Health

Pediatricians quietly changed their minds about screen time

The advice parents have white-knuckled for a decade just got a rewrite.

Right now, the world is in full phone-panic mode. Australia banned social media for anyone under 16, Denmark, France, and the U.K. are following suit, and more than 30 U.S. states have kicked cellphones out of the classroom. Meanwhile, parents everywhere are left making judgment calls with a stopwatch in one hand and a guilty conscience in the other.

Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the folks who gave us the famous "two hours a day" rule, has quietly retired it. In this piece by Gabriel E. Hales, a Michigan State researcher who studies how digital media shapes kids' social and emotional lives, he argues the popular story that phones are wrecking a generation "runs well ahead of the current evidence." The problem was never really the clock.

So what replaces the stopwatch? Something that costs nothing, takes a few minutes, and starts with an actual face-to-face conversation with your kid. Hales lays out exactly what to ask, including one question about phones at the dinner table that might sting a little for the adults in the room.

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Pop Culture | Courtesy of Upworthy

Your parents' wedding song was written to sell checking accounts

Written in one afternoon, for a bank commercial, of all things.

Some commercial jingles just live in our heads rent-free. And then there's "We've Only Just Begun," which pulled off something far stranger: it escaped the commercial entirely and became one of the most beloved songs of the 1970s. In this story by Heather Wake, first shared on our sister site Upworthy, the trail leads back to a California bank with an image problem and an ad man with an unusually cinematic vision.

The songwriters almost said no. They wanted radio hits, not jingles, and it took an injured colleague's personal plea (plus a very persuasive "creative fee") to get them in the room. What they wrote in a single afternoon was supposed to soundtrack a young couple opening their first checking account. Then Richard Carpenter caught the ad on TV and heard something nobody at the bank did.

And what did we learn?

Friday, we shared advice on finding gratitude when it doesn’t come naturally.

Who do GOOD readers struggle to properly appreciate? This result blew me away because I appreciate each of you so very much, but apparently 65% of GOOD readers have trouble showing gratitude for themselves.

• A parent (10.9%)

• An in-law (10.2%)

• A partner (13.9%)

• Myself (65.0%)

I’m grateful for reader Liap, who summed it up best. “I usually berate myself for doing something “dumb” but rarely tell myself thank you for doing [something] “smart”.”

Well-being

The adult report card you never knew you needed

One therapist has six signs you're further along than you think.

There's so much about growing up that's strange. Things you dreaded as a kid turn out to be bog-standard adulting. And things you hated in school sound amazing to you as a proper grown-up. My son is currently furious about having to spend a month on Edgar Allan Poe. I would give anything to deep dive into the symbolism of The Tell-Tale Heart for a few weeks right now. And his report card? He dreads it. I'd love one. Wouldn't you? A formal, official accounting of how you're actually doing?

As Mark Wales reports, you might have one. Licensed therapist Jeffrey Meltzer lays out six signs that you're doing a lot better than you think. The criteria are not what you'd expect. "Knowing what you don't want" counts. Having even one relationship that doesn't require a performance counts. The fact that you're asking these questions at all? That counts too.

The reason most of us miss this stuff is neurological. Your brain is wired to clear your wins the moment they're banked and immediately move the goalposts. Meltzer's list is essentially a cheat code to outsmart it.

On July 20, 1807, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte put his signature on a patent for a very strange machine called the Pyréolophore, and in doing so made brothers Nicéphore and Claude Niépce the fathers of the world's first internal combustion engine.

The brothers had spent years chasing a wild idea: that a series of controlled explosions could push a machine forward. Their fuel of choice was a powder made of clubmoss spores, occasionally mixed with crushed coal, which they detonated in tidy little bursts. To prove it worked, they strapped the contraption to a boat and sent it chugging up the Saône River, against the current, with no sail, no oars, and no horses in sight.

The Pyréolophore never became a commercial hit, but the principle inside it eventually powered nearly everything that moves. And the Niépce brothers weren't done changing the world: Nicéphore's restless tinkering later produced the world's first photograph. Not a bad résumé for one family workshop in Burgundy.

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