenting, Philosophy

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • 2020 Has Been a Big Year or I Finally Quit
  • Steps to Open a Bible College
  • You Have No Power Here, This is a Library
  • What is true wealth?
  • What’s Wrong with Conservatives?

Recent Comments

  • Geoff on Why is Covetousness Idolatry?
  • Geoff on 2020 Has Been a Big Year or I Finally Quit
  • Kelly Jensen on Why is Covetousness Idolatry?
  • MW on 2020 Has Been a Big Year or I Finally Quit
  • Geoff on John Piper Doesn’t Understand Strength Training

Archives

  • August 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • May 2013
  • March 2013

Cateories

WordPress · Log in