Alabama Takes Off | Men's Health | Piece of Cake - 10/8/07

[Smartmarriages]

- WHAT IS THE FOUNDATION FOR THIS APPROACH?
- DAILY DOSE - GOLF AND POKER NIGHT
- STACEY AND SHARIF: STATE OF THE UNIONS - A PIECE OF CAKE

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- WHAT IS THE FOUNDATION FOR THIS APPROACH?

This is a wonderful interview of Francesca Adler Bader with clear, succinct
Q & A section to use in your community efforts to explain what is marriage
education and how can the govt money be used to turn the tide on family
breakdown.   - diane


Healthy marriage initiative takes off in Alabama
The Birmingham News
October 08, 2007
DAVE PARKS
News staff writer

Anybody who has ever been in a bad relationship knows that the experience
can take a emotional, spiritual and physical toll.

This has been validated by researchers who have found that failing marriages
can lead to social problems and illness in couples as well as their
children. Researchers have also found ways to improve relationships, thus
making marriages stronger and families healthier.

The U.S. military and many states have turned to this approach. In Alabama
it has emerged as the Alabama Community Healthy Marriage Initiative, funded
by a five-year, $8 million federal grant and coordinated by Auburn
University.

The initiative is based on a partnership including the Alabama Cooperative
Extension System, the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama, state agencies,
family resource centers, mental health centers, individuals and
community-based organizations.

Francesca Adler-Baeder, director of Auburn's Center for Children, Youth, and
Families, has played a key role in gaining the federal grant and creating
the new resource network. Here is her expert opinion:

Can you provide a brief overview of the Alabama Community Healthy Marriage
Initiative?

The emphasis in the Health Marriage Initiative is on education and
prevention, much like you would expect in a parenting class. Similarly there
is information you can learn about a healthy relationship and relationship
skills that serve us well in all relationships and particularly in marital
relationships.

The launch of the initiative was this year, and Oct. 1 of last year we
received a federal grant for five years from the federal Department of
Health and Human Services.

We're just working to grow that network of service providers and improve
access in general to information on healthy relationship skills. We're
working on resources for citizens, educational modules that they go through
online, informational pieces they can look at and utilize. We're also doing
relationship education for high school students.

What is the foundation for this approach?

What brought me into this work was the very clear scientific basis we have
that also makes good common sense - how your relationship is working impacts
your parenting skills. It impacts how you're doing individually, which also
impacts your parenting skills. So there is a focus on child well-being.

There's a piece of the puzzle that we've been missing, and that is providing
preventive services and educational programs focused on teaching healthy
relationships. So there's benefit for individuals as adults, and there's
benefit for children in families because of this spillover effect.

Other than the Internet, how are you reaching people?

There are community-based programs that provide these educational programs.
There are family resource centers, our extension agents who do child and
family programs, and faith-based organizations.

We target premarital couples. We have ministers who are requiring premarital
education, which is a great idea. Just as important as planning the wedding
is planning and preparing for the marriage.

In our state, we also have a large number of non-married parents who are
dealing kind of simultaneously with being a new parent and navigating a
co-parent relationship. They may not necessarily be married, but there are
some skills that can be learned to really enhance that adult relationship,
which then benefits the individuals and kids involved.

So basically you're trying to strengthen families by strengthening the
primary relationship?

You got it. It's really about strengthening families, and it's really about
family stability. It puts kids at risk when they face family reorganizations
... when they go through divorce, recoupling, remarrying. The focus is
really on couples having stable relationships that are healthy. The emphasis
also has to be on the quality of the relationship. It's not about just being
married or just being together. It's about having a good quality
relationship.

How many people have you reached so far?

We distributed the Alabama Marriage Handbook, and there were 15,000 of those
handed out last year through the marriage license offices. We have just
printed another 130,000. Those are going to be distributed in the next
several months.

Within the last five months, there were 700 people served in series classes
- six educational classes put together. With the youth focus program last
year we had over 2,000 students in high schools who participated in a
13-week program.

How can people get more information?

