Just the right amount of concern could solidify ties between parents and their adult children, but too much fretting may become a burden to the relationship, said Elizabeth Hay, a UF psychology professor, who led the research.

“If someone knows you worry about them, they may see it as an expression of love and caring, but at the same time they can feel irritated and annoyed by it,” said Hay, whose study is published in the December issue of the journal Personal Relationships.

To date, most of the studies on worry don’t consider worries experienced within the context of specific relationships and instead focus on pathological worries or anxiety disorders, she said.

Worrying appears to reflect people’s investment in the relationship, Hay said. Parents and their adult children felt more positively about their relationships when the other party worried about them and conveyed their concerns, she said.

At a certain point, however, expressing one’s unease to the other person exacted a cost, Hay said. The more parents and adult children worry about one another and discuss those worries, the more negatively the other party viewed the relationship, she said.

“In a sense it’s socially and emotionally supportive to worry and share your concerns, but you need to do it in a way that doesn’t make the other person feel that you perceive them to be incapable of managing their own affairs,” she said. “Perhaps they feel like you are undermining their autonomy, and maintaining autonomy is important in parent-adult child ties.”

In the study, 70 percent of the adult children said their parents’ health was their biggest worry, while parents expressed a wide range of worries relating to their adult children, according to an analysis she did for a second paper that has not been published yet.

“The interesting thing is that many of the children in our study were in their 20s and their parents were not of advanced age or experiencing any health problems,” Hay said.

The study’s participants were 213 adult children — 110 daughters and 103 sons — between the ages of 22 and 49 and each of their mothers and fathers, whose ages ranged from 40 to 84. They were interviewed by telephone in the Philadelphia area from fall 2002 through fall 2003.

“Very few adults or their parents said they didn’t worry about each other,” Hay said. “Almost everyone could identify a major worry that they could clearly explain, and they reported thinking about it somewhat to a lot of the time.”

Parents worry about their children largely as a continuation of patterns that developed early in the relationship, Hay believes. “When children are young and parents are responsible for so much of their life, they probably worry about a variety of things, which is not likely to just suddenly stop once their children become adults,” she said.

Indeed, while the focus of adult children’s worries overwhelmingly centers on their parents’ health, parents had many diverse worries, the study found. They talked about their children’s health, but they also mentioned finances, relationship issues and problems in balancing work and family, Hay said.

A small proportion of adults brought up more global concerns, such as today’s world being a dangerous place, Hay said. The majority of parents discussed anxieties that were specific to their own situation, though, such as their child having an unsafe job, she said.

The study found that daughters fretted slightly more about their mothers than fathers, while sons worried equally about both parents, Hay said. There were no differences in how much mothers and fathers worried about their daughters and sons, she said.

Worrying was also slightly greater in black families than in white ones, the results showed. Participants in the study included 141 white and 66 black families, with each family consisting of an adult child and two parents.

The study confirms that worrying is still very much a part of family relationships once children have grown and moved out, she said.

“I think the take-home message would be that to a certain degree it is normal to worry about your adult child or to worry about your parents, even if it is before they get very old and have health problems,” she said.

Hay did the research with Karen Fingerman, professor of developmental and family studies at Purdue University, and Eva Lefkowitz, professor of human development and family studies at The Pennsylvania State University.

According to an annual consumer survey conducted for the National Retail Federation, 56 percent of us expect to treat ourselves this season, taking advantage of holiday sales. Another 30 percent aren’t sure, and 13 percent say they can resist temptation.

On top of the $816 the average consumer expects to spend on the holidays this year, they’ll tack on another $106 treating themselves, the survey said. The trend has held steady. The same survey in 2002 showed 55 percent of respondents intended to spend on themselves.

“If you start buying for yourself while you’re buying for other people, especially, you really run the risk of overspending,” said Michael Gutter, an assistant professor in family financial management with the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “You’re just going to likely spend more than you intended and you’re only going to end up being frustrated in the result.”

Gutter’s No. 1 rule for avoiding a financial holiday hangover: Before you ever step foot in a store, make a budget. Either jot down specific gift ideas for those on your list or the amount you can spend on each person.

“Making those lists in advance can help people really kind of set limits, set boundaries for themselves,” he said. “And if your name isn’t on the list of people that you’re buying for, then that can sometimes be helpful.”

Gail Cunningham, spokesman for the Silver Spring, Md.-based National Foundation for Credit Counseling, says not sticking to a budget is one of the biggest consumer mistakes.“People are well intentioned,” she said. “About half of the people that go out shopping make a budget, and half will exceed that dollar amount.”

Once you’re out shopping, instead of grabbing those half-price shoes that go perfectly with your new black skirt, pass the buck, Gutter says. Go home and drop a hint about the shoes to a relative or friend who may be looking for a good gift idea.

“If there’s a sweater you really like and you really wanted to get it for yourself, or a video game or whatever it is…there’s nothing wrong with letting people know,” he said. “In fact, I find that if you do that, people are grateful. Because no one knows what to get anyone, most of the time.”

If no one takes your well-placed hint, evaluate the gifts you do get. Often you can go back and buy those perfect shoes with a gift card or cash. Or you can take back a present you don’t like and exchange it for the shoes, he said.

Other rules on Gutter’s list to avoid a depressing January:

If you can do your holiday shopping with cash or a debit card, leave the interest-accruing credit cards safely at home.

“It’s the ultimate stopgap,” he said. “No matter how much you’re using the debit card, you’re going to think ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, did I go over my balance?’ With the credit cards, we may not think about it at all.”

But many consumers don’t have the bank balance available to pull off a cash-only Christmas, he said. And for them, here’s another rule:

Do not, under any circumstances, use credit cards to charge more than you can pay off by the end of February without ignoring other bills, he said.

“We hear that the average American has $9,000 in credit card debt, well, this is why,” he said. “We don’t ever let ourselves pay it off because we’re constantly giving ourselves permission to charge this or charge that. So I really do suggest that two-month limit.”

And Gutter urges everyone to think about what they’re spending on the holiday and why. There is enormous pressure to spend to make the holiday “perfect,” but you can ignore it.

