“Downtime in the business world is the equivalent to the off-season or active rest for a professional athlete,” says Dr. Jason Selk, author of Organize Tomorrow Today and a former Director of Mental Training for the St Louis Cardinals. “Without the down, the ups will not be nearly as high.” So you need to take that vacation. But how do you make it so that in the first few days back, you aren’t absolutely soul-crushed as you stare into a sea of tasks and unreturned emails?...

“There’s been no endemic transmission of the measles from person to person in the U.S. since the year 2000,” explains Waleed Javaid, MD, Director of Infection Prevention and Control at Mount Sinai Downtown and Mount Sinai Brooklyn. “If you are born here and have your vaccinations the risk to get measles is infinitesimally small.” Still, Javaid says, there is a very small chance that the measles vaccine can fail considering the two doses when given correctly offer 97 percent protection....

“Although there are individual variations in the timeline for this growth, adolescence can generally be thought of in three phases with their own specific characteristics and tasks: early, middle, and late adolescence,” explains Dr. Leslie Kaplan, who specializes in adolescent and young adult medicine at the Calabasas Pediatrics Wellness Center in California. Early Adolescence “Early adolescence is a physically tumultuous time characterized by the onset of puberty,” explains Kaplan. It generally starts from 10 to 13 years of age, and possibly even earlier for girls....

First, evidence points out that the main answer to this question is that people are spreading the virus, whether they have symptoms or not. This is the prime driver, no doubt about it. But it’s not the only one. There is also the fact that a variety of surfaces — metal, plastic, and cardboard, for starters — have been proven in labs to host the live virus for days, weeks even....

“The advantage to a small tub initially is your ability to hold the baby more securely versus awkwardly leaning over a bathtub with that hard surface,” explains Cari Hotchkiss, a registered nurse with six years’ experience in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and another five working in schools. “That said, you need to be prepared and have all the things you anticipate needing before you begin.” First, parents should prepare their workspace....

It’s called a stimulus for a reason. The idea here is to, perhaps, stimulate the economy. So, arguably, you might want to think of spending the money in a way that actually helps the economy on which you — and your family — rely. Still, there aren’t easy answers to this question — we have to think about not only what we want for ourselves, but how our communities look going forward....

What’s the deal with the new Macbeth? Macbeth has been the subject of countless stage productions, television presentations, and film adaptations. The latest version of Shakespeare’s masterwork is The Tragedy of Macbeth, a movie directed by Joel Coen, his first without brother and longtime collaborator, Ethan Coen, with whom he’d worked on Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, True Grit, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, among others....

Jill Whitney, a marriage and family therapist with KeepTheTalkGoing.com, works with girls going through puberty. She wants parents to understand one crucial thing: Puberty is a phase, and it feels lonely and difficult for young girls in particular. “Kids kind of feel like they’re the only one who has ever been through any of this, even though intellectually, they know that’s not true,” says Whitney. But she notes parents can combat those feelings of isolation by preparing children as early as prudently possible....

It can be even more difficult, then, to ask a partner to attend couples therapy. While an immensely powerful tool to help couples manage conflict, grow closer, and gain a better perspective on one another — and, importantly, helps solve problems before they start — the very mention of it can light up a blinking marquee in your partner’s head that reads “OUR RELATIONSHIP IS NOT OKAY.” So how do you ask your partner to try couple’s therapy?...

“The things that create safe sleep environments also overlap a lot with preventing these unexplained deaths,” explains Elizabeth Murray, M.D., a pediatric emergency physician and spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “So creating a safe sleep environment will also reduce risk factors for SIDS.” READ MORE: The Fatherly Guide to SIDS Sleep risk-factors tend to skew according to age and correlating ability. The greatest risk for the youngest infants — one to three months — is some kind of object or bedding in the crib, or being put into bed with a parent who is not nursing....

A Reading Rainbow reboot is officially happening! The original show aired in 1983 and it was hosted by LeVar Burton. The show helped encourage kids to explore and grow their love of reading and imagination. In total, there were 155 30-minute episodes over 21 seasons. The last new episode aired on November 10, 2006, however, re-runs continued to air until August 28, 2009. The new show, titled Reading Rainbow Live, is going to have a message as the original show, aiming to encourage kids to read....

That said because it’s going to be while on the movie, we really recommend that you grab the excellent book by Michael Davis. It will probably get to you faster than the movie will show up on VOD!

1. We use the day for foreplay “My husband and I work long hours, so we can’t always devote a lot of time to sex. We’re either too busy, or too exhausted. So, when we do have sex, we usually have to plan or discuss it ahead of time. During those days, we tease each other with texts and pics. Sometimes we send voice messages. It’s basically our foreplay. Even though we work hard, we’re able to maintain the intimacy and connection throughout the day, and it really pays off when we get home....

Here’s the thing: Leaving for extended periods of time is tough but coming back is even harder. I’m not talking about my anticipation of a glorious reunion with my loved ones in the days or weeks waiting to return. I am excited. It’s just harder for my wife and kids once I get there. It seems counter-intuitive but it’s true. This story was submitted by a Fatherly reader. Opinions expressed in the story do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fatherly as a publication....

READ MORE: The Fatherly Guide to Screen Time I expected my 5- and 7-year-old boys to be slumped beneath blankets with buttery bemusement spread across their faces. After all, that’s pretty much the way they had been since Sunday when their mother and I had removed all screen time restrictions. Save for juice and food runs to the kitchen, they’d barely shifted from their television-induced hypnotic repose. They’d been essentially lost to this world, subsumed in the apocalyptic future of sentient Jurassic machinery....

While the announcement was a win for the trans community in the state, Idaho Senate Republicans still used the opportunity to decry gender-affirming care as a whole. “The Idaho State Senate Majority Caucus strongly opposes any and all gender reassignment and surgical manipulation of the natural sex of minors,” the senators wrote in a statement, adding that the bill “undermines parental rights and allows the government to interfere in parents’ medical decision-making authority for their children....

“Physical activity is a very well-established means of decreasing cardiovascular risk. But it’s also widely advocated as a means of decreasing stress,” says Hadil Zureigat, M.D., lead study author and postdoctoral clinical research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We all know how good it feels to go for a walk or a run.” So she and colleagues asked the question: Is this effect particularly salient for folks with higher stress-related activity in the brain — namely, folks with anxiety and/or depression?...

Yes, the good people at bideninaugural.org, have created a printable, totally free, and totally rad 2021 coloring book for the Biden-Harris Inauguration. Here’s a link to the printable PDF file. Hot tip from a parent who has just tried to print-out this coloring book. Be sure to select “pages per sheet” (if you have that option) and select “2.” Otherwise, the images will be GIANT and take several pages to print out....

The end result? Millions of Americans are currently being left waiting to receive their returns, just like those waiting for their stimulus checks. And when you consider that the average value of a tax return last year was $2,873, hundreds of millions of dollars being kept out of the economy. Here’s what you should know about the mess—what’s causing it, what you can do about it, and a small but significant silver lining for those affected....

“Gross, dude!” I exclaimed, exasperated. I told him he had to stop, but had a realization as the words passed my lips: I didn’t know if that was true in a medical sense. The truth was that I wanted him to stop because every time I caught the two placidly munching mucus, I was flooded with a wave of disgust and anxiety. However, I had to admit I lacked a scientific reason to be concerned by this behavior — aside from its potential to become romantically limiting down the line....