Both professionals and volunteers can go to our Web site. That's our best
point of entry right now, www.alabamamarriage.org. You can e-mail directly.
There's also a listserv you can sign up for to learn about our training
opportunities, which are paid for by the grant.

What about classes for the general public?

We're working on that right now. We'll have a Web page that is under
development where you can click on your county and then see who the trained
marriage educators are. We currently have a list, and anyone who is
interested in looking at classes can either e-mail or call phone numbers on
the Web site. Very soon will have that up on the Web via our map. That's
part of what we're trying to do: centralize that information.

© 2007 The Birmingham News

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- DAILY DOSE - GOLF AND POKER NIGHT
Healthiernews.com
Oct 10, 2007

Despite the romantic prevalence of so many real or fictional
man-as-solitary-loner archetypes in literature and pop culture (Henry David
Thoreau, the Old Man and the Sea, the Lone Ranger, etc.), what men truly
need in order to be as healthy as they can be is social interaction ‹ yes,
even rugged, individualist men like the Marlboro man. And now, there's
credible research that shows just how important frequent and fulfilling
bonding among males really is.

A group of researchers from Sweden conducted a 15-year health study on a
pool of nearly 750 men of varying backgrounds and determined that those with
the greatest amount of social interaction ‹ contact with many friends they
saw on a regular basis ‹ were less than half as likely to have heart
disease, all other factors being equal (smoking, weight, job-related stress,
etc.). 

Furthermore, the men in the study who showed the most evidence of a deep
emotional attachment to their friends (not simply frequency of contact)
proved only 58% as likely to DEVELOP heart disease as their more loner-esque
counterparts. These findings amount to an astonishing reduction in risk ‹
far greater, I'll wager, than any prescription drug can credibly boast.

What does all of this mean? It means that your monthly poker night or round
of golf with the boys (or whatever the bunch of you do for fun) is not only
good for your soul ‹ it's crucial for your heart and every other aspect of
your health, too. Yes, even if you down a few belts of good scotch or smoke
a cigar or two (especially so, if you ask me) in the course of having fun.
The research offered up no hypothesis as to WHY social interaction made such
a difference in the heart disease risk of the study's men, but do we really
even need to guess at the reasons? Isn't the answer obvious?

Of course it is. Common sense should tell us that the personal happiness and
a sense of belonging we derive from spending quality time with people of
like mind and sensibilities (friends, in other words) is vital to life ‹ and
to REALLY LIVING ‹ no matter what our sex. And it takes no high-falutin'
study from Sweden to prove it, but it was Swede of them to do it.

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- STACEY AND SHARIF: STATE OF THE UNIONS - A PIECE OF CAKE
The New York Times
October 7, 2007 
Stacey and Sharif Mahdavian
By LOIS SMITH BRADY

[This little bit of Monday morning inspiration is from the series that
revisits couples originally featured in the NY Times Vows column.  It's a
good one to give to couples that might feel weighed down by childcare or by
seemingly endless "honey do" lists. Maybe laminate it and leave it in your
waiting room. Click on the link and check out the photo.  Good for the soul.
- diane ]  

WHEN Stacey Frigerio and Sharif Mahdavian were married on Aug. 30, 1997, she
made him a promise: one day, she would carry the luggage when they traveled.

Mrs. Mahdavian broke her back in a car accident the summer after she
graduated from college. Since then, she has walked with canes and leg
braces, and sometimes uses a wheelchair.

She cannot negotiate snowy sidewalks, wear flip-flops or push a vacuum. ³I
can¹t say I¹m sorry about that,² she said.

When they married, she and her husband were both lawyers. Mr. Mahdavian
worked at a Manhattan firm and Mrs. Mahdavian as a prosecutor with the
district attorney¹s office in Brooklyn. They lived in a Brooklyn walk-up and
Mr. Mahdavian, who is as mellow as Mrs. Mahdavian is fiery, often carried
her up the steep staircase. He didn¹t mind at all. He was also unfazed when
she gave him a lengthy list of the things she couldn¹t do, including bear
children. (She was told she couldn¹t.)