“If you get someone a video game system, it’s not like you saved the world. It’s a nice gesture, but you might even feel better about yourself sometimes to give some of that money away,” he said. “I think people as they get older often see that.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — In about 20 percent of women with breast cancer who plan to undergo a lumpectomy, breast magnetic resonance imaging reveals important diagnostic information that alters their treatment plan, University of Florida surgeons reported today (Dec. 5).

MRI, which is not routinely administered to these patients, can find additional cancerous areas in the breast that previously evaded detection, discover cancer in the opposite breast that standard imaging tests such as mammography and ultrasound missed, or determine a tumor is actually larger than expected, the doctors say.

Some of these women end up needing a total mastectomy instead of breast-conserving lumpectomy. Others whose tumors are bigger than indicated on standard imaging could be less likely to face a second operation to remove cancerous cells left behind after a tumor is removed if MRI findings signal the need for surgeons to be more aggressive.

Either way, UF surgeons say MRI can help confirm which women are indeed candidates for a breast-sparing operation.

“In these patients, we did one of three things: We offered them a mastectomy, we offered them another treatment — preoperative chemotherapy to shrink the lesion and allow us to save the breast — or, in some cases, we could perform a more precise excision to remove the cancer,” said Dr. Stephen R. Grobmyer, an assistant professor of surgical oncology and endocrine surgery in the UF College of Medicine’s department of surgery.

“When you operate for breast cancer, you need to achieve clear margins around the tumor,” he added. “This inability to clear the margin is a problem that continues to plague both breast surgeons and patients. In some recent reports the margin-positive resection rate for breast cancer is up to 50 percent.”

Findings from the UF study, a retrospective review of 79 women ages 29 to 82 who had localized noninvasive or early stage invasive breast cancer and were planning to have a lumpectomy, were presented at the Southern Surgical Association’s 119th annual meeting in Hot Springs, Va. Study participants had undergone preoperative MRI — which provides highly detailed images of the breast, particularly in women whose breast tissue is very dense — for diagnostic purposes and, when indicated, MRI-directed biopsies for preoperative evaluation of suspicious areas between January 2006 and July 2007.

“We’re talking about MRIs for patients who have breast cancer and would like to save the breast, to make sure there is (no other cancer) in the breast that would eliminate them from breast conservation,” said Dr. Edward M. Copeland III, the Edward R. Woodward professor of surgical oncology and endocrine surgery at UF.

Until now, few studies have focused on the use of breast MRI for confirmation of the extent of disease in patients already found to have cancer through traditional imaging methods. Recommendations published earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine touted the merits of annual breast MRI for screening women with a high lifetime risk of breast cancer because of family history or their genetic makeup, but did not advocate widespread use.

In the UF study, 21 patients underwent an MRI-guided biopsy after preoperative breast MRI revealed a suspicious area. About 40 percent of the biopsies revealed additional cancer. The MRI led to a change in treatment plan in 19 percent of the study sample. Overall, approximately three-fourths of patients underwent a partial mastectomy, also known as lumpectomy or breast-conserving surgery, while one-fourth ultimately had a total mastectomy, UF’s chairman of surgery Dr. William G. Cance reported Wednesday morning.

UF surgeons say high-quality preoperative breast MRI along with the capacity to perform MRI-guided biopsy could benefit many cancer patients because it detects cancers that otherwise would be missed, particularly women with dense breasts that are difficult to see on mammography or smaller lesions hard to pinpoint on ultrasound. Early diagnosis and treatment of other sites of breast cancer with MRI may reduce recurrence rates following treatment, said Grobmyer, who is affiliated with the UF Shands Cancer Center.

“MRI has been known for a while to be the most sensitive method to detect breast cancer,” Grobmyer said. “Some concerns over the use of MRI in this context have been one, the cost, and two, the fact that MRI detects many ‘abnormal’ areas that upon further work-up turn out not to be cancer.”

The cost of breast MRI can run 10 times that of mammography. That and subjecting women to the anxiety and discomfort of a biopsy for a tumor that turns out to be benign are among the reasons why using MRI has not been advised for everyone.

Still, if larger studies show that preoperative MRI reduces the need for second operations to obtain clean margins, some or all of the cost of the imaging could be offset by savings from avoiding more surgery, Grobmyer said. Costs may also be offset by reducing the future need for operations to manage breast cancer recurrences, which Grobmyer believes will be reduced by the use of preoperative MRI. Other research will have to answer whether by identifying cancerous areas earlier and changing the treatment plan, patients will have lower recurrence rates and improved cancer-related survival.

UF researchers said MRI might be especially useful for people considering partial breast radiation therapy. Patients undergoing lumpectomy typically receive whole-breast radiation, but more recently some practitioners have opted to only radiate a portion of the breast because when cancer recurs it typically does so in the scar from the original surgery, Grobmyer said.

“There is some suggestion that the recurrence rate in these patients is fairly low, but we’re worried this finding of breast cancer at other sites of disease is particularly important in patients considering partial radiotherapy,” he said. “Our study certainly raises questions — should you do MRI before you consider partial breast radiotherapy to make sure you don’t have disease in other sites of the breast?”

Parenthood has very different consequences for women compared with men, said Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox, a UF sociologist whose study is published in the November issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family. “Although fathers have become more involved in childcare and housework in recent decades, they provide fewer hours and generally less intensive care on average than mothers,” she said.

The study also found women to be less optimistic about the benefits and permanence of marriage. Women were more likely than men to disagree or give neutral responses to such statements as “it is better to marry than to remain single” and “marriage is for life.”

“The results suggest that women regard both childbearing and marriage as being less central and more optional in women’s lives,” Koropeckyj-Cox said. “Because opportunities for women have changed more rapidly than they have for men over the last 30 years, and with it women’s lives, their attitudes may have also changed in ways that reflect new options and challenges. Women may be asking more questions about whether everyone needs to follow the same path.”

The study of 11,043 adults 25 and older uses data from the 1980s and mid-1990s that were part of two large-scale surveys, the National Survey of Families and Households and the General Social Survey. It assessed attitudes about childlessness by asking such questions as whether “it is better to have a child than to remain childless” and whether “the main purpose of marriage these days is to have children.”

The study found that white women were most accepting of childlessness, followed by black women. Men, regardless of race, were least accepting. Among whites, women were twice as likely as men to have favorable impressions.

