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The new Australian Institute of Marine Science report highlights some positive news. The organization, which has been monitoring the world’s largest coral reef system that covers approximately 109,800 sq mi off the coast of Australia, has recorded the highest amount of coral coverage in 36 years, a sign of a healthy (or healthier) reef. The survey of 87 reefs found that from August 2021 to May 2022, the northern and central regions of the Great Barrier Reef had hard coral cover levels of 35% and 33%, respectively....

Beyond the people who proudly proclaim what house they belong to, or those who debate the storyline and how things could have gone, lots of parents are giving their babies Potter-inspired names. But the most popular Harry Potter-inspired baby name over the past few years is surprising. According to The Wall Street Journal, parents have long looked to pop culture for baby name inspiration, from Game of Thrones to the Marvel movies....

Monologue Malek was charming, if not outright hysterical in his monologue, as he was clearly very comfortable working the crowd and showed that he was taking his hosting duties seriously. He acknowledged his “resting villain face” and admitted that he’s always sympathized with the bad guys, even going as far as saying that he’s “Team Scar” when he watches Lion King. “I actually found Simba to be kind of annoying,” Malek said....

Best Last-Minute Christmas Gifts This sleek stand elevates your MacBook for a cleaner, less cluttered workspace, and it nicely complements your home decor. These cashmere socks are so soft, so decadent, she’ll never take them off. They’re a great gift for any woman in your life. This refined olive oil pourer takes dressing your salads, or dipping your breads, to a whole new level. You don’t need a green thumb to grow six herbs in this self-contained garden....

“The Family Reunification Task Force has been working day and night, across the federal government and with counsel for the families and our foreign partners, to address the prior administration’s cruel separation of children from their parents,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the chair of the task force, said in a statement. He also promised that “many more [families] will follow” these four. Immigrant advocacy organization Al Otro Lado countered, saying that the Biden administration deserves little credit....

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of NJ Rank: 29 2017 Rank: N/ANumber of Employees: 5,570Median Salary: $76,000 Based in Newark, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey is a not-for-profit health insurance corporation that provides medical coverage to over 3.8 million people across the Garden State. One tenth of the company’s 5,500 employees are either full-time call center associates (manage care coordinators) or registered nurses, and all are, as of January 2018, eligible for six weeks of full paid parental leave (up from two weeks)....

It’s his best because, given that he’s so aware when someone seems sad or upset, he springs into action and does little things on his own to help people out. It flips this switch in him that says ‘oh I got this’ and he tries to help. He’s such a good kid in that way. Last week, he must’ve noticed that his younger cousin, who is four, was down about something and he spent the next hour writing her a silly rhyming story about her dog to cheer her up....

Castleman knows a thing or two about juggling the responsibilities of parenting and maintaining a healthy sex life. “My wife and I raised two children,” he says. “When they were young, we traded sleep-overs with other parents to create space for sex. We also went to hotels. We didn’t sleep at the hotels. After the babysitter arrived, we went out for dinner, then to the hotel around 8:30, where we made love, and got home by 11....

The idea that undermining the authority of elected leaders or elections might, in turn, undermine the institution of the family might sound like a reach — an attempt to pull Washington in-fighting over the threshold and into the living room. It’s not. Children have a nuanced understanding of authority from a very early age and are adept social learners. When adults engage in partisan attacks on authority figures in lieu of considered criticisms couched in prosocial values, kids quickly learn to view power with suspicion....

The guy who doesn’t talk much but gets it done is lionized in America, where men teach their boys to tough it out and pain is just weakness leaving the body. Stoicism, practiced this way, makes a virtue of repression and a mockery of the Roman Empire’s non-official, official philosophy. Which is to say that it’s not as strange as it sounds that stoicism is having a minor renaissance. And it’s not outlandish as it might seem that there’s a three-day camp for Stoics in Hudson Valley, a convention called Stoicon, and multiple websites and Facebook groups devoted to the virtues of “stoic parenting....

Confirm that the tree is safe to climb. One of the first things Steve Hanaburgh, a certified arborist with the National Parks Service, advises a parent to do before choosing a tree for their kid to climb, is to check out its roots. If they’re rotting, or levering out of the ground, move on to another tree. Mushrooms or fungus that are growing on or near the tree’s trunk are other indicators you should stay away....

There’s a good reason for a child’s fear. It’s all in their minds. This’s not to say you can explain their fear away. You can’t. Developmentally, a young child gets frightened because everything they are seeing and hearing is telling them that they’re in real and present danger. The trick for parents, then, is in working with their child’s mind rather than fighting it. Kids have the same fear triggers as adults, but they’re dialed up to 11, says Margee Kerr, Ph....

As a sleep specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital Sleep Center, nurse practitioner Jennifer Gingrasfield has seen her fair share of parents struggle with early-waking toddlers and toddlers who won’t sleep. “Sometimes in those toddler years, there can be a lot of triggers,” Gingrasfield says. Some of those triggers are linked to normal developmental changes, like an increasing drive to explore and test their environment. Other triggers might be purely physical, such as night accidents that cause wet pull-ups and discomfort....

But then there are other times when you know a proper massage is in order and you reach for the lotions and crack your knuckles and go the extra mile because you know your partner needs it and because a good massage is a stress-busting, relaxation-spawning gift. For those times, it’s smart to brush up on some basics — what kind of pressure is worthwhile; what areas deserve extra attention — because the last thing you want is to do leave your loved one with more stress and tight muscles than when they started....

Dr. Anthony Chambers, the Chief Academic Officer of The Family Institute and the Director of the Center for Applied Psychological and Family Studies at Northwestern University has witnessed a lot of arguments. The three topics that couples fight the most often about are — surprise, surprise — money, sex, and parenting. Differences about priorities in saving or spending money are often a hot topic, as are the frequency and quality of sex, and differing parenting strategies....

“With newborns, all bets are off,” laughs Dr. Howard Reinstein, a spokesman for the American Association of Pediatricians who serves as clinical faculty at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the UCLA Medical Center. “With young infants in the first two to three months of life, making them sleepy is hard to do. The younger they are, the less organized they are: They eat and sleep on demand, not really on a schedule, so it’s difficult....

The Setup One does not simply walk into a play date. You, your kid, and the parents of their best friend du jour must be prepared. A few key elements: Secure a perimeter: Find some toys and activities you think everyone will enjoy, and lock up the rest. Okay, not all of it, but definitely the stuff you don’t want played with, from tabletop decorations that will be misinterpreted by tiny hands and brains to Junior’s favorite toy that only Junior can touch....

Mitchell also advises her clients that having dad heavily involved in sleep training can be a secret weapon. “Most babies have a stronger soothing association with the mother, as the one who is often doing most of the feeding,” says Mitchell. “When you’re working on removing the sleep crutch and it’s the dad who comes in to do the checks, the baby will typically cry for a shorter period of time....

“Worrying about work on the weekends — and weekday evenings — can be a major struggle for fathers who want to be excellent providers for their families,” says Dr. Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist and the author of the upcoming book Joy from Fear. “So many men work tirelessly to provide financial safety for their families.” However, the inability to separate oneself from their office responsibilities can put an undue strain on marriage and family life, causing relationships to suffer....

“Diagnoses evolve,” says Andrew Adesman, M.D., Chief of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics at the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York. He admits the evolution may be officially slow. After all, it took 16 years for Autism Spectrum Disorder to become officially recognized in the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). However, practitioners who work with children every day are quicker to recognize emerging conditions....