³It didn¹t appear to me to be much of a choice,² he said. ³You fall in love
with someone and say, ŒThat¹s the deal.¹

³And,² he added, ³it was a great deal.²

Mrs. Mahdavian, 40, believes a silent marriage is a troubled marriage. ³I
had a friend who got divorced,² she said, ³and he told me, ŒWe woke up one
day and looked at each other and we didn¹t know each other.¹ I remember
saying to Sharif, ŒI don¹t ever want to get there.¹²

Several months after the wedding, Mrs. Mahdavian quit her job to spend more
time with him. (³I don¹t want to be sitting at this desk,² she remembered
saying to herself late one Friday night in the office. ³We¹re 30 years old,
let¹s live.²)

In 1999, they moved to Chatham, N.J., where she zipped around the house in a
purple wheelchair. He commuted to work in Manhattan; she prepared for the
New Jersey bar exam.

³One day, I¹m at my dining room table studying for the exam and I¹m sobbing,
crying,² she said. ³So I call my best friend from high school, who¹s been
through everything with me, and I said, ŒBobby, I quit my job and I¹m home
all the time and I think I¹m going crazy.¹ And she said, ŒI think you¹re
pregnant.¹²

That possibility had not occurred to Mrs. Mahdavian, but she took a
pregnancy test, and it was positive.

Anastasia Mahdavian was born in 2000; then Andrew in 2003; and Alex, another
boy, in 2005.

³Giving birth?² Mrs. Mahdavian said. ³Piece of cake.²

Mr. Mahdavian, 39, no longer carries her up stairs or through snowstorms.
(³We¹re getting a little older,² he said with a sigh.) Instead, they
improvise, invent and dream up ways to increase her mobility. He cuts and
saws her leg braces so that they fit more comfortably. She has an adult
tricycle for family bike rides. She has figured out how to play tennis with
the children, sitting in her wheelchair in the driveway.

³I always vowed I would not be a damsel in distress,² said Mrs. Mahdavian,
who still can¹t carry luggage but is busy devising a way that involves a
cane and a rolling suitcase.

During a recent trip to Disney World, the family got around like this: Mr.
Mahdavian pushed her wheelchair as she pushed the double stroller. ³We were
like a choo-choo train,² she said.

At home, he does all of the grocery shopping, cooking, gardening and
anything that requires a ladder ‹ all with the quiet demeanor of someone
doing yoga.

³If you¹re an old-time husband who likes to be taken care of ‹ I have some
friends like that ‹ this is not your lifestyle,² he said.

In turn, Mrs. Mahdavian does anything that can be accomplished from a
sitting position. She pays the bills, dispenses hugs, ties shoelaces. She
drives her kids everywhere (her favorite activities are driving and
kayaking, she said, because she forgets she is disabled). Although she can¹t
lift her children (the family has a full-time nanny), when they cry at
night, she shimmies along the floor to their bedrooms and appears at eye
level next to their beds.

³She¹s extremely compulsive about having the kids have as idyllic a
childhood as possible,² Mr. Mahdavian said.

But the children are not permitted to whine, complain, mope or ‹ worst of
all ‹ quit. ³I tell them, ŒYou¹re a Mahdavian!¹² she said. ³ŒWhen life gives
you lemons, you make lemonade.¹²

Teamwork and conversation remain the most important parts of the Mahdavians¹
marriage. They put the children to bed at 7:45 so they can spend the evening
talking and talking and talking in the kitchen.

³I told Sharif,² she said, ³ŒDude, if we¹re going to do this, we have to do
it together. I have no desire to have a stranger in the house who I pick up
after.¹²

Most of their conversations these days are about his career. He quit
practicing law in 2005, saying he was tired of arguing; he is now a ratings
analyst for Standard & Poor¹s.

³Stacey very much wants to be part of my work life and demands that I be
part of hers,² he said.

For years, Mrs. Mahdavian said, she thought she would trade anything to be
able to walk barefoot on grass, ski down a mountain or slow dance.

³It¹s hard walking with braces,² she said. ³It¹s hard having people stare at
you. It¹s hard to fall all the time, but I wouldn¹t trade my life just to
have mobility.²

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/fashion/weddings/07UNIONS.html?_r=1&oref=s
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