The gap in attitudes was particularly wide between college-educated men and women of childbearing age, Koropeckyj-Cox said. Men in this group were the least accepting of childlessness of any group in the study, she said.

“The costs that women experience related to childbearing are greater the higher their level of education in terms of potentially lost income, promotions and opportunities for career advancement,” she said. “For men, however, fatherhood generally brings enhanced status and emotional benefits, with few if any costs in the labor market.”

Positive attitudes toward childlessness also were greater among young and middle-aged adults. Within this age group, women were nearly 80 percent more likely than men to report favorable attitudes toward childlessness, the study found.

“Especially among those who go to college and then go on to professional or managerial positions, it remains difficult to balance childbearing with work,” she said. “This points to the importance of thinking about workplace policies and career timelines that might allow greater flexibility for both men and women to choose a lifestyle that may include children.”

Among religious groups, the study found that Baptists and Jews were least likely to support childlessness, while fundamentalist Protestants and Catholics were not significantly different from other Protestants or those reporting no religion.

“Interestingly, those who approved of living together outside of marriage were less likely to hold positive attitudes about childlessness,” Koropeckyj-Cox said. “We suspect this reflects the view that premarital cohabitation is increasingly accepted as a step toward marriage with children but not as an alternative to conventional marriage and childrearing.”

Receptiveness to childlessness has increased since the 1970s, with Americans waiting longer to become parents, Koropeckyj-Cox said. The average age of first-time mothers is now over 25, and more than a quarter of adults remain childless into their 30s, she said.

Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at New York University and author of the book “Hard Choices: How Women Decide About Work, Career and Motherhood,” said Koropeckyj-Cox’s “important findings make it clear that changes in women’s lives are here to stay. While it may seem surprising that women view childlessness more favorably than men, her study should prompt us to jettison our lingering stereotypes and focus instead on helping contemporary women — and men — blend work with parenting.”

UF researchers, who analyzed the dieting and smoking practices of 8,000 adolescents, did not find the same link in boys, who were also less likely than girls to diet, according to findings to be released Friday in the American Journal of Health Promotion.

“Dieting was a significant predictor of initiation of regular smoking among females,” said Mildred Maldonado-Molina, a UF assistant professor of epidemiology and health policy research and lead author of the study. “We were expecting that this relationship was going to be stronger among females. That has been well-documented, especially because (nicotine) can suppress your appetite.

“In boys we found something we don’t understand yet,” she said. “We found that those who were inactive dieters, those who first started dieting and then stopped, were more likely to engage in smoking behaviors.”

The researchers derived their findings from the answers of 7,795 adolescents who were surveyed during the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, completed in 1994 and 1996. The teens were in seventh, eighth and ninth grade when surveyed.

UF researchers included the answers of adolescents who said they were trying to lose weight and divided the group into four units: non-dieters, new dieters, former dieters and consistent dieters, who said they were dieting both times they were surveyed. They excluded teens who were already smokers and those who admitted to taking diet pills, vomiting and using other unhealthy weight-loss tactics.

“That group (of teens who were beginning to diet) was the one we were most interested in, seeing how the start of one behavior related to initiation of smoking,” Maldonado-Molina said.

Researchers also found that girls who consistently dieted were more likely to smoke.

Still, the number of children smoking in the United States has dropped in the 10 years since the first two waves of the survey were completed. In 1995, about 35 percent of high school students smoked regularly, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now about 23 percent of high-school age children reportedly smoke and 8 percent of middle school students do. The percentage of girls who smoke is slightly higher in both age groups, according to a 2006 CDC report on tobacco use among youth.

“In the last decade there has been a decrease in smoking among adolescents, in part because of all the campaigns and policies against smoking,” Maldonado-Molina said. “On the other hand, the practices of dieting are going up in both females and males. We don’t know if we did this study right now if that relationship between smoking and dieting is going to be stronger (among females) or different among males.”

Smoking to suppress the appetite may be one reason why some dieting teens pick up the habit, Maldonado-Molina said. But nicotine’s ability to suppress the appetite may not be the only reason teenagers are more likely to smoke after they start dieting, said S. Bryn Austin, an assistant professor of pediatrics in the division of adolescent medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School.

“It’s also possible that dieting itself is making people more vulnerable to smoking,” Austin said, noting that animal studies have shown a link between food deprivation using substances such as tobacco. “If (animals) are extremely food-deprived, they will use more drugs.”

Despite the link, Maldonado-Molina said parents shouldn’t go on red alert if their child starts a diet. Some dieting practices, such as eating balanced meals, can be a part of a healthy lifestyle, she said.

“This doesn’t mean if your child starts dieting they are going to start smoking,” she said. “I think (parents should) be vigilant and talk about it. It’s looking for those changes in behavior.”

A UF study described in the current issue of the Journal of Women’s Health revealed that when treated with either of two commonly prescribed medication strategies, Hispanic women achieved greater blood pressure control and were half as likely as white women to suffer adverse outcomes such as heart attack, stroke or death from any cause. The findings provide new data on a population of ethnic women who have been all but absent from such research.

“The study is unique in that we enrolled a substantial number of women and a substantial number of Hispanic patients from a variety of different Hispanic regions. As a result, we have data that enabled us to really fully evaluate the treatment of hypertension in this ethnically diverse group,” said Rhonda Cooper-DeHoff, a research assistant professor of medicine and associate director of the clinical research program in cardiovascular medicine at UF’s College of Medicine.

UF researchers studied 22,500 patients enrolled in the landmark International Verapamil SR-Trandolapril study, known as INVEST, and tracked a subgroup of 5,017 Hispanic and 4,710 non-Hispanic white women who were randomly assigned to a drug strategy containing either a sustained release form of the calcium antagonist verapamil or the beta-blocker atenolol.

The INVEST study enrolled more Hispanic patients than any other hypertension trial to date, Cooper-DeHoff said, and included Hispanic participants from the mainland United States, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, Panama and El Salvador.

After 24 months of follow-up, researchers found that both treatment strategies worked — and worked better in the Hispanic women.

Blood pressure control, defined at less than 140/90 mmHg, was achieved in 75 percent of Hispanic women and 68 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

And despite having a higher prevalence of diabetes at baseline, only 5.7 percent of Hispanic women suffered from adverse cardiovascular outcomes, compared with 12.3 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

Cooper-DeHoff attributed the low incidence of adverse outcomes to the fact that Hispanic women enrolled in the study were younger. If follow-up had continued over a longer period of time, adverse outcomes in the Hispanic women may have increased, she said.

However, these women remained at a lower risk for these outcomes even after statisticians adjusted for age and other factors. Still, she warned that problems associated with diabetes are likely to show up in these patients down the road.

“Diabetes in and of itself imparts significant future adverse cardiovascular outcomes,” she said. “These women should be well-monitored under the care of a physician so that they can prevent future cardiovascular morbidity and mortality related to hypertension and diabetes. Importantly, because the Hispanic population is the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the United States, Hispanics — especially women — should be included in future cardiovascular research in order to further our understanding of these high-risk diseases in Hispanic patients.”

High blood pressure is becoming more prevalent in women across all ethnic groups, Cooper-DeHoff said. And although it is thought to actually be less common in Hispanic women, fewer Hispanics have been included in hypertension studies.

“The INVEST findings are important because they demonstrate that this treatment for Hispanic women really pays off,” said Dr. Thomas G. Pickering, director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center. “They’ve got something really interesting with this study, and it wasn’t something that could have been expected.”

The study confirms that men are more preoccupied with sex than women are, but both genders get in touch with their inner feelings when they bond in an intimate relationship.

“Men experience a lot of pressure in our society to have sex with a number of different partners, the opposite of what women experience as kind of the gatekeepers of sexuality,” said Paul Perrin, a UF graduate student in psychology and one of the study’s researchers. “Once they enter a relationship, however, the pressure on men to have sex is not as strong and the pressure on women to not have sex goes away.”

Expected gender roles give way to partners’ romantic feelings for each other, which turn out to be a lot stronger than society’s roles for them, he said.

“People in romantic relationships give more importance to their own feelings and their partners’ than they do to social expectations about sexual behavior,” he said.

The study, titled ‘My Place or Yours?’ published in the April edition of the journal Sex Roles, found that men are much more likely than women to find sex personally and physically pleasurable, while women are more inclined to think sex violates social taboos. Too often, these sexually restrictive gender roles become self-fulfilling prophecies, he said.

But the study also found that men and women can change when it comes to conforming to prescribed gender roles. Although men showed significantly greater interest in sex as measured by three of the four categories, when sex was examined in an intimate relationship, men and women were more alike than different, he said.

“One example might be the typical stereotype of a guy in a fraternity who is pressured by his fraternity brothers to sleep with a lot of different women and move on,” Perrin said. “If he were in a romantic relationship, he wouldn’t feel as much pressure to have sex with multiple partners. Whereas a woman feels freer to engage in sex within a relationship than outside of one because she runs less risk of being called derogatory names and being viewed negatively by a larger society.”

The study involved 219 women and 161 men in an introductory psychology course at UF. They answered 160 questions about sexual behavior and attitudes relating to four different areas: whether they considered sex to be personally and physically pleasurable, a benefit in creating positive feelings about oneself, a violation of social injunctions and personally costly in terms of having negative emotional, psychological or physical consequences.

The biggest gender difference was that men were much more likely to find sex personally and physically pleasurable, the study found. “Though not as frequently talked about, gender roles also restrict men to a narrow range of acceptable sexual behavior in the sense that others deem him immature and unmasculine if he doesn’t have frequent sex,” Perrin said. “Witness the popular 2005 film comedy ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin.’ ”

Men also were more likely to consider sex to be personally costly, perhaps because they engage in more risky sexual behavior, Perrin said. The more partners and the more sex one has, the more likely one is to see the consequences of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, he said.

“Men in our sample appear to walk a fine line between wanting the risky sex that society says they should have and paying the price for having had it,” he said.

Not surprisingly, women were more likely to believe that being sexually active had negative social ramifications, Perrin said. “Women endorsed at higher rates waiting longer to have sex and not engaging in premarital sex, consistent with the notion of women as sexual gatekeepers,” he said. “Perhaps women are more interested than men are in waiting for the right person and the right moment to have sex.”

But attitudes both for men and women changed when attention shifted to how they felt once they were in a relationship. “Because gender roles have existed for hundreds and hundreds of years, we kind of take them for granted and assume this is the way society is and the way men and women should act,” he said. “The biggest implication of this study is that we aren’t slave to the gender roles that society imposes on us but have a lot more freedom, especially sexually.”

Jim O’Neil, a University of Connecticut professor of family studies and educational psychology, praised the study. “How refreshing to review important empirical research that dispels myths, common stereotypes and casual impressions about men’s and women’s sexual values and relations,” he said.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — For one day each year, motherhood brings flowers, cards and Sunday brunches, but a new University of Florida study asks, how important is it for women’s happiness in midlife whether and when they had children?

“Contrary to warnings we hear about being lonely if you don’t have children, our study finds that childless women and mothers generally report similar levels of psychological well-being in their 50s,” said Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox, lead author and a UF sociology professor.

Whether a woman has children seems less critical than other important factors that shape her life, including education, work and earnings, and relationships with family and friends, Koropeckyj-Cox said. “Whether you are socially integrated or have concerns about paying the bills — those things play a more direct role in shaping psychological well-being among women in midlife,” she said.

Being in good health and having a husband or partner gave the biggest boost to older women’s psychological well-being, said Koropeckyj-Cox, whose study of nearly 6,000 women between the ages of 51 and 61 is scheduled to be published in the June 7 issue of the International Journal of Aging and Human Development.

The study used data from two major national surveys: the Health and Retirement Study, conducted in 1992, which includes women born between 1931 and 1941, and the National Survey of Families and Households, which provides a comparable sample from 1987-88.

“The most vulnerable group in terms of being least happy, loneliest and most depressed are the mothers who were single, divorced or widowed in middle age,” she said.

For mothers, psychological well-being also was heavily influenced by when they had their children. Women who gave birth early, before age 19, reported being least happy, more depressed and lonelier than mothers who had their children later, Koropeckyj-Cox said. Slightly more than one-third — 35 percent — of “early mothers” reported ever feeling lonely, for
example, compared with about a quarter — 25 percent to 27 percent — of mothers who had their children in their 20s or later, she said.

For early mothers, unhappiness is related to poorer economic circumstances and the likelihood of being unmarried in midlife. “Early childbearing often means interrupting or dropping out of school, creating economic stress that can last throughout adulthood,” Koropeckyj-Cox said.

Women who became mothers at age 25 or older were happier and less lonely or depressed than either the early or “on-time” mothers, defined for these women who were born in the late 1920s and the 1930s as between 19 and 24, when about half of American women had their first child, she said.

“Those women who delay childbearing and possibly marriage as well are able to spend their early adult years focusing on education and career, which helps them economically and gives them more opportunities later in their 30s and 40s and beyond,” she said.

Besides being better educated and having higher incomes, older mothers may find it rewarding to have children young enough to be at home as they enter their 50s, she said.

Family satisfaction was lower among those who had been single mothers, and more than half of early mothers had been without a partner at some time when their children were under 18, compared with a quarter to a third of women who gave birth on-time or late.
That so few differences in psychological well-being were found between childless women and mothers was significant considering it was this generation that mothered the baby boomers, Koropeckyj-Cox said. “If anyone was going to show disadvantages in being childless, it would be these women,” she said. “They came of age during the 1950s, when motherhood was regarded as the focal point that defined women’s lives.”
Fewer than 10 percent of women of this generation remained childless, compared with nearly a quarter of those who came of age earlier during the Depression, Koropeckyj-Cox said. Today, 16 percent to 19 percent of women in their 40s have not had children, she said.

Koropeckyj-Cox worked on the study with Amy Pienta, a University of Michigan sociologist, and Tyson Brown, a sociology doctoral student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The dividing line appears to be whether men and women go to the stores alone or in a group, with gaggles of women often tittering like bashful teenagers and men with girlfriends resorting to macho bragging and gay-bashing homophobia, said Dana Berkowitz, a UF sociology graduate student whose research is published in the October issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.

“In the highly sexualized space of the adult novelty store, people present themselves in ways that both sustain and challenge society’s notions of masculinity and femininity,” she said. “If people can understand these performances of gender aren’t natural and can lead to such problems as violence against women, it might trigger the consciousness to change behavior.”

Lone women can be very assertive claiming what they want, while many single men are reduced to cringing embarrassment about their desires, she said.

Little research exists on how people present themselves in adult bookstores, said Berkowitz, noting that most studies look at how images of sex influence behavior or how these shops are linked to prostitution, drugs and gambling. “These findings are important because they help us look at what it is about groups of men that encourages physical and verbal violence against women and, in even worse forms, against gay men,” she said. “We see it in fraternities, we see it in sports and we see it in the military. On the other hand, what is it about some women that make them uncomfortable with their sexuality?”

Berkowitz did her research at a Florida store that specializes in pornographic videos, magazines and novelty items and is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For six months, she frequented the shop two to three times a week for about an hour each time to observe.

She found two kinds of men who shopped alone: One group entered the store only to purchase or rent pornographic videos, while the other would discreetly browse through the entire store for a prolonged time before making a purchase — if they made one at all.

“Interestingly, of all the men I observed purchasing or renting videos, not a single one appeared to be uncomfortable or anxious in this setting,” she said. “It was like they were walking into a pharmacy, picking up their medication and walking out.”

Unlike the “video voyeurs,” the other group of solo men appeared timid and uncomfortable, darting their eyes, hunching their backs and muffling their speech, Berkowitz said. They found creative ways to manage the shame associated with being patrons of pornography, often by feigning interest in more socially accepted products, she said.

One balding man who appeared to be in his late 40s, for example, walked up to the counter one night and asked the clerk for a large box of condoms before proceeding to inquire about various sexual enhancement lotions, considered somewhat more shameful, she said.

Unlike these men, women who shopped alone were not shy, Berkowitz said.

“There was one older woman with gray shoulder-length hair wearing Birkenstocks who felt so comfortable with her sexuality that she waltzed straight into the shop and announced in a voice loud enough for the whole store to hear that her vibrator had broken in use,” she said.

In groups, women displayed such stereotypical feminine practices as giggling and blushing, while some resorted to badmouthing and condemning other women, Berkowitz said. Women are not socially conditioned to flaunt their sexuality, and under the gaze of other females, many felt pressure to distance themselves from certain images and items, she said.

Men who shopped with women tried to reaffirm their heterosexuality, acting according to culturally imposed ideals of ultra-masculine or homophobic behavior, Berkowitz said. Some would loudly describe their sexual exploits with other women, while others criticized the all-male pornography section, saying gays should have their own establishment, she said.

“People may act differently when alone because these shops are somewhat anonymous settings and patrons may feel they don’t need to act in expected ways,” Berkowitz said.

John DeLamater, a University of Wisconsin sociology professor, said Berkowitz’s research “provides a good example of the value of careful observation. People behave differently when they patronize adult stores as part of a group, and their behavior reflects that context, focusing on sexual activity and sexual orientation.”

Indiana was rated the best state in providing information about sex offenders on the Internet while Hawaii, Nebraska and South Dakota were rated the least forthcoming by the Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project in UF’s College of Journalism and Communications. Florida was rated 35th.

“Parents can look at the project’s Web site and say ‘this is a state that provides more information than anyone else’ or ‘these states don’t provide information,” said Bill Chamberlin, director of the Citizen Access Project and Joseph Brechner Eminent Scholar of Freedom of Information. “We tracked distribution of sex offender information because it was the subject of a recent Supreme Court opinion and we knew it was a topic a lot of citizens are interested in.”

The UF project is the first to systematically rate state laws on the accessibility to information about sex offenders, Chamberlin said.

States were ranked on a scale of one to seven, with one being “completely closed” and seven being “completely open.” Indiana rated a five, “somewhat open.” While no state received a rating of one, the three lowest – Hawaii, Nebraska and South Dakota — scored a two and were described as “mostly closed.” Florida, where there has been several highly publicized cases involving sex offenders in recent years, rated a “four,” which is “neither more open nor more closed.”

Indiana, the state rated most open, requires sex offender information to be posted on-line with stringent language, such as “must” or “shall” instead of “may,” said Courtney Barclay, a UF doctoral student in media law who helped prepare the Web site.

Whether the data about sex offenders “had to be posted,” or was simply allowed to be posted, was one of the four subcategories making up the overall rating. States also were rated on the kind of personal information available about an offender, such as a physical description, current address and occupation; administration and procedures, which among other things specifies which government agency is responsible for developing and maintaining the Web site; and sex offender classification, the types of offenders who have their information placed online.

North Carolina, Colorado and Arizona ranked most open for the mandate to distribute sex offender information. They received a five for “somewhat open.” Indiana, Wisconsin and New Jersey placed highest in maximizing the personal information available and received a six for “mostly open.” Indiana, Kansas and Kentucky had the best scores – six and “mostly open” – for providing information about sex offenders. In the administration and procedures category, all of the states received either a four for “neither more open nor more closed,” or three for “somewhat closed.”

“All our project does is rate laws according to whether they are more open or closed,” Chamberlin said. “We don’t pretend to make a value judgment on the best or worst laws because this is a very complicated subject.

“More information about sex offenders may not be necessarily better, depending on each individual’s values,” he said. “On the one hand it certainly is a compelling argument that parents need to know when repeat sex offenders are living nearby so they can take adequate precautions, but in some states a person can be classified as a sex offender for having had a consensual intimate relationship with someone under age 30 years ago.

“Society also has a real interest in rehabilitation of sex offenders and we don’t want to drive people who make one mistake many years ago into a position where they have no way to live a new life because they can’t get beyond their past,” he said.

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that photos of convicted sex offenders could be posted online, refuting claims that such publicity was unconstitutional because it constituted a second punishment and was a form of double jeopardy.

A federal law passed in August goes beyond what many states have required to be posted on the Internet. States have three years to conform to the federal law. In the meantime, substantial differences exist in various state requirements, which are spelled out on the project’s Web site, Chamberlin said.

The Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project is funded by a grant from Marion Brechner, an Orlando broadcast executive and philanthropist. More information and individual state rankings can be found at www.citizenaccess.org.

The findings, described at this week’s meeting of the American Heart Association’s 2006 Scientific Sessions in Chicago, stem from the National Institutes of Health-sponsored Women’s Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation and the St. James Women Take Heart study and add to a growing body of evidence that suggests while heart disease is an equal opportunity killer, it frequently manifests itself much differently in women than in men.

“There are reasons to worry,” said Rhonda Cooper-DeHoff, a research assistant professor and associate director of the clinical research program in cardiovascular medicine at UF’s College of Medicine. “The message here is you do not want to tell a woman who comes to you and says ‘I have chest pain’ not to worry. Often when women present with chest pain or atypical signs of reduced blood flow to the heart they are told it’s probably heartburn and they should go home and lie down and it’ll go away. What our data show is that although women who present with different signs and symptoms don’t always have obstructive disease, they do have increased risk compared with women who do not have these signs and symptoms.

“Also, our data suggest that these women should be aggressively treated to manage diabetes and lower cholesterol and blood pressure, and should be told to exercise and lose weight when appropriate, because having these risk factors significantly increases the risk in these women,” Cooper-DeHoff said.

The multicenter WISE study seeks to define the prevalence, extent, severity and complexity of heart disease in women and aims to identify ways to predict heart disease, which according to the American Heart Association kills nearly half a million women each year.

Researchers studied 564 women with chest pain who underwent coronary angiography to track blood flow through key arteries and were found to have no visible obstructive coronary artery disease. They compared them with 1,000 Chicago-area women of similar age and race who were free of documented heart disease and were participating in the St. James Women Take Heart Project.

Women enrolled in WISE had a four-fold increased risk of developing serious cardiac complications or dying within the study’s five-year follow-up period, independent of the influence of age, race, history of hypertension or diabetes, and other factors. Nearly 12 percent experienced problems, compared with nearly 3 percent in the Women Take Heart study.

“You can’t explain the differences (in the two study groups) by their baseline risk factors. Something else is going on that’s increasing their risk and we think it’s at the microvascular level,” Cooper-DeHoff said. “Future studies are warranted to further assess what to do with these women.”

Physicians suspect smaller arteries become glazed with plaque, triggering symptoms. But because these vessels are much tinier than the heart’s major arteries, the build-up is not detectable using standard coronary angiography. The phenomenon, coined coronary microvascular syndrome, is thought to be much more common in women than in men, and it is raising questions about how best to diagnose and treat these patients.

“Typically when men present with chest pain and typical signs and symptoms of cardiovascular disease and we take them to the (cardiac catheterization) lab they end up having some sort of obstruction in a major cardiac vessel,” Cooper-DeHoff said. “However, in these women who have similar signs and symptoms of ischemic disease, the majority do not have obstruction. And so what do you do with these women? Do you send them home and do nothing? Do you treat their risk factors more aggressively? Do you do additional testing to look for other signs or signals of disease? It’s kind of a dilemma.”

UF researchers are pursuing additional studies to find ways to better identify women at increased risk and to better understand how to treat these women to reduce future risk of adverse outcomes.

“Cardiac catheterization is fairly invasive, and what we’d like to do is determine whether other testing can be used that is more noninvasive,” Cooper-DeHoff said.

One possibility may be to test whether blood vessels inappropriately constrict when they should dilate in response to certain medications, which has been linked to poor prognosis in both men and women. In addition, UF cardiologists have been involved in the development of a new risk assessment score designed to pinpoint the likelihood a woman with early signs of heart disease will eventually experience a bad outcome such as heart attack, stroke or death. The approach — called the WISE score — appears to determine a patient’s prognosis more effectively than standard methods alone, they have reported.

The WISE score takes into account 10 factors, traditional ones such as age, smoking, diabetes and hypertension and those increasingly recognized as playing a role in heart disease development and progression. These include elevated levels of inflammatory markers and low levels of the oxygen-carrying molecule hemoglobin. Other aspects are blood vessels that malfunction in response to exercise or blood flow-regulating chemicals in the body, and the presence of metabolic syndrome, characterized by a constellation of symptoms, including obesity.

Data suggest women may have more inflammation as the underlying root of their coronary disease, one reason why the WISE score may be useful.

“A man and a woman of different races in the movies have a greater statistical probability of dying than of getting married or dating seriously,” said Nadia Ramoutar, who did the research for her doctoral dissertation in mass communications at UF and is now a communications professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine.

White women have not appeared in an interracial relationship in a top-selling film since “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, she said. American Indian women have not been portrayed this way since “Dances with Wolves” in 1995, and the last time an American Indian man was part of such a union was in “The Trial of Billy Jack” in 1974.

The findings are important, Ramoutar said, because popular films do more than entertain: They are a powerful means of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

“The results of this study sadly show that racial and ethnic segregation in romantic relationships is heavily practiced in Hollywood blockbuster films and has become more common rather than less common in the past four decades,” Ramoutar said.

The study analyzed interracial relationships in blockbuster Hollywood films between 1967 and 2005, beginning with the landmark social commentary “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Ramoutar selected the 15 top-grossing box office hits of each year for her sample. Of these, she found 36 films with interracial couples.

Forty-two percent of the women in such partnerships were victims of violence. “Lying on the table like a piece of sushi” is how police described Cheryl, the drug-addicted, sexually deviant female character in “Rising Sun” responsible for three men’s deaths who dies herself.

The scripts use certain interracial combinations more than others and avoid some entirely, the study found. No Arabic or eastern Indian appears in any film, for example.

The most common racial coupling was a white male with an Asian female, who was often portrayed as a “model minority,” in that she was smarter, more compliant and less sexually aggressive than women of other races, Ramoutar said.

But while Asians were the most common women of color, representing nearly one-quarter of interracial romances, Asian men were practically invisible, Ramoutar said. The only major Asian male in such a relationship in nearly four decades was Jackie Chan’s character in the 2001 movie “Rush Hour 2,” she said.

And a Hispanic woman playing a CIA double agent who briefly falls in love with Chan’s character marks the first time a Hispanic female appears in an interracial relationship at all during those years, said Ramoutar.

Hispanic men also were marginalized, cast in only three movies, Ramoutar said. The women they were paired with, including Michele Pfeiffer’s character Elvira in “Scarface,” were drug addicts with no purpose in life but getting high, she said.

“Despite the large number of women actively employed in the American workplace, the most commonly portrayed occupation of all the women in these films is that they have no identifiable occupation,” Ramoutar said. The second most popular occupation was working as a spy, followed by a tie between prostitute and entertainer, she said.

While white women in interracial relationships came across as either morally corrupt or socially inept or as victims of physical or sexual abuse, women of color who become involved with white men were often presented as erotic, exotic and possessing exceptional talents, she said.

“(Chinese-American) Alex in ‘Charlie’s Angels’ is a sky-diving, computer-hacking, black belt martial artist who can defeat a room full of men – her only misgiving is that she is a bad cook,” she said. “And Charlotte Lewis’ character in ‘The Golden Child’ can leap over tall walls or from high buildings, usually just wearing Eddie Murphy’s shirt and her underwear.”

The majority of black women on the big screen were pale skinned like Halle Berry, with dark-skinned actresses rarely cast except as villainesses or femme fatales, she said.

Terry Francis, a film studies professor at Yale University, praised Ramoutar’s choice of a topic. “It might be the quintessential American narrative,” she said.

The new study found that narcissists are more likely to philander and dump their partners than people who view closeness and commitment as the most important parts of a relationship, said Ilan Shrira, a UF visiting psychologist.

“Narcissists have a heightened sense of sexuality, but they tend to view sex very differently than other people do,” said Shrira, whose study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. “They see sexuality more in terms of power, influence and as something daring, in contrast to people with low narcissistic qualities who associated sex more with caring and love.”

As a result, narcissists tend to go through a string of short-term relationships that don’t last long and are usually devoid of much intimacy, he said.

“Even when they’re in a relationship, they always seem to be on the lookout for other partners and searching for a better deal,” Shrira said. “Whether that’s because of their heightened sexuality or because they think multiple partners enhance their self-image isn’t entirely clear.”

Although narcissism and sexuality have been linked since the psychoanalytic writings of Freud, researchers have paid little attention to the connection, he said.

Shrira collaborated with Joshua D. Foster, a University of South Alabama social psychologist, and W. Keith Campbell, a University of Georgia social psychologist and author of the 2005 book “When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself.” They did two studies with a total of 485 undergraduate students at the University of Georgia.

In the first study, participants who scored high on a narcissism personality inventory test, as measured by strong agreement to such statements as ‘I will be a success’ and “I find it easy to manipulate people,’ considered physical pleasure to be much more important in a sexual relationship than emotional intimacy. The highly narcissistic were 50 percent more likely than the more humble to view the primary purpose of sexual intercourse as enhancing their own physical pleasure, rather than increasing emotional intimacy with their partner, he said.

In the second study, which involved only undergraduates who were in a romantic relationship, those with high narcissism scores expressed considerably low commitment to their partner.

Typically, males are more narcissistic than females, who are known to place greater priority than men on personal relationships, Shrira said. “Narcissists tend not to value relationships unless it’s for self-serving purposes,” he said.

In a separate cross-cultural study the researchers conducted on people ages 8 to 80, they found that narcissism peaks at about 15 or 16 and then steadily declines as people get older, Shrira said. He attributed this partly to the “reality principle.”

“When you’re in high school or college, you’re at the peak of your physical condition and the world is your oyster,” he said. “But when you get out in the world you realize you’re not the best at everything and it sort of humbles you.”

Narcissists often make a good first impression because of strong social skills that make them appear charming, and sometimes even empathetic, but this is usually only a ploy to attract attention, Shrira said. “Once you get to know these people, you realize they’re very self-focused and are always bringing the conversation back to themselves,” he said.

Shrira said he believes narcissism is on the rise partly because of the prominence of the self-esteem movement over the past quarter century. When the movement began in the ‘80s, an improved self-concept was credited with helping students perform better in school and resisting the temptations of premarital sex. But now people are starting to realize that unlimited positive reinforcement may not necessarily be a good thing, he said.

“If all you get is positive feedback as a child and your success is not based on any sort of real accomplishment, you’re not going to be motivated to work hard,” he said.

Seth Rosenthal, a post-doctoral research fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University, said Shrira’s study “adds to an accumulating body of evidence that narcissists often aren’t playing by the same set of interpersonal ‘rules’ that most people are.”

So conclude three University of Florida advertising professors in a new study that gauged young women’s emotional responses to ads featuring beautiful women from Vogue, Allure and other women’s magazines.

The hotter the model’s attire or look, the more it left the women, well, cold, say UF’s Robyn Goodman, Jon Morris and John Sutherland. What the 100-plus college-age women surveyed in the study found far more appealing than provocative sex kittens were natural, pretty-in-an-everyday-way types, a look the researchers describe as wholesome.

“What we found is the way that the industry and the way that consumers are looking at beauty are totally different,” said Goodman.

The study – which won the top paper award in the advertising division at last month’s Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in San Francisco — is partly of interest because it clashes with the sex-drenched conventions of glossy magazine advertising. According to Goodman, it also brings to light a looming disconnect between generally male executives of companies seeking to market their products and the female consumers they’re trying so desperately to reach.

“If you look at most of the Fortune 500 companies, who are they run by? Men,” Goodman said. “So, you’re their advertising agency and you’re pitching these ideas to these men. Well, men have a very specific idea of what’s beautiful.”

The situation is similar when it comes to fashion photography. “Most of the high fashion photographers are men,” she said.

The researchers launched the study with the original goal of determining what sort of models epitomized six different types of beauty — “classic feminine,” “sensual exotic,” “trendy,” “cute,” “girl next door” and “sex kitten”–– that had been identified as advertising archetypes by earlier researchers.

Some 258 women looked at an identical set of photos and rated the models for how well the six types described each. All of the photos, which included celebrities such as Uma Thurman and Lindsay Lohan, had appeared in fashion magazines aimed specifically and uniquely at female consumers, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Allure.

Analysis of the numbers soon revealed that the six types collapsed into two much more general categories: sexy and wholesome. “When Uma was rated high ‘classic beauty,’ she was also rated high ‘cute’ and high ‘girl next door,’ so there’s not six types, there’s really only two,” Sutherland explained.

The researchers then had 127 women give their emotional responses to the models that best fit these two descriptions.

The results were unambiguous. The more lustful the models’ expressions and spare their attire, the more the women’s emotional reactions revealed that they were bored or uninterested. The more the models smiled naturally and displayed a minimum of skin, the more positive the women’s reactions.

The researchers said the results may indicate that sex has become so commonplace as an advertising theme that consumers, or at least female consumers, are simply no longer interested. The study’s results are all the more intriguing because of the young age of the survey’s respondents, they noted. They agreed the results would likely have been even more pronounced had older women been surveyed.

What’s the message for advertisers? First, sex isn’t a guaranteed sell.

“I think advertisers would say if you show a woman a sexy picture, many of them will want to emulate it, but I think this research shows that’s not true,” Morris said.

Second, while sexual themes may be appropriate for some products and publications, it’s important to think more broadly and field test potential ads with consumers.

“Instead of taking the obvious or the easy route, I think you really need to think about who your audience is, who you are trying to attract and what your brand image is,” Goodman said. “And if you’re saying, ‘Which direction should we go,’ err on the side of wholesome.”

Recreational shoppers are not mere browsers but even go so far as to have their self-concept and personal identity wrapped in the all-consuming thrill of the search and victory of the buy, said Richard Lutz, a UF marketing professor who led the study.

“The notion of a leisure shopper is someone who looks a lot but doesn’t buy much,” he said. “It might be the mall rat who wanders from store to store or the customer that walks into Starbucks, orders a cup of coffee and plops down in a chair for the afternoon to read a book.”

Instead, leisure shoppers are really shopping enthusiasts who broaden their search from stores to the Internet, catalogs and TV home shopping channels in the quest for the perfect deal, he said.

“For people who are really intense shoppers, it’s almost a source of pride,” Lutz said. “They view shopping as a creative act and something they are an expert at, whether it be finding a good bargain or putting together an outfit.”

Often these enthusiasts go out of their way to convey this passion, he said.

“If you meet them at a cocktail party, they are very likely to bring up in a conversation that they are shoppers,” he said. “It’s really part of what makes them who they are.”

The researchers surveyed 354 parents of students enrolled in an introductory marketing class about how much time and money they spent shopping for clothing during the past year. The questions covered retail stores, catalogs, TV home shopping channels and the Internet.

The results showed that a majority (56 percent) were “normal shoppers,” for whom shopping had no particular place of importance, either positive or negative, 27 percent were “shopping aversives” who hated to shop and 17 percent were “shopping enthusiasts” who embraced the practice so strongly that it became part of their identity.

“The good news for retailers is that recreational shoppers not only shop longer and more often, they also tend to buy more,” Lutz said. “The bad news is these customers are not particularly store-loyal or even loyal to any particular retail form.”

In keeping with stereotypes, shopping enthusiasts were largely female and shopping aversives were overwhelmingly male, Lutz said. “It may be that if we had studied electronics stores or car lots instead of clothing shops, the results might have been different,” he said.

Lutz and co-researchers Anne Magi, a UF visiting marketing professor, and Michael Guiry, a marketing professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, who published their research in the winter 2005-06 edition of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, also found that shopping enthusiasts were slightly younger, had less education and were more likely to be immigrants.

While other studies have shown that people become less materialistic as they age, the finding on immigrants is relatively new and may reflect their desire to assimilate, Lutz said.

“Wearing the right clothes and the right brands is one way to fit into a particular group,” he said. “Perhaps when newcomers want to find out what it’s like here they say, ‘Let’s go to the mall and see what Americans buy.’”

One reason shopping has assumed greater importance in American society may be because churches, civic organizations and other institutions have declined, Lutz said. The appearance of such aphorisms as “Born to Shop” and “I Shop, Therefore I Am” on bumper stickers reflect the prominent position shopping plays in consumer culture, he said.

In a separate survey of 561 UF graduate and undergraduate students, Lutz’s research team found that those who considered shopping part of their identity strongly agreed with such statements as “I find that a lot of my life is organized around shopping” and “I get so involved in shopping that I forget everything else.”

Because recreational shoppers spend more, Lutz said, it is in retailers’ interest to try to cater to them.

Lutz said it is unclear whether someone is likely to love shopping because his or her mother does. “There are all sorts of rules that you might learn from your parents about how to approach the marketplace,” he said. “One of those might be that shopping isn’t just for filling our utilitarian needs, but it’s a place to have fun, be creative and spend time